Volume 11, Tome I: Kierkegaard's Influence on Philosophy: German and Scandinavian Philosophy (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) [1 ed.] 9781409442851, 1409442853

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Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy Tome I: German and Scandinavian Philosophy

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Volume 11, Tome I

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources is a publication of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

General Editor Jon Stewart Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Editorial Board FINN GREDAL JENSEN Katalin Nun peter Šajda Advisory Board Lee c. barrett maría j. binetti IstvÁn CzakÓ Heiko Schulz curtis l. thompson

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy

Tome I: German and Scandinavian Philosophy

Edited by JOn Stewart

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2012 Jon Stewart and the contributors Jon Stewart has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kierkegaard’s influence on philosophy, Tome I: German and Scandinavian philosophy. Tome I. – (Kierkegaard research ; v. 11) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855 – Influence. 2. Philosophy, German – 19th century. 3. Philosophy – Scandinavia – History – 19th century. I. Series II. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) 198.9–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kierkegaard’s influence on philosophy, Tome I: German and Scandinavian philosophy / edited by Jon Stewart. p. cm. — (Kierkegaard research ; v. 11, t. 1) Includes indexes. ISBN 978-1-4094-4285-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Influence. 2. Philosophers—Germany. 3. Philosophers—Scandinavia. 4. Philosophy—Germany. 5. Philosophy—Scandinavia. I. Stewart, Jon (Jon Bartley) B4377.K5126 2011 198’.9—dc23 2011036850 ISBN 9781409442851 (hbk) Cover design by Katalin Nun

Contents List of Contributors   Preface   Acknowledgements   List of Abbreviations   PART I

vii ix xiii xv

German Philosophy

Theodor W. Adorno:   Tracing the Trajectory of Kierkegaard’s Unintended Triumphs and Defeats Peter Šajda

3

Walter Benjamin:   Appropriating the Kierkegaardian Aesthetic Joseph Westfall

49

Ernst Bloch:   The Thinker of Utopia’s Reading of Kierkegaard Alina Vaisfeld

67

Wilhelm Dilthey:   Kierkegaard’s Influence on Dilthey’s Work Elisabetta Basso

85

Ferdinand Ebner:   Ebner’s Neuer Mann Dustin Feddon and Patricia Stanley105 Hans-Georg Gadamer:   Kierkegaardian Traits in Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics Luiz Rohden123 Edmund Husserl:   Naturalism, Subjectivity, Eternity Jamie Turnbull

147

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Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy

Karl Löwith:   In Search of a Singular Man Noreen Khawaja163 Michael Theunissen:   Fortune and Misfortune of Temporality Stefan Egenberger

187

Ludwig Wittgenstein:   Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Origin of Analytic Philosophy Thomas Miles

209

PART II Scandinavian Philosophy Hans Brøchner:   Professor of Philosophy, Antagonist—and a Loving and Admiring Relative Carl Henrik Koch245  Harald Høffding:   The Respectful Critic Carl Henrik Koch267 Peter Wessel Zapffe:   Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Pessimistic Existentialism Roe Fremstedal289 Index of Persons Index of Subjects

303 309

List of Contributors

Elisabetta Basso, c/o Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Stefan Egenberger, Stadtkirche Glückstadt, Rheinhörn 3, D-25348 Glückstadt, Germany. Dustin Feddon, M05 Dodd Hall, Department of Religion, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1520, USA. Roe Fremstedal, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. Noreen Khawaja, Department of Religious Studies, Building 70, Main Quad, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. Carl Henrik Koch, Institut for medier, erkendelse og formidling, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Thomas Miles, Philosophy Department, Boston College, Carney Hall 268, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3806, USA. Luiz Rohden, Centro I, Av. Unisinos, 950, Caixa Postal 275, 93022000 São Leopoldo, RS, Brazil. Peter Šajda, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy, Klemensova 19, 813 64 Bratislava, Slovakia. Patricia Stanley, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32308, USA. Jamie Turnbull, Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, 1510 St. Olaf Avenue Northfield, MN 55057, USA. Alina Vaisfeld, The New School for Social Research, Department of Philosophy, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 1000, USA. Joseph Westfall, Department of Social Sciences, University of Houston-Downtown, Houston, TX 77002, USA.

Preface

Kierkegaard’s relation to the field of philosophy is a particularly complex and disputed one. Throughout much of his authorship he carried on a passionate polemic with the dominant philosophy of the time, namely, German speculative philosophy. In this context it is clear that his objection was not just to individual thinkers or isolated ideas but rather to the entire enterprise that this paradigm of thought represented. In short, he rejected the model of philosophical inquiry that was mainstream in his day. This manifested itself in the form of regular polemics directed against speculative philosophy and philosophers. As a part of this polemical relation Kierkegaard was careful to have his pseudonymous authors repeatedly and vocally disassociate themselves from philosophy. Typical of this tendency is when Judge William says “As you know, I have never passed myself off as a philosopher.”1 The prefaces and introductions to his numerous pseudonymous works are full of disclaimers of this kind. This has led some scholars to raise the question of what it means to call Kierkegaard a philosopher at all.2 Since he rejected philosophy as it was practiced in his own day as overly abstract and blind to the real issues of life and existence, it seems inappropriate to designate him as a philosopher without some serious qualifications. But this issue is not so straightforward since philosophy today is far more heterogeneous than it was in Kierkegaard’s time. Might it not be the case that while Kierkegaard cannot be rightly designated a philosopher in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, there would be no problem in designating him a philosopher in our own more diverse philosophical milieu in the twenty-first century? His project might reasonably be understood alongside the many very heterogeneous programs that count for philosophy today. This issue is further complicated by the fact that Kierkegaard had great respect for Socrates and ancient philosophy. Indeed, in works like the Concluding Unscientific Postscript he explicitly contrasts ancient philosophy with the philosophy of his own day.3 This would seem to imply that he wishes to reject only a certain model of philosophy and not the entire discipline as such. SKS 3, 166 / EO2, 170. See Alastair Hannay, “Why Should Anyone Call Kierkegaard a Philosopher?” in Kierkegaard Revisited, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 1), pp. 238–253. Alastair Hannay, “Kierkegaard and What We Mean by ‘Philosophy,’ ” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–22. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 632–52. 3 See, for example, SKS 7, 175 / CUP1, 191. SKS 7, 280 / CUP1, 308. SKS 7, 289 / CUP1, 318. SKS 7, 302 / CUP1, 331. SKS 7, 304 / CUP1, 333. SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 352. 1 2

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But although it seems clear that Kierkegaard never regarded himself as a philosopher or had it as his goal to be one, nonetheless there can be no doubt at all that his writings contain philosophical ideas and insights. There are many aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought and literary exposition that philosophers have felt uncomfortable with and dismissed, such as his use of the pseudonyms or his conception of faith or Christianity. But while no philosopher has, as it were, uncritically accepted the entire Kierkegaardian edifice, it can be said that many philosophers have taken individual bricks from it. Indeed, it can be fairly claimed that many later thinkers have used his writings as a source of insights and ideas that they could apply in the context of their own philosophical program, picking and choosing as they pleased. As a result, his works have been profoundly influential in a number of different philosophical traditions. When Kierkegaard’s name is mentioned in the context of philosophy, the immediate association is generally with existentialism, where he is hailed either as an important forerunner or the founder of the school. The numerous connections between Kierkegaard and the existentialist writers and thinkers have been treated in volume 9 of the present series. However, Kierkegaard’s impact on philosophy goes far beyond that of existentialism. In fact, his writings influenced many different schools of philosophy in many different countries and traditions. Generally speaking, it can be said that Kierkegaard was a fixed figure in the philosophical canon in Germany and France for most of the twentieth century, while his influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy was slower to develop. As is the case in theology, his influence in philosophy is particularly strong in the Germanophone world. Kierkegaard has been a major influence for philosophers such as Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Karl Löwith (1897–1973), and Michael Theunissen (b. 1932). His thought also appears somewhat more sporadically in the works of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Ferdinand Ebner (1882– 1931), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). This reception testifies to the way in which Kierkegaard’s corpus was seen as a goldmine of ideas that could be used for such different philosophical projects as phenomenology, hermeneutics, dialogical thinking, critical theory, Marxism, logical positivism, and ordinary language philosophy. Similarly, in Denmark and Norway, Kierkegaard is invariably an important point of orientation for any philosophical discussion or work. Thus, his writings have been more or less constantly discussed in one way or another by important philosophers from Scandinavia, despite the later dominance of analytic philosophy in these countries. The present volume features articles on one of Denmark’s most important philosophers Harald Høffding (1843–1931) as well as Kierkegaard’s relative, the professor of philosophy Hans Brøchner (1820–75). Kierkegaard’s importance for the twentieth-century Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) is also explored. The Germanophone and Scandinavian reception of Kierkegaard’s philosophy are treated in Tome I of the present volume. Kierkegaard’s thinking was also highly influential for many generations of French philosophers right up to this very day. Ever since the discovery of Kierkegaard in the Francophone world, he has remained a fixed pillar in French philosophy. It was not

Preface

xi

just existentialism that tried to co-opt Kierkegaard for its own purposes. He has also been seen as an important forerunner of deconstruction and postmodernism. Leading theorists of these movements, such as Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), have occupied themselves intensively with Kierkegaard’s writings. The list of Francophone philosophers influenced by Kierkegaard is long: Sylviane Agacinski (b. 1945), Roland Barthes (1915–80), Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Jacques Ellul (1912–94), Pierre Hadot (1922–2010), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95), Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), Jean Luc Marion (b. 1946), and Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). These thinkers jointly represent most every modern school of French thought: phenomenology, feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction. The French intellectual tradition squares well with Kierkegaard’s eclectic profile since its leading figures are often difficult to classify unambiguously as philosophers, theologians, literary critics, or simply writers. Kierkegaard’s influence on Francophone philosophy is the subject of Tome II of the present volume. It has long been thought that Kierkegaard played no role in the Anglophone world of philosophy, which for years was dominated by analytic philosophy. In this philosophical environment it was common to dismiss Kierkegaard along with the current European philosophers who were influenced by him, such as Heidegger, Sartre, and Derrida. The pioneers of Anglophone Kierkegaard studies were often at pains to demonstrate to their colleagues the philosophical value and merits of Kierkegaard’s complex corpus. However, a closer look reveals that in fact there were several thinkers in the USA and Great Britain who were inspired by Kierkegaard even during the heyday of analytic philosophy. Well-known philosophers such as Stanley Cavell (b. 1926), Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929), Iris Murdoch (1919–99), Richard Rorty (1931–2007), and Charles Taylor (b. 1931) read Kierkegaard and made at least some limited use of him. Moreover, even those analytic philosophers who were critical of Kierkegaard used him as a kind of opposing position as they constructed their own positive conception of the nature and office of philosophy. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Kierkegaard was a major influence or source for these figures, he was nonetheless taken seriously and employed by them in different contexts relevant for their philosophical agendas. The situation in Anglophone philosophy today is much different. Now it is not uncommon to read Kierkegaard in introductory courses on the history of philosophy, and indeed in courses on the philosophy of religion he is an unavoidable figure. His works have been excerpted in standard anthologies on the main philosophers of the Western tradition. It can be said that he has made some serious inroads into mainstream Anglophone philosophy, and many authors today are seeking inspiration in his works for current discussions about ethics, personal identity, philosophy of religion, and philosophical anthropology. Tome III of the present volume traces Kierkegaard’s influence on Anglophone philosophy. The present volume attempts to document these different traditions of the philosophical reception of Kierkegaard’s thought. The articles featured here aim to demonstrate the vast reach of Kierkegaard’s writings in philosophical contexts that were often quite different from his own. Despite his attempt to distance himself from philosophy, Kierkegaard remains an immovable pillar in the history of the discipline.

Acknowledgements

This long-awaited volume has been the fruit of the labor of a large team of outstanding scholars, whose efforts I would like to recognize here. A number of people helped— often at great inconvenience or personal expense—to chase down first editions of the works of the featured authors for use in the individual articles. Their work has made the historical dimension of these articles far more soundly grounded than it would otherwise have been. For their efforts in this regard, I would like to thank Joseph Ballan, Lee C. Barrett, Elisabetta Basso, Ingrid Basso, Maria Binetti, Patrizia Conforti, István Czakó, Kristin Gjesdal, Archie Graham, Manuela Hackel, Markus Kleinert, J.D. Mininger, Anne Rachut, Peter Šajda, Jeanette Schindler-Wirth, Gerhard Schreiber, Heiko Schulz, Françoise Surdez, Curtis Thompson, and Karl Verstrynge. The authors in the present volume were further assisted by the extensive bibliographies to the individual figures provided by Peter Šajda. I would also like to express my gratitude to Yusuke Suzuki who corrected the Japanese titles that appear in the bibliographies. In the name of everyone involved in the production of this volume I would like to thank Katalin Nun for her tireless work in preparing the files electronically for publication. The meticulous proof-reading of Finn Gredal Jensen and Philip Hillyer have improved the quality of this volume dramatically. It has been a pleasure to work together with the authors in the preparation of this volume. Their efforts and sacrifices made in writing their articles will be much appreciated by future Kierkegaard scholarship.

List of Abbreviations

Danish Abbreviations B&A

Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, vols. 1–2, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953–54.

Bl.art. S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, ed. by Rasmus Nielsen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1857. EP

Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, vols. 1–9, ed. by H.P. Barfod and Hermann Gottsched, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1869–81.

Pap.

Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968–78.

SKS

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, vols. K1–K28, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997ff.

SV1

Samlede Værker, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and H.O. Lange, vols. I–XIV, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1901–06. English Abbreviations

AN

Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

AR

On Authority and Revelation, The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955.

ASKB The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967.

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BA

The Book on Adler, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

C

The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CA

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

CD

Christian Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CI

The Concept of Irony, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

CIC

The Concept of Irony, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966.

COR

The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.

CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUP2 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUPH Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. EO1

Either/Or, Part I, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EO2

Either/Or, Part II, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EOP

Either/Or, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1992.

EPW

Early Polemical Writings, among others: From the Papers of One Still Living; Articles from Student Days; The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, trans. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

EUD

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

List of Abbreviations

xvii

FSE

For Self-Examination, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

FT

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

FTP

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1985.

JC

Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

JFY

Judge for Yourself!, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (vol. 7, Index and Composite Collation), Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press 1967–78.

KAC

Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944.

KJN

Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007ff.

LD

Letters and Documents, trans. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978.

LR

A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001.

M

The Moment and Late Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

P

Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

PC

Practice in Christianity, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991.

PF

Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

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PJ

Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1996.

PLR

Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require, trans. by William McDonald, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1989.

PLS

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941.

PV

The Point of View including On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

PVL

The Point of View for My Work as an Author including On My Work as an Author, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York and London: Oxford University Press 1939.

R

Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

SBL

Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

SLW

Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988.

SUD

The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

SUDP The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London and New York: Penguin Books 1989. TA

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978.

TD

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993.

UD

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993.

WA

Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion on

List of Abbreviations

xix

Fridays, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997. WL

Works of Love, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995.

WS

Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

PART I German Philosophy

Theodor W. Adorno: Tracing the Trajectory of Kierkegaard’s Unintended Triumphs and Defeats Peter Šajda

Adorno’s more than four-decade-long reception of the philosophical legacy of Søren Kierkegaard is a story of a highly productive encounter which affected many different areas of Adorno’s thought. After an early acquaintance with Kierkegaard, Adorno undertook an extensive reading of the German edition of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, familiarized himself with contemporary Kierkegaard literature, and joined the public discourse on Kierkegaard with the controversial monograph Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen in 1933. Adorno carried on a dialogue about Kierkegaard with a number of influential German and international scholars and popularized Kierkegaard’s thought not just in the philosophical community, but also in sociological, musicological, and literary circles. The present study attempts to outline the rough chronology and the main themes of this rich reception, focusing primarily on philosophical issues while indicating also Adorno’s other uses of Kierkegaard. I. Brief Outline of Adorno’s Life and Work Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born on September 11, 1903 in Frankfurt am Main. In a short autobiographical sketch written at the age of 45, Adorno described his father, Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1946), as “a German Jew” and his mother, Maria Barbara Calvelli-Adorno (1865–1952), as “a daughter of a  French officer of Corsican—originally Genoese—ancestry.”1 Adorno’s father was a successful wine merchant with a keen interest in culture, good international contacts, and with a “sober-secular attitude towards all religion.”2 His mother was a singer with former artistic careers in Vienna and Riga,3 and her passion for music exerted a substantial influence on both the atmosphere of the household and the 1 See [Theodor W. Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Thomas Mann. Briefwechsel 1943– 1955,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 3, p. 33. 2 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003, p. 37. 3 Ibid., p. 39.

4

Peter Šajda

musical formation of young Adorno. Her religious identity also had an impact on her son, who in his early twenties seriously considered a conversion to Catholicism.4 A third important member of the household was Adorno’s aunt Agathe, who significantly contributed to the education of her nephew and was known for following “the intellectual fashions of the 1920s, ranging from Kierkegaard to the cinema.”5 Adorno was raised as an only child in a cultured and well-to-do family in a city with a rich intellectual tradition and a lively cultural scene. Following his primary and secondary education Adorno continued his studies at both the Conservatory and the University of Frankfurt, thus academically combining his life-long interests in music, philosophy, and sociology. During the early 1920s he became acquainted with several personalities, who would subsequently become his closest companions and colleagues: Gretel Karplus (1902–93), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and Alban Berg (1885–1935). The encounter with the Austrian composer Alban Berg in 1924 prompted Adorno to move to Vienna where he studied composition under Berg’s auspices. During the nearly six months spent in Vienna, Adorno had the chance to meet and exchange ideas with the representatives of the Viennese Neue Musik movement, whose radically novel approach to composition had fascinated him for quite some time. In the person of Alban Berg he found a rare discussion partner interested and proficient not only in music, but also in literature and theory of art.6 Alongside his primary focus on the musical scene, Adorno also kept track of other areas of the vibrant cultural life of the city, actively seeking contact with littérateurs and thinkers, such as Karl Kraus (1874–1936) or György Lukács (1885–1971). After his return to Frankfurt Adorno remained in touch with the Viennese musical milieu, both through his musicological production and through his editorship of the Viennese musical journal Musikblätter des Anbruch. Despite his differences with the central figure of the movement, Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951),7 Neue Musik remained for Adorno a unique source of inspiration throughout his life, occupying a prominent place in his musicological writings. Back in Frankfurt Adorno pursued further his academic education in philosophy, composing his first habilitation thesis Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre under the guidance of Hans Cornelius (1863–1947). Following the failure of the habilitation project8 and Paul Tillich’s (1886–1965) 4 See Carlo Pettazzi, “Studien zu Leben und Werk Adornos bis 1938,” in Theodor W. Adorno, ed. by Heinz L. Arnold, Munich: Text + Kritik 1977, p. 24. Although Adorno speaks of “a conversion,” he was actually baptized (1903) and later confirmed (1918) in the Catholic Church. 5 Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2008, p. 33. 6 See Johann Dvořák, Theodor W. Adorno und die Wiener Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2005, p. 107. 7 See, for example, Heinz Steinert, Adorno in Wien. Über die (Un-)Möglichkeit von Kunst, Kultur und Befreiung, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2003, pp. 139–40. 8 In November 1927 Adorno submitted his Habilitationsschrift to Cornelius, who subsequently asked him to withdraw it and replace it with a work “of greater relevance.” See Pettazzi, “Studien zu Leben und Werk Adornos bis 1938,” p. 32.

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replacing of Cornelius as the head of the department of philosophy, Adorno refocused on Kierkegaard, an interest he shared with Tillich. The second attempt at habilitation was successfully completed in February 1931, with Adorno teaching his first seminars in the winter semester of the same year.9 The revised version of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift—entitled Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen—was published in 1933, “on the same day Hitler established his dictatorship.”10 Despite the steadily deteriorating political situation and the revocation of Adorno’s venia legendi in September 1933, Adorno was at first hesitant to emigrate from Germany. This reluctance, which was not uncommon among intellectuals in the early stages of the Third Reich, partly “depended on the miscalculation…that the Hitler regime might come to a quick conclusion.”11 As this turned out to be false hope, Adorno secured for himself and his wife Gretel a residence permit in the United Kingdom and in 1938 left Europe for the United States. In the United States Adorno collaborated closely with Max Horkheimer, becoming a full member of the Institute for Social Research in 1940. As part of his sociological and philosophical work he conducted several research projects analyzing the phenomena of anti-Semitism and authoritarian leadership.12 Between 1939 and 1944 he co-authored with Horkheimer the seminal study Dialectic of Enlightenment which appeared at first in 1944 as a hectographic typescript of the Institute and was in 1947 printed in Amsterdam.13 After the war Adorno gradually revived his contacts with Germany, reconnecting to the previously familiar environment in Frankfurt. In 1951 the Frankfurt-based publishing house Suhrkamp published his Minima Moralia and in 1953 he received a teaching post at his alma mater, the University of Frankfurt. Some months later he became the deputy director of the Institute for Social Research which had been transferred back to Frankfurt in 1951. In Germany Adorno published extensively on philosophical, sociological, literary, and musicological subjects and organized the publication of the writings 9 An overview of Adorno’s lectures and seminars at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt can be found in Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie, pp. 944– 50. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, “Notiz,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 2, p. 261. 11 Russell Berman, “Adorno’s Politics,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. by Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin, Blackwell: Oxford 2002, p. 113. See Adorno’s largely optimistic view of the political situation in Germany in his letter to Kracauer from April 15, 1933. See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 7, p. 308. 12 See, for example, Adorno, “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses,” [1943], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9.1, pp. 11–141, or Adorno’s contributions in the collective volume Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper & Brothers 1950. 13 See “Editor’s Afterword,” in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002, p. 217.

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of his tragically deceased friend Walter Benjamin. He actively co-shaped the intellectual discourse in Germany, and his confrontation with Karl Raimund Popper (1902–1994) provided an important momentum for the central academic debate of the 1960s known as the Positivismusstreit.14 In 1963 the volume Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft was published, followed by Jargon der Eigentlichkeit in 1964 and Negative Dialektik in 1966. Although Adorno experienced a great deal of recognition and respect in postwar Germany, his last years were overshadowed by an open conflict with radical student groups. Beginning with the disturbance of his lecture at the Freie Universität Berlin on June 7, 1967,15 Adorno’s relationship with the students began to grow tense. The battleground shifted to Frankfurt, and when the students in January 1969 occupied the Institute for Social Research, the leadership of the Institute asked the police to intervene.16 Adorno brought charges against his student Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1943–70), a member of the Socialist German Student Union, who was subsequently arrested and tried.17 More disturbances of Adorno’s lectures took place during the summer semester of 1969. Adorno died on August 6, 1969, just a few weeks after he had testified against Krahl in court. II. The Early Stages of Adorno’s Kierkegaard Reception Adorno’s first contact with Kierkegaard dates back to his years of adolescence. According to a letter addressed by Siegfried Kracauer to Leo Löwenthal in December 1923, Adorno was by this time already acquainted with Kierkegaardian terminology and had read some of Kierkegaard’s works, such as The Sickness unto Death and Philosophical Fragments.18 Kracauer, who was 14 years older than Adorno and exerted substantial influence on Adorno’s early philosophical inclinations, doubtlessly also played a vital role in Adorno’s early exploration of Kierkegaard. As Adorno recalled almost five decades later, following their first encounter at the end of World War I, he and Kracauer would meet on Saturday afternoons for a joint reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.19 Their shared philosophical interest was, however, not confined to German idealism and, as their correspondence shows, Kierkegaard was a lasting subject of their discussions. Although it is not entirely clear when and how their dialogue on Kierkegaard originated, it is obvious that Kracauer knew Kierkegaard earlier. A reference to For more detail on the debate see the volume Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, ed. by Heinz Maus and Friedrich Fürstenberg, Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1969. 15 See Lorenz Jäger, Adorno. Eine politische Biographie, Munich: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt 2003, pp. 277–8. 16 See ibid., p. 281. 17 See ibid., pp. 281–5. 18 See Siegfried Kracauer’s letter to Leo Löwenthal. Quoted in Lorenz Jäger, Adorno. Eine politische Biographie, p. 31. 19 Theodor W. Adorno, “Der wunderliche Realist. Über Siegfrid Kracauer,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, p. 388. 14

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Kierkegaard appears as early as 1913–14 in his unpublished treatise Über das Wesen der Persönlichkeit. Eine Abhandlung,20 and in the first half of the 1920s Kracauer quotes and mentions Kierkegaard in several of his reviews and essays.21 After Adorno’s relocation to Vienna in March 1925 the discussions between the two friends on Kierkegaard continued in their correspondence. Almost immediately after his arrival in Vienna, Adorno reports to Kracauer that he spends his evenings with the Austrian journalist Lili Körber (1897–1982) reading Kierkegaard.22 He confesses that he has brought a pile of Kierkegaard books with him to Vienna,23 and in the letter from June 17, 1925 he describes his visit at György Lukács’ flat in Vienna, during which the debate revolved also around Kierkegaard.24 Kierkegaard’s name continues to appear in their correspondence in 1926 and 1929, as well as in the first half of the 1930s when Adorno was working on his Habilitationsschrift and his Kierkegaardbuch.25 Apart from being an inspirational interlocutor on nuances of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, Kracauer was also instrumental in the publication of Adorno’s earliest pieces explicitly dealing with Kierkegaard. On May 13, 1930 Adorno sent Kracauer—who worked as an editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung—a short piece entitled “Kierkegaard prophezeit Chaplin,”26 which subsequently appeared on the front page of the newspaper on May 22, 1930.27 A year later, on April 18, 1931, Adorno’s essay “Rede über den ‘Raritätenladen’ von Charles Dickens” was published in Frankfurter Zeitung, once again bringing Kierkegaard’s name to the front page of the influential German newspaper.28 The fact that Adorno’s interest in Kierkegaard was well known to those involved in his intellectual and artistic projects in the 1920s is documented also by his correspondence with the Austrian composer Alban Berg. There, starting with 1926, Kierkegaard’s name appears at first rather sporadically, but its occurrence intensifies See Siegfried Kracauer, “Über das Wesen der Persönlichkeit. Eine Abhandlung,” in Siegfried Kracauer. Werke, ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke, vols. 1–9, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 2004–09, vol. 9, p. 32. 21 Kracauer refers to Kierkegaard in his reviews of Ernst Troeltsch’s Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1923) and Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (1923), as well as in his essays Untergang? (1923) and Zur religiösen Lage in Deutschland (1924). See Siegfried Kracauer, “Siegfried Kracauer. Aufsätze 1915–1926,” in Siegfried Kracauer. Schriften, ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach, vols. 1–8, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971–90, vol. 5.1, p. 215; p. 239; p. 245; pp. 275–6. 22 [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” p. 28. 23 Ibid., p. 37. 24 Ibid., pp. 79–80. 25 The published version of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift from 1933 (i.e., his Kierkegaardbuch) is dedicated to Siegfried Kracauer. 26 See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” pp. 211–12. 27 Theodor W. Adorno, “Kierkegaard prophezeit Chaplin,” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, no. 377, May 22, 1930, p. 1. 28 Theodor W. Adorno, “Rede über den ‘Raritätenladen’ von Charles Dickens,” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, no. 285, April 18, 1931, p. 1. 20

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as Adorno becomes absorbed in his work on the thesis.29 In short, Adorno’s intensive preoccupation with Kierkegaard in 1929 and the early 1930s rendered it virtually impossible for his friends not to be acquainted with Kierkegaard. As has been mentioned above, Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard— whose history stretches from 1928 to 1931—represented Adorno’s second attempt at a habilitation. As Adorno recalled in 1966, he composed the treatise in 1929–30 and was granted his habilitation in February 1931.30 The process of reaching this goal was, however, much more turbulent than it might seem from Adorno’s emotionally neutral description ex post. His correspondence with both Siegfried Kracauer and Alban Berg from the years 1929 and 1930 suggests that Adorno’s work on the treatise largely overshadowed many of his usual activities. In October 1929 he informed Berg that due to his work on the treatise he significantly limited his composing of music,31 and in May 1930 he confessed to Kracauer that he was working “like a horse” on his Kierkegaard thesis.32 In the letter addressed to Berg on January 16, 1931 Adorno explained that having finalized the preparations in February 1930, he had decided to move to Kronberg in the Taunus mountains, where he intended to write the Habilitationsschrift in complete isolation and concentration.33 With the treatise almost complete Adorno suffered a nervous breakdown at the beginning of August 1930,34 which interrupted his work for several weeks. In retrospect, he described himself as “someone who due to work was no human for months.”35 The Habilitationsschrift was at last sucessfully submitted and positively evaluated by both Paul Tillich and Max Horkheimer. It was in the early 1930s that Adorno began to draw on his expanding knowledge of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, both in his literary production and in his lectures. Along with the two minor texts published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, he turned for inspiration to Kierkegaard in his musicological piece “Motive V: Hermeneutik” which appeared in the Viennese musical journal Anbruch in 1930.36 In contrast to the mainly aesthetic interest in Kierkegaard apparent in Adorno’s early short texts, his inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt (1931) explored Kierkegaard from a clearly philosophical perspective. The lecture contained a critique of Kierkegaard that would become a standard in Adorno’s treatments of the philosopher: Kierkegaard

[Theodor W. Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Alban Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1935,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 2, p. 66; pp. 87–8; p. 231; p. 236; p. 241; pp. 249–51; p. 257; p. 277; p. 281; p. 322. 30 Adorno, “Notiz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, p. 261. The habilitation took place on February 16, 1931. 31 [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Alban Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1935,” p. 231. 32 [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” p. 206. 33 [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Alban Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1935,” pp. 249–50. 34 Ibid., p. 250. 35 Ibid., p. 249. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, “Motive V: Hermeneutik,” in Anbruch. Monatsschrift für moderne Musik, nos. 7–8, 1930, p. 236. 29

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as a late idealist thinker, whose self-contradictory system of existence prepared the ground for Heideggerian ontology.37 Brief mentions of Kierkegaard continued to appear in Adorno’s texts in 1932,38 but an important event of the year was the Kierkegaard course given by Adorno in the summer semester at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.39 According to the recollections of Peter von Haselberg, the course took place in a small auditorium and was attended by students who had little or no previous knowledge of Kierkegaard.40 As Haselberg remarks, the group did not comprise any theologians and the Danish original of Kierkegaard’s texts was never used.41 The course—which Haselberg characterized as a paraphrase of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift—seems to have pursued a similar line as Adorno’s to-be-published Kierkegaardbuch. What appeared at first sight to be Kierkegaard’s project of authentic Christian existence was exposed by Adorno as a form of self-enclosed idealist spiritualism. Searching for an ever deeper level of Kierkegaard, Adorno encouraged his students to “take [Kierkegaard] at his word,”42 enter the world of his metaphors and images liberating these from the author’s idealist intentions and uncovering the truth embedded in them. This meant trying to trap Kierkegaard in his own quotations, turning his “system” upside-down, and, in fact, reconstructing his thought from an angle that was rejected by Kierkegaard himself. III. Adorno’s Philosophical Confrontations with Kierkegaard Given the fact that Kierkegaard’s name appears in several dozen texts authored by Adorno, the present analysis will focus on a selection of texts that illustrate Adorno’s reception in the most complex way. An obvious choice in this respect is Adorno’s monograph Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (1933), as well as his two later essays specifically dedicated to Kierkegaard: “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” (1940–51) and “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag” (1963). Since Adorno paid a great deal of attention to the reception of Kierkegaard’s thought in existentialism and contemporary ontologies, as well as in the intellectual milieu of National Socialism, the article will examine Adorno’s writings dealing with this issue: the literary controversy with Jean Wahl (1938–40), the lecture Verhältnis zu Kierkegaard (1961) and the works Jargon der Eigentlichkeit See Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Aktualität der Philosophie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, pp. 329–30. 38 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte” [1932], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, p. 363; Adorno, “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 1, 1932, nos. 1–2, p. 115; Adorno, “Gutachten über die Dissertation von Sternberger” [1932], in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 4.1, p. 551. 39 Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie, p. 944. The course took place in the summer semester of 1932 on Wednesdays and Fridays between 10 and 11 a.m. 40 Peter von Haselberg, “Wiesengrund-Adorno,” in Theodor W. Adorno, ed. by Heinz L. Arnold, Munich: Text + Kritik 1977, p. 9. 41 See ibid., p. 9; p. 10. 42 Ibid., p. 10. 37

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(1963) and Negative Dialektik (1966). A brief overview of Adorno’s treatment of Kierkegaard in his writings on sociology, musicology, and literature will be provided at the end to complete the mosaic. A. An Idealistic System of Existence and the Inconspicuous Hope: Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (1933) The published version of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift, which appeared in 1933 in Tübingen, was in no way a mere copy of the thesis submitted at the University of Frankfurt two years earlier. In many aspects the book entitled Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen represented a new intellectual product with its own unique esprit. This version,43 in which the material of the Habilitationsschrift had been “at once maintained and completely transformed,”44 was produced by Adorno in the autumn of 1932. Even though the publication of the monograph coincided with Hitler’s rise to power, the book did not suffer from Nazi censorship and was never removed from German bookshops, probably also due to its impenetrable language.45 It was a well-known fact to Adorno that at the time of the publication of his monograph Kierkegaard was no longer a novelty in Germany. Adorno was aware of the influential Kierkegaard reception in dialectical theology, existential philosophy, and the Catholic Hochland Circle, and was to a large extent familiar with the growing corpus of secondary literature. He also realized the role of the 12-volume edition of Kierkegaard’s Gesammelte Werke, published between 1909 and 1922 by Eugen Diederichs,46 which provided the German academic public with an unprecedented access to Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. When looking at Adorno’s Kierkegaardbuch from a comparative point of view, three facts stand out which provide basic coordinates for understanding Adorno’s methodology and approach to Kierkegaard. First, the citations in the monograph suggest an extraordinarily extensive knowledge of primary sources and a high level of their processing. The book contains hundreds of quotations and references to the 12 volumes of Kierkegaard’s Gesammelte Werke and Hans Heinrich Schaeder’s edition of The Concept of Irony,47 which in itself sets it apart from many philosophical and theological interpretations of Kierkegaard of this time.48

Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press 2005, p. 129. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, New York: Columbia University Press 2006, p. 90. 45 See Adorno, “Notiz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, p. 261. 46 Søren Kierkegaard, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–12, trans. and ed. by Hermann Gottsched and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diederichs 1909–22. 47 Søren Kierkegaard, Über den Begriff der Ironie mit ständiger Rücksicht auf Sokrates, trans. and ed. by Hans Heinrich Schaeder, Munich and Berlin: Oldenburg 1929. 48 A number of influential interpretations of Kierkegaard from the 1920s and 1930s— such as Romano Guardini’s Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung Sören Kierkegaards (1927) or Martin Buber’s Die Frage an den Einzelnen (1936)—tended to rely on a much narrower scope of Kierkegaard’s writings and sometimes did not even identify the primary sources used. 43 44

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Secondly, Adorno seems to be little impressed with contemporary Kierkegaard literature, from which he derives only marginal inspiration. Although he refers to a dozen studies on Kierkegaard,49 none of these seems to have added a genuinely new quality to his own research. This is reflected in Adorno’s succint characterization of contemporary Kierkegaard interpretations in a letter to his friend Siegfried Kracauer: I have read infinitely much on the topic, most of it being really poor. In relative terms, Haecker and Guardini did the best job, the acclaimed Przywara is really bad and ideological, the rest not worth discussing. I have also read Lukács, “Die Seele und die Formen,” which contains a really weak essay on Kierkegaard.50

The third distinctive feature of Adorno’s work is the influence of a thinker who had little to do with contemporary Kierkegaard literature: Walter Benjamin. Although Adorno’s knowledge of Kierkegaard was clearly superior to Benjamin’s, the methodological impact of the latter on the monograph was substantial and can be traced in some of the most original and plastic passages of the book. Benjamin’s inspiration, whose “theory of allegory stands at the center of Kierkegaard, as it does at the center of Adorno’s philosophy altogether,”51 was already recognized by contemporary readers. Kracauer stated in his review that Adorno’s method “follows roughly the same insights” as are present in Benjamin’s philosophical works,52 and Gershom Scholem even denoted the monograph as “a sublime piece of plagiarism” of Benjamin’s work.53

Adorno makes use of the following studies on Kierkegaard: Eduard Geismar, Sören Kierkegaard. Seine Lebensentwicklung und seine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller, trans. by E. Krüger and L. Geismar, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1927–29; Romano Guardini, “Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung Sören Kierkegaards,” Hochland, vol. 24, 1927, pp. 12–33; Theodor Haecker, “Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Søren Kierkegaard. Ein Vortrag,” Hochland, vol. 26, 1929, vol. 2, no. 11, pp. 476–93; Theodor Haecker, Sören Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit, Munich: Schreiber 1913; Georg Lukács, Die Seele und die Formen. Essays, Berlin: Fleischel 1911; Ludwig Marcuse, “Søren Kierkegaard. Die Überwindung des romantischen Menschen,” Die Dioskuren, vol. 2, 1923, pp. 194–237; Olaf P. Monrad, Søren Kierkegaard. Sein Leben und seine Werke, Jena: Diederichs 1909; Erich Przywara, Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards, Munich: Oldenburg 1929; Christoph Schrempf, Sören Kierkegaard. Eine Biographie, vols. 1–2, Jena: Diederichs 1927–28; August Vetter, Frömmigkeit als Leidenschaft. Eine Deutung Kierkegaards, Leipzig: Insel 1928. 50 [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” p. 208. 51 Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, p. 89. In his letter to Siegfried Kracauer from May 12, 1930 Adorno explicitly mentions Benjamin’s influence on his Habilitationsschrift. He specifically mentions Benjamin’s treatment of nature and the mythical. See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” pp. 208–9. 52 See Siegfried Kracauer, “Der enthüllte Kierkegaard,” in Siegfried Kracauer. Schriften, ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach, vols. 1–8, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971–90, vol. 5.3, pp. 266–7. 53 Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, p. 519. 49

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Adorno’s Kierkegaardbuch has been notorious for its complex style and structure.54 It is certainly no standard piece of secondary literature, rather it follows a highly original project and examines Kierkegaard from a perspective that stirred quite a controversy among its reviewers. Although the title suggests the aesthetic as a key theme, the monograph clearly pursues a number of parallel thematic lines. Given the fact that Adorno’s ambition was to provide “an explanation” and not merely “an interpretation” of Kierkegaard,55 the reader is repeatedly confronted with concepts and structures that are applied to, rather than derived from Kierkegaard’s thought. The singular character of the book is also largely due to the fact that it explores topics that were for Adorno not connected exclusively to Kierkegaard, but rather constituted long-term themes in Adorno’s thought and oeuvre. As Robert Hullot-Kentor has pointed out, the monograph anticipates in many aspects Adorno’s future philosophical orientation and represents his “first analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment.”56 Adorno’s Kierkegaardbuch evidently preconfigures some of the major themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), and several issues treated in the former subsequently form the core material of the latter. Most importantly, both of the works study at length the dynamic of rationality and nature. The 1933 monograph exemplifies with Kierkegaard how “[a]ny attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion.”57 Adorno later sums up this dialectic by claiming that Kierkegaard “sets out to expel nature with a pitchfork, only to become Nature’s prey himself.”58 For Adorno, Kierkegaard’s spirit-oriented philosophy becomes a medium, upon which he attempts to illustrate how the masterful reason seeking to dominate nature falls under nature’s spell; how the advance of thought reverts to mythology. The Kierkegaardbuch thematizes all the three principal forms of rational domination studied in Dialectic of Enlightenment59 together with the related phenomena of abstraction, sacrifice, and reification of social life. It traces the trajectory of how philosophically motivated abstraction and spiritualization fails to transcend “the condition of necessity [nature / myth] from

This is obvious already from the reviews of Adorno’s monograph. For more detail see the next section. 55 I have borrowed these terms from Adorno’s review of Jean Wahl’s Études kierkegaardiennes in which Adorno reproached Wahl for the lack of critical distance from Kierkegaard and for preferring “interpretations to explanations.” See Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” in The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, January 5, 1939 p. 19. Adorno’s controversy with Wahl is discussed below. 56 Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, p. 78. 57 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, p. 9. 58 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, 1939–40, p. 417. 59 These include the rational domination of “external nature, internal nature and society.” See “Editor’s Afterword,” in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, p. 218. 54

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which it meant to escape.”60 This demonstration rests primarily on Adorno’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s notion of inwardness and his theory of the self. Before outlining Adorno’s line of argumentation in more detail it is important to note that Adorno’s book attempts to lay bare the mythical features not just of Kierkegaard’s philosophy but also of “any idealism of absolute spirit.”61 The critique of idealism is a theme that pervades the entire monograph and in Adorno’s philosophical evolution constituted a long-term topic per se. In the Kierkegaardbuch this critique is linked directly to Kierkegaard, whose thought is believed to be derived from an idealist foundation. One of the leading insights of Adorno’s book is that Kierkegaard’s thought represents a direct reaction against the negative developments of the early highcapitalist society of his time.62 Adorno maintains that Kierkegaard detected the dehumanizing tendencies of this stage of capitalism, pointing out “the reification of social life, the alienation of the individual from a world that comes into focus as a mere commodity.”63 A world in which the individual is defined by his labor power— an exchange article on the capitalist market—appears to Kierkegaard as a decadent place from which he seeks an escape. Kierkegaard’s response to the progressing degeneration of the reified world is the flight into inwardness, the only possible locus of authentic life. Adorno captures this transition with the image of the intérieur—the interior of a nineteenth-century bourgeois apartment—which he employs as a condensed metaphor for inwardness. Using Kierkegaard’s own narratives,64 Adorno depicts the intérieur as “a private sphere free from the power of reification,”65 which functions as an ersatz for the Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, p. 78. See also Hullot-Kentor’s comment that it is a central insight of Adorno’s Kierkegaardbuch that “abstraction is the mark of the mythical.” See ibid., p. 81. 61 Walter Benjamin, “Kierkegaard. Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” in Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–16 in 12 volumes, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971–99, vol. 3, p. 381. 62 An interesting summary of the Kierkegaardbuch can be found in Adorno’s short review of his own work. See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” p. 306. 63 Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: Verlag von J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1933, p. 42. (English translation: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. and ed. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989, p. 39.) In his review Kracauer summed up Adorno’s point in the following way: “The withdrawal into [inwardness] is explained with reference to the state of the beginning high-capitalist epoch, in which all things and contents are more and more transformed into commodities and their proper value is replaced with their exchange value.” Siegfried Kracauer, “Der enthüllte Kierkegaard,” p. 264. 64 Adorno refers to Johannes Climacus’ report about his promenades with his father inside their apartment. See Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus dubitandum est, in Pap. IV B 1. 65 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 52. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 47.) In his letter to Kracauer from May 12, 1930, as well as in his review of his own work, Adorno describes the interiéur as “the model of Kierkegaard’s inwardness.” See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923– 1966,” p. 208; p. 306. 60

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external world.66 Here the objective world appears as a reflection seen in a window mirror that “casts into the apartment only the semblance of things.”67 Although Adorno deems every attempt at escape from objective reality illusory and ultimately self-contradictory, he argues that Kierkegaard sees the withdrawal into inwardness as a consistent and necessary move. The consequence of Kierkegaard’s retreat into subjectivity is the conversion of the outside world and its Realien into “dark otherness,” abstract and contingent, in itself random and indeterminate.68 Kierkegaard posits material objectivity as incommensurable with inwardness,69 reduces the external to a mere “occasion,”70 and severs the dialectical relationship between the individual and society. Instead, he elaborates an intrasubjective dialectic confined to “objectless inwardness.”71 With the absolutization of subjectivity and “the external world jettisoned from inwardness as contingent,”72 it is only natural that Kierkegaard finds himself forced to redefine the problematic concept of history. With the immanent dialectic bound to no positive ontic content,73 Kierkegaard shifts the focus to internal history, trying to anathemize objective history,74 which at the given point of time assumes the form of “the depraved present.”75 For this purpose the concepts of contemporaneity and situation are developed as vehicles of Kierkegaard’s negative philosophy of history that subordinates objective historical elements to the individual.76 However, as Adorno insists, this attempt at negative emancipation of subjectivity from the external historical developments is bound to fail, as internal history remains dialectically dependent on its external opposite. A central piece of Adorno’s monograph is the analysis of Kierkegaard’s concept of the self. As Adorno suggests, the aim of Kierkegaard’s anthropology seems to be the re-establishing of the concretion of subjectivity obliterated by idealism, as Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 56. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 50). 67 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 46. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 42.) 68 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 31. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 29.) 69 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 31–2. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 30.) 70 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 31; p. 32. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 29; p. 31.) 71 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 33–4; p. 36. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 32; p. 34.) 72 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 75. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 66.) 73 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 32. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 31.) 74 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 38. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 35.) 75 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 42. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 39.) 76 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 40. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 37.) 66

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well as the highlighting of its fundamental relation to objective transcendence, that is God. However, Adorno’s demonstration arrives at the conclusion that what Kierkegaard manages to produce is merely a late idealist version of an absolute self that remains enclosed in itself, in its abstract, objectless inwardness. Moreover, this self is debunked as mythical and without a relationship to positive transcendence. Kierkegaard’s accentuation of existence and the concrete individual seems at first glance to be a clear evidence of the fact that he intends to break away from the philosophical tradition that views humanity primarily through the prism of the anonymous and apersonal Concept and Spirit. Kierkegaard sets out to formulate a theory of existence, whose center is to be occupied by the determinate human self. This vision, however, shipwrecks on both Kierkegaard’s definition of the self and the status assigned to the external world. According to Adorno, the fatal element of Kierkegard’s anthropology, largely responsible for its ultimate collapse, is the claim that self is identical with spirit. As Adorno believes, it is in this view that Kierkegaard’s failure to overcome idealism is encoded. In his critique, Adorno avails himself of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript where Kierkegaard defines the subject as a synthesis, as “an existing infinite spirit.”77 Subsequently, Adorno points to The Sickness unto Death, where the self is not only determined as spirit,78 but also as “a relation which relates itself to itself”79—or as Adorno puts it, as a “relation to relation.”80 These utterly abstract delineations of the self are affirmed also elsewhere in Kierkegaard when the contingent, natural, and temporal are spiritualized and infinitized. The fact that Kierkegaard’s anthropology rests on concepts such as infinity, eternity, relation, and spirit, as its fundamental pillars, is for Adorno a clear indication of Kierkegaard’s failure to reinstate concreteness. Adorno insists that the self constructed from these “components” necessarily remains indeterminate: “as the intersection of conceptual projections, it is not grasped as this specific self.”81 Or, phrased with respect to the religious dimension of the self: “[n]o theology has ever conceived the idea of hope for a ‘relation,’ or for the indeterminate substratum of the relation, but solely as hope for the mortal creature.”82 Starting from Kierkegaard’s axiom that spirit is the self, Adorno inquires about the crucial relation of the “existing infinite spirit” to nature. Alluding to Kierkegaard’s abstract, idealist-like description of the self, Adorno poses the pertinent question:

Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 87. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 78.) 78 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 89. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 79.) 79 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 89. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 80.) See SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13. 80 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 91. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 82.) 81 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 87. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 78.) 82 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 92. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 82.) 77

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“does not spirit, identified with created being, become a mythical quality?”83 As he goes on to explain, the Kierkegaardian self as spirit is supposed to “transcend the natural world to which its substratum necessarily belongs.”84 In Adorno’s interpretation it is precisely the definition of self as “spirit” and as “a relation that relates itself to itself” that reveals the mythical character of Kierkegaard’s doctrine. Namely, the self, which is capable of producing the duality of nature and the supranatural and establishing the domination of the latter over the former, “has raised itself unnoticed to the status of the creator.”85 This means, however, that the “spirit” generated in such a way is only seemingly distinct from nature; in reality it is merely a product of a mythically selfpositing creature.86 Thus the circle of natural life is never broken, only the creature is fractured by being “deceptively exalt[ed] into transcendence as ‘spirit.’ ”87 The fact that Kierkegaard’s doctrine of subjectivity is ultimately a portrayal of a monological natural-mythical self that is not bound to any determinate transcendence, is exemplified by Adorno with Kierkegaard’s notion of sacrifice.88 At first, Adorno attempts to document the mythical character of sacrifice in Kierkegaard by examining his Christology. Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Christ’s death as “a propitiating sacrifice” rather than “an act of reconciliation”89 is a decisive step towards natural religion and towards positing sacrificial self-annihilation as the most central theme of Christ’s life. The natural-mythical element of such Christology is not only its overt emphasis on expiation and disregard for grace, but above all “the fetishistic autonomization of sacrifice” which gradually overshadows Christ himself and becomes the main theme in its own right.90 As Adorno suggests, Kierkegaard’s philosophy “develops the cult of sacrifice with such tenacity that it finally becomes a gnosis...[that] draws Christianity into the graceless immanence of the course of nature.”91 In gnosis God is rendered helpless in the face of fate and necessity, losing control and disappearing into the nature.92

Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 89. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 79.) 84 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 89. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 80.) 85 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 90. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 81.) 86 Ibid. 87 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 92. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 82.) 88 The notion of sacrifice is discussed at length in Dialectic of Enlightenment. See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, pp. 39–45. 89 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 124. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 110.) 90 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 124–5. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, pp. 111–12.) 91 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 125. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 112.) 92 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 125–7. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 112–13.) 83

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Divine transcendence is in Kierkegaard canceled by the autonomous natural human spirit that constructs its own god—the “strictly different”—by means of a thought process that ends in self-sacrifice.93 This happens in paradox, the source of the highest passion of thought that expresses itself as a desire “to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.”94 The paradoxical movement pushes thought towards its own self-negation, through which it is supposed to to draw the “strictly different” to itself. Thus God is to be attained by the collapse of thought and the spirit’s self-sacrifice. The indeterminate transcendence arrived at through this thought process is, however, nothing other than an echo of the natural spirit in objectless interiority.95 Importantly, however, “the impulse towards self-destruction and annihilation” is presented by Kierkegaard himself in The Sickness unto Death as the characteristic feature of despair,96 thus anticipating the fate of his own project. Although Kierkegaard’s “system of existence” brings about its own collapse and yields no hope, Adorno insists that it would be mistaken to consider this the last word of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. If, as he claims, the “ruins of the shattered self are the marks of hope,”97 then another reading of Kierkegaard is possible than just the one through the prism of the system of existence. In spite of Kierkegaard’s harsh verdict on the aesthetic sphere, it is the content of the images and metaphors in his works that ultimately defies the “rigorous logic of existence,”98 dissolves despair, and offers hope. The inconspicuous hope enciphered in the disparate images scattered across Kierkegaard’s oeuvre is said to live its own life, disobeying the imperatives of the idealist construction of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Using Kierkegaard’s own metaphor from The Sickness unto Death, Adorno likens this situation to a typographical error revolting against the author, suggesting that “perhaps it was no error but in a far higher sense...an essential constituent in the whole exposition.”99 In this way Adorno is able to reverse Kierkegaard’s explicit judgment on the aesthetic and redefine its role. As Paul Tillich remarks in connection with this redefinition,

Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 127. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 113.) Here Adorno draws on Chapter 3 of Philosophical Fragments entitled “The Absolute Paradox (A Metaphysical Caprice).” In Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno note that “[a]ll sacrificial acts, deliberately planned by humans, deceive the god for whom they are performed: by imposing on him the primacy of human purposes they dissolve away his power.” See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, p. 40. 94 See SKS 4, 243 / PF, 37. 95 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 127; p. 132. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 113; p. 117.) 96 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 127. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, pp. 113–14.) 97 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 95. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 85.) 98 See Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 148–9. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, pp. 132–3.) 99 Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 149–50. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 133.); see SKS 11, 187 / SUD, 74. 93

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Adorno is aware of the fact that here he interprets Kierkegaard beyond his own intentions.100 Addendum: Reactions to Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (1933–35) Adorno’s monograph attracted considerable attention in Germanophone intellectual circles and was reviewed in newpapers and journals of a broad scope of orientation: philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, psychology, theology, church history, and literature.101 The reactions were largely polarized, which aptly illustrates the controversial reception of the book. The reviews published in philosophical journals were predominantly critical of the monograph. In Kant-Studien F.J. Brecht complained that Adorno pulls Kierkegaard “into an eerie realm of fog,” where through an odd blend of astrology, mythology, gnosis, Baroque, idealism, and sociology he hollows out the content of Kierkegaard’s thought and downplays Kierkegaard’s true intentions.102 Brecht sums up his opinion on the book in the short claim: “what happens in this book—with considerable skill and not without taste—is nothing else than this: desubstantiation of Kierkegaard.”103 In his critical review published in Philosophisches Jahrbuch, H. Fels suggests that Adorno’s strictly philosophical interpretation of Kierkegaard misses the important fact that the religious is the primary in Kierkegaard. Due to the fact that Adorno “did not sufficiently appreciate this,”104 he chose an overly narrow standpoint which in Fels’ opinion significantly impaired the quality of the book. Paul Tillich’s brief review in The Journal of Philosophy shows much more understanding for Adorno’s project than the preceding two. Although Tillich points out that Adorno’s style is “heavy and peculiar,” he deems his attack on Kierkegaard “exceptionally thoughtful” and the whole monograph “an important contribution to the critique of Existential philosophy.”105 Tillich denotes Adorno’s analysis of the 100 Paul Tillich, “Gutachten über die Arbeit von Dr. Wiesengrund: Die Konstruktion des Ästhetischen bei Kierkegaard,” in Ergänzungs- und Nachlassbände zu den Gesammelten Werken von Paul Tillich, vol. 11, part 2, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter and Evangelisches Verlagswerk 1999, p. 346. 101 Apart from the reviews analyzed below, Jens Himmelstrup’s bibliography lists also an anonymous review in Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung from April 2, 1933 and a review by H. Stephan in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 14, no. 3, 1933, pp. 186–8. See Jens Himmelstrup, Søren Kierkegaard. International Bibliografi, Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag / Arnold Busck 1962, p. 141. 102 F.J. Brecht, “Wiesengrund-Adorno, Theodor, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. J.B. Mohr, Tübingen 1932. VII, 165 S.,” in Kant-Studien, vol. 40, 1935, p. 327. 103 Ibid. 104 H. Fels, “Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Aesthetischen. Von Theodor WiesengrundAdorno. Tübingen 1933. J.C.B. Mohr. gr.8º. VII u. 165 S. Geh. M 9,60; Lwd. M 11,40,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 48, nos. 2–3, 1935, p. 396. 105 Paul Tillich, “Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Theodor WiesengrundAdorno. (Beiträge zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte, 2.) Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1933. VII + 165 pp. 9.60 M,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 23, 8, 1934, p. 640.

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intérieur as “a masterpiece,” explains Adorno’s usage of the notion of myth and underlines the idealistic background of Kierkegaard’s thought.106 He captures the overall message of Adorno’s construction of the aesthetic in saying that “he points out that the true significance of Kierkegaard is to be found where he himself did not seek it, namely, in the realm of esthetics and in the images he uses to portray it.”107 One of the harshest critiques of Adorno’s monograph stems from the pen of Karl Troost and appeared in 1934 in Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie. Troost dismisses the book as a difficult-to-read but simplistic work of a convinced Marxist who notices in Kierkegaard, “the Christian monk,”108 mostly the unimportant aspects. In Troost’s evaluation Adorno does not pursue the declared aim, but instead attempts “the destruction of Kierkegaard’s substance and the praise of discoveries on the margin of his thought.”109 Adorno never succeeds in grasping the center of Kierkegaard’s thought which prompts him to odd attacks based on misunderstandings. What remains of Kierkegaard at the end is merely “a romantic nihilist.”110 The rather poetically written review of Dolf Sternberger in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung contains a similar observation as Troost’s article, namely, that Adorno refused to accept as the center of Kierkegaard’s philosophy the doctrines proclaimed to be central by Kierkegaard himself.111 Sternberger claims that in this way Adorno “makes discoveries that no one would have imagined,”112 since instead of conservatively following Kierkegaard’s declared intentions, he reaches beyond this primary stratum. Also, the reviewer praises Adorno for uncovering the hopelessness of Kierkegaard’s inwardness and bringing to light the fact that the true locus of hope is the “actual social world.”113 Helmut Kuhn’s analytical review, written in a positive tone and published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, praises Adorno’s monograph as a pioneering work in the field of philosophical confrontation with Kierkegaard’s thought. Contrary to earlier studies that still remained “under the spell of [Kierkegaard’s] premises,” Adorno is able to look beyond Kierkegaard’s theoretical constructions.114 Kuhn does not share the critical view of other reviewers who condemned Adorno’s re-evaluation of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard, but rather

Ibid. Ibid. 108 Karl Troost, “Wiesengrund-Adorno: Kierkegaard, Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Tübingen 1933, Mohr. VII, 165 S. 9.60 RM,” Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie, vol. 12, 1934, p. 423. 109 Ibid., p. 422. 110 Ibid., p. 423. 111 Dolf Sternberger, “Wiesengrund-Adorno, Theodor, Kierkegaard, Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. J.C.B. Mohr. Tübingen 1933. (165 S.; RM. 9.60, w. RM. 11.40),” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 2, 1933, p. 108. 112 Ibid., p. 109. 113 Ibid., p. 110. 114 Helmut Kuhn, “Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno: Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen 1933. (Beiträge zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte 2), 165 S.,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 28, 1934, p. 103. 106 107

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commends Adorno for uncovering the secrets of Kierkegaard hidden in nonconceptual descriptions, mainly in his images and metaphors.115 The review published in the Viennese journal for psychoanalytical psychology Imago, written by W. Marseille, pays primary attention to Adorno’s use of psycho analysis, as well as to his psychological insight into Kierkegaard’s thought. Although Adorno presents his philosophical method as distinct from the psychoanalytical one, Marseille detects “anonymous continuing effects” of psychoanalysis in Adorno’s work.116 The monograph is praised for an inspiring analysis of the dialectic of the natural-mythical and the spiritual, or for the examination of affectivity in Kierkegaard, but the reviewer notes that “the analysis so auspiciously begun diverges from psychology to idealistic philosophy and at last ends in pure speculation.”117 Marseille also reproaches Adorno for the unclarity of his concepts and his entanglement with the object of his analysis: Kierkegaard himself.118 W. Ruttenbeck’s review published in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte describes Adorno’s monograph as a critique that is aimed “against the theological interpretation of Kierkegaard.”119 Ruttenbeck notes that the depiction of Kierkegaard as an idealist and a Hegelian is in no way new and can be encountered even in theological analyses of Kierkegaard.120 Adorno’s specialty is, however, to make this view absolute and extreme. Furthermore, Adorno completely ignores Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses and tendentiously twists the content of Kierkegaard’s last conversations with Emil Boesen.121 Ruttenbeck sees this as evidence of the fact that “Wiesengrund’s whole Kierkegaard-view...is ‘a construction.’ ”122 Nonetheless, even this “entirely erroneous interpretation of Kierkegaard”123 can serve as an inspiring medium for self-reflection and self-examination of contemporary Protestant theology.124 The most detailed review of Adorno’s monograph is the one from the pen of Karl Löwith published in Deutsche Literaturzeitung in 1934.125 At the outset of Ibid. W. Marseille, “Wiesengrund-Adorno, Theodor: Kierkegaard, Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. Beiträge zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte. 2. Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1933. 165 Seiten,” Imago. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Psychologie, ihre Grenzgebiete und Anwendungen, vol. 20, 1934, p. 502. 117 Ibid., p. 503. 118 Ibid. 119 W. Ruttenbeck, “Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Kierkegaard, Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (= Beiträge zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte. Nr. 2.) Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr, 1933, 165 S., RM. 9,60 br.; RM. geb. 11.40,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, vol. 53, 1934, p. 695. 120 Ruttenbeck refers to Torsten Bohlin. See ibid., p. 697. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., p. 698. 125 See Karl Löwith, “Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno [Dr. phil., Frankfurt a. M.], Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. [Beiträge z. Philos. u. Gesch. H. 2.] Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1933. 165 S. 8º. M. 9,60; geb. M. 11.40,” Deutsche Literaturzeitung, no. 4, 1934, pp. 156–77. See especially pp. 166–77. 115 116

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his analysis Löwith summarizes Adorno’s view of Kierkegaard, describing him as “an intellectually existing ‘idealist’” who attempts in vain to posit religious transcendence.126 Contrary to Kierkegaard’s own intention, his “ontological” truth is manifested “there, where he rejects it, in the metaphysical content of his ‘aesthetic’ images.”127 Adorno’s “mannered” and “dictatorially presented” interpretation128 is then examined at length with Löwith concluding that the mutually opposed pictures of Kierkegaard presented by Adorno, Thust, and Fischer129 reflect the intellectual uncertainty of the present time.130 Walter Benjamin’s review in Vossische Zeitung shows clearly, in spite of its brevity, the reviewer’s deep understanding of Adorno’s project. Benjamin is aware of the fact that Adorno’s interpretation points in a completely different direction than Barth’s or Heidegger’s,131 since it reconnects Kierkegaard to idealism and demonstrates the mythical features of “any idealism of absolute spirit.”132 The main message of Benjamin’s review concerns, however, the most controversial part of Adorno’s monograph: the redefinition of the role of the aesthetic. As Benjamin argues, “[n]owhere does Wiesengrund reach deeper than, where he, disregarding the templates of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, seeks the key in its most inconspicuous relics: in images, parables, allegories.”133 Adorno’s intentions and methodology are perhaps even better explained in Siegfried Kracauer’s review written for the Frankfurter Zeitung.134 Kracauer starts by claiming that Adorno’s “decisive discovery” consists in the finding that Kierkegaard does not put an end to the idealist tradition, but instead his thought represents “an historically conditioned final form of idealism.”135 Kracauer goes on to highlight some of the main motives of the monograph, paying closer attention to the sociological background of Kierkegaard’s inwardness136 and arguing that “the accent of Wiesengrund’s study rests on the finding that Kierkegaard’s inwardness is of a Ibid., p. 166. Ibid. 128 Ibid., p. 176. 129 Here Löwith refers to the following contemporary treatments of Kierkegaard: Martin Thust, Sören Kierkegaard. Der Dichter des Religiösen. Grundlagen eines Systems der Subjektivität, Munich: Beck 1931; Friedrich C. Fischer, Die Nullpunkt-Existenz dargestellt an der Lebensform Sören Kierkegaards, Munich: Beck 1933. 130 Löwith, “Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno [Dr. phil., Frankfurt a. M.], Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen,” p. 177. 131 Benjamin, “Kierkegaard. Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” p. 380. 132 Ibid., p. 381. 133 Ibid., p. 382. 134 Kracauer’s review written for the Frankfurter Zeitung remained unpublished. For more detail on the fate of the review see the correspondence between Kracauer and Adorno in early 1933. See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923– 1966,” pp. 300–9. 135 Siegfried Kracauer, “Der enthüllte Kierkegaard,” in Siegfried Kracauer. Schriften, vols. 1–8, ed. by Inka Mülder-Bach, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1971–90, vol. 5.3, p. 263. 136 Ibid., p. 264. 126 127

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natural, mythical kind.”137 Importantly, Kracauer explains that the method employed by Adorno follows roughly the same intuition as is present in Walter Benjamin’s works, according to which “the truth content of a work becomes manifest in its collapse.”138 This enables Adorno to arrive at the conviction that Kierkegaard comes nearest to truth where he does not hope to find it: in the aesthetic sphere.139 B. Defending Kierkegaard Against Existentialist and Nazi Abuse: The Controversy with Jean Wahl (1938–40) Although Adorno’s monograph from 1933 contained both direct and indirect criticism of what Kierkegaard’s “philosophy of existence” came to represent in the twentieth century, his controversy with Jean Wahl (1888–1974) provides unequivocal clues to Adorno’s stance on the existentialist and National Socialist appropriation of Kierkegaard. Adorno first encountered Jean Wahl in Paris in 1937 where he attended the Congrès Descartes and the Second International Congress on Aesthetics and the Science of Art.140 During the latter he was introduced to Jean Wahl by Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), and already in their first discussion they touched upon Kierkegaard. In his report from the congress Adorno noted that Wahl was equally impressed with two rather “incompatible” studies on Kierkegaard—Adorno’s own Kierkegaardbuch and the monograph by August Vetter—which prompted Adorno to the comment that Wahl’s ability of discrimination was not particularly developed.141 After being asked to review Jean Wahl’s 745-page-long work Études kierkegaardiennes, which appeared in 1938 in Paris, Adorno turned to Walter Benjamin for tactical advice. In his letter from May 4, 1938 he confessed to Benjamin that he finds himself unable to produce a genuinely positive review, since the book fails to deal critically with existential philosophy and its appropriation of Kierkegaard. Although Adorno admitted that the book had its informative value, he argued that it was heavily conformist, “indescribably boring” and resembled a “textbook” whose aim is simply to advocate existentialism.142 Adorno’s two reviews143 of Jean Wahl’s monumental work appeared in The Journal of Philosophy (1939)144 and in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., p. 266. 139 Ibid., p. 267. 140 See Adorno’s report from his stay in Paris from August 11, 1937 in [Theodor W. Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 4.1, pp. 571–9. 141 See ibid., p. 573. 142 See [Theodor W. Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Walter Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 1, p. 327. 143 Structurally, the two reviews are very similar and contain the same main arguments. However, the texts are not entirely identical and in several instances differ in important nuances. 144 Theodor W. Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, January 5, 1939, pp. 18–19. 137 138

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(1940),145 in English and German respectively. Adorno chose a relatively diplomatic tone, but did not hold back his criticism of Wahl’s analyses. His initial positive claim in both essays was that although Kierkegaard had been known in France for some decades, Jean Wahl’s work represented a seminal project in the sense that for the first time it offered a detailed and thorough presentation of Kierkegaard’s life and work based on a solid knowledge of primary sources and secondary literature.146 He added, however, that this, in many aspects reliable source, needed to be seen in its proper context, namely, that it sought to uncover the roots of the currently popular existential philosophy. As Adorno explained, this philosophical tradition was in France associated chiefly with the circle of thinkers around the Recherches Philosophiques which followed “pretty much the line of Jaspers and Heidegger.”147 As for the methodology and content of Études kierkegaardiennes, Adorno’s criticism focused on three principal points. First, Adorno reproached Wahl for being too exegetical, preferring “interpretations to explanations,” as a result of which the book lacked critical distance from both Kierkegaard and existentialism.148 Secondly, Adorno protested against Wahl’s overly “respectful treatment” of Kierkegaard which turned him into “a sort of classic” and “deprive[d] him of the thorn which he not only felt within his own flesh, but which he also pointed against society.”149 Thirdly, Adorno found it unacceptable that Wahl did not thematize the fact that Heidegger and Jaspers heavily neutralized Kierkegaard’s radicality and standardized a conformist interpretation of the “true enemy of the established order.”150 This neutralization of Kierkegaard reached its climax in the National Socialist ideology, which again remained unmentioned in Wahl: “Kierkegaard is not even defended against the abuse of his notions for the sinister purposes obtained by the present sacrifice of conscience for the sake of a cult of powers, which Kierkegaard certainly would have condemned as demonic.”151 It was especially this last point of criticism that seems to have prompted Jean Wahl’s reaction.

Theodor W. Adorno, “Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes. Éditions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S.; fr. fr. 100.-),” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, 1939–40, nos. 1–2, 1940, pp. 232–3. 146 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” p. 19. (“Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes. Éditions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S.; fr. fr. 100.-),” p. 233.) 147 Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” p. 19. (“Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes. Éditions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S.; fr. fr. 100.-),” p. 232.) 148 Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” p. 19. 149 Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” p. 19. (“Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes. Éditions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S.; fr. fr. 100.-),” p. 233.) 150 Adorno, “Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes. Éditions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S.; fr. fr. 100.-),” p. 233. 151 Adorno, “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” p. 19. 145

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Jean Wahl responded to Adorno’s unflattering review in the Journal of Philosophy by sending a letter to the editors who forwarded it to Adorno. Adorno reacted by formulating a letter of explanation which is dated April 30, 1939. There, first of all, Adorno takes pains to assure Wahl that he is well aware of the fact that both of them share the same negative attitude towards “the authoritarian regime.”152 However, he maintains his argument that Wahl’s book obscures the borderline between Kierkegaard and modern existential philosophy, thus making it nearly impossible to distance Kierkegaard from the “pandemonium unleashed in Germany in the name of existential philosophy.”153 Adorno points at first to the “henchman of National Socialism” Emanuel Hirsch (1888–1972), but insists that “even what Jaspers made out of Kierkegaard has a lot to do with these sinister things.”154 He maintains that although Kierkegaard’s relation to positive Christian theology may be dubious in many aspects, it is this interconnection that prevents his doctrine from political abuse. Once this theological dimension is eliminated, “there seems to be in existential philosophy no more barrier against irrationalist individualism and against the glorification of the blind being so [So-Sein].”155 Adorno underlines the fact that it was precisely the high scholarly value of Wahl’s work that made him feel obliged to highlight critically this missing element. He concludes by admitting that also his own Kierkegaardbuch from 1933 failed to provide a more concrete political analysis of Kierkegaard.156 C. Capitalism and Agape: “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” (1940) The reviews of the monograph Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen repeatedly reproached Adorno for paying insufficient regard to Kierkegaard’s Christian world-view and for ignoring his non-pseudonymous writings. Perhaps as a response to these allegations, Adorno’s essay “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” focused specifically on a major Christian treatise published under Kierkegaard’s own name: Works of Love.157 Although originally written in German, the essay appeared at first in Adorno’s own English translation in Studies in Philosophy and

152 [Theodor W. Adorno], “Adorno an Jean Wahl” [1939] in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 4.2, p. 450. 153 Ibid., p. 451. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid., p. 452. 157 Adorno acknowledged the fact that his monograph largely ignored Kierkegaard’s upbuilding works and that this was a factor in his choice of Works of Love for his next analysis of Kierkegaard. See Adorno, “Notiz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, p. 262. In his letter to Walter Benjamin from February 29, 1940 Adorno noted that his lecture “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” pursued further “certain tendencies of the Kierkegaardbuch on a material that had not been processed in the latter.” [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Walter Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940,” p. 419.

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Social Science (1939–40),158 and in 1951 a revised German version was published in Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte.159 Compared to Adorno’s monograph from 1933, the essay “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” presents the reader with a markedly different balance of criticism and appreciation of Kierkegaard. A large part of the essay is dedicated to Kierkegaard’s strikingly accurate and insightful diagnosis of the societal trends of his age. Although Adorno had already praised Kierkegaard’s critical reaction to early high-capitalism in his 1933 monograph, in “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love” his appreciation is much more outspoken and nuanced. Nevertheless, this positive verdict on Kierkegaard’s philosophical nonconformism is intrinsically linked with the thesis that Kierkegaard’s response to the corruption of his age is selfcontradictory and ultimately misses its own target. The essay portrays Kierkegaard as a thinker deeply affected by the endangerment of the human subject at the beginning of high-capitalism.160 Appalled by the numbing and mutilation of the individual through collective mechanisms of domination, Kierkegaard is said to have developed enmity towards masses161 and formulated a negative concept of history as the progress in the hollowing out of the individual.162 In the assemblies of 1848 Kierkegaard “seems to have heard those loudspeakers which filled the Berlin Sportpalast one hundred years later”163 and spotted the ideology behind “the doctrine of bourgeois equality.”164 Adorno argues that Kierkegaard managed to see through the deceptive facade of capitalist prosperity and detected the self-destructive tendencies embedded in the “bourgeois seriousness” based on money, acquisition, exchange, and competition.165 However, in his protest against the society that has degraded the individual to a mere purpose, Kierkegaard insisted on the withdrawal into inwardness, thus distancing himself not only from the present state of hopelessness but from the actual world altogether. As Adorno suggests, this is clearly manifested in Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Christian love which is reduced to “a matter of pure inwardness.”166 Thus, although Kierkegaard identified Theodor W. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, 1939–40, pp. 413–29. Upon an invitation by Paul Tillich the text was presented as a lecture on February 23, 1940 to a circle of theologians and philosophers in New York. See Adorno, “Notiz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 262–3. 159 Theodor W. Adorno, “Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” Zeitschrift für Religionsund Geistesgeschichte, vol. 3, no. 1, 1951, pp. 23–38. 160 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 424. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 33.) 161 Ibid. 162 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 424. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” pp. 32–3.) 163 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 424. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 33.) 164 Ibid. 165 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” pp. 426–7. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” pp. 35–6.) 166 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 415. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 25.) 158

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a real problem inherent in the capitalist society of the mid-nineteenth century, in his indignation he formulated a dysfunctional and self-negating solution. Taking his point of departure from Works of Love, Adorno introduces the reader to Kierkegaard’s basic differentiation between natural immediate love and Christian love of the neighbor.167 He argues that it is Kierkegaard’s intention to disconnect the latter from all natural inclinations and preference, thus eliminating the value of specific properties of the object of love.168 In Kierkegaard’s depiction, Christian love is conceived of as “a ‘breaking down’ of nature,” as rejection of one’s own immediate impulses, of all self-interest, as well as of all objective reasons for love.169 Turning the neighbor into a mere variable and making the determination of love entirely dependent on the subject’s disposition results, according to Adorno, in the transformation of Christian love into mere inwardness.170 In Kierkegaard’s objectless love the neighbor becomes “in a way irrelevant,” as love seeks out only the universally human in each particular object.171 The concrete neighbor represents merely an occasion for love and with love becoming a quality of inwardness, the neighbor is relegated to the realm of randomness and indetermination. Paradoxically, Kierkegaard’s rigorous Christian love can then be summed up with Goethe’s “aesthetic” dictum “if I love you, what concern is it of yours?,”172 which aptly illustrates the devaluation of the role of the particular neighbor. If, however, inwardness becomes the sole measure of action, the external world can easily become prey of evil powers.173 With the neighbor losing all concreteness and the concept of equality entirely internalized, no interest is taken in

Ibid. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” pp. 415–16. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” pp. 25–6.) In recent Kierkegaard research several scholars have reacted to Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard’s concept of Christian neighbor love. See, for example, Begonya Sàez Tajafuerce, “Works of Love: Modernity or Antiquity?,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 60–76; Pia Søltoft, “The Presence of the Absent Neighbor in Works of Love,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 113–28; M. Jamie Ferreira, “Mutual Responsiveness in Relation: The Challenge of the Ninth Deliberation,” in Works of Love, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16), pp. 193–210; Louise Carroll Keeley, “Loving ‘No One,’ Loving Everyone: The Work of Love in Recollecting One Dead in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love,” in Works of Love, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16), pp. 211–48. 169 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 416. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” pp. 25–6.) 170 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 416. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 26.) 171 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 415. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 25.) 172 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 416. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 26.) 173 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 420. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 29.) 167 168

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external oppression and social inequality.174 Kierkegaard’s attempt to identify the category of neighbor with the universal humanity in the particular person rebounds in a religiously motivated disinterest that, according to Adorno, comes close to callousness.175 This is best seen in the chapter “The Work of Love in Recollecting One Who is Dead” of Works of Love, where Kierkegaard extols the selfless love towards a deceased neighbor which precludes even the most latent quid pro quo of natural love.176 Adorno confronts Kierkegaard on this point and maintains that Kierkegaard posits the love for the dead as the model of all Christian love. All neighbors are to be loved “as if they were dead,” with their specificity annulled and with subjectivity becoming the only determining factor in the love process. At this point Adorno avails himself of his old critique of Kierkegaard and attempts to lay bare the natural-mythical character of Kierkegaard’s prima facie Christian and spiritual doctrine. With regard to Kierkegaard’s abstract denaturalization of love, Adorno claims that “[t]he overstraining of the transcendence of love threatens, at any given moment, to become transformed into the darkest hatred of man.”177 He also insists that Kierkegaard’s “reckless spiritualisation of love” provokes a “relapse into mythology” and the Kierkegaardian spirit, confined to radical inwardness, “is prone to conceive itself as the sole ground of the world.”178 Face to face with this intrinsically idealist construction, Adorno reiterates his old reproach that Kierkegaard “sets out to expel nature with a pitchfork, only to become Nature’s prey himself.”179 The same fate necessarily befalls his “super-Christianity” that ultimately discloses its true nature and “tilts over into paganism.”180 D. The Truth and Untruth of the Single Individual: Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag (1963) Adorno’s essay “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag” (1963)181 continues to some extent the line suggested in “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine 174 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 421. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 30.) 175 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 416. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 26.) 176 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” pp. 416–17. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 26.) 177 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 417. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 26.) 178 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 417. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” pp. 26–7.) 179 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 417. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 27.) 180 Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” p. 418. (“Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” p. 27.) 181 Theodor W. Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” Neue Deutsche Hefte, vol. 95, 1963, pp. 5–25. The material was originally recorded as a radio speech by the Hessischer Rundfunk on May 3, 1963 and broadcast in mid-May by Westdeutscher Rundfunk. On June 28 Adorno presented the text as a lecture at

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of Love,” as it highlights both Kierkegaard’s legitimate protest against the decadent tendencies of capitalist society and the failure of his self-enclosed subjectivity to offer a relevant remedy. In this later essay, however, Adorno adds a further dimension to his portrait of Kierkegaard by examining the reception of his philosophy in the intellectual traditions of the twentieth century. The initial thesis of the essay underscores the fact that according to Kierkegaard’s own standard he is not destined to triumph.182 For the truth which Kierkegaard attempted to portray in his works there is no triumph possible in this world, whose history was to Kierkegaard a downward spiral towards hell and an ever greater betrayal of God’s revelation.183 Thus, in Kierkegaard’s negative concept of history there is no place for a posthumous triumph of his doctrine or of any of his potential disciples.184 Furthermore, the very principle of success, promoted by the bourgeois society he so fervently opposed, is evidently irreconciliable with the notion of truth Kierkegaard stood for.185 In spite of all this, it is Adorno’s claim that in reality Kierkegaard has triumphed.186 Adorno points at first to Kierkegaard’s historical triumph, to the steady growth in popularity and influence that Kierkegaard’s thought has experienced in the past one hundred years. Starting with Georg Brandes and Henrik Ibsen, the popularization of Kierkegaard continued with Christoph Schrempf and reached a turning point in Theodor Haecker. The ensuing reception in dialectical theology and existential philosophy sealed Kierkegaard’s triumph and helped put an end to the academic reign of German idealism.187 The price of Kierkegaard’s unwanted triumph was, however, the complete neutralization of his doctrine. Kierkegaard’s radicality and negativity, his rejection of accommodation to the trends of his age, have been played down and abolished.188 Referring to Jaspers’ personal abhorrence of Kierkegaard’s radical Christianity,189 Adorno argues that one hundred years after Kierkegaard’s death his doctrines were subject to the same kind of levelling that Christianity was experiencing in Christendom during his lifetime.190 Kierkegaard’s controversial doctrine of the single individual has devolved into empty existentialist talk of authenticity and the ideological adaptation of his philosophy to the consciousness of the age reached its tragic climax in the National Socialist interpretation by Emanuel Hirsch.191 However, Adorno insists that Kierkegaard indirectly contributed to this triumph in the form of defeat. As a matter of fact, it was the deep ambiguity of his central the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” p. 592; pp. 594–5; p. 600; pp. 604–6. 182 Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 5. 183 Ibid., p. 6. 184 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 185 Ibid., p. 7. 186 Ibid., p. 8. 187 See ibid. 188 Ibid., p. 9. 189 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 190 Ibid., p. 10. 191 Ibid.

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doctrine of the single individual which paved the way for the one-sided usurpation and neutralization of his thought in the first half of the twentieth century. With regard to Kierkegaard’s doctrine of the single individual, Adorno emphasizes the fact that it is imperative that both of its sides be brought to light: its truth, as well as its untruth. The truth of the concept consists in its resistance and protest against the degenerative tendencies of the established capitalist order. Kierkegaard’s defense of the individual’s position proved to be a refuge against the instrumentalization and objectification of human relationships and the reduction of the human to a role.192 It was an important instrument in Kierkegaard’s attack on the ideology of the profitsystem and on the reification of the high-capitalist commodity-world. It was crucial for Kierkegaard’s critique of the neutralization of the Danish Church and its reduction to a cultural artifact and ultimately to a non-binding consumer product.193 Moreover, it embodied Kierkegaard’s principle of non-accommodation which enabled him to side with the losers, rather than with the winners of the progressing liberalism.194 The untruth of the concept of the single individual, on the other hand, lies primarily in its extreme inwardness and the contempt for the world inherent in it. Adorno argues that having misconstrued Hegel’s notion of dialectic Kierkegaard formulated a dialectic without mediation in which the single individual falls out of the dialectic back into pure immediacy.195 Against the absolute Füranderessein of the commodity-world, Kierkegaard posits the absolute Fürsichsein of the single individual.196 By constructing the category of the single individual as an absolute that does not need to include society as its opposite, Kierkegaard arrives at a doctrine of inwardness that is nothing other than a “fixed unhappy consciousness that has broken out of dialectic.”197 Furthermore, the absolute character assigned to the single individual implies total abstractness. Since the single individual is to remain untouched by the world—which is the real source of his potential content— his seeming concretion turns out to be total indetermination. As Adorno succinctly concludes, “[h]is content obeys the rule of randomness.”198 The unfortunate fate of the abstract notion of Kierkegaard’s acosmic single individual was completed in its later adoption by an ideology that did not share the same respect for subjectivity as Kierkegaard did. In this transplantation, the untruth of the concept of the single individual was extended to include single individuals as well. Adorno argues that this ideology extended Kierkegaard’s “contempt for the world to his single individual, decried autonomy…and integrated the self-negated single individuals into a collective.”199 With the notions of radical inwardness and Ibid. Ibid., p. 22. 194 See ibid., p. 23. 195 Ibid., pp. 13–14. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1963, p. 20; Theodor W. Adorno, “Bewußtsein der Negativität,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 14, pp. 190–1. 196 Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 22. 197 Ibid., p. 14. 198 Ibid., p. 16. 199 Ibid., p. 12. 192 193

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the paradoxical sacrifice of reason, Kierkegaard provided, without ever realizing it, the “intellectual good conscience” for a totalitarian ideology that used him for political purposes.200 The possibility of secularization and collectivization of the Kierkegaardian single individual is in Adorno’s interpretation clearly connected to the weakened position of positive Christian revelation in Kierkegaard. In “Kierkegaard noch einmal” Adorno returns to his critique of Kierkegaard’s concept of religiousness from 1933. Once again, he insists that in Kierkegaard religion originates from a process of thinking that negates itself and thus attempts to attain transcendence. In this way, however, God is made dependent on human initiative which to Adorno is the same kind of blasphemy that Kierkegaard reproached Hegel for.201 This “desperate natural religion”202 is derived not so much from a belief in Christian dogmas or from the living tradition of the church, but as Adorno attempts to demonstrate, from a natural relationship: from the authority of Kierkegaard’s own father.203 The mythical face of this naturally conditioned pseudo-supranaturalism is manifested in the frequent occurrence of Nordic myths in Kierkegaard’s writings.204 Also, the divine sphere of Christianity is altered so that it is hardly recognizeable: Kierkegaard’s God, the unknown Absolute, is so purified and featureless that it is as “menacing and hopeless as the gods of fate,”205 while Jesus Christ, the paradoxical God-man, is as “abstract as a concept and ambiguous as a demon.”206 E. Ontologization of the Ontic: Verhältnis zu Kierkegaard (1961), Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1964), Negative Dialektik (1966) In the 1960s Adorno authored several texts in which he dealt in great detail with different streams of the en vogue existential philosophy. Although Kierkegaard was not the prime subject of these texts, as “the father of existentialism” he received considerable attention. In continuity with the views presented in his studies devoted to Kierkegaard, Adorno aimed in these writings to examine the existentialist adoption of central Kierkegaardian doctrines and concepts, with a special focus on the doctrine of existence. The major texts of this period, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit and Negative Dialektik, are thematically anticipated in Adorno’s lectures on Ontology and Dialectic which provide a good introduction to the Kierkegaard treatments in the monographs.207 Ibid. Ibid., p. 17. See also p. 19. 202 Ibid., p. 18. See also pp. 21–2. 203 Ibid., pp. 19–20. 204 Ibid., pp. 19–21. 205 Ibid., p. 18. See also Adorno, “Bewußtsein der Negativität,” p. 191; Adorno, “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 64, no. 3, 1953, p. 350. 206 Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 19. 207 See “Theodor W. Adorno. Ontologie und Dialektik,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung 4, vol. 7, pp. 107–8; pp. 121–2; pp. 127–8; pp. 132–3; p. 150; pp. 155–6; pp. 168–86; pp. 190–1; p. 200; pp. 255–6; pp. 319–23; p. 330; p. 341. 200 201

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Adorno’s lecture “Verhältnis zu Kierkegaard” from January 10, 1961 presents a succinct account of the reception of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in Germanophone existential ontology.208 After highlighting Kierkegaard’s importance for modern existence-oriented thought, Adorno sets out to examine the connection between the apparently distinct approaches of Kierkegaard’s “theological subjectivism” and Heidegger’s “mythological objectivism.”209 An important claim of the lecture is that the most influential parts of Being and Time, namely those treating the existentiales (die Existenzialien), are “in all essential moments inspired by Kierkegaard.”210 Reacting to Hegel’s idealism which in its focus on the essence and the idea “neglected the human as a finite, sensuous and mortal being,”211 Kierkegaard formulated a philosophy which attempted to develop fundamental categories that would characterize existence as such. As Adorno observes, Kierkegaard’s categories of existence are quite accurately echoed in Heidegger’s states-of-mind of Dasein (Befindlichkeiten des Daseins), which he documents with three pairs of concepts: anxiety (anxiety), decision (resoluteness), despair (being-towardsdeath).212 Importantly, Adorno argues that already in Kierkegaard’s anthropology “these determinations of existence, in spite of their seeming immersion in the concrete human, are from the outset determinations of the essence of the human (des Menschenwesens), as at once finite and infinite, and the relation of these moments in the human is conceived in an absolute way (schlechterdings).”213 This enables Adorno to detect “an ontological intention” in Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence and prompts him to the claim that Kierkegaard’s “extremely anti-ontological philosophy in fact contains implicit ontology.”214 Thus, although Kierkegaard rejects the possibility of constructing a rational design of Being, in his doctrine of existence, delineated by such fundamental determinations as anxiety, despair, decision or leap, he produces “a disguised ontology that is unaware of itself.”215 This peculiar fact yielded, according to Adorno, obvious inspiration to more recent ontologically oriented philosophies, and the tenet that “existence is determined as a relation between the finite and the infinite” paved the way for the modern ontologization of existence.216 As Adorno concluded in his next lecture from January 12, 1961, existential ontology aims ultimately at the neutralization of its own motives and This is a term repeatedly used by Adorno, especially when referring to Heidegger. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, “13. Vorlesung. 12. 1. 1961 (Kritik des Subjektivismus),” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung 4, vol. 7, p. 184. 209 Theodor W. Adorno, “12. Vorlesung. 10. 1. 1961 (Verhältnis zu Kierkegaard),” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung 4, vol. 7, p. 176. 210 Ibid., p. 176. The English equivalents of Heidegger’s terms from Being and Time are adopted from the following translation: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1962. 211 Adorno, “12. Vorlesung. 10. 1. 1961 (Verhältnis zu Kierkegaard),” p. 176. 212 Ibid., p. 177. In German the pairs are as follows (with Heidegger’s terms in brackets): Angst (Angst), Entscheidung (Entschlossenheit), Verzweiflung (Sein zum Tode). 213 Ibid., p. 178. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid., p. 182. 216 Ibid., p. 178. 208

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the latent ontological intention present in Kierkegaard leads at last to “marked antisubjectivism.”217 Adorno’s well-known book Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1964) draws on the arguments developed both in his controversy with Jean Wahl and in his earlier Kierkegaard texts from the 1960s. Here, as before, Adorno focuses primarily on ambiguous notions in Kierkegaard’s philosophy, which his twentieth-century heirs adopted in a one-sided way, thus making their negative potential more extreme. In Jargon der Eigentlichkeit Adorno deals especially with the modern reinterpretations of Kierkegaard’s theology, theory of subjectivity, and social criticism. With respect to Kierkegaard’s theology, Adorno recalls his older objection that Kierkegaard’s overstraining of transcendence in his attempt at its purification results in the indeterminate concept of the “absolutely different.” As he pointed out in “Kierkegaard noch einmal,” the project of complete demythologization of transcendence is necessarily bound to revert to mythology.218 In Jargon der Eigentlichkeit Adorno locates a similar trend in certain theological streams of the twentieth century and argues that once again transcendence is reduced to “an abstraction, to a concept” and a relapse into mythology is inevitable.219 He points out yet another result of Kierkegaard’s model of radical transcendence, maintaining that “[t]he theological freeing of the numinous from ossified dogma has, ever since Kierkegaard, involuntarily come to mean its partial secularization.”220 Related to this, Adorno highlights the secularization of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of existence in existentialism which ultimately “succeeds” in removing “the thorn” inherent in Christological theology.221 In connection with the twentieth-century appropriation of Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity, Adorno pays special attention to the translatio of the concept of inwardness. Having outlined the contours of inwardness in Hegel and Kierkegaard, Adorno proceeds to determine what transformation the concept underwent at the hands of its “inheritors.”222 Claiming that inwardness was fatally cleansed of its truth, Adorno traces the trajectory of “the philosophy of inwardness” from Kierkegaard to the modern jargon: Adorno, “13. Vorlesung. 12. 1. 1961,” p. 184. Furthermore, Adorno’s lecture from February 16, 1961 contains a longer passage on Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ weakening of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of existence that subsequently reappears as a key argument in Negative Dialektik. See Theodor W. Adorno, “22. Vorlesung. 16. 2. 1961 (Sein und Existenz),” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung 4, vol. 7, pp. 319–20; Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1966, p. 126; pp. 128–9. 218 Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 18. See also Theodor W. Adorno, “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 64, no. 3, 1953, p. 350. 219 Theodor W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1964, p. 29. (English translation: The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1973, pp. 31–2.) 220 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, p. 28. (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 31.) 221 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, p. 17. (The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 16–17.) 222 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, pp. 62–3. (The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 72–3.) 217

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In the classic texts of existentialism, as in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, existence becomes a relationship to itself, under which heading nothing further can be conceived. It becomes, as it were, an absolutized moment of mediation, without any regard for what is mediated; and it pronounces a verdict, from the very beginning, against any philosophy of inwardness. In the jargon, finally, there remains from inwardness only the most external aspect, that thinking oneself superior which marks people who elect themselves: the claim of people who consider themselves blessed simply by virtue of being what they are. Without any effort, this claim can turn into an elitist claim, or into a readiness to attach itself to elites which then quickly gives the ax to inwardness.223

Although the modern jargon of authenticity in many aspects contradicts the main lines of Kierkegaard’s thought, there are thematic and conceptual overlaps that deserve attention. Most importantly, Adorno identifies Kierkegaard as an obvious source of inspiration for Heidegger’s concept of authenticity224 and highlights the Kierkegaardian criterion for differentiating authenticity from inauthenticity—“the decision in which the individual subject chooses itself as its own possession.”225 He goes on to explain that Kierkegaard’s modern followers have appropriated the category of decision without altering its obvious disregard for objectivity: “[s]ubjectivity, Dasein itself, is sought in the absolute disposal of the individual over himself, without regard to the fact that he is caught up in a determining objectivity.”226 Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to societal changes that jeopardize the status of the subject has been a topic in basically all of Adorno’s major treatments of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Although in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit the theme is not as explicit as in some of the earlier works, there are clear echoes of the neutralization of Kierkegaard’s antagonistic attitude towards the established order in the twentiethcentury intellectual paradigms. Adorno maintains his critique—present already in his controversy with Jean Wahl—that in the modern jargon “[t]he edge is removed from the living subject’s protest” against his being reduced to a role.227 Adorno’s late chef d’oeuvre Negative Dialektik (1966) can be brought into connection with Kierkegaard in many ways. The explicit references to Kierkegaard, however, make the work largely continue the line of Adorno’s earlier treatments of Kierkegaard from the first half of the 1960s. The object of analysis is once again the transition of Kierkegaard’s philosophical legacy into two related traditions of thought: existentialism and contemporary ontologies.228 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, pp. 64–5. (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 75. Translation slightly modified.) 224 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, p. 96. (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 114.) In his essay from 1963, Adorno explicitly identified Kierkegaard’s concept of inwardness as “the model of the Heideggerian authenticity.” See Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 8. 225 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, p. 96. (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 115.) 226 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, p. 107. (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 128.) 227 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, p. 61. (The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 71.) 228 See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 68. The English translation of the quotations from Negative Dialektik is taken from the freely available online translation by Dennis Redmond: http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html. An older translation by E.B. Ashton has also 223

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This time Adorno characterizes existentialism as “the most recent attempt to break out of conceptual fetishism,” a protest against academic philosophy, which differs from fundamental ontology through its political engagement.229 Similar to modern ontologies, existentialism fails, according to Adorno, to rid itself of idealistic elements and Kierkegaard is seen as substantially contributing to this failure. Sartre’s strong emphasis on the Kierkegaardian category of decision—purged of its Christological teleology—involves a transformation of the category into “an absolute” in its own right.230 As Adorno argues, in spite of its extreme nominalism, Sartre’s philosophy “organized itself in its most effective phase according to the old idealistic category of the subject’s freely-conceived act [Tathandlung].”231 Adorno’s ensuing critique of existentialism mirrors almost verbatim his critique of Kierkegaard: existentialism is presented as “indifferent towards every objectivity,” Sartre’s philosophy is objectless, and social circumstances and conditions are depicted as merely “an occasion for the action.”232 Although Adorno makes an explicit mention of the legitimacy of the Kierkegaardian and existentialist protest against the state of society, disempowerment of the subject, and invalidation of unregimented experience,233 he maintains that existentialism with its decisionism does not succeed in transcending Kierkegaard’s powerless solution to these challenges. Adorno’s confrontation with contemporary ontologies resumes the critical tone known from his earlier discussions of primarily Heidegger’s philosophy. Apart from suggesting that the Kierkegaard-inspired non-academic movement has long since become an institutionlized academic standard—thus betraying its original promises—Adorno argues that its “concern with the relevant rebounded into an abstraction, which could in no way be trumped by any neo-Kantian methodology.”234 The reproach of abstraction goes hand in hand with Adorno’s claim that the doctrine of existence inherited from Kierkegaard has been used to construct a new form of ontology, thus simultaneously contradicting Kierkegaard’s original intention and making use of the doctrine’s latent ontological potential. Adorno points out this double aspect of the reception in the following way: The ontologization of the ontic is the primarly aim of the doctrine of existence. Since this last, after the age-old argument, cannot be deduced out of the essence, it is supposed to be itself essential. Existence is raised up higher than Kierkegaard’s model, but thereby blunted in contrast to the latter.235

been consulted. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge 1973. 229 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 55. 230 Ibid. See also Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Dialektik des Engagements,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 73, no. 1, 1962, p. 96. 231 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 56. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid., p. 127. 234 Ibid., p. 69. 235 Ibid., p. 126.

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Adorno locates a tendency towards the ontologization of the ontic already in Kierkegaard, who in spite of the nominalist features of his philosophy produces a strongly ambiguous anthropology. This becomes apparent when parallels between The Sickness unto Death and Being and Time, between Kierkegaard’s individual and Heidegger’s Dasein, are drawn. Although Kierkegaard openly polemicizes against ontology, his delineation of the subject in The Sickness unto Death makes the subject absorb its attributes.236 What is latent in Kierkegaard becomes explicit in Heidegger, which Adorno illustrates with a quotation from Being and Time: “[e]xistence (Dasein) is on the grounds of its existential determination ‘ontological’ in itself.”237 Adorno then details the conclusion claiming that “[its] ambiguity permits the existent (Dasein) to be equated to being’s mode of being (Seinsweise des Seins) and thus analyzes the ontological difference away. Existence (Dasein) is then called ontic, by virtue of its spatio-temporal individuation, [and is called] ontological as the logos.”238 Kierkegaard’s nominalism and his opposition to idealism helped shape the aura of Heidegger’s ontology as non-speculative philosophy,239 and Heidegger’s partly Kierkegaard-inspired emphasis on subjectivity made Being and Time appear as “a manifesto of personalism.”240 However, as Adorno declared already in his lecture “Verhältnis zu Kierkegaard” in 1961, existential ontology ultimately drifts away from Kierkegaard’s fundamental intention and leads to an utter neutralization of the subject. IV. Christianity and Anti-Semitism, Neue Musik, and Literature The works studied above shed light on Adorno’s picture of Kierkegaard from different angles, complementing each other and indicating basic trends in the evolution of this picture. However, they do not fully exhaust the richesse of Adorno’s Kierkegaard reception, thus this final part will examine one last important thematic focus and briefly mention Adorno’s other uses of Kierkegaard. Adorno’s interest in Kierkegaard’s social and political relevance is obvious already in his early reception, but with the rise of Nazism and its systematic antiSemitism, a new question emerged for Adorno: the relation of Kierkegaard’s radical Christanity to anti-Semitism. This issue subsequently received attention in several of Adorno’s works, such as “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Ibid., pp. 128–9. Ibid., p. 129. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6th ed., Tübingen: Neomarius Verlag 1949, p. 13. 238 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 129. See also Adorno, “22. Vorlesung. 16. 2. 1961 (Sein und Existenz),” pp. 319–20. When speaking of the ontologization of the existent, Adorno describes it in another instance as “expropriating it (i.e. the existent) of all its nonconceptuality by recourse to its characteristica formalis.” Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 132. Adorno also suggests that the apersonal character of Heidegger’s philosophy is detectable linguistically, in the apersonal terms Dasein and Existenz. See ibid., p. 273. 239 Ibid., pp. 129–30. 240 Ibid., p. 273. 236 237

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Thomas’ Radio Addresses” (1943),241 Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947),242 and The Authoritarian Personality (1950).243 In the latter, Adorno introduces the topic by making two general remarks. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Christianity by its “relativization of the natural [and its] extreme emphasis on the ‘spirit,’ ” naturally works against worldviews that judge humans by their race or descent.244 On the other hand, he points out that “the religion of the ‘Son’ contains an implicit antagonism against the religion of the ‘Father’ and its surviving witnesses, the Jews.”245 With reference to Kierkegaard, Adorno further argues that Christianity’s paradoxical doctrine of the Infinite becoming finite represents a lasting problem for Christians themselves. He suggests that “[u]nless this element is consciously put into the center of the religious conception, it tends to promote hostility against the outgroup.”246 The different level of processing and internalization of religious doctrine prompts Adorno to introduce a distinction between “weak” and “strong” Christians, between “regular fellows” and those who “take religion seriously.”247 In the case of the former, religious affiliation does not seem to inhibit anti-Semitic sentiments. As Adorno notes, it can easily happen that for a “weak” Christian “it is as much ‘second nature’ to attend church as it is not to admit Jews to his country club.”248 “Strong” Christians, however, due to their emphasis on the specific content of religion and their nonconformist attitude towards the societal status quo, are unlikely adherents of any kind of ethnocentrism. Adorno documents this with the opposition of the Kierkegaard-inspired dialectical theology against Nazism.249 A convinced religious subjectivist is capable of feeling compassion for those who do not belong to his or her religious group, because he or she recognizes in their suffering the marks of Christ’s martyrdom.250 Although “strong” Christians can form a vital dissent group in oppressive regimes, Adorno points out the danger that inheres in an extreme form of religious subjectivism. As he suggests, “[r]eligious subjectivism that dispenses with any binding principles provides the spiritual climate for other authoritative claims”251 and thus can prepare

See Adorno, “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses” [1943], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9.1, pp. 110–11. 242 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag N.V. 1947, pp. 210–11. 243 See Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper & Brothers 1950, p. 728; pp. 731–2. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1951, p. 288; Theodor W. Adorno, “Notiz über sozialwissenschaftliche Objektivität,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 17, 1965, p. 420. 244 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, p. 728. 245 Ibid. 246 Ibid. 247 Ibid., p. 728; p. 731. 248 Ibid., p. 731. 249 Ibid. 250 Ibid. 251 Ibid., p. 732. 241

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the ground for fascist agitators operating in a religious setting.252 With a reference to Kierkegaard’s notion of faith of the father, Adorno also draws attention to “naturalistic” elements present even in utterly subjectivist and spiritualist forms of theology and insists that these “essentially anti-Christian” elements can help pervert Christianity into “aggressive nativism.”253 Apart from Adorno’s treatments of Kierkegaard in his philosophical and sociological writings, there is a great deal of references to Kierkegaard scattered across Adorno’s works on musicology, literature, and aesthetics. Although, in some cases, these works thematize similar issues as those mentioned above,254 in most instances they make use of individual metaphors and concepts borrowed from Kierkegaard, rather than of larger philosophical constructions. This use of Kierkegaardian motifs can be exemplified with Adorno’s expositions of Neue Musik which contain a variety of images stemming from Kierkegaard. The most extensively used motif is Kierkegaard’s metaphor of “the speculative ear”255 with which Adorno aims to describe the adequate disposition of someone who intends to listen to the complex compositions of the Neue Musik tradition. Rejecting the “passively culinary” attitude, he maintains that what is required is “a silent, imaginative and finally listening activity, a performance of that what Kierkegaard denoted as the speculative ear.”256 Similarly, when describing “the aging” of Neue Musik, Adorno repeatedly employs Kierkegaard’s metaphor of a railway bridge stretching over what used to be a terrible Wolf Ravine.257 This metaphor—originally used by Kierkegaard to show how Christendom turned the New Testament into an outdated travel guide—depicts in Adorno the devolution of an avant-garde musical movement into mere repetition and imitation.258 Ibid. See Adorno, “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses,” pp. 110–11. 254 For example, in “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka” Adorno discusses Kierkegaard’s “objectless inwardness” and points out the mythological qualities of the extremely abstract and indeterminate concept of God present in Kierkegaard and dialectical theology. See “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 64, no. 3, 1953, p. 340; p. 343; p. 350. 255 The term “speculative ear” appears in Kierkegaard’s treatment of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Either/Or: “Just as the speculative eye sees things together, so the speculative ear hear things together.” See SKS 2, 124 / EO1, 122. Adorno makes use of this metaphor in the following works: Theodor W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepetitor. Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1963, p. 41; Theodor W. Adorno, Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, p. 145; Theodor W. Adorno, “Schwierigkeiten in der Auffassung neuer Musik,” Neue deutsche Hefte, no. 117, 1968, p. 55; Theodor W. Adorno, “Über einige Arbeiten von Anton Webern” [1958], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18, p. 677. Adorno also points out a curious parallel to Kierkegaard in Paul Valéry, who speaks of “a philosophical ear.” See Theodor W. Adorno, “Valérys Abweichungen,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 71, no. 1, 1960, p. 9. 256 Adorno, Der getreue Korrepetitor. Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis, pp. 40–1. 257 SKS 13, 165 / M, 123. 258 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Über das gegenwärtige Verhältnis von Philosophie und Musik,” in Filosofia dell’Arte, Rome and Milan: Fratelli Bocca 1953, p. 29; Theodor W. 252 253

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In an analogous way Adorno reinterprets for musicological purposes Kierkegaard’s dictum the demonic is the sudden259 and time and again avails himself of the concept of “esthetic earnestness” from Either/Or. 260 In his works on literature, recurrent Kierkegaardian motifs include the metaphor of “a baptism of oblivion” from “Diapsalmata”261 or the notion of seducing into truth adopted from The Point of View for My Work as an Author.262 Furthermore, Kierkegaard is repeatedly mentioned in Ästhetische Theorie in Adorno’s elaborations on the aesthetics of content and form.263 V. Conclusion: Kierkegaard’s Triumphs and Defeats There is no doubt that Adorno represents a significant voice in German philosophical reception of Kierkegaard in the twentieth century. Kierkegaard’s extensive presence in Adorno’s corpus, the long-term character of the reception, as well as the implicit occurrence of Kierkegaardian themes throughout Adorno’s oeuvre are but the most obvious marks of Adorno’s active contribution to the Weiterleben of Kierkegaard’s thought in German intellectual discourse.264 The impact of Adorno’s Kierkegaard Adorno, Dissonanzen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1956, p. 105. See also Adorno, Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 25 (Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, pp. 25–6); Adorno, “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” p. 22. 259 SKS 4, 430 / CA, 129. Adorno writes of the demonical character of the sudden in the following works: Theodor W. Adorno, “Theorie der Halbbildung,” Der Monat, vol. 11, no. 132, 1959, p. 38; Theodor W. Adorno, “Dritter Mahler-Vortrag” [1960], in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18, p. 616. 260 SKS 2, 115 / EO1, 112. SKS 3, 216 / EO2, 225. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Schwierigkeiten in der Auffassung neuer Musik,” Neue deutsche Hefte, no. 117, 1968, p. 39; Theodor W. Adorno, “Ästhetische Theorie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, p. 294. See also Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, p. 74; p. 110. (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. 66; p. 97.) 261 SKS 2, 51 / EO1, 42. For Adorno’s use of the metaphor see Theodor W. Adorno, “George und Hofmannsthal—Zum Briefwechsel: 1891–1906” [1942], in Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1955, p. 237; Theodor W. Adorno, “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs” [1957], in Noten zur Literatur, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main 1958, p. 134. 262 See SV1 XIII, 540–2 / PV, 53–5. Adorno uses this notion in two works: Theodor W. Adorno, “Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität. Zum elften Band der Werke von Karl Kraus,” in Noten zur Literatur III, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1965, p. 73; Theodor W. Adorno, Berg. Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Vienna: Verlag Elisabeth Lafite and Österreichischer Bundesverlag 1968, p. 110. 263 See Adorno, “Ästhetische Theorie,” in Gesammelte Schriften, p. 18; pp. 223–4; pp. 293–4; p. 526. 264 In his detailed study of the Kierkegaard reception in the Germanophone world Heiko Schulz suggests that Adorno can be considered “one of the very few paradigmatic representatives of…genuine borderline cases between productive reception and receptive production. For apart from Kierkegaard’s implicit presence in much of Adorno’s work the latter has also written and published quite a bit about the Danish thinker.” Heiko Schulz,

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interpretation on influential figures of the Germanophone philosophical and cultural scene—such as Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Karl Löwith, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, or Thomas Mann—is further evidence of Adorno’s central role in modern reflection on Kierkegaard in Germany and beyond. When examining Adorno’s reception in its entirety, several trends become manifest, suggesting both the stability and evolution of Adorno’s view of Kierkegaard.265 The interplay of the two is perhaps best illustrated by Adorno’s portrayal of the ambivalent character of Kierkegaard’s thought. Although the accents of Adorno’s affirmation and criticism of Kierkegaard shift over time, all of his larger treatments of Kierkegaard contain both. Given the fact that several of the philosophical themes elaborated in Adorno’s 1933 monograph constitute his core message about Kierkegaard—which remains largely consistent throughout his oeuvre—they are paraphrased and further developed in Adorno’s later writings. A stable historical-philosophical theme is Kierkegaard’s connection to the philosophical traditions of German idealism and existential philosophy. With regard to idealism, Adorno continuously affirms his early thesis about the idealist foundation of Kierkegaard’s anthropology and the position according to which Kierkegaard’s spiritualist philosophy of inwardness fails to provide the concretion it attempted to reinstate. Time and again, the dynamic of rationality and nature in Kierkegaard is thematized, with Adorno drawing attention to the mythical nature of Kierkegaard’s idealist theory of the self. Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel, and to a lesser extent to Fichte, is a recurrent topic, and especially in his later writings, Adorno lays an emphasis on Kierkegaard’s misappropriation of the Hegelian dialectic. Although Kierkegaard’s reception in existential philosophy and modern ontology constitutes a stable topic throughout Adorno’s oeuvre, it is especially accentuated in Adorno’s controversy with Jean Wahl and in the writings of the 1960s. Adorno examines in ever greater detail the translatio of Kierkegaardian concepts and categories—such as inwardness, anxiety, despair, decision, and the single individual—identifying their “counterparts” especially in Heidegger and Sartre. The depiction of the neutralization and trivialization of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of existence in these twentieth-century traditions is in Adorno’s later writings coupled with the increasingly emphasized claim that Kierkegaard’s implicit ontology yielded vital inspiration to more recent ontologies whose final word is anti-subjectivism. Another continuously discussed historical-philosophical theme is Kierkegaard’s (in)compatibility with oppressive collectivist ideologies, in particular with National “Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, Resources, vol. 8), p. 363. 265 In his letter to Kracauer from September 28, 1966 Adorno indicates that his treatments of Kierkegaard written over several decades illustrate aptly the overall evolution of his thought. See [Adorno], “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” p. 716.

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Socialism, whose abuse of Kierkegaard Adorno highlighted in his controversy with Jean Wahl. This position he later complemented with the statement that Kierkegaard’s doctrines of inwardness, the single individual, and self-sacrifice of reason inadvertently facilitated the progress of collectivist totalitarianism. In the field of ethics, Adorno’s Kierkegaard treatments from the 1930s—his Kierkegaardbuch and his essay “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love”—examine critically Kierkegaard’s notion of Christian love and his delineation of the category of the neighbor. This intersubjective focus, however, recedes in the later works into the background and is overshadowed by Adorno’s analysis of the larger-scale social implications of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Despite the fact that the aesthetic has many faces in Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, the finale of the book—which contains Adorno’s attempt to highlight the hope present in the images and metaphors scattered across Kierkegaard’s oeuvre—provided the most obvious impetus for a controversy among the reviewers of the monograph. Interestingly enough, this precarious component found minimal echo in Adorno’s later theoretical treatments of Kierkegaard and thus can hardly be considered part of his overall core message about the Danish philosopher. Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard’s theological positions winds through most of his major treatments of Kierkegaard. Its fundamental claim is that Kierkegaard’s theology grows out of an idealistic philosophical substrate and its god is in reality a rational product of the absolute self. Adorno persistently underlines the mythological character of both Kierkegaard’s Christology and his doctrine of God as the totally other, accusing Kierkegaard of tending towards gnosis, paganism, and natural religion. The inheritance of Kierkegaard’s concept of the Absolute in dialectical theology is repeatedly thematized with regard to the reversal of radical demythologization into mythology. Kierkegaard’s sense of socio-political developments and its expression in his philosophical concepts plays a role in basically all Adorno’s works treating Kierkegaard at some length. The theme of Kierkegaard’s real (and hypothetical) stances on the social and political order in industrial Europe is already seen as intrinsically linked with Kierkegaard’s central doctrines in Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. It gains substantially more weight with the rise of Nazism and with the diverse responses of Kierkegaard-inspired German philosophers and theologians to it. Although Adorno’s affirmation of Kierkegaard’s insights is probably most explicit in this area, from the beginning he consistently points out the deficiencies of the solutions to the failures of the industrial age proposed by Kierkegaard. This critique becomes increasingly nuanced in Adorno’s late authorship. Although Adorno has been criticized for “constructing” his own Kierkegaard and some of his findings have found little endorsement in modern Kierkegaard research, his Kierkegaard reception continues to exert tangible influence on modern Kierkegaard scholarship. This is due not only to the abundance of Kierkegaardian motifs in Adorno’s oeuvre and the radicality of his interpretation that often gave rise to debates, but also to Adorno’s ability to contest Kierkegaard’s place in the philosophical agenda of his time. Tracing Kierkegaard’s posthumous triumphs and defeats, Adorno confronted and challenged several modern attempts at the standardization of Kierkegaard’s locus in twentieth-century philosophy. In

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this way Adorno came to represent an important voice calling for a continuous critical reflection on the appropriation of Kierkegaard’s thought in the dominant philosophical and theological traditions of the day.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Adorno’s Corpus “Kierkegaard prophezeit Chaplin,” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, no. 377, May 22, 1930, p. 1. “Motive V: Hermeneutik,” in Anbruch. Monatsschrift für moderne Musik, nos. 7–8, 1930, p. 236. “Rede über den ‘Raritätenladen’ von Charles Dickens,” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, no. 285, April 18, 1931, p. 1. “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” [1931], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 1, pp. 329–30. “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 1, 1932, nos. 1–2, p. 115. “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte” [1932], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970– 86, vol. 1, p. 363. “Gutachten über die Dissertation von Sternberger” [1932], in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 4.1, p. 551. Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) 1933. (English translation: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. and ed. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989.) “Eine Geschichte der Musikästhetik” [1934], Der Auftakt. Musikblätter, vol. 15, 1935, p. 17. “Congrès Descartes und Ästhetikerkongreß” [1937], in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 4.1, pp. 571–9. “Spengler Today” [1938], Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 9, no. 2, 1941, p. 313. “Études kierkegaardiennes. Jean Wahl. Paris: Fernand Aubier. 1938. 745 pp,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, January 5, 1939, pp. 18–19. “Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes. Éditions Montaigne. Paris 1938. (745 S.; fr. fr. 100.); Lowrie, Walter, Kierkegaard. Oxford University Press. London u. New York 1938. (XIX u. 636 S.; 25 s., $ 7.-); The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard; a selection, edited and translated by Alexander Dru. Oxford University Press. London u. New York 1938. (LXI u. 603 S.; 25 s., $ 7.-),” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, 1939–40, nos. 1–2, 1940, pp. 232–5.

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“Adorno an Jean Wahl” [1939], in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff, vol. 4.2, pp. 450–2. “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. 8, 1939–40, pp. 413–29 (a revised German version published as “Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 3, no. 1, 1951, pp. 23–38). “George und Hofmannsthal—Zum Briefwechsel: 1891–1906” [1942], in Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1955, p. 237. “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses” [1943], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 9.1, pp. 110–11. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (co-authored with Max Horkheimer), Amsterdam: Querido Verlag N.V. 1947, p. 23; pp. 210–11. The Authoritarian Personality (co-authored with Else Frenkel-Brunswik et al.), New York: Harper & Brothers 1950, p. 728; pp. 731–2. Minima moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1951, p. 131; p. 157; p. 249; pp. 288–92; pp. 430–1. “Über das gegenwärtige Verhältnis von Philosophie und Musik,” in Filosofia dell’Arte, Rome and Milan: Fratelli Bocca 1953, p. 29. “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 64, no. 3, 1953, p. 335; p. 340; pp. 342–3; pp. 348–51. “Fernsehen als Ideologie” [1953], in Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1963, pp. 94–5. “Im Gedächtnis an Alban Berg” [1955], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970– 86, vol. 18, p. 511. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1956, p. 197. Dissonanzen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1956, p. 105. “Zum Gedächtnis Eichendorffs” [1957], in Noten zur Literatur, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main 1958, p. 134. “Balzac-Lektüre,” in Noten zur Literatur II, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1961, p. 40. “Über einige Arbeiten von Anton Webern” [1958], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 18, p. 677. “Erpreßte Versöhnung,” Der Monat, vol. 11, no. 122, 1958, pp. 43–4. “Dritter Mahler-Vortrag” [1960], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 18, p. 616. Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 16, p. 145.

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“Offenbarung oder autonome Vernunft,” Frankfurter Hefte. Zeitschrift für Kultur und Politik, vol. 13, no. 6, June 1958, pp. 399, 402. “Theorie der Halbbildung,” Der Monat, vol. 11, no. 132, September 1959, p. 38. “Valérys Abweichungen,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 71, no. 1, 1960, p. 9; p. 22. “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen,” in Noten zur Literatur II, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1961, p. 195; p. 199. “Zur Dialektik des Engagements,” Die Neue Rundschau, vol. 73, no. 1, 1962, p. 96. “Kierkegaard noch einmal. Zum hundertundfünfzigsten Geburtstag,” Neue Deutsche Hefte, vol. 95, 1963, pp. 5–25. Der getreue Korrepetitor. Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1963, pp. 40–1. “Rede über ein imaginäres Feuilleton” [1963], in Noten zur Literatur III, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1965, p. 47. Drei Studien zu Hegel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1963, p. 20; p. 62; p. 64. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1964, p. 7; p. 17; p. 27; pp. 29–31; pp. 62–5; pp. 95–6; p. 107. “Der wunderliche Realist. Über Siegfried Kracauer,” Neue Deutsche Hefte, no. 101, September and October 1964, pp. 25–6. “Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität. Zum elften Band der Werke von Karl Kraus,” in Noten zur Literatur III, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1965, p. 63; p. 73. “Notiz über sozialwissenschaftliche Objektivität,” in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 17, 1965, p. 420. Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1966, p. 47; pp. 55–6; pp. 68–9; p. 74; pp. 126–32; pp. 142–3; p. 182; p. 274; p. 344; p. 354; p. 366. “Einleitung,” in Walter Benjamin. Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1955, vol. 1, p. XIX. “Fällige Revision,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, vol. 23, no. 243, October 11, 1967, Beilage, p. 4. Berg. Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Vienna: Verlag Elisabeth Lafite and Österreichischer Bundesverlag 1968, p. 41; p. 110. “Schwierigkeiten in der Auffassung neuer Musik,” Neue deutsche Hefte, no. 117, 1968, p. 39; p. 55. “Einleitung,” in Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, ed. by Heinz Maus and Friedrich Fürstenberg, 2nd ed., Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand 1970 [1969], p. 46. “Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis,” in Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1969, p. 174. “Ästhetische Theorie,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–20, ed. by Gretel Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970–86, vol. 7, p. 18; pp. 176–8; p. 224; p. 294; p. 427; p. 511; p. 526. “Theodor W. Adorno. Ästhetik,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 3, p. 59; p. 142; pp. 157–8; p. 172; p. 195. “Theodor W. Adorno. Kants ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft,’ ” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 4, p. 16; p. 117; p. 184.

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“Theodor W. Adorno. Metaphysik,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 14, pp. 190–1. “Theodor W. Adorno. Ontologie und Dialektik,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 7, pp. 107–8; pp. 121–2; pp. 127–8; pp. 132–3; p. 150; pp. 155–6; pp. 168–86; pp. 190–1; p. 200; pp. 255–6; pp. 319–23; p. 330; p. 341. “Theodor W. Adorno. Philosophische Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 12, pp. 186–8. “Theodor W. Adorno. Probleme der Moralphilosophie,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 10, pp. 158–9; pp. 219–20. “Theodor W. Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 16, p. 71; p. 210; p. 212; p. 215; pp. 253–5. “Theodor W. Adorno. Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993ff., Abteilung 4, vol. 13, p. 169. “Theodor W. Adorno / Alban Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1935,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 2, p. 66; pp. 87–8; p. 231; p. 236; p. 241; pp. 249–51; p. 257; p. 277; p. 281; p. 322. “Theodor W. Adorno / Max Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 4.2, p. 118; p. 125; p. 203. “Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer. Briefwechsel 1923–1966,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 7, p. 28; p. 37; p. 49; pp. 79–80; p. 133; p. 186; p. 190; p. 195; pp. 206–8; pp. 211–14; p. 218; p. 220; pp. 228–30; pp. 234–5; p. 237; p. 262; pp. 296–7; pp. 300–2; pp. 304–8; p. 526; p. 590; p. 592; p. 600; p. 604; p. 609; p. 685; p. 716. “Theodor W. Adorno / Thomas Mann. Briefwechsel 1943–1955,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 3, p. 33. “Theodor W. Adorno / Walter Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, vols. 1–7, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 1, p. 32; pp. 34–5; p. 37; p. 39; pp. 65–6; p. 69; p. 71; p. 90; p. 92; p. 112; p. 123; p. 140; p. 145; pp. 148–50; p. 197; p. 321; p. 327; p. 356; p. 362; p. 380; p. 395; p. 407; p. 419. “Contra Paulum,” in Theodor W. Adorno. Briefe und Briefwechsel, vols. 1–7, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995ff., vol. 4.2, p. 499.

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II. Sources of Adorno’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Geismar, Eduard, Sören Kierkegaard. Seine Lebensentwicklung und seine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller, trans. by E. Krüger and L. Geismar, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1927. Guardini, Romano, “Der Ausgangspunkt der Denkbewegung Sören Kierkegaards,” Hochland, vol. 24, 1927, pp. 12–33. Haecker, Theodor, “Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Søren Kierkegaard. Ein Vortrag,” Hochland 26, vol. 2, no. 11, 1929, pp. 476–93. — Sören Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit, Munich: Schreiber 1913. Kroner, Richard J., “Kierkegaards Hegelverständnis,” in Kant-Studien, vol. 46, 1954–55, pp. 19–27. Lowrie, Walter, Kierkegaard, London and New York: Oxford University Press 1938. Lukács, Georg, “Das Zerschellen der Form am Leben: Sören Kierkegaard und Regine Olsen,” in his Die Seele und die Formen. Essays, Berlin: Fleischel 1911, pp. 61–90. Marcuse, Ludwig, “Søren Kierkegaard. Die Überwindung des romantischen Menschen,” in Die Dioskuren, vol. 2, 1923, pp. 194–237. Monrad, Olaf P., Søren Kierkegaard. Sein Leben und seine Werke, Jena: Diederichs 1909. Przywara, Erich, Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards, Munich: Oldenburg 1929. Schrempf, Christoph, Sören Kierkegaard. Eine Biographie, vols. 1–2, Jena: Diederichs 1927–28. Schweppenhäuser, Hermann, Kierkegaards Angriff auf die Spekulation. Eine Verteidigung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1967. Vetter, August, Frömmigkeit als Leidenschaft. Eine Deutung Kierkegaards, Leipzig: Insel 1928. Wahl, Jean, Études kierkegaardiennes, Paris: Aubier 1938. III. Secondary Literature on Adorno’s Relation to Kierkegaard Beck, Elke, Identität der Person. Sozialphilosophische Studien zu Kierkegaard, Adorno und Habermas, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 1991 (Epistemata. Reihe Philosophie, vol. 94). Carroll Keeley, Louise, “Loving ‘No One,’ Loving Everyone: The Work of Love in Recollecting One Dead in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love,” in Works of Love, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16), pp. 211–48. Desroches, Dominic, “Existence esthetique, musique et language. Retour sur la réception critique de Kierkegaard par Adorno,” Horizons Philosophiques, vol. 16, no. 2, 2006, pp. 21–38. Deuser, Hermann, Dialektische Theologie. Studien zu Adornos Metaphysik und zum Spätwerk Kierkegaards, Munich and Mainz: Kaiser-Grünewald 1980 (Gesellschaft und Theologie, Fundamentaltheologische Studien, vol. 1).

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— “Kierkegaard in der kritischen Theorie,” in Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982, ed. by Heinrich Anz, Poul Lübcke, and Friedrich Schmöe, Copenhagen and Munich: Fink 1983 (Text & Kontext, Sonderreihe, vol. 15), pp. 101–13. Ferreira, M. Jaime, “Mutual Responsiveness in Relation: The Challenge of the Ninth Deliberation,” in Works of Love, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 16), pp. 193–209. Gómez Ibañez, Vicente, “De ‘Kierkegaard: Construcción de lo estético’ (1929–1930) a ‘Dialéctica negativa’ (1966). Los orígenes filosóficos de la filosofía de Th. W. Adorno,” Quaderns de Filosofia i Ciencia, no. 28, 1999, pp. 93–106. Hale, Geoffrey Arthur, “Fragmentary Extravagance.” Modernist Readings of Kierkegaard in Kafka, Rilke and Adorno. Ph.D. Thesis, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 1996. — “Learning to Read: Adorno, Kierkegaard, and Konstruktion,” in his Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002, pp. 37–72. Harrits, Flemming, “Provisorier. Adorno versus Kierkegaard,” in Jeget og ordene. Festskrift til Rolf Reitan, ed. by Carsten Madsen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Peer E. Sørensen, Aarhus: Klim 2001, pp. 31–43. Herrera Guevara, Asunción, La historia perdida de Kierkegaard y Adorno: Cómo leer a Kierkegaard y Adorno, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva 2005. Heyerdahl, Grete Børsand, “Filosofi og kjærlighet, 2: Kierkegaard, Adorno og ‘Kjerlighedens Gjerninger,’ ” in her Idéhistoriske smuler. Essays om litteratur og filosofi, kjærlighet og undertrykkelse—om Hegel, Kierkegaard, H.C. Andersen, Freud, Hermann Hesse, Adorno, Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag 1979, pp. 70–94. Hullot-Kentor, Robert, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, New York: Columbia University Press 2006, pp. 77–93. Kodalle, Klaus-M., “Adornos Kierkegaard—ein kritischer Kommentar,” in Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982, ed. by Heinrich Anz, Poul Lübcke, and Friedrich Schmöe, Copenhagen and Munich: Fink 1983 (Text & Kontext, Sonderreihe, vol. 15), pp. 70–100. Morgan, Marcia, “Adorno’s Reception of Kierkegaard: 1929–1933,” Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 46, 2003, pp. 8–12. — The Aesthetic-Religious Nexus in Theodor W. Adorno’s Interpretation of the Works of Søren Kierkegaard and Its Influence on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Ph.D. Thesis, New School University, New York 2003. Morsing, Ole, “Adorno. Konstruktion af Kierkegaard,” Slagmark, vol. 26, 1997, pp. 79–103. Pettazzi, Carlo, “Studien zu Leben und Werk Adornos bis 1938,” in Theodor W. Adorno, ed. by Heinz L. Arnold, Munich: Text + Kritik 1977, pp. 33–9. Rochlitz, Rainer, “Le meilleur disciple de Walter Benjamin,” Critique, vol. 593, 1996, pp. 819–35.

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Rose, Gillian, “Kierkegaard,” in her The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, London: Macmillan 1978, pp. 62–5. Ryan, Bartholomew, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: A Dialogue with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Aarhus 2006. Šajda, Peter, “Náčrt kritiky Kierkegaardovho konceptu lásky v diele M. Bubera, T.W. Adorna a K.E. Løgstrupa” [An Outline of the Critique of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Love by M. Buber, T.W. Adorno and K.E. Løgstrup], Filozofia, vol. 58, no. 7, 2003, pp. 484–93. — “Theodor W. Adorno: Dve tváre Kierkegaarda ako kritika spoločnosti,” [Theodor W. Adorno: Two Faces of Kierkegaard as a Critic of Society], Filozofia, vol. 65, no. 9, 2010, pp. 821–32. Sherman, David, “Adorno’s Kierkegaardian Debt,” Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 27, 2001, pp. 77–106. Søltoft, Pia, “The Presence of the Absent Neighbor in Works of Love,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 113–28. Vaccaro, Gian Battista, “Il Kierkegaard di Adorno e la critica dell’ontologia esistenziale,” Annali della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università di Siena, 1989, pp. 67–89. Valls, Alvaro L.M., “Testemunhos da presenca de Kierkegaard em Adorno,” Educação e Filosofia (Uberlândia), vol. 12, no. 23, 1998, pp. 197–219. Winkel Holm, Isak, “Intermitterende dialektik. Filosofi og fantasi hos Adorno og Kierkegaard,” Slagmark, no. 44, 2005, pp. 89–100. — “3. Bogstavelighed: Adorno,” in his Tanken i billedet, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1998, pp. 91–114. Zhang Liang, “克尔凯郭尔的生存概念与唯心主义问题—读阿多诺《克尔凯 郭尔：审美对象的建构》” [The Concept of Existence in Kierkegaard and the Problems of Idealism—On Adorno’s Kierkegaard, Construction of the Aesthetic], 浙江学刊 [Zhejiang Academic Journal], vol. 2, 2002, pp. 118–24.

Walter Benjamin: Appropriating the Kierkegaardian Aesthetic Joseph Westfall

Of the numerous luminaries of twentieth-century German thought to come to maturity in the period between World War I and World War II, perhaps the most enigmatic and therefore compelling for contemporary readers is the German-Jewish philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Over the course of his brief but exceptionally diverse scholarly career, Benjamin made lasting contributions to philosophy, political thought, literary criticism, art history, and literature (through translations into German of selected works by the French authors Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Charles-Pierre Baudelaire (1821–67), and Marcel Proust (1871– 1922). He published numerous articles and books during his lifetime, but at his death left a singularly large collection of unpublished writings, as well. His most influential works include “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften” (in two parts in 1925),1 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928),2 “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1936),3 and Das Passagen-Werk, unfinished and published posthumously.4

Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” Neue Deutsche Beiträge, vol. 2, no. 1, 1925, pp. 83–138 and vol. 2, no. 2, 1925, pp. 134–68 (in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–6 in 12 tomes, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971–99, vol. 1, part 1, pp. 123–202; English translation: “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. by Stanley Corngold, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vols. 1–4, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press 1997–2003, vol. 1, pp. 297–360). 2 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Berlin: Rowohlt 1928 (English translation: The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne, London: Verso 1998.) 3 Walter Benjamin, “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée,” trans. by Pierre Klossowski, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 5, no. 1, 1936, pp. 40–68 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 709–39; English translation: “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, pp. 101–33; revised and expanded German translation published posthumously as “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 471–508). 4 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5. (English translation: The Arcades Project, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press 2002.) 1

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In the earliest period of his thinking life, Benjamin was a special and almost single-minded devotee of Gustav Wyneken (1875–1964), a German educational theorist and school reformer—until Wyneken’s advocacy and glorification of war caused Benjamin to break off all ties in March 1915.5 Around that time, he met and befriended a fellow student who was to become a leading figure in contemporary Jewish thought, Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–1982). Later, Benjamin became a friend or associate of the early critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–69) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), as well as the playwright, critic, theorist, and poet, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). The friendship with Brecht exerted a great influence over Benjamin’s thought, which was a matter of some concern to other of Benjamin’s friends and colleagues, including Adorno and Scholem. To a certain extent, Benjamin seems to have struggled to reconcile his intellectual allegiances to Marxism (in both its Brechtian and Adornoian/Frankfurt School modes) and to Judaism (and the Jewish mysticism of Scholem) in his own mind in his later authorship, but he does not seem to have been able to come to a satisfactory resolution in his own worldview before his death in Spain, by suicide, in September 1940. It is in this sense that, although voluminous, the philosophy of Walter Benjamin remains unfinished. Benjamin’s influence was not particularly strongly felt during his lifetime. As Hannah Arendt (1906–75) notes, Benjamin “was known, but not famous, as contributor to magazines and literary sections of newspapers for less than ten years prior to Hitler’s seizure of power and [Benjamin’s] own emigration.”6 Arendt continues, however, that although widespread fame eluded Benjamin while he was alive, it is also the case that he was esteemed most highly by those of his contemporaries who were familiar with his work. Among them, Arendt lists Scholem, Adorno (Benjamin’s “first and only disciple”7), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874– 1929), and Brecht—“who upon receiving the news of Benjamin’s death is reported to have said that this was the first real loss Hitler had caused to German literature.”8 It was in part Benjamin’s reputation among these figures and others, and in part the publication of a posthumous two-volume edition of Benjamin’s works, Schriften (1955), edited by Adorno and Scholem, that secured Benjamin’s place in European literary and philosophical history. The importance of Benjamin for philosophy and cultural studies is now unquestionable, and studies of Benjamin’s life, writings, and thought proliferate unabated around the world. In 1933, Benjamin published a review entitled “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus”9 of a new book by Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion

See Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin, London: Reaktion Books 2007, pp. 20–32. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken 1968, p. 1. 7 Ibid., p. 2. Also see Rainer Rochlitz, “Le meilleur disciple de Walter Benjamin,” Critique, vol. 52, no. 593, 1996, pp. 819–35. 8 Ibid. 9 Walter Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933. 5 6

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des Ästhetischen.10 The review is Benjamin’s only sustained examination of the works or thought of Søren Kierkegaard—and it is largely a commentary on Adorno, not Kierkegaard. Benjamin otherwise makes only scattered comments about Kierkegaard, most of which are either in no context (as fragments) or in the context of commentary on some third thinker, and thus there is much difficulty in coming to understand the role Kierkegaard plays in Benjamin’s thought. As Michael Theunissen and Wilfred Greve note, “Unfortunately, he did not comment about Kierkegaard elsewhere”11 than in the Adorno review. That it is unfortunate that Benjamin made no extended consideration of Kierkegaard outside of his review of Adorno is without doubt; that he did not comment elsewhere about Kierkegaard is, however, a bit of an exaggeration. Perhaps Rainer Nägele puts it best, when he notes that Kierkegaard plays a “discreet but decisive role in Benjamin’s thought in general.”12 By piecing together Benjamin’s brief (and sometimes passing) comments on Kierkegaard, I hope in this article to begin to reconstruct something of a Benjaminian account of the Kierkegaardian authorship. To that end, I will organize Benjamin’s comments into two groups: (1) the direct comments Benjamin makes about Kierkegaard’s works or thought, and (2) the comments he makes about Kierkegaard as he relates to other authors and thinkers (chief among these, Theodor Adorno). By the end of this examination, we will have acquired a much clearer picture of the understanding and use of Kierkegaard in Benjamin’s writings, and so I will conclude the article with an analysis of Benjamin’s Kierkegaard—and Benjamin’s Kierkegaardianism, such as it is.13

Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: Mohr 1933. (English translation: Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999.) 11 Michael Theunissen and Wilfred Greve, “Kritischer Marxismus,” in Materialen zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. by Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, p. 80. 12 Rainer Nägele, “Body Politics: Benjamin’s Dialectical Materialism between Brecht and the Frankfurt School,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. by David S. Ferris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004, p. 174, note 8. 13 One area of correspondence between the two thinkers that has yet to be explored— and which there is not space to explore here—is their different uses of pseudonymity. While Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity is well known, the fact that many of Benjamin’s published works from the 1930s were pseudonymous has been less carefully studied. The most prolific of Benjamin’s pseudonyms is “Detlef Holz” (whose signature appears at the end of some of Benjamin’s personal letters, as well), but others include “C. Conrad” and “J.E. Mabinn” (the latter likely of Max Horkheimer’s devising). (See Leslie, Walter Benjamin, p. 198.) While Benjamin’s pseudonymity might easily be dismissed as the necessary precaution of a Jewish author writing in Nazi Germany, it is also worth noting that Benjamin seemed to conceive of naming (including pseudonymity) in a manner at least somewhat akin to Kierkegaard, and that one pseudonym Benjamin playfully—perhaps “Kierkegaardianly”—considered (but did not use) was “O. E. Tal,” the reverse of the Latin verb lateo, to be hidden. A notable exception to the absence of commentary on this issue—where, I think, there is much comparative work with Kierkegaard still to be done—is Marion Picker, Der konservative Charakter. Walter Benjamin und die Politik der Dichter, Bielefeld: transcript 2004. 10

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I. What Benjamin Read: Direct References to Kierkegaard Benjamin read Kierkegaard, although the precise extent to which he did so is unclear. From letters he wrote to Carla Seligson and Herbert Blumenthal14 in 1913, we know that Benjamin had read and been profoundly affected by Either/Or, and that he had at the very least intended to read The Concept of Anxiety (both in German translation). To Seligson, after having noted he has devoted himself to reading Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804), Gottfried Keller (1819–90), and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Benjamin writes: Whenever a few pages of Kant had tired me out, I fled to Kierkegaard. You probably know that he demands heroism on the grounds of Christian ethics (or Jewish ethics, if you will) as mercilessly as Nietzsche does on other grounds, and that he engages in psychological analyses that are as devastating as Nietzsche’s. Either/Or is the ultimatum: aestheticism or morality? In short, this book confronted me with question after question that I had always divined but never articulated to myself, and excited (even) me more than any other book.15

Interestingly, for the 21-year-old Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the closest comparison he can conceive to the early Kierkegaard. While his chief philosophical interests seem to be Kierkegaard’s insights into human psychology (where the comparison to Nietzsche is the strongest), as well as the emphasis on a dichotomy in human existence between aestheticism (in Either/Or, the aesthetic, represented by A, the pseudonymous author of the first volume of the book) and morality (the ethical, represented by B or Judge William, the pseudonym to whom authorship of the second volume is ascribed). This latter point will inform much of Benjamin’s thinking on Kierkegaard throughout his life. In the letter to Blumenthal, after noting that he had just received a copy of another Kierkegaard book, The Concept of Anxiety, the young Benjamin offers his friend advice on the reading of Either/Or: You are surely reading Kierkegaard in the Diederichs edition; the other translation is indigestible. But even then, it is highly unlikely that you will read the book in a single sitting. It becomes very difficult and dialectical, particularly in the second part—which is where I had to take a break. I believe that such a high degree of artistry in presentation and overall vision is not as evident as a by-product in many other books as it is in Kierkegaard. In his life, he probably forcibly subdued the melancholy cynic in himself, in order to write this Either—and above all, the Diary of a Seducer.16 Herbert Blumenthal later changed his name to Herbert Belmore. He is named as “Blumenthal” in the German Gesammelte Briefe; as “Belmore” in the English translation of Benjamin’s correspondence. See Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. by Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers, ed. by Martina Derviş, London: Verso 1996, p. 20. 15 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vols. 1–6, ed. by Christoph Gödde, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995–2000, vol. 1, p. 92. (English translation: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910–1940, ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994, p. 20.) 16 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 1, 1995, p. 148. (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 44.) The “Diederichs edition” to which Benjamin refers is likely the German edition of Either/Or (Entweder-Oder) which appears as volumes 1 and 2 of Kierkegaard’s 14

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However unlikely it seems to contemporary readers that Benjamin was able to read through the first volume of Either/Or “in a single sitting,” the comparison between the two volumes of that work should seem familiar to most readers of Kierkegaard. In any event, in both of the letters of 1913, Benjamin makes clear at least one additional detail: that his attraction to Kierkegaard is as much a matter of personality (he seems to see himself in the Kierkegaard books—especially Either/Or—that he is reading) as it is of philosophical or literary interest. In addition to these two letters—both of which are evidence he read Either/Or, and the second of which indicates his intention to read The Concept of Anxiety— there is but one more reference in Benjamin’s published or unpublished writings that makes evident a personal familiarity on his part with a work of Kierkegaard. In a brief passage from the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: “ ‘The art would be to be able to feel homesick, even though one is at home. Expertness in the use of illusion is required for this.’ Kierkegaard, Sämtliche Werke vol. 4, p. 12. This is the formula for the interior.”17 As Scholem and Adorno note, “Sämtliche Werke” ought here to read “Gesammelte Werke”; the reference is to “In Vino Veritas,” by the pseudonym William Afham, in Stages on Life’s Way.18 Whether Benjamin read Stages, however, or came upon the quotation in another author’s work (as we will see later was the case for passages from Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus dubitandum est and A Literary Review), cannot be known. In any event, the most basic elements of Benjamin’s understanding of Kierkegaard—the aesthetic, the notion of inwardness, and the figure of the flâneur—all have their origins (and explanations) in the same place. Whatever else he read, the most significant impact a work of Kierkegaard had on Benjamin was made by Either/Or. Outside of his correspondence, there are 14 references to Kierkegaard in the writings of Benjamin that comment directly upon Kierkegaard or a work written by Kierkegaard (as opposed to indirect references, which refer to Kierkegaard in relation to or as discussed in the work of some other thinker). Ten of these are from the Arcades Project; the other four are in the essays “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” published posthumously in 1955), “Karl Kraus” (1931), “Kierkegaard: The End of Philosophical Idealism,” and Benjamin’s unsuccessful Habilitationsschrift, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Of the ten Arcades references, only one is not to Either/Or—the quotation, already cited, from Stages. All of the passages are relatively brief, and only one of them—the passage from Benjamin’s review of Adorno—is situated in the context of a discussion of Kierkegaard. As such, they can seem rather disjointed, fragments of an interpretation of Kierkegaard that might have been but is not. Nevertheless, there do seem to be the beginnings of some basic themes. Gesammelte Werke (Jena: Diederichs 1909–22). The translation was by Wolfgang Pfleiderer and Christoph Schrempf. Benjamin refers to this edition of Either/Or throughout his authorship. 17 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, p. 289. (The Arcades Project, p. 218.) 18 SKS 6, 20 / SLW, 13.

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In the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin makes reference to the Kierkegaardian term Snak, translated alternatively as “prattle,” “nonsense,” or “chatter.” (In Benjamin’s German, it appears as Geschwätz.) He writes: “The knowledge of things resides in name, whereas that of good and evil is, in the profound sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word, ‘prattle,’ and knows only one purification and elevation, to which the prattling man, the sinner, was there submitted: judgment.”19 Benjamin refers similarly to knowledge of good and evil as “nonsense” in a specifically Kierkegaardian sense in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where he extends the nonsensical knowledge of good and evil into the realm of allegory: “This knowledge, the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary rule over things, is the origin of all allegorical contemplation.”20 Prattle or nonsense in the “profound sense,” then, is a kind of non-factual knowledge; evaluative knowledge, or “knowledge of good and evil,” is identified with nonsense. This is, for Benjamin, not a criticism of such “knowledge”; rather, it is an elevation of the term “nonsense” to what Benjamin takes to be Kierkegaardian heights. To prattle is, then, in this sense something profound.21 It is to speak of that which, unlike things, cannot be named. Unable to name that of which the BenjaminianKierkegaardian prattler wishes to speak, he or she is compelled by the external inaccessibility of the subjective to try to find new ways of speaking, ways that require allegorical thinking.22 Such thinking—and such language—are failures on the part of the individual to submerge himself or herself in the universality of comprehensibility (that is, for Benjamin, to be named), and thus to elevate himself or herself as subjective individual over the universal (that is, for Kierkegaard, to sin). It

Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, part 1, p. 153. (English translation: “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 71.) The essay was written in 1916, but remained unpublished during Benjamin’s lifetime. 20 Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, p. 234. (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 233.) 21 There seems in Benjamin to be an acknowledgment of another sense of the term outside of the epistemological and ethical contexts. In the “Karl Kraus” essay of 1931, Benjamin notes, “Through the newspaper, says Kierkegaard, ‘the distinction between public and private affairs is abolished in private-public prattle.’ ” Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, vol. 76, nos. 805–7, March 1931 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, part 1, p. 356; Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 448). The Kierkegaard quotation is from A Literary Review, SKS 8, 95 / TA, 100. It is unclear what Benjamin’s source for the passage from A Literary Review might have been, although in the absence of any other corroborating evidence and noting the absence of any citation, it seems unlikely that he read the book himself. A more likely possibility—considering that quotations from other writers quoting Kierkegaard is not foreign to Benjamin—is that Benjamin came upon the passage in a book by another author he was reading. 22 See Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1993, p. 134. For some religious ramifications of this view in Benjamin’s thought, see Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, New York: Columbia University Press 1982, pp. 73–4. 19

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is for this reason that judgment—re-submission of the subjective to the universal—is the only “purification and elevation” of the prattling man.23 The recognition of this purely individual and inaccessibly subjective aspect of human existence is at the center of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, for Benjamin, a point he makes repeatedly in his review of Adorno’s Kierkegaard. He writes: This world of images whose labyrinths and halls of mirrors contain Kierkegaard’s innermost experiences is something he himself considered insignificant, arbitrary, and idiosyncratic. All the arrogant pretensions of his existentialist philosophy rest on his conviction that he had found the realm of “inwardness,” of “pure spirituality,” which had enabled him to overcome appearance through “decision,” through existential resolve— in short, through a religious stance.24

Even more clearly than before, we see here Benjamin’s criticism of what he takes to be the arrogance of Kierkegaard’s elevation of the arbitrariness of subjectivity over facts, understanding, and the universal. The religious in Kierkegaard comes to be understood by Benjamin as an outward assertion of the individual’s belief that he or she has independently discovered the truth in his or her own private inwardness. This notion of inwardness—the intérieur, as he frequently refers to it—is central to Benjamin’s reading of Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard, and so will be addressed in more depth in the next section. Most of Benjamin’s direct references to Kierkegaard are found in the Arcades Project, and most of those references (eight of the ten) consist almost entirely of Kierkegaard quotations. This is not unusual; much of Benjamin’s work on the unfinished Arcades Project consists of collecting and fragmentary note-taking. We can learn something, however, from the quotations Benjamin chose to inscribe in his notes—as we can from the admittedly brief commentary provided by Benjamin on those quotations. All of the quotations (with the possible exception of the passage, already cited, from Stages on Life’s Way) deal with the aesthetic in Kierkegaard, and specifically with the notions of boredom and suffering. Benjamin does not have much to add to Kierkegaard on boredom, it seems—his commentaries amount to nothing more than the claim that a certain paragraph “deals with boredom”; the cryptic introduction, “Blanqui’s journey”;25 and the altogether unhelpful preface, “Boredom.”26 Benjamin’s fragmentary notes on the aesthetic and the aesthete in the Arcades Project do maintain an interesting emphasis, however. He sums up his conclusion at one point in a single line: “The aesthete in Kierkegaard is predestined to the Passion. A comparable movement occurs with regard to Abraham and his “inability” to speak in Fear and Trembling. Cf. SKS 4, 201 / FT, 113–14. 24 Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Die Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 382; “Kierkegaard: The End of Philosophical Idealism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 704). 25 Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–81) was the author of L’eternité par les asters (Paris: G. Baillière 1872). 26 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, pp. 430–1. (Arcades Project, p. 341.) 23

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See ‘The Unhappiest Man’ in Either/Or.”27 The Kierkegaardian aesthete, according to Benjamin, inevitably suffers. While this is a view Kierkegaard’s readers are accustomed to, by way of the argument made from the ethical perspective, Benjamin draws his conclusion more or less entirely from within the aesthetic—and, defining the term perhaps a bit more narrowly than does Kierkegaard, Benjamin treats the aesthetic domain as the domain of art or, at least, artistry, image-making. Benjamin offers a rather lengthy quotation from the “Diapsalmata” section of Either/Or, prefacing it with four rather telling words: “Melancholy, pride, and images.”28 In the quotation, the aesthetic pseudonym, A, compares himself to an eagle—and a feudal lord. Benjamin quotes him when he writes: Carking care is my feudal castle. It is built like an eagle’s nest upon the peak of a mountain lost in the clouds. No one can take it by storm. From this abode I dart down into the world of reality to seize my prey; but I do not remain down there, I bear my quarry aloft to my stronghold. What I capture are images.29

The aesthete’s sorrow—his “carking care”—isolates and elevates him, distancing him from others so profoundly that, in his melancholy, his world is no longer real. And all that he can take with him from reality back to his melancholy solitude are images—not themselves real things, but mere imitations of reality. Melancholy, pride, and images: in these lies the aesthete’s entire existence. Hence, the suffering that Benjamin thinks is inevitable for the Kierkegaardian aesthete. The melancholy, imagistic world of the aesthetic is not on some mountain peak, however, but contained entirely within the aesthete himself or herself. Distanced from the world and elevated (at least in his or her own mind) above the universal, the aesthete must come to terms with an inwardly directed existence and the melancholic suffering that such an existence entails. The interiority of Kierkegaard’s aesthete is, according to Benjamin, one of the central concerns of Adorno’s Kierkegaard interpretation, as well. In the next section, we will turn our attention to Benjamin’s thoughts, commentary, and criticism of other thinkers’ readings of Kierkegaard, including that of Adorno. Although much of this has more bearing on Benjamin’s reception of those other authors, there are nevertheless a Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, p. 429. (Arcades Project, p. 340.) 28 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, p. 430. (Arcades Project, p. 341.) 29 Kierkegaard in Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, p. 430. (Arcades Project, p. 341.) SKS 2, 51 / EO1, 42. The aphorism in full, as it appears in the translation by Howard and Edna Hong, reads: “My sorrow is my baronial castle, which lies like an eagle’s nest high up on the mountain peak among the clouds. No one can take it by storm. From it I swoop down into actuality and snatch my prey, but I do not stay down there. I bring my booty home, and this booty is a picture I weave into the tapestries at my castle. Then I live as one already dead. Everything I have experienced I immerse in a baptism of oblivion unto an eternity of recollection. Everything temporal and fortuitous is forgotten and blotted out. Then I sit like an old gray-haired man, pensive, and explain the pictures in a soft voice, almost whispering, and beside me sits a child, listening, although he remembers everything before I tell it.” 27

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few indications of Benjamin’s own sense of his developing understanding of and relationship to Kierkegaard embedded in the criticism and the commentary, and it is to Benjamin’s indirect references to Kierkegaard that we now turn. II. Whom Benjamin Read: References to Kierkegaard and Other Authors Benjamin prided himself on his personal library, a collection of books that he not only had shipped around Europe depending upon his living arrangements (or lack thereof), but one he also made the focus of a brief essay.30 He was an avid reader in all genres (including, famously, children’s literature), and he makes much use of his diverse reading in his writing, even when he is not engaged in some sort of criticism—although he was a frequent literary and scholarly critic. As we have already seen, among the many books Benjamin read were, relatively early on, at least one work by Kierkegaard, perhaps as many as three: Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, and Stages on Life’s Way, respectively. But these were not Benjamin’s only source of information about Kierkegaard; in addition, he read any number of works of theology and philosophy that made reference to (or elicited comparisons with) Kierkegaard. The most significant of these, and perhaps the most influential, is Theodor Adorno’s Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. The only work of Benjamin’s devoted exclusively to a consideration of Kierkegaard is, in fact, a review of Adorno’s book (published three days after the Adorno book appeared in print), “Kierkegaard: The End of Philosophical Idealism.” In the review, Benjamin tries to defend in broad strokes the view of Kierkegaard put forward by Adorno, as a writer and thinker shipwrecked on his own religious idealism—but one salvageable, for the most part, if read in light of the insights of twentieth-century theories of literature and historical materialism. Unsurprisingly, Benjamin is largely in agreement with Adorno; as translator Robert Hullot-Kentor notes: “Benjamin’s theory of allegory stands at the center of Kierkegaard, as it does at the center of Adorno’s philosophy altogether.”31 Although there is some correspondence between Benjamin and Adorno in which Benjamin offers criticisms of Kierkegaard, these criticisms address Adorno’s thinking more generally, rather than the details of his reading of Kierkegaard. In addition to the review of the Adorno book, Benjamin makes 14 references to Kierkegaard in the context of or comparison to other authors. Six of these are references in other texts to Adorno’s Kierkegaard; three are to similarities between Kierkegaard and Baudelaire. Of the remaining five, each refers to a different author: Eduard Geismar (1871–1939), Willy Haas (1891–1973), Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Theodor Haecker (1879–1945), and Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Benjamin quotes a lengthy passage from Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus dubitandum 30 Walter Benjamin, “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus,” Die literarische Welt, March 17, 1931 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, part 1, pp. 388–96; English translation: “Unpacking My Library,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 486–92). 31 Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Foreword: Critique of the Organic,” in Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, p. xix.

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est as it appears in the German translation of Geismar’s Søren Kierkegaard,32 lists Kierkegaard among the theologians discussed in Haas’ Gestalten der Zeit (1930),33 maintains that Haecker, “although a Catholic, is a disciple of Kierkegaard,”34 and offers a quotation from Haas that identifies Kafka as the “only legitimate heir” of Kierkegaard and Blaise Pascal (1623–62).35 In a somewhat more interesting passage from the essay “Karl Kraus,” Benjamin returns to the theme of aesthetic passion: “Idiosyncrasy as the highest critical organ—this is the hidden logic of that self-reflection and the hellish state known only to a writer for whom every act of gratification becomes at the same time a station of his martyrdom, a state experienced, apart from Kraus, by no one as deeply as by Kierkegaard.”36 Here Benjamin seems to see in Kierkegaard the same inevitable “Passion” he claims Kierkegaard identified in the aesthete in Either/ Or. Importantly, Kierkegaard’s “martyrdom” is not associated with his religious views, on Benjamin’s account, but instead, as in the case of Kraus, in “every act of [writerly] gratification.” This is in perfect accord with the general theme in Benjamin’s Kierkegaard interpretation, within which Kierkegaard is analyzed and criticized in aesthetic terms. We see it quite clearly in Benjamin’s comparisons of Kierkegaard and Baudelaire in the Arcades Project, in a passage where he notes the central role Baudelaire’s reputation and depiction as a libertine have played in the history of interpretations of his work: “Over this image another was laid, one that has had a much less widespread but—for that very reason—perhaps more lasting effect: it shows Baudelaire as the exemplar of an aesthetic passion, such as Kierkegaard conceived of around the same time (in Either/Or).”37 In addition to the melancholy and the suffering of the passion, Benjamin also finds in Baudelaire a kind of heroism—an aesthetic heroism that sounds remarkably familiar to a reader of Benjamin’s comments on Either/Or. As Benjamin writes, albeit in his sometimes cryptic fashion: “The signature of heroism in Baudelaire: to live Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, p. 530. (Arcades Project, p. 421.) 33 Walter Benjamin, “Theologische Kritik: Zu Willy Haas, ‘Gestalten der Zeit,’ ” Die neue Rundschau, February 1931 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 276–7; “Theological Criticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 429). 34 Walter Benjamin, “Privilegiertes Denken: Zu Theodor Haeckers ‘Vergil,’ ” Die Literarische Welt, February 1932 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 315; “Privileged Thinking: On Theodor Haecker’s Virgil,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 569). 35 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” Jüdische Rundschau, December 1934 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, p. 426; “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 807). The quotation appears in Willy Haas, Gestalten der Zeit, Berlin: Kiepenheuer 1930, p. 176. This is in the third section of the essay, “Drei Dichter,” about Franz Kafka (pp. 172–99). 36 Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, part 1, p. 346; Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 441–2. 37 Walter Benjamin, Zentralpark, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, part 2, p. 665. (“Central Park,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 168.) Cf. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, pp. 158–60. The work was written between April 1938 and February 1939, but remained unpublished during Benjamin’s lifetime. 32

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in the heart of unreality (semblance). In keeping with this is the fact that Baudelaire knew nothing of nostalgia. Kierkegaard!”38 Benjamin notes elsewhere that “the Passion of the aesthetic man in Kierkegaard” has its “foundation in memory,” of which nostalgia is a special variety.39 Thus, a more complex picture of Kierkegaard begins to emerge from Benjamin’s scattered fragments of commentary. While suffering is inevitable for the aesthete—at least, for a certain kind of aesthete—a Kierkegaardian-Baudelairean hero would not relinquish the aesthetic, but instead (and with far more difficulty) divorce the aesthetic from nostalgic memory in some way. Such a hero would continue to reside in semblance, the sort of unreality that the aesthetic pseudonym, A, claims is associated fundamentally with his residence in “carking care.” This is semblance without passion, image without idealism. While perhaps inevitably melancholy, the aesthete is not necessarily doomed to failure, for Benjamin—a view he shares with, and perhaps borrows from, Adorno’s Kierkegaard. Although the aesthetic, as Benjamin reads Kierkegaard to understand it, fails in a way that must lead, in the end, to a kind of religiousness, Benjamin thinks we are justified in reading Kierkegaard in an unorthodox way: not with the goal of uncovering what Kierkegaard intends to tell us (to embrace what Benjamin, quoting Adorno, calls “the fraudulent theology of an existence based on paradox”),40 but instead to take out of Kierkegaard’s thought its “apparently insignificant relics,” its “images, similes, and allegories.”41 With them, one can construct—as Benjamin (and Adorno) thought Adorno had done—Kierkegaard anew, in his “historical truth.”42 Development of this view occurs throughout Benjamin’s review of the Adorno book, as well as in Benjamin’s other comments on Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard. At the heart of Benjamin’s understanding of Adorno, and Benjamin and Adorno’s understanding of Kierkegaard, is (naturally) an image: And it is not, as Kierkegaard believed, the “leap” that will liberate mankind from this incarceration with the magical power of “paradox.” Nowhere does Wiesengrund’s [Adorno’s] insight go deeper than where he ignores the stereotypes of Kierkegaardian philosophy and where he looks instead for the key to Kierkegaard’s thought in its apparently insignificant relics, in its images, similes, and allegories. He discerns the

Benjamin, Zentralpark, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, part 2, p. 673. (“Central Park,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 175.) 39 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, p. 431. (Arcades Project, p. 341.) 40 Adorno in Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 382; “Kierkegaard,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 704). 41 Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 382; “Kierkegaard,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 704). 42 Adorno in Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 382; “Kierkegaard,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 704). 38

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While Kierkegaard himself (in his own name) never seems to put forward such a view, and Kierkegaard’s aesthetic pseudonym, A, only puts this view forward as the root of inextinguishable melancholy and, from a different point of view, despair, Benjamin’s theory of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama—in many ways, the centerpiece of Adorno’s strategy—allows Adorno to find something else, something historically conditioned and free of the taint of philosophical idealism. In having written Kierkegaard, then, Adorno provides Benjamin with an approach to Kierkegaard that (because Adorno’s view is inherently Benjaminian) Benjamin can take to be his own. Kierkegaard disappears in the imagery of Either/Or, Adorno disappears in the imagery of Kierkegaard, and Benjamin—Benjamin tries to disappear in the essays, reviews, monographs, and fragments that constitute his authorship.44 III. Benjamin’s Kierkegaard Benjamin’s Kierkegaard is a product of diverse sources: Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (and, possibly, The Concept of Anxiety and Stages on Life’s Way); Theodor Adorno’s Kierkegaard; Willy Haas’ Gestalten der Zeit; Eduard Geismar’s Søren Kierkegaard; and, given that inwardness was central to Benjamin’s reading of Kierkegaard and he authored a review of another work of Haecker’s, perhaps Theodor Haecker’s Søren Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit (1913). And yet, even in this light, Benjamin’s Kierkegaard is an enigmatic figure. Benjamin offers readers only a glimpse of his thoughts on Kierkegaard; even when we read his personal correspondence, we find only a few more mentions, tantalizing but incomplete.45 Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933 (in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, p. 382; “Kierkegaard,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 704). 44 Benjamin quotes Adorno (quoting Benjamin) in the Arcades Project: “For this reason, the images—which, like those of the intérieur, bring dialectic and myth to the point of indifferentiation—are truly ‘antediluvian fossils.’ They may be called dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s expression, whose compelling definition of ‘allegory’ also holds true for Kierkegaard’s allegorical intention taken as a figure of historical dialectic and mythical nature. According to this definition, ‘in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history, a petrified primordial landscape.’ ” Adorno in Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, part 1, pp. 575–6. (Arcades Project, p. 461.) The Adorno quotation can be found at Adorno, Kierkegaard, p. 54. Preceding the Benjamin quotation in the Adorno quotation in Benjamin, Adorno quotes Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony. See SKS 1, 157 / CI, 103. The passage from Benjamin that Adorno quotes can be found at Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, p. 164. (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 166.) 45 As Marc Katz notes, in addition to the Adorno review, only “Scattered references to Kierkegaard are found in Konvolut D, I, J and M in Das Passagen-Werk as part of planned chapters on the flâneur, Baudelaire, boredom and the bourgeois interior. When Kierkegaard 43

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Benjamin’s Kierkegaard is, thus, very much an unfinished figure, a work in progress that each of us, when we come to Benjamin looking for Kierkegaard, must—like Benjamin and Adorno—construct out of the pieces we find there. I have tried to bring some of those pieces together here. Benjamin’s comments on Kierkegaard are centrally—perhaps exclusively—concerned with the aesthetic, particularly with the figure of the aesthete. While Benjamin is centrally concerned with issues surrounding art and literature, and undertakes rigorous studies of works and genres of art (most notably, of Trauerspiel, the German “mourning play”), it is important to note that Benjamin also, in a sense, distances himself from the history of the study of such products of culture. This is the sense in which Benjamin must be read as a critic of Kierkegaard, as he understood him. While the youthful Benjamin is an avid and excited reader of Kierkegaard, later in life, and definitely by 1933 and the publication of the review of the Adorno book, Benjamin has established a nonKierkegaardian perspective of his own. As Nickolas Lambrianou notes of the later Benjamin: Here Kierkegaard, along with other apparently radical positions such as Karl Barth’s “dialectical theology” and Heidegger’s existentialism, is now read as a form of baroque, allegorical reconciliation of the spiritual and the profane realms—a reconciliation which is no less “conciliatory”—in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s terms—for being paradoxical. Indeed, the impossibility of resolving the contradictions of contemporary existence by merely reflecting (and hence “consoling”) them in a narrative form is just that form of “privileged thinking” that requires urgent political critique at this time.46

For political (Benjaminian-Marxist) reasons, Benjamin must abandon what he takes the Kierkegaardian project to be, at least in part. Benjamin reads Kierkegaard as bound inherently to the aesthetic—and “aesthetic” in a sense that is opposed to historical critique. Despite the fact that Kierkegaard himself differentiates the “paradoxical religious” from the aesthetic in any number of ways, for Benjamin, for whom paradox could only ever be acceptable to the artist or aesthete, the differences are so minute as to be irrelevant. The knight of faith is, we might say, just another kind of aesthete, from Benjamin’s perspective. Recall that, on Benjamin’s reading of Either/Or, the aesthete willfully removes himself or herself from reality, creating a fictive world in which he or she resides, melancholy and alone. Such construction is not entirely opposed to Benjamin’s historical-critical-political project, since the aesthetic (in a certain, non-Kierkegaardian sense of the word) is important to Benjamin. But Benjaminian construction is a creation back into the world, not an escape from it. A’s aesthetic melancholy in Either/Or has the aesthete isolated from the rest of us, darting back into reality only now and then to abscond with images, the stuff of the aesthete’s is mentioned among Benjamin scholars, it is typically as a footnote in B.’s intellectual biography.” Marc Katz, “Rendezvous in Berlin: Benjamin and Kierkegaard on the Architecture of Repetition,” The German Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 1, 1998, p. 13, note 1. 46 Nickolas Lambrianou, “Antinomies of Narrated Experience: Apologetic Thinking, New Thinking and Privileged Thinking,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 37, no. 1, 2006, pp. 31–2.

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existence. The Benjaminian aesthete, however—deeply influenced by but essentially different from the Kierkegaardian—lives in the world and is of the world, creating with critical and political intent. The Benjaminian aesthete moves in the opposite direction, darting from reality into the unrealities in which the culturally important artists and writers have lived, finding therein the myths, images, and allegories that root those artists and writers and their works in a specific culture and society, and constructing therefrom historically informed, politically aware, critical images of the foundational aesthetic works of a culture. This is, in a very broad sense, the project of the Arcades Project; it is, in a much narrower and less complete way, the project of Benjamin’s mature Kierkegaard interpretation. Thus, although the criticism could be made of Benjamin that he was not the most careful reader of Kierkegaard’s works, and certainly not the most generous interpreter of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, Benjamin forestalls such criticism by virtue of his method. He does not read and interpret Kierkegaard for Kierkegaard’s sake, or for the sake of devotees and disciples of Kierkegaard; his goal is not to attempt to articulate the clearest, fairest, most charitable version of Kierkegaard’s views for contemporary readers of Kierkegaard. Rather, Benjamin sees in Kierkegaard both an image of the danger he sees facing European society and culture, and an image of one possibility for avoiding that danger. Benjamin tries in his own way to distance himself from the historical Kierkegaard by situating Kierkegaard in his historical context, presenting Kierkegaard not as a voice in the contemporary debate but as a predecessor to and resource for all such voices. Such an approach, although dismissive in some ways of Kierkegaard and Kierkegaardian concerns, gives Benjamin the opportunity to begin to unfold a new (sometimes messianic) political critique of the Europe of the 1930s that, although not itself Kierkegaardian, is aware of its indebtedness to Kierkegaard.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Benjamin’s Corpus Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Berlin: Rowohlt 1928, pp. 233–4. (English translation: The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne, London: Verso 1998, p. 233.) “Karl Kraus,” Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt, March 1931. (English translation: “Karl Kraus,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 441–2.) “Kierkegaard: Das Ende des philosophischen Idealismus,” Die Vossische Zeitung, April 2, 1933. (English translation: “Kierkegaard: The End of Philosophical Idealism,” in Selected Writings, vols. 1–4, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press 1996–2003, vol. 2, pp. 703–5.) “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–6 in 12 tomes, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971–99, vol. 2, part 1, p. 153. (English translation: “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1996, p. 71.) Das Passagen-Werk, in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–6 in 12 tomes, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971–99, vol. 5, pp. 429–31. (English translation: The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press 1999, pp. 340–1.) Letter to Carla Seligson, Freiburg, April 30, 1913, in Gesammelte Briefe, vols. 1–6, ed. by Christoph Gödde, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995–2000, vol. 1, pp. 92–4. (English translation: in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin: 1910– 1940, ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994, pp. 20–1.) Letter to Herbert Blumenthal, Freiburg, July 17, 1913, in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 147–50. (English translation: in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, pp. 43–5.) II. Sources of Benjamin’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: Mohr 1933.

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Geismar, Eduard, Sören Kierkegaard. Seine Lebensentwicklung und seine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller, trans. by E. Krüger and L. Geismar, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1929. Haas, Willy, Gestalten der Zeit, Berlin: Kiepenheuer 1930, p. 27; p. 38; p. 46; pp. 76–7; pp. 79–82; pp. 84–5; pp. 92–3; p. 99; p. 118; pp. 176–8. Haecker, Theodor, Sören Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit, Munich: Schreiber 1913. III. Secondary Literature on Benjamin’s Relation to Kierkegaard Figal, Günter, “Die doppelte Geschichte: Das Verhältnis Walter Benjamins zu Søren Kierkegaard,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsgeschichte, vol. 24, 1982, pp. 295–310. Harrits, Flemming, “Grammatik des Glaubens oder Zwischenspiel über den Begriff der Geschichte: Zeit und Geschichte bei Søren Kierkegaard und Walter Benjamin,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 82–99. Josipovici, Gabriel, “Kierkegaard and the Novel,” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. by Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain, Oxford: Blackwell 1998, pp. 116–18. Katz, Marc, “Rendezvous in Berlin: Benjamin and Kierkegaard on the Architecture of Repetition,” The German Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–13. Lambrianou, Nickolas, “Antinomies of Narrated Experience: Apologetic Thinking, New Thinking, and Privileged Thinking,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 37, no. 1, 2006, pp. 21–36. Nägele, Rainer, “Trembling Contours: Kierkegaard—Benjamin—Brecht,” in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. by Andrew Benjamin, London: Continuum 2005, pp. 102–17. Newmark, Kevin, “Translators, Inc.: Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Mallarmé & Co,” Parallax, vol. 6, no. 1, 2000, pp. 39–55. Palermo, S., “La scena e il prisma: Teatro e cinema come immagini concettuali in Kierkegaard e Benjamin,” in Kierkegaard e la letteratura, ed. by Massimo Iritano and Inge Lise Rasmussen, Rome: Città Nuova 2002 (NotaBene: Quaderni di Studi Kierkegaardiani, vol. 2), pp. 83–99. Peters, John Durham, “Beauty’s Veils: The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Kierkegaard and Benjamin,” in The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. by Dudley Andrew, Austin: University of Texas Press 1997, pp. 9–32. Rochlitz, Rainer, “Le meilleur disciple de Walter Benjamin,” Critique, vol. 52, no. 593, 1996, pp. 819–35. Ryan, Bartholomew, “Loafing Heroes of History,” in Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: A Dialogue with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Aarhus, Århus 2006, pp. 150–98. Schmid, Hermann, “Der Historiker als rückwärtsgewandter Prophet im Denken Kierkegaards und W. Benjamins,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2004, pp. 275–94.

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Theunissen, Michael and Wilfried Greve, “Kritischer Marxismus,” in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. by Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, pp. 76–83. Weber, Samuel, “Medium als Störung: Theater und Sprache bei Kierkegaard und Benjamin,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 120, 2005, pp. 590–603.

Ernst Bloch: The Thinker of Utopia’s Reading of Kierkegaard Alina Vaisfeld

Søren Kierkegaard’s influence upon the German philosopher Ernst Bloch has been the subject of very little discussion, and no comprehensive study on the topic exists. One simple reason for this could be that by itself, Bloch’s work is comparatively unknown. The epic scope and ambition of his writings, an almost Faustian undertaking to perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost fold, and Bloch’s dense, expressionistic style, in particular of his earlier works, might have contributed to the dearth of knowledge of Bloch, especially in the English-speaking world.1 However, Bloch’s earlier works in particular abound with appreciative references to Kierkegaard as a critic of the closedness and lack of open-endedness of the Hegelian system. His later reading of Kierkegaard represents a curious mix of enthusiasm and reservation, which some commentators have linked to the “materialist turn” in Bloch’s work, where an early expressionist-existentialist emphasis and an enthusiastic reading of Kierkegaard yields to a more rigidly Marxistmaterialist approach entailing an explicit critique of Kierkegaard’s inwardness as petty bourgeois thought.2 Others have proposed to understand the developments in Bloch’s work more as a shift in emphasis than a genuine break.3 In line with the latter interpretation, Helmut Fahrenbach even puts forth the suggestion that in his later works, Bloch’s direct and indirect references to Kierkegaard play an even greater role.4

As Jack Zipes argues, Bloch’s work has experienced a period of disrepute and neglect in post-1989 Germany after being widely read in the preceding years. See Jack Zipes, “Traces of Hope: The Non-Synchronicity of Ernst Bloch,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, ed. by Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan, London and New York: Verso 1997, pp. 1–14. 2 See Manfred Riedel, Tradition und Utopie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1994, p. 210. 3 I have here in mind, for example, Peter Thompson in his engaging introduction to Ernst Bloch, Atheism and Christianity, London and New York: Verso 2009, p. XI. 4 Helmut Fahrenbach, “Kierkegaards untergründige Wirkungsgeschichte. Zur Kierkegaard-Rezeption bei Wittgenstein, Bloch, Marcuse,” in Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie: Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982, ed. by Heinrich Anz, Poul Lübcke, and Friedrich Schmöe, Copenhagen and Munich: Fink 1983, pp. 30–69, see p. 47. 1

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I. Life and Work Ernst Simon Bloch was born on 8 July 1885 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, into what could broadly be called an assimilated Jewish family.5 Later, Bloch would recall an unhappy childhood and youth overshadowed by intellectually and philosophically unsympathetic parents and teachers. Forbidden to study philosophy at home as it was not deemed “proper” education, the young Bloch withdrew into the castle library at Mannheim to read philosophy, in particular G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling. Even so, Bloch later underscored the importance that being born in “a worker’s city” had for the development of his interest in Marxism.6 Between 1905 and 1908, Bloch studied philosophy and psychology with Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) in Munich, and with Oswald Külpe (1862–1915) in Würzburg. As subsidiary studies, he read music, physics, and German studies. In 1908, he concluded his studies with a dissertation on Heinrich Rickert’s (1863– 1936) epistemology titled Kritische Erörterungen über Rickert und das Problem der modernen Erkenntnistheorie, published in 1909.7 In the ensuing years, Bloch was first a member of Georg Simmel’s (1858–1918) private colloquium in Berlin before becoming associated with Max Weber’s (1864–1920) circle in Heidelberg. As a member of the Simmel circle, Bloch became acquainted with Georg Lukács (1885–1971), his “mentor in Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard.”8 Even if the period of near identity of opinion between Bloch and Lukács would break down eventually, Bloch’s early work, in particular his Geist der Utopie,9 is still very influenced by what Bloch called “their mutual apprenticeship.”10 In this section, I am drawing in particular on Vincent Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, London and New York: Routledge 1996, see in particular pp. 9–46, on Burghart Schmidt, Ernst Bloch, Stuttgart: Metzler 1985, and on Zipes, “Traces of Hope: The Non-synchronicity of Ernst Bloch.” 6 In an interview in March 1974, Bloch recounts, “I learned about Marxism at a very early age. I was born in a worker’s city on the banks of the Rhine, Ludwigshafen, where the I.G. Farben Trust had its central headquarters. Half of the city’s inhabitants were workers and I had some contact with the Social Democrats very early.” Michael Lowy and Vicki Williams Hill, “Interview with Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique, no. 9, 1976, pp. 35–45, see p. 40. 7 Heinrich Rickert, Kritische Erörterungen über Rickert und das Problem der modernen Erkenntnistheorie, Ludwigshafen a. Rh.: Baur 1909. 8 Ibid., p. 38. 9 Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie, Munich: Duncker und Humblot 1918 (revised ed., in Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vols. 1–16, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1959–78, vol. 3; English translation: The Spirit of Utopia, trans. by Anthony A. Nassar, ed. by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000.) 10 Although Bloch does not mention the text explicitly, it can be assumed that he was familiar with Lukács’ piece on Kierkegaard, “The Foundering of Form against Life: Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen.” See Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1974, pp. 28–41. (The essay was first published as “Sören Kierkegaard és Regine Olsen” in the Hungarian literary periodical Nyugat, vol. 1, no. 6, 1910, pp. 378–87.) In his Der Hintern des Teufels, an account of Bloch’s life and work, Peter Zudeick states that Bloch was one of the few people who read the manuscript of Soul and Form. See Peter Zudeick, Der Hintern des Teufels, Moos and Baden-Baden: Elster 5

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Bloch spent the years from 1917 to 1919 in Swiss exile in opposition to German imperialism during the World War I. In 1918, his Geist der Utopie was published, which established his reputation as a new and important intellectual voice, whilst also being met with critical responses, in particular because of its expressionistic language and dense style. In the years following his return to Germany in 1919, Bloch’s personal life saw many changes: his first wife Elsa died in 1921, and he entered into a second, short-lived marriage with the painter Linda Oppenheimer in the following year. After Hitler’s seizure of power, Bloch was expatriated in 1933 and joined the European Jewish diaspora in Zurich, Vienna, and finally in Prague. Closely escaping the Nazi invasion of Prague, Bloch, his third wife, Karola Piotrkowska, and their son fled to the United States. Bloch spent the years between 1938 and 1949 in American exile, first in New York (where he was denied a position at the Institute of Social Research on account of being “too Communist”), then in Marlborough, New Hampshire, and finally in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even though a lack of proficiency in the English language prevented him from employment in any academic institution, Bloch worked on a number of important books, most importantly his major work Das Prinzip der Hoffnung.11 In 1949, Bloch returned to East Germany to embark, in his mid-sixties, on his first academic post, a position at the University of Leipzig, where he became a highly influential and popular figure with an enthusiastic student following.12 Bloch’s relationship to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), however, deteriorated during the crisis in the Communist block. Bloch was sympathetic to the opposition in Poland and Hungary and came to be seen as a threat to the party rule. Deemed to be the spiritual leader of the democratic socialist student groups, he was eventually banned from the university. Coincidentally, Bloch and his wife found themselves in West Germany when the wall was constructed in August 1961 Verlag 1985, p. 42. For an excellent piece on the relationship between Bloch and Lukács, see Sándor Radnóti, “Lukács and Bloch,” in Lukács Reappraised, ed. by Ágnes Heller, New York: Columbia University Press 1983, pp. 63–75. For an account of Bloch’s and Lukács’ encounter and a comparison in particular of their aesthetic theories, see Werner Jung, “The Early Aesthetic Theories of Bloch and Lukács,” New German Critique, no. 45, 1988, pp. 41–54. Jung writes: “One need only glance at Bloch’s first edition of Geist der Utopie to see how closely related it is to Lukács’ collection of essays Soul and Form and his Theory of the Novel….The Theory of the Novel begins with an almost poetic description of the transcendental homelessness of modern man, a description which Bloch shortened in Geist der Utopie to the formula of ‘the darkness of the lived moment.’ ” Ibid., p. 46. 11 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vols. 1–2, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1954–55 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5; English translation: The Principle of Hope, vol. 1–3, trans. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1995. Pagination is contiguous in both editions). 12 For Bloch’s influence on an entire generation of important East German writers such as Uwe Johnson and Christa Wolf, see Verena Kirchner, Im Bann der Utopie. Ernst Blochs Hoffnungsphilosophie in der DDR-Literatur, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2002. For Bloch’s influence on Uwe Johnson in particular, see Gary Lee Baker, “(Anti-)utopian Elements in Uwe Johnson’s ‘Jahrestage’: Traces of Ernst Bloch,” The Germanic Review, vol. 68, no. 32, 1993, pp. 32–45.

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and decided to remain there. During the last 16 years of his life, Bloch was based at Tübingen. As a professor at the university, he inspired a large and loyal following of students and continued to back political struggles such as the student movement in 1968.13 He died on 4 August 1977 at the age of 92. It is no easy task to establish the exact influences on Bloch’s philosophy. Bloch was a highly original thinker who, as he himself put it, discovered at the age of 22 the concept of the “Not-Yet,” which was to become “the origin of his philosophy.”14 With the concept of the “Not-Yet,” Bloch sought to describe his understanding of the world (and of man) as fundamentally unfinished and therefore utopian. Human experience, Bloch argues, can only be understood by the desire for a more fulfilling existence—“to become who you are”—which lies at its core. In a constant state of becoming, man and the world tend towards a “Not-Yet,” a future realm of utopia, where they could become what they have the potential to be.15 Utopia, however, is never a form of escapism or flight of fancy. For Bloch, it is concrete in that it always already surrounds us in our world, which carries within it the concrete possibility of a future utopian society. Utopia is concrete because man can catch small glimpses of a future utopia in the human world. To rehabilitate the concept of utopia, Bloch drew on a number of traditions, in particular on aesthetics. According to Bloch, all art is utopian in that it presents imaginary realization of what is not yet. In art, but also in everyday life, utopian wishes and dreams for the future pre-appear (the term Bloch uses is Vorschein), without yet existing at all. What we glimpse in the here and now is but the promise of a future utopia. These promises, which our world carries in it, awaken the transformative desire to actively change the world, which must, as especially the later Bloch will emphasize, be married to the objective possibilities of doing so. Despite a highly distinctive and personal vision, Bloch was deeply woven into the German philosophical tradition, especially German idealism. What Bloch stated in his lectures on the history of philosophy at Leipzig very much applied to his own thought: “All profound philosophizing has, per definitionem, the brother Schelling, the father Hegel, and the here and now of Marx.”16 Although Bloch admired the comprehensive and encyclopedic dimensions of the Hegelian system, he appreciated During his years at Tübingen, Bloch’s work also gained increasing importance for left and liberation theology. For a discussion of Bloch’s influence on figures such as Jürgen Moltmann and Harvey Cox, see Tom Moylan, “Bloch against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, pp. 96–122. 14 In an interview with José Marchand in 1974, published as “Die Welt bis zur Kenntlichkeit verändern,” in Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang. Sechs Interviews mit Ernst Bloch, ed. by Arno Münster, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977, pp. 20–101, see p. 36. 15 On the centrality of the logical category of “possibility” in Bloch’s work, see Ze’ev Levy, “Utopia and Reality in the Philosophy of Ernst Bloch,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, pp. 175–86. 16 Ernst Bloch, Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vols. 1–2, ed. by Ruth Römer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1985 (Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie: 1950–1956, vols. 3–4), vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 140. Translations are mine. 13

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Schelling for exposing the shortcomings of the lack of open-endedness and nonteleological becoming of Hegel’s system. In Karl Marx, Bloch found the grounding in the actual material process of life, which he sensed was missing in other idealistic approaches. In this vein, Kierkegaard is set side-by-side first with Immanuel Kant, later with Schelling as another important critic of Hegel who underscored the lack of processuality and true becoming in the Hegelian system. II. Spirit of Utopia (1918, 1923) In commentaries on Bloch’s work, Spirit of Utopia stands out as the work most unanimously identified as bearing a “Kierkegaardian streak.” Referring to Bloch’s first major work, Manfred Riedel, in his important Tradition und Utopie, writes that “[i]n lieu of a dialectical method and constructions, the young Block takes as his methodical paradigm Kierkegaard’s historical concrete understanding of existence [Existenzverstehen].”17 Helmut Fahrenbach observes “Kierkegaard’s strong direct influence in Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia,” which, for Fahrenbach, comes as a surprise since “[b]eginning with Hegel, Bloch came, as he himself said, to Kierkegaard only through Lukács. Whereas Lukács became a Hegelian, Bloch sided with Kierkegaard and Kant in Spirit of Utopia.”18 Indeed, Bloch demonstrates what is perhaps his most uncritical and unreserved endorsement and historical appreciation of Kierkegaard, “the Hume born to us,” in his first major work. Even if the enthusiasm for Kierkegaard, which Bloch displays in Spirit of Utopia, will give way in later works to a more reserved and critical reception, certain ideas, unfolded in this early work and tied to Kierkegaard as the thinker of subjectivity, continue to resonate throughout all of Bloch’s work. Although Bloch later moves from an emphasis upon individual self-encounter to a notion of enlightenment through interaction with others, he will continue to emphasize the importance of finding direction within oneself and to initiate radical change with radical selfchange. In this vein, the opening lines of his last, posthumously published work Experimentum Mundi. Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis—“We are, but we do not yet possess ourselves.”19—seem like an echo of the opening lines of his Spirit of Utopia, published over sixty years earlier: “I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to begin. Life has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago. It pitches senselessly back and forth, but we stand firm, and so we want to be its initiative and we want to be its end.”20

Riedel, Tradition und Utopie, pp. 42–3. Translation mine. Fahrenbach, “Kierkegaards untergründige Wirkungsgeschichte. Zur KierkegaardRezeption bei Wittgenstein, Bloch, Marcuse,” pp. 44–5. Translation mine. 19 Ernst Bloch, Experimentum Mundi. Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1975 (vol. 15 in Gesamtausgabe der Werke; the quotation is from the very first page of the book, which precedes his introduction and which is not numbered—pagination only starts on the next page, which is p. 1). Translation mine. 20 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 9 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 3, p. 11; Spirit of Utopia, p. 1). 17 18

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First published in 1918, Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia is written against World War I and against German imperialism, “a suffocating coercion imposed by mediocrities and tolerated by mediocrities; a triumph of stupidity, guarded by the gendarme, acclaimed by the intellectuals who did not have enough brains to provide slogans.”21 More generally, a concern comes to the fore with the critical state of contemporary existence, which is experienced as empty and void, as lacking in foundation and guidance. The war, Bloch states, could only occur because “we [the Germans] no longer have any thoughts, because we ceased long ago to be the people of the poets and thinkers, because there is no foundation anymore.”22 Even so, Spirit of Utopia is not a work of cultural pessimism, but rather promises a new beginning, a taking possession of an unlost heritage—the spirit of utopia. The kind of guidance and direction that is needed to break through the falsity and reification of the world can only be found within: in mankind’s encounter with itself. Philosophy, however, with its emphasis upon systematicity and abstraction, bars man from encountering himself. In particular, Bloch considers Hegel to have brought “all inwardness outside” and to have closed off everything that remains open “in favor of a certainly accessible but also regrettable achievement of an explicitly concluded system.”23 Man, for Bloch, is unconcluded and open, a question to be asked; he loses himself in the concept. “Whether we suffer, whether we can be blessed, whether we are immortal as individual, existing human beings—the concept does not care. For the philosopher is on the way to no longer being human; he leaves the worst to us and proudly departs an existence that so little affects the interests of abstraction.”24 Hegel’s detached, objective system cannot touch upon the question that we ourselves are, since there is no genuine and new becoming in Hegel, where all becoming is teleologically determined, a reassembling of solid formations out of the already completed process of world spirit. Moreover, existence, Bloch states in reference to Kierkegaard, is not a matter of speculation, abstraction, or reflection. “[T]he trouble with existing, as Kierkegaard says, is just that those who exist find existence endlessly interesting,” Bloch writes, paraphrasing from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript.25 In the realm of existence, to remain untouched, speculative, and objective is to be a Münchhausen, a baron of lies, who only pretended to be adventurous and passionate without actually leaving the comfortable realm of abstraction and changing one’s self. To understand man requires an undogmatic openness to the radically new and not yet, a conception of man as a question that has not yet an answer. “We have no organ for the I or the We,” Bloch writes, “rather, we are located in our own blind spot, in the darkness of the lived moment, whose darkness is ultimately our own darkness, Ibid. In the interview with José Marchand in 1974, “Die Welt bis zur Kenntlichkeit verändern,” p. 37. 23 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 276 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 3, p. 227; Spirit of Utopia, p. 180). 24 Ibid. 25 “[Abstraction] is disinterested, but the difficulty of existence is the existing person’s interest, and the existing person is infinitely interested in existing.” SKS 7, 275 / CUP1, 302. 21 22

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being-unfamiliar-to-ourselves, being-enfolded, being-missing.”26 In the analogy to the eye’s blind spot, Bloch uses the terms “darkness” to convey the inability of the mind to grasp the present and the moment in their immediacy. Insofar as the subject has never been present to itself, it cannot appear or be known in memory, or any sphere of the no-longer-conscious. Therefore, it must be conceived as an inconstruable question, which not yet has an answer and which must be grasped “purely as question and not as the construed indication of an available solution.”27 Against Hegel, Bloch sides with Kant and Kierkegaard, the thinkers of subjectivity. Referring to the latter, he states: One man above all here left behind the merely external, thinks his way into what concern us. Kierkegaard alone left what is ultimately alien behind, is the Hume born to us, who awakens far differently, more significantly, from dogmatic slumber. We are: that alone is the concern where what is truly fundamental is involved; one looks out the window onto the street, but in the silvered glass, in the mirror alone does one see oneself. Only in the cloudy, shimmering aspect of being-there [da-Sein], which feels and wants to become aware [innewerden] of itself, is one together with the truly infinite, the immediate, out of which alone the truth looks towards us.28

In analogy to Kant’s statement that Hume interrupted his dogmatic slumber of metaphysics, Bloch credits Kierkegaard with awakening him from the objective slumber of Hegelian thought by positing “the task for subjective, un-Hegelian thought: to apprehend oneself as existent and to understand oneself in existence,” which ought to be a matter of concern, engagement, and passion to every single individual. In Spirit of Utopia, Bloch emphasizes the eminently important role of Kierkegaard for Bloch’s own project of utopian philosophy. “[T]he question about us,” which was formulated by Kierkegaard, “is the only problem, the resultant of every worldproblem, and to formulate this Self- and We-problem in everything, the opening, reverberating through the world, of the gates of homecoming, is the ultimate basic principle of utopian philosophy.”29 His enthusiastic appraisal of Kierkegaard as subjective thinker will, in later works, become interlaced with more critical and reserved remarks and a call for the need of mediation.30 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, pp. 371–2 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 3, p. 253; Spirit of Utopia, p. 200). 27 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 367 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 3, p. 249; Spirit of Utopia, pp. 197–8). 28 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 368 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 3, pp. 249–50; Spirit of Utopia, p. 198). 29 Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 260. (Spirit of Utopia, p. 203.) (The sentence only appears in the revised version from 1923.) 30 It should be noted, however, that already in Spirit of Utopia, Bloch emphasizes that the self’s relation to itself must always be mediated. Man’s encounter with himself and the illumination of his existence, in which the immediate dark riddle of the lived moment will be illuminated and fulfilled—especially in times of emptiness and alienation of life—is not possible as immediate presence. Moreover, self and world must not be divorced. It is important, Bloch emphasizes, that “the self that improves itself not be lost in the world” and therefore 26

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III. The Principle of Hope Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope,31 was written between 1938 and 1947 during Bloch’s exile in the United States. In comparison to the early Spirit of Utopia, both Bloch’s political and his philosophical position had changed, which had important ramifications for his reception of Kierkegaard. Bloch’s selfconsciously Marxist position, which he had developed by the 1920s, is reflected in The Principle of Hope in a Marxist analysis of social situations and conditions. Besides, Bloch had developed a sensitivity to the positive aspects, which the German idealist tradition, especially Hegel, had bequeathed to Marxism.32 Without losing sight of the criticism leveled against Hegel by Kant and Kierkegaard, Bloch was now particularly appreciative of the encyclopedic, all-encompassing dimensions of the Hegelian system,33 which provided him with the possibility of a systematicity and structure, which he retrospectively sensed to be missing in his own earlier work.34 Moreover, Bloch had grown increasingly critical of existentialist thought, in particular the writings of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger although he continued to subtly distinguish between Kierkegaard, “the real thinker of existence” and what Bloch dismissively described as petit-bourgeois and reactionary “second and third hand existentialists.”35 In The Principle of Hope, an encyclopedia of human strivings for utopia throughout human history, Bloch carries through a thorough examination of the ways that hopes and visions of a better world reside in everyday life and in everyday cultural artifacts. Moreover, he traces through history anticipatory visions of what would later be systematized and theorized as socialism by Karl Marx and others to corroborate his understanding of socialism as the realization of mankind’s deepest necessary “to let Kant burn through Hegel: the self must remain in everything,” even though “Kant ultimately stands above Hegel.” Bloch, Geist der Utopie, p. 291 (in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 3, p. 236; Spirit of Utopia, p. 187). 31 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. (The Principle of Hope.) 32 This is posited in particular in Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8 [Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1951], which will be discussed in the following section. The translations are mine. 33 Douglas Kellner even likens the structural arrangement of the three volumes of Bloch’s The Principle of Hope to Hegel’s division of his system into interrogations of subjective, objective, and absolute spirit, a suggestion which works very well and which might help one to get some kind of overview over Bloch’s difficult and lengthy three-volume work. See Douglas Keller, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, pp. 80–95. 34 As Bloch self-critically put it in 1963 in an afterword to Spirit of Utopia, p. 279, where he refers to Spirit of Utopia as “a Sturm und Drang book entrenched and carried out by night, against the War, as well as about a first work—built around the nos ipse—of a new, utopian kind of philosophy. Its revolutionary Romanticism…attains measure and definition in The Principle of Hope.” 35 See Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 386. For a more detailed discussion of changes both in Bloch’s philosophical and political attitude, see Fahrenbach, “Kierkegaards untergründige Wirkungsgeschichte. Zur Kierkegaard-Rezeption bei Wittgenstein, Bloch, Marcuse,” p. 47.

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wishes towards which social, political, and cultural developments point.36 In The Principle of Hope, then, Bloch seeks to give a systematic account of the glimmers of utopia in everyday life, which he had already, albeit more abstractly, described in The Spirit of Utopia. Bloch will now emphasize the concrete character of utopia as a place that can be reached in potentia.37 As an objective possibility, concrete utopia represents a reality today. In order to be concrete, utopia must bear a two-fold structure: subjective utopian longing must be anchored in the world, where it finds its objective counterpart in the form of “a correlate in the objective hope-contents of the tendency-latency.”38 “Just as a Not-Yet-Conscious, which has never been conscious before, dawns in the human soul,” Bloch writes, “so a Not-Yet-Become dawns in the world.”39 The utopian movement, therefore, is not confined to human development. Man and the world must be thought of as process. In a radically materialist view, Bloch posits a grander, less anthropocentric picture, in which the utopian striving within the human world is put in relation with the larger process of the onward unfolding of matter itself. This is Bloch’s anti-essentiality, anti-dualist material dialectics, a vision of man and the world as unfolding in a non-teleological way.40 Bloch’s new emphasis upon the relatedness of man and world has important repercussions for his understanding of Kierkegaard whom he continues to appreciate as the thinker of subjectivity and existence, whilst also condemning Kierkegaard’s too narrow concept of subjectivity void of an objective correspondent in the world. On the one hand, Bloch does not cease to foreground the subjective, “existentialist” streak of concrete utopia, which is always a matter of subjective concern. In this vein, Bloch writes:

36 The work is published in three volumes. Focusing on daydreams and wish images, on the utopian wishes and hopes revealed and recorded in everyday human life, such as in fashion, travel, fairy tales, and cultural artifacts in general, the first volume systematically introduces the idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious, the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as essential to the human mind. The second volume, “Outlines of a Better World,” analyzes social and political utopias including technological, architectural and geographical utopias. Examining the utopian systems constructed by thinkers in all fields, in medicine, in poetry, in philosophy, it recounts the development of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. The third volume depicts “Wishful Images of the Fulfilled Moment,” including the visions provided by morality, music, and religion. It is prescriptive in that it suggests ways in which humans can reach their proper “homeland,” where they have become what they are and where social justice is married to an openness to change and to the future. 37 For a critical discussion of Bloch’s distinction between abstract and concrete utopia, see Ruth Levitas, “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia,” in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, pp. 65–79. 38 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 198. (The Principle of Hope, p. 173.) 39 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 728. (The Principle of Hope, p. 623.) 40 For a more detailed discussion of Bloch’s understanding of the creativity of matter, see Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, pp. 133–60.

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Alina Vaisfeld Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, in which everything that is both drives and is hidden from itself. In other words: we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness. Namely, the most immediate immediacy, in which the care of selflocation and being-here still lives, in which at the same time the whole knot of the world-secret is to be found.41

It is in man’s self-encounter, when penetrating the darkness of the nearest near, where not only man but also the structure and the content of the world process are revealed.42 Utopia, for Bloch, is concrete because it starts with existence and is rooted in man’s material becoming. “The desire to start something new,” Bloch says, “begins with ourselves….We have in us what we could become.”43 Moreover, utopian self-knowledge is transmitted in emotional insights. Selfknowledge can only be gained when the intellect is in contact with human emotions— hunger, craving, striving for what is sensed to be missing. As already in Spirit of Utopia, Bloch credits “the original, the nevertheless basically honest Kierkegaard with his playing off of emotionalized subject-thinking against the merely objectbased kind”44 for recognizing the revelatory function of emotional insight. In the later work, Bloch, however, emphasizes the interdependence between reason and emotions: whilst a philosophy which clings merely to reason remains trapped inside “ ‘an asylum of ignorance,’ ” a thinking solely based upon emotional insight is but a “ ‘world of idle chatter.’ ”45

Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 11. (The Principle of Hope, p. 12.) 42 For an interesting discussion of Bloch’s understanding of the utopian moment as “revelatory” and for a comparison of his understanding with Kierkegaard’s, see Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy, Aldershot: Ashgate 2008. Ward argues that Bloch interprets the process of the “now,” the penetration of the darkness of the lived moment, “as a section which reveals the structure and content of the world process.” Ibid., p. 150. In a similar vein, Fredric Jameson underscores the centrality of Bloch’s concern with the instant, which Jameson views to be culminating in Bloch’s continuous engagement with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, which is organized “around the key episode of the wager with the devil, the terms of which involve refusal of, or consent to, the Instant.” Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1974, p. 140. Jameson even suggests that Bloch’s “entire work, indeed, may in one sense be seen as an immense commentary on Goethe’s poem (in this light the peculiar and untraditional characteristics of his dialectic may be accounted for by the hypothesis that his is a Marxism which springs not from Hegel but from Goethe himself, not from the Phenomenology but from Faust).” Ibid., p. 140. 43 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 1098. (The Principle of Hope, p. 927.) 44 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 80. (The Principle of Hope, p. 72.) 45 Ibid. 41

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Accordingly, concrete utopia hinges on Bloch’s notion of man as open, moved, striving—“[m]an is not solid,”46 but must be understood as becoming, as extending towards his possibilities. Again, it is in Kierkegaard, where Bloch finds expressed his own understanding of being as always being-in-possibility such as in a section from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, which Bloch himself cites: “If I could wish for something, I would wish for neither wealth nor power, but the passion of possibility; I would wish only for an eye which, eternally young, eternally burns with the longing to see possibility.”47 Keeping in mind Bloch’s opposition to a view of man as determined and closed and the significance of becoming for his vision of man and the world, it is important to note that in The Principle of Hope, but also in other later works such as SubjektObjekt and in his Leipzig Lectures,48 Bloch proceeds to put Kierkegaard in line with Schelling,49 who had posited the primacy of existence over essence and who had by now gained even greater importance for him. Bloch appreciated Schelling’s dialectical concept of matter, his view of nature as unfolding dialectically in a way that mirrors the development of our rational conception of it, which he saw reflected in his processual ontology of the Not-Yet.50 Relating Kierkegaard to Schelling, the thinker of processuality and possibility, rather than to Kant, the thinker of subjective spontaneity, must, in this context, be interpreted as a gesture of recognition and acknowledgment of Kierkegaard and of his influence upon Bloch’s own philosophical development. Even so, in The Principle of Hope, Bloch’s emphasis lies upon the concreteness of utopia and the interrelatedness of its subjective and its objective parts. For Bloch, Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity remains too narrow and ultimately fails to become concrete precisely because it lacks the objective counterpart in the world, which distinguishes abstract and concrete utopia. For Bloch, Kierkegaard therefore becomes the thinker of solitary subjectivity: [T]he will of the last truly Protestant Christian, the existential recourse of Kierkegaard, is subjectively and objectively one of solitude, indeed it is the Christian exhaustion of it. Never before had its narrowness been so desperately longed for, never before Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 224. (The Principle of Hope, p. 195.) 47 Kierkegaard, The Moment, quoted in Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 1243. (The Principle of Hope, p. 1057.) / SKS 2, 50 / EO1, 4. 48 What is being referred to here as Leipzig Lectures is a series of lectures on the history of philosophy, which Bloch gave during his appointment at Leipzig between 1949 and 1956. More precisely, I am referring to Bloch’s lectures on modern philosophy, in particular German idealism and the philosophy of the nineteenth century, published as Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. 49 See, for instance, Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 1199. (The Principle of Hope, p. 1021.) 50 For a discussion of Schelling’s influence on Bloch, see Jürgen Habermas, “Ernst Bloch. Ein marxistischer Schelling” (1960), in his Politik, Kunst und Religion. Essays über zeitgenössische Philosophen, Stuttgart: Reclam 1978, pp. 11–32. Habermas points out the parallels between Bloch and Schelling’s nature philosophy, of which Bloch gives a Marxist interpretation, and proposes an understanding of Bloch as “Marxist Schelling.” 46

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Alina Vaisfeld enjoyed with such meek vanity, never before had the attempt been made to provide it with such a wide arc to the existence of the human. From the perspective of solitude, all Kierkegaard’s moral questions are monological, they have as their unreflected foundation the privateness of the small rentier.51

In Kierkegaard, Bloch concludes, the call to subjectivity “becomes the language of a totally paradoxical flight from the object: into the innermost mine of the most distant heaven.”52 Kierkegaard’s solitary individual indulges in his inwardness and wraps himself up in solitude as in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, from which Bloch cites: “My sorrow is my knight’s castle; like an eyrie it stands on a mountain-top and towers high into the clouds.”53 The subject retreats to his castle, a place so inward that communication with others is no longer possible. Inwardness, Bloch sets forth, becomes egotism in Kierkegaard. In The Principle of Hope, Bloch levels a Marxist criticism against Kierkegaard who fails to see the necessary embeddedness of all subjectivity in the world and of the self in social relations. This critique of Kierkegaard is further elaborated in Bloch’s Subjekt-Objekt and the Leipzig Lectures, where the somehow ambivalent attitude towards Kierkegaard, which Bloch had developed by the time of The Principle of Hope, finds further manifestation: emphasizing the unprecedented nature of Kierkegaard as the thinker of existence, Bloch simultaneously raises serious objections against Kierkegaard’s too narrow concept of subjectivity, which runs the risk of becoming a bourgeois flight from the world. IV. Subjekt-Objekt and The Leipzig Lectures The peculiar mix of enthusiasm and criticism, which marks the later Bloch’s reception of Kierkegaard, comes to the fore sharply in both Bloch’s Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, published in 1949 and in the short lecture on Kierkegaard, which Bloch gave as part of a lecture course on the history of philosophy at the University of Leipzig in the winter semester 1956–57.54 In his Subjekt-Objekt, Bloch lays out what he understands to be the Hegelian dimension in Marxism, which, in turn, reflects his sensitivity to the positive aspects of the idealist tradition in general.55 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 1128. (The Principle of Hope, pp. 960–1.) 52 Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 5, p. 1128. (The Principle of Hope, p. 961.) 53 Ibid. See SKS 2 , 51 / EO1, 42. 54 Bloch, Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 360–7. 55 In the text, Bloch highlights the debt which dialectical materialism, as which Bloch came to identify his own philosophical work, owes to the great idealist dialectician Hegel. Following Marx, Bloch, however, rejects the Hegelian notion of a pre-existing substance lying at the heart of reality, to which he opposes the notion of dialectical, processual becoming, which always retains its openness. Bloch, therefore, understands his kind of dialectical materialism not as a mechanics of inert matter unfolding teleologically but as a vision of man and the world actively and dynamically tending towards the man and the world that they could 51

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In this context, Kierkegaard is mentioned as a historical figure in the post-Hegelian era, when, in general, Hegel was either forgotten or interpreted in a reactionary manner. Kierkegaard’s Hegel reception is yet viewed to be “very different,”56 a form of departure, not of forgetting. Kierkegaard, for Bloch, had a profound reason for departing from Hegel: existence, a ground which the panlogician Hegel left behind. After Kierkegaard, existence has become a buzzword, which merely reflects the despondency of the bourgeois classes without being able to point the way out of the crisis of the bourgeoisie. Kierkegaard, however, “the real thinker of existence,”57 is resolutely set apart from what Bloch terms “existentialism of second and third hand,”58 Heidegger and Jaspers for instance. Kierkegaard’s critique was well founded, even if he was blind to certain aspects in Hegel: opposing the Hegelian abstraction, his position, as well as the position of the later Schelling, bears, in this aspect, a certain resemblance with Ludwig Feuerbach’s and Marx’s Hegel critique.59 Taking the quod of existence as their starting ground, the two kinds of Hegel critique—Schelling and Kierkegaard on the one, Feuerbach and Marx on the other side—soon parted ways. In the Leipzig Lectures, Bloch sums up the different nature of these approaches by introducing a distinction between two lines of thought in post-Hegelian philosophy: a disaster-line (Unheilslinie), now spanning from Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, to Heidegger and others, and a salvationline (Heilslinie), encompassing Feuerbach, Marx, and Bloch himself.60 Whilst both lines oppose the abstraction of Hegelian thinking, they differ in the nature of the thinking they posit instead, which either continues to be abstract, as applies to the thinkers of the disaster line, or which becomes materially grounded, as was done by the thinkers of the salvation line.61 The solution that Kierkegaard and other thinkers of disaster propose is, Bloch argues, no less abstract than the Hegelian abstraction they criticize for its lack of become. For a further discussion of Bloch’s appropriation of the Marxist tradition, see Vincent Geoghegan’s section on “Marxism” in Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, pp. 117–32. 56 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 386. 57 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 387. 58 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 386. 59 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, pp. 389ff. 60 It is important to note Bloch’s emphasis that the notion of disaster should not be understood pejoratively. The thinkers of disaster, whose position Bloch characterizes as pessimism, were receptive to something in the world, to the disaster and the darkness that exists and that forms an important principle of reality that must not be overlooked by utopian philosophy even though their approach ultimately resulted in irrationalism and an opposition to thinking in general. See Bloch, Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 355–9. 61 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 387.

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concern with material existence. Unlike Marxism, which in its materialist-dialectical dimension translated the Hegelian system into the real, Kierkegaard remains “trapped into the isolated inwardness of the petty pensioner.”62 The self, which Kierkegaard— rightly, for Bloch—defends against the universal and the educated abstract, is no less abstract than the Hegelian self. Withdrawing into the privacy of existence, the self shuts out social relations without ceasing to belong to them: “inwardness, privateness,” Bloch emphasizes, “is a kind of social relation too.”63 As before, Bloch is sharply critical of what he understands to be Kierkegaard’s petty bourgeois traits, which instigate a withdrawal into one’s own affairs and an overemphasis of the private. Yet underlying these disapproving remarks, one finds, in perhaps less explicit form, a continuous appreciation for Kierkegaard and his work. Kierkegaard’s books, which Bloch describes as “[g]rey volumes, resembling a Protestant rectory and yet a haunted place,”64 are drawn from life, from each reader’s life and cause their readers to ask themselves: “How can he [the author] know this about me?”65 What is “Kierkegaardian” for Bloch is the impossibility to process oneself out of the immediate task that Kierkegaard sets forth and out of one’s individual responsibility to attend to this task. Matters of salvation (or of utopia, for Bloch) are a question of individual concern.66 According to Bloch, the emphasis upon the existentialist, individual nature of the subject of concern distinguishes Kierkegaard’s philosophy from Hegel’s philosophy. As I have argued earlier, this is also what makes utopia concrete: utopia can be concrete and determinate because it can be anticipated in today’s world and because its anticipation is “my affair.”67 Moreover, utopia is concrete for Bloch because we can find guidance and direction for it in this world and our existence in it. For concrete utopia, therefore, abstract thinking that sublates or skips over individual existence will not suffice. To corroborate this crucial point, Bloch cites from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “Having to exist with the help of the guidance of pure thinking is like having to travel in Denmark with a small map of Europe on which Denmark is no larger than a steel pen-point.”68 A map of the world that 62 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 389. 63 Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 394. 64 Ernst Bloch, Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 360. 65 Ibid. 66 The two expressions Bloch uses are: tua res agitur (it is your concern) and de te fabula narratur (this story is being told about you), a line from Horace. Both expressions are frequently used by Bloch to indicate the personal responsibility and concern of the matter at stake. Bloch, Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 365. I would like to thank Dr. Johan Siebers from the University of London for drawing my attention to this. 67 See the previous footnote. 68 SKS 7, 282 / CUP1, 310–11, quoted in Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 8, p. 395 and referred to in Bloch, Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, p. 366.

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includes concrete utopia must, however, reproduce not only Denmark but also the single individual existing in it. It has been argued in this article that Bloch’s early enthusiastic reading of Kierkegaard gave way to a much more critical and reserved reception. Even so, Kierkegaard remained for Bloch throughout his life a figure to be grappled and engaged with, in particular so in Bloch’s two major works The Spirit of Utopia and The Principle of Hope. Bloch’s important and original concept of concrete utopia— not as a nowhere, but as a place that already exists in possibility—crucially hinges upon his critical appropriation of some of Kierkegaard’s ideas, in particular the latter’s emphasis upon the irreducibility of the individual’s existence and the task of understanding oneself in existence as always a matter of individual concern.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Bloch’s Corpus Geist der Utopie, Munich: Duncker und Humblot 1918, pp. 249–53; p. 260; p. 276 (revised new ed. of 1923, in Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vols. 1–17, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1959–78, vol. 3, pp. 212–13; pp. 219–36; pp. 249–50; English translation: Spirit of Utopia, trans. by Anthony A. Nassar, ed. by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000, pp. 168–9; pp. 173–80; pp. 189–90.) Subjekt-Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vols. 1–17, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1959–71 [Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1951], vol. 8, pp. 38–9; pp. 387–92; pp. 393–5; pp. 453–4. Das Prinzip der Hoffnung, in Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vols. 1–17, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1959–71 [vols. 1–2, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1954–55], vol. 5, pp. 77–84; pp. 206–13; pp. 1162–7; pp. 1180–8; pp. 1194–201; pp. 1579–82; pp. 1604–8; English translation: The Principle of Hope, vols. 1–3, trans. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1995, pp.71–3; pp. 181–3; pp. 960–89; pp. 1011–21; pp. 1335–56). Neuzeitliche Philosophie, vols. 1–2, ed. by Ruth Römer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1985 (Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie: 1950–1956, vols. 3–4), vol. 2, Deutscher Idealismus. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, pp. 355–9; pp. 360–7. “Interview with Ernst Bloch,” interview with Michael Lowy and Vicki Williams Hill in 1974, New German Critique, no. 9, 1976, pp. 35–45. “Die Welt bis zur Kenntlichkeit verändern,” interview with José Marchand in 1974, in Tagträume vom aufrechten Gang. Sechs Interviews mit Ernst Bloch, ed. by Arno Münster, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977, pp. 20–101. II. Sources of Bloch’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Barth, Karl, Der Römerbrief, 2nd ed., Munich: Kaiser 1922, pp. v–vi; p. xii; pp. 15–16; p. 71; p. 75; p. 77; pp. 85–9; p. 93; p. 96; pp. 98–9; p. 114; p. 141; p. 145; p. 236; p. 261; p. 264; p. 267; p. 319; p. 325; p. 381; p. 400; pp. 426–7; p. 455; p. 481; pp. 483–4. Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit, Halle: Niemeyer 1927, pp. 175–96, see also p. 190, note 1; p. 235, note 1; and p. 338, note 1. Lukács, Georg, “Das Zerschellen der Form against Leben: Søren Kierkegaard und Regine Olsen,” in Die Seele und die Formen: Essays, Berlin: Fleischel 1911, pp. 61–91.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard 1943 (Bibliothèque des Idées), pp. 58–84; pp. 94–111; pp. 115–49; pp. 150–74; pp. 291–300; pp. 508–16; pp. 529–60; pp. 639–42; pp. 643–63; pp. 669–70; pp. 720–2. — L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel 1946, pp. 27–33. Schmitt, Carl, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1922, p. 22; p. 27; p. 69; p. 71. III. Secondary Literature on Bloch’s Relation to Kierkegaard Fahrenbach, Helmut, “Kierkegaard und die gegenwärtige Philosophie,” in Kierkegaard und die deutsche Philosophie seiner Zeit. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 5. und 6. November 1979, ed. by Heinrich Anz, Peter Kemp, and Friedrich Schmöe, Copenhagen and Munich: Fink 1980, pp. 149–68. — “Kierkegaards untergründige Wirkungsgeschichte. Zur Kierkegaard-Rezeption bei Wittgenstein, Bloch, Marcuse,” in Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982, ed. by Heinrich Anz, Poul Lübcke, and Friedrich Schmöe, Copenhagen and Munich: Fink 1983, pp. 30–69. Lehmann, Günther K., Ästhetik der Utopie. Arthur Schopenhauer, Sören Kierkegaard, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Ernst Bloch, Stuttgart: Neske 1995, pp. 9–15; pp. 237–40; pp. 255–8. Riedel, Manfred, Tradition und Utopie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1994, pp. 40–3; pp. 157–63; pp. 163–71; pp. 194–9; pp. 206–8; p. 221; pp. 222–5; pp. 225–8; p. 252. Ward, Koral, Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20thCentury Western Philosophy, Aldershot: Ashgate 2008, pp. 149–74.

Wilhelm Dilthey Kierkegaard’s Influence on Dilthey’s Work Elisabetta Basso

Appraising something like an “influence” of Kierkegaard in Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) work appears to be a quite difficult task since one can actually find only a single reference to the Danish philosopher in Dilthey’s complete works. Moreover, this reference does not concern especially Kierkegaard’s works or concepts. The context where it appears is the academic lectures that Dilthey gave at the University of Berlin in the last years of the nineteenth century on the “general history of philosophy,” a history of which he outlined the “biographic and literary plan.”1 The Danish philosopher is mentioned right after Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), at the end of a paragraph on the German philosophy of “the second stage of the 19th century.”2 He appears together with Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) as an example, outside Germany, of an increasing philosophical trend turned against systematic thinking and “aiming at understanding and assessing life from the standpoint of life itself.”3 At the time of these lectures, several of Kierkegaard’s works were already translated into German,4 and it is more than likely that Dilthey knew them. In any event, it is indisputable that he was aware of the increasing attention that Kierkegaard was receiving in Germany at the turn of the century. One should mention, in this respect, the “Annual Report on the Post-Kantian Philosophy” presented respectively by Dilthey himself and Alfred Heubaum in 1899 in the journal that Dilthey, at that time, edited together with Ludwig Stein (1859–1930)—the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie—where Heubaum reviewed the recent German translations of Wilhelm Dilthey, “Biographisch-literarischer Grundriss der allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie,” in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1900–1905, in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–26, ed. by Karlfried Gründer (vols. 1–15) Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi (vols. 18–26), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1970–2006, vol. 23, ed. by Gabriele Gebhardt and Hans-Ulrich Lessing, p. 157: “Biographisch-literarischer Grundriss des allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie.” 2 Ibid. The translations from Dilthey’s works are mine, unless otherwise noted. 3 Ibid. 4 See section II of the bibliography in this article: “Sources of Dilthey’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard.” See also Heiko Schulz, “Germany and Austria. A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 307–87. 1

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Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom” (1896), and Harald Høffding’s (1843– 1931) Søren Kierkegaard as Philosopher (1896),5 a work which is also mentioned in a letter sent by the Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg (1835–1897) to Dilthey on October 1897, and where the Danish philosopher is described as “manifestly a profound thinker.”6 At the time Høffding’s book was frequently reviewed, and it played an important part in disseminating Kierkegaard’s thought in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this respect, it is worth mentioning the bibliographical preface written by Christoph Schrempf for the German edition of Høffding’s work, in order to have an idea of the increasing presence of Kierkegaard in the German philosophical scene at that time.7 One is reminded also of the long article that Høffding had already written in 1889 in the same Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, which presented Kierkegaard as one the most influential Danish

Alfred Heubaum, [Review of Søren Kierkegaard, Angriff auf die Christenheit: Schriften und Aussätze 1851–1855, vols. 1–2, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896; Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896], “Jahresbericht über die nachkantische Philosophie,” Part IV, “Schriften über Schleiermacher, Herbart, Grillparzer, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 12, 1899, pp. 358–60. Habib C. Malik (in his Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997) wrongly attributes these reviews to Dilthey (pp. 326–7. See also p. 394). So also does Heiko Schulz in his article on Kierkegaard’s reception in Germany: “Germany and Austria. A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” p. 320; p. 333. In addition to Kierkegaard, Heubam also reviewed some “writings on Schleiermacher, Herbart, Grillparzer, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche” (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 12, 1899, pp. 338–75). Dilthey’s report, for its part—in this same issue of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie—concerned some “Schriften über Schelling, K.E. von Baer, Strauss und Vischer,” pp. 325–38. 6 Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, “Brief an Dilthey, 12.10.1896,” in Briefwechsel Wilhelm Dilthey und Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, 1877–1897, ed. by Erich Rothacker, Halle: Max Niemeyer 1923, p. 224. 7 Christoph Schrempf, “Vorwort,” in Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896, pp. III–X. Also, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch wrote a review of Høffding’s book in 1896, where he remarked precisely the increase every year in the attention that Kierkegaard was receiving in Germany at that time: see “Religionsphilosophie und theologische Principienlehre,” § 3: “Historisch-Kritisches,” a) “Philosophen,” Theologischer Jahresbericht, vol. 16, 1896, pp. 539–40. Interestingly enough, in an essay from 1913 on “Logos und Mythos in Theologie und Religionsphilosophie,” Troeltsch mentions Kierkegaard in the same way as Dilthey did it, namely, together with Tolstoy and Maeterlinck: see Ernst Troeltsch, Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–4, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1913–25, vol. 2: Zur religiösen Lage, Religionsphilosophie und Ethik, pp. 805–36. (Originally published in Logos, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 8–35). For a complete account of Kierkegaard’s reception in the German world, see Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, chapter 8: “The Beginning of Serious Reception in the German-Speaking World,” pp. 339–92. 5

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philosophers of the nineteenth century, one who had struggled against speculative philosophy and underscored individual existence.8 Many interpreters agree in emphasizing the role played by Høffding in the German reception of Kierkegaard. One commentator goes so far as to maintain that many in Germany who had their first acquaintance with Kierkegaard via Høffding were infected by the misconception entailed by the latter’s study of 1892 on Kierkegaard “as philosopher,” one that equated Kierkegaard’s subjectivity with subjectivism.9 In his review in Dilthey’s Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Heubaum actually maintained that Høffding had “given the correct appraisal of the remarkable thinker” who was Kierkegaard, in that he had systematized his thought, whereas “Kierkegaard is so little a systematic philosopher, as Nietzsche has been.”10 Now, the quick reference to both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard made by Dilthey in his academic lectures at the end of the nineteenth century appears to correspond to such an appraisal, and this could lead us to conclude that the German philosopher was acquainted with the debate raised by Høffding’s work. Nevertheless, Dilthey would never mention Kierkegaard again in his works, and therefore it is impossible to reach a final answer about the real weight of the Danish philosopher in his thought. Even though one could be tempted to compare the two authors with regard to some points they seem to share—like, for instance, the problem about how to reconcile the singularity of the individual experience with the universality of the philosophical categories, or the criticism of Hegel’s system—yet it is impossible to know exactly which of Kierkegaard’s works Dilthey really knew.11 That is why it would be certainly hazardous to talk of a direct and explicit influence of Kierkegaard in Dilthey’s thought. In any event, one should remark that the names of the two philosophers very often appear together in the works of some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century—like, for instance, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) or Karl Jaspers (1883–1969)—and it would be certainly worth questioning the meaning of such a double reference or even coupling.12 What is more, the present-day historiography Harald Høffding, “Die Philosophie in Dänemark im 19. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, 1889, pp. 49–74, see pp. 64ff. 9 Malik, in his Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, p. 331. 10 Heubaum, [Review of Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph], p. 359. 11 The same goes for the question about which works on Kierkegaard that Dilthey really knew. That is why in section II of the bibliography of this article (“Sources of Dilthey’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard”), in addition to Kierkegaard’s translated works in German, we just confine ourselves to the works somehow related to Høffding’s works, since Høffding is present in the journal edited by Dilthey and Stein, the Archiv für die Geschichte der Philosophie. For a complete bibliographical account of the secondary literature on Kierkegaard in the Germanspeaking countries at the time of Dilthey, see Schulz, “Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start,” pp. 396–419. See also Heiko Schulz, “Die theologische Rezeption Kierkegaards in Deutschland und Dänemark. Notizen zu einer historisches Typologie,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1999, pp. 220–44; and Helen Mustard, “Sören Kierkegaard in German Literary Periodicals, 1860–1930,” The German Review, vol. 26, 1951, pp. 83–101. 12 Schulz, in his study on the reception of Kierkegaard in Germany, draws an interesting distinction between “productive reception” and “receptive production” (cf. “Germany and 8

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of philosophy often considers both Kierkegaard and Dilthey as two of the most meaningful representatives—on the threshold of the contemporary age—of a philosophical commitment to the fullness of concrete being and its history against the conceptual schemes of idealistic reason.13 This is probably a reductive interpretation, which does not consider in its entirety the complexity of Dilthey’s philosophical project. Some interpreters do not agree indeed with this historiographical scheme and believe that it is wrong to consider Dilthey a Lebensphilosoph. Interestingly enough, Alfredo Marini—in his Alle origini della filosofia contemporanea— maintains that Dilthey’s philosophical project cannot be equated either with “an existentialist philosophy of interiority like that of Kierkegaard, or with Nietzsche’s ‘Entlarvungspsychologie,’ ” since Dilthey’s aim is rather to “found experience scientifically.”14 According to Marini: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Stirner are isolated men who lead a dramatic life. From the point of view of science, the “way of the inner experience” is pathological. Whoever privileges it—although within the scientific or philosophical field—assumes a connotation of abnormality or eccentricity. Dilthey, for his part, is certainly not a victim of “temperament”….He is not urged by a strong existential “vocation”: he is an academic, a scientist, he has a critical and scientific education.15

Marini continues as follows: “Inner experience—for Dilthey—should not pretend to found a great metaphysics, a great world-view like those one can find in Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Dilthey is a philosopher who comes from a rationalist tradition; he is close to Kant’s Criticism, and Positivism, and he conceives philosophy as a science.”16 In any event, before supporting the one interpretation or the other, it is worth drawing the main biographical and theoretical outline of Dilthey’s philosophical project. After he studied theology at the University of Heidelberg until 1856, Dilthey moved to the University of Berlin, where he came into contact with Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–72)17 and August Böckh (1785–1867), two students of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who involved him in the edition of Schleiermacher’s Austria: A Modest Head Start,” p. 309). In our case, we could say that such a way of “using” both Dilthey and Kierkegaard together falls within the category of a “receptive production.” 13 Just consider, for instance, Wolfram Hoegrebe’s history of German philosophy of the nineteenth century, which gathers together Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Kierkegaard, Engels, Marx, Dilthey, and Nietzsche under the common denominator of critics of idealistic reason: Wolfram Hoegrebe, Deutsche Philosophie im XIX. Jahrhundert. Kritik der idealistische Vernunft: Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Kierkegaard, Engels, Marx, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, Munich: Fink 1987. 14 Alfredo Marini, Alle origini della filosofia contemporanea: Wilhelm Dilthey. Antinomie dell’esperienza, fondazione temporale del mondo umano, epistemologia della connessione, Florence: La Nuova Italia 1984, p. 214. 15 Ibid., p. 213. 16 Ibid., p. 214. 17 According to Michael Ermarth, “Dilthey was but one of a distinguished group of thinkers, including Kierkegaard, Franz Brentano, Gustav Teichmüller, and Otto Wilmann, who credited Trendelenburg with ‘the greatest influence’ over their thought.” Ermarth,

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letters. Between the publication of Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen in 186118 (the second part of which would be published two years later) and the biography (1867–70),19 Schleiermacher became the focus of Dilthey’s interests. He also wrote his dissertation on Schleiermacher’s ethics in 1864 (De principiis ethices Schleiermacheri). This encounter with the German theologian and philosopher was crucial for the young Dilthey, whose later hermeneutical perspective is indebted to Schleiermacher’s concept of understanding as grounded on the historical and psychological nature of communication. In Berlin, Dilthey also met the most influential figures of the Historical School, like the jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779–1861), the linguist Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), and the historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), to whom he would later acknowledge the merit of having raised historical knowledge to the rank of a science, and therefore of having laid the foundations for the development of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).20 As we can read in his journals from these years, indeed, Dilthey was working out the double plan of outlining “a history of the western Christian world-view,” and delineating “a new critique of the pure reason based on our philosophical and historical world-view.”21 Once he had obtained his teaching diploma in 1864 with a work on ethics,22 Dilthey assumed his first professorship in Basel in 1867, then in Kiel and Breslau. He was finally appointed in 1882—as successor of Hermann Lotze (1817–81)—to the chair in philosophy in Berlin that Hegel had once held. He would hold it until 1907. Member of the “Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften” since 1887, he promoted an edition of the complete works of Kant, and then one of the early writings of Hegel, which would be published in 1907 by Herman Nohl (1879–1960).23 Wilhelm Dilthey: “The Critique of Historical Reason,” Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1978, p. 59. 18 Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, vols. 1–4, Berlin: G. Reimers 1858–63. 19 Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, Berlin: Reimer 1870. Reprinted in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 13–14, ed. by Martin Redecker, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1970; 3rd ed., 1979. 20 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Rede zum 70. Geburtstag,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1924; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990, p. 7. 21 Wilhelm Dilthey, Der junge Dilthey: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern, 1852–1870, ed. by Clara Dilthey Misch, Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner 1933; 2nd ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1960, p. 120. 22 Wilhelm Dilthey, Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstsein, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, Die geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 2, Abhandlungen zur Poetik, Ethik und Pädagogik, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1958; 6th ed, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1978, pp. 1–55. 23 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Theologischen Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek in Berlin, ed. by Herman Nohl, Tübingen: Mohr 1907. In 1906 Dilthey published a work on the young Hegel that made use of the recently discovered theological and political fragments (Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels). The same Nohl would publish it in 1921 in a volume collecting Dilthey’s writings on the history of German idealism: Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels und andere

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Since the inaugural lecture by which he assumed his professorship in Basel (Die dichterische und philosophische Bewegung in Deutschland 1770–1800), Dilthey acknowledged the centrality of Kant—with whom he shared the philosophical task of a critical foundation of knowledge—but at the same time he expressed his intention of completing the critique of the pure reason by the project of studying the man as a whole, considered in both his psychic reality and historicity. For Dilthey, it was a matter of working out a new critique of reason which would also take into account man’s historical and social world. Thus, in a writing of 1875 on “the study of the history of the sciences of man, society, and state,”24 he outlined a project of defining a scientific field which differed from that of the natural sciences in that it required different methods. Such a project became more explicit in the Introduction to the Human Sciences which he published in 1883,25 and where he clearly formulated a distinction between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). In this work, Dilthey intended to provide the latter with a logical, methodological, and gnoseological foundation. In doing so, he emphasized the fact that their distinction from the natural sciences did not lie in a metaphysical incommensurability between two different substances, but in that they possessed their own explanatory principles. Such a distinction is also at the root of the main works that Dilthey wrote during the 1890s: “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification,”26 and, above all, the Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894),27 where he worked out the famous distinction between explanation (Erklären) and understanding (Verstehen). Here he increasingly parted Abhandlungen zur Geschichte des Deutschen Idealismus, Stuttgart: Teubner 1921; 6th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990. Cf. also “Fragmente aus Wilhelm Diltheys Hegelwerk,” ed. by Friedhelm Nicolin and Otto Pöggeler, Hegelstudien, vol. 1, 1961, pp. 103–34 24 Wilhelm Dilthey, Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1924; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990, pp. 31–73. 25 Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. by Bernhard Groethuysen, Stuttgart: Teubner 1914; 9th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990; English translation: Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. and ed. by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989. 26 Wilhelm Dilthey, Beiträge zur Lösung der Frage vom Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt und seinem Recht, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1924; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990, pp. 90–138. 27 Wilhelm Dilthey, Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1924; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990, pp. 139–240. English translation: Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, in Descriptive

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company with Kant by opposing the theory of knowledge with a stress on the lived experience (Erlebnis) and the immediate understanding of human life. On this basis, Dilthey claimed the gnoseological importance of an “analytic and descriptive” psychology able to analyze the totality of the psychic life in order to break it down into different functions. Hence, he distinguished such an “understanding psychology” from a psychology grounded on causal explanation (like psychophysics and associationism), by maintaining that such a distinction lay in the different ways phenomena give themselves to consciousness. As psychic phenomena give themselves to the inner experience in their nexus with the totality of the psychic life, then they can be grasped only by the analysis of such a psychic nexus, that is, by investigating the inner perceptions as well as the historical processes in which this nexus develops and expresses itself in a concrete form. For Dilthey, the constructions that explanatory psychology builds according to the model of natural science are hypothetic and arbitrary, since the “facts” they dwell upon are stripped of their historical concreteness, their character of singularity and uniqueness. This is why—he concluded at the end of the first chapter of the Ideas—explanatory psychology could find in the understanding psychology not only “a sound descriptive framework” and “a precise terminology for exact analysis,” but also “an important means of control.”28 One commentator has interpreted Dilthey’s Ideas not just as a theoreticalmethodological work, but also as a “philosophical-political manifesto.”29 Alfredo Marini, for instance, compared Dilthey’s criticism of positivistic psychology to respectively Nietzsche’s and Marx’s anthropological “romantic” ideal against the world and the science of their time. In the same way, he compared this ideal also to “Kierkegaard’s revolt against the Lutheran Church, the ethics and theology of his time,”30 and concluded that, despite the important differences, at the very foundation there is, in all these authors, a common stance that lies in the attempt to trace the modern world (from Galileo to Newton) and the successful line of modern science back to an ideal of humanity that modern civilization has limited, repressed. So these authors would “share a Renaissance ideal of humanity: humanity as natural microcosm, a full, rich, not mutilated humanity, one which is at the center of an infinite universe. It is such a kind of humanity, of humanistic ideal, that they oppose to the actual modernity.”31 During the years following the publication of his Ideas, Dilthey devoted himself to answering the objections that the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) had respectively addressed to his project of a descriptive and analytic psychology. The Contributions to the Psychology and Historical Understanding, trans. by Richard M. Zaner and Kenneth L. Heiges; with an introduction by Rudolf A. Makkreel, The Hague: Nijhoff 1977. 28 Dilthey, Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, p. 153 (Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, p. 37). 29 Marini, Alle origini della filosofia contemporanea: Wilhelm Dilthey. Antinomie dell’esperienza, fondazione temporale del mondo umano, epistemologia della connessione, p. 238. 30 Ibid., p. 239. 31 Ibid., pp. 238–9.

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Study of Individuality (1895–96)32 were conceived by Dilthey exactly as a response to Windelband’s idea that the human sciences would distinguish themselves from the natural sciences not on the basis of the character of their object, but in that they are oriented toward the description or narration of singularities—while the natural sciences aim to determine general laws. Dilthey granted to the human sciences the primacy of an orientation toward individuality, but not its exclusiveness. Moreover, he emphasized again the fact that the distinction between the human and natural sciences lies in the distinction between their respective objects and not just in their methodology. Whereas in the natural world uniformities prevail, in the social and historical world it is individuality that asserts itself. This is why human sciences pursue, in the final analysis, the knowledge of the singular. Now, the passage from uniformities to individualization is mediated—according to Dilthey—by a plurality of different but recurrent forms or “types” that are at the root of the individuality of the phenomena of the human world. As regards the question about the understanding as a lived experience (Erlebnis), Dilthey now maintained that it no longer coincides with a direct and immediate knowledge of self given by introspection, but it consists in grasping the inner life of other individuals by analogy with one’s own inner life. Such a passage is quite important in Dilthey’s thought, since it coupled the problem of understanding with the need of interpretation, and therefore it emphasized the problem of hermeneutics as historical process. This is a crucial theme that characterizes the last part of the philosopher’s work. Thus, in the essay of 1900 on “The Rise of Hermeneutics,”33 Dilthey claimed that the inner intelligibility of lived experience did not yet constitute understanding. This latter proceeds indeed through the interpretation of human objectifications, that is, through the objective and historical expression of life. It is only in this way that it would become possible to raise the understanding of the singular to the level of universal validity. Between 1904 and 1910 Dilthey presented the “Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften” with a series of “studies on the grounding of the human sciences”34

Wilhelm Dilthey, Beiträge zum Studium der Individualität (Über vergleichende Psychologie), in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1924; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990, pp. 241–316. 33 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 317–38. 34 Wilhelm Dilthey, Studien zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Bernhard Groethuysen, Stuttgart: Teubner 1927; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1992. English translation: Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences, trans. by Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon, in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Selected Works, vol. 3, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002. 32

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focused respectively on the “psychic structural nexus,”35 the “structural nexus of knowledge,”36 and the delimitation between human sciences and natural sciences.37 Compared to the emphasis in Ideas on the concept of Erlebnis, these studies introduced the notion of Erleben, intended as lived temporal sequence of the Erlebnisse on the level of consciousness. Moreover, following Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01)—whose descriptive method appeared to him to be similar to his own descriptive and analytic psychology—Dilthey now distinguished in the structural unity of the Erleben two different moments: acts and contents. Psychic acts—according to him—have contents that are related to the objects of the world by means of attitudinal stances. The aim of the theory of knowledge (Theorie des Wissens) would be thus to regress from objects to attitudes, in order to uncover the structural nexus of knowledge as grounded on cognition, feeling, and will. From Husserl Dilthey also took the concept of expression, by which he defined the objectivation of the psychic life in its manifold forms, and that he conceived as the bridge between the Erleben and the understanding. This latter was now intended as the process by which the subject traces back the “expressions of the Erlebnisse” (Erlebnisausdrucken)38 to their origins, namely, the psychic life and the forms in which it has objectived itself. At the root of understanding there is what Dilthey calls the “referring back” from outer phenomena to the Erleben. Therefore, the highest task of understanding is to retrospectively articulate the specific dynamic context in which the expressions of the Erlebnisse originate. One scholar has seen in such a conception of understanding as an operation running inverse to the course of production, “Dilthey’s rendering of the Kierkegaardian maxim that we live forward and understand backwards.”39 In any event, the circularity of the relation between the Erleben, the expression, and the understanding becomes now the ground of the human sciences that Dilthey was still looking for at the beginning Wilhelm Dilthey, Studien zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, Erste Studie: “Der psychische Strukturzusammenhang,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, pp. 3–23. English translation: Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences, First Study, “The Psychic Structural Nexus,” pp. 23–33. 36 Wilhelm Dilthey, Studien zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, Zweite Studie: “Der Strukturzusammenhang des Wissens,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, pp. 24–69. English translation: Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences, Second Study, “The Structural Nexus of Knowledge,” pp. 45–90. 37 Wilhelm Dilthey, Studien zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, Dritte Studie: “Die Abgrenzung der Geisteswissenschaften,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, pp. 70–5. English translation, Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences, Third Study, “The Delimitation of the Human Sciences,” pp. 91–7. 38 Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7. English translation: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, trans. by Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon, in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Selected Works, vol. 3, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002, pp. 79–190. 39 Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975, p. 328. 35

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of the century. In his main work of 1910, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences,40 Dilthey maintained that the objective correlate of that relation is life insofar as it is, ultimately, the connectedness of the whole of mankind. On this basis, he showed that the psychic life is tied to socio-historical reality, since everything—in the latter—is objectivated life, and everything should be traced back to life. In this sense, Dilthey could reutilize Hegel’s concept of “objective spirit,” but, whereas Hegel had restricted objective spirit to the political, social, and economic aspects of historical life, he expanded the concept to embody not only the sciences, religion, art, and philosophy, but also the mundane aspects of life. Moreover, in order to define the structure of historical reality, Dilthey coined the notion of “productive nexus or system” (Wirkungszusammenhang),41 a nexus that— unlike the object of the natural sciences—produces values and realizes goals. This entails that values and goals do not have a universal validity, since they are historical products. For this reason, Dilthey’s “critique of historical reason” is grounded on the acknowledgement of the finitude of man and world. Historicity and finitude are thus also the main characters of philosophy, since this latter is grounded on life. This is why, for Dilthey, each philosophical system basically coincides with a different “world-view” (Weltanschauung). And it is precisely to this theme that the last works of Dilthey are devoted. In an unpublished essay on “The Historical Consciousness and the World Views,”42 as well as in “The Types of World-Views and their Unfolding within the Metaphysical Systems”43—which was published in 1911, the same year of the philosopher’s death—Dilthey distinguished three main forms of world-views, namely, the artistic or poetic, the religious, and the philosophical or metaphysical. Despite their differences, all these systems of thought share the aim of giving an answer to the question about “the riddle of world and life,”44 but none of them— according to Dilthey—owns the truth. Thus, in a text from 1907 on The Essence

Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Ibid., p. 152. English translation: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, p. 174. 42 Wilhelm Dilthey, Das geschichtliche Bewusstsein und die Weltanschauungen, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Weltanschauungslehre. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Philosophie, ed. by Bernard Groethuysen, Stuttgart: Teubner 1931; 6th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1991, pp. 3–71. 43 Wilhelm Dilthey, Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Weltanschauungslehre. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Philosophie, ed. by Bernard Groethuysen, Stuttgart: Teubner 1931; 6th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1991, pp. 75–118. English translation: “The Types of World-Views and Their Development in the Metaphysical Systems,” trans. and ed. by Hans Peter Rickman, in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Selected Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976, pp. 133–54. 44 Wilhelm Dilthey, Zur Weltanschauungslehre, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Weltanschauungslehre. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Philosophie, ed. by Bernard Groethuysen, Stuttgart: Teubner 1931; 6th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1991, pp. 208–9. 40 41

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of Philosophy45—but also in his last works on the doctrine of the world-views (Weltanschauungslehre)—the German philosopher aimed less at proposing a philosophy, than at outlining a “philosophy of philosophy” which would be able to acknowledge the historical conditions of all philosophical doctrines. This meant also, for Dilthey, acknowledging the inconsistency of any attempts at decreeing once and for all an unconditioned and universal truth. Since truth is the expression of the activity of a finite being who cannot transcend his own finitude, it cannot be but historical. The few scholars who have wondered about the relation between Dilthey’s philosophical project and Kierkegaard’s thought have mainly dwelt upon this latter point. If it is true that no philosophical system owns the truth, that our grasp of reality is finite and piecemeal—so that all knowledge contains a fiduciary element—“it appears, then, that a world-view of this kind is really secular nomenclature for faith,” a faith that “functions much like religious faith.”46 Thus Dilthey would agree with Kierkegaard in admitting that the world in its own terms is absurd and irrational. But, instead of accepting the “leap of faith” into a transcendent realm wherein it finds meaning and value, he tried to combine the two opposite views of atheism and Christianity by “placing his absolute, life, in an immanenentist setting,”47 that is a “philosophy of philosophy” aiming at studying the manifold historical world-views or “faiths” by which men have tried to solve the riddle of life. Besides, if each Weltanschauung is a kind of faith or metaphysical will to universal validity, this entails that each of them must struggle in order to prevail over Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Wesen der Philosophie, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, tome 1, Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. by Georg Misch, Stuttgart: Teubner 1924; 8th ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1990, pp. 339–416. English translation: The Essence of Philosophy, trans. by Stephen A. Emery and William T. Emery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1954. 46 Ramon J. Betanzos, “Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, trans. by Ramon J. Betanzos, Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1988, pp. 9–63, see p. 59. 47 Ibid. Also Carlo Antoni, in his From History to Sociology, Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1959—in discussing Max Weber’s position towards ethics—introduces both Kierkegaard’s and Dilthey’s conception of faith: “Dilthey had pointed out the modern ‘anarchy of values.’ Weber accepted it: ‘Anyone who lives in the world cannot avoid experiencing within him a struggle between the plurality of values, each one of which appears binding when taken by itself.…As in Kierkegaard and the ‘crisis theologians,’ faith, for Weber, had become a commitment” (pp. 141–2). As regards Dilthey’s position towards ethics and values, Livio Bottani—in his Wilhelm Dilthey. Coscienza storica, coscienza metafisica ed ermeneutica, Vercelli: Edizioni Mercurio 1994—emphasizes the concept of responsibility. In fact, despite the outward relativism that appears to characterize Dilthey’s historicism, his idea of history as “memory of mankind” involves the concepts of sin and responsibility: “It is not a matter of something of the original sin, although Christian thought, on this point, has much to teach us (just think, for instance, of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas or Kierkegaard)…Although Dilthey is not a Christian thinker in the true sense of the term, yet he has much to teach us on this subject” (p. 142). 45

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the others. One scholar has interpreted this position as an answer to Kierkegaard’s question about whether “should one suffer death for the truth,” and compared Kierkegaard’s own answer—according to which no single man and no Christian should believe that he is in sole possession of the truth—to Dilthey’s radical historicization of philosophical truth.48 It is indisputable, however, that—even though it appears that Dilthey shares Kierkegaard’s attitude towards the historicity of man’s truth and finitude—nonetheless the two thinkers’ respective goals are very different. Whereas Kierkegaard’s thought arises from Christian faith and is devoted to found man’s commitment towards God’s truth in history, Dilthey, rather, is interested in apprehending the innermost nature of religious life in history. If it is true that, like Kierkegaard, he attacks the systematic aspect of theology, he does so not in order to restore the purity of the Christian faith, but in order to bring the religious life to the attention of his times, “which are moved exclusively by matters of state and science.”49 Dilthey is not a Christian author, and religion, for him, is just one among the manifold human and historical world-views. The answer that religion offers to the “riddle of world and life” is at the same level as art and philosophy, since that riddle does not arise from God’s transcendence. The experience of the riddle of life—an experience from which arises metaphysics— cannot be overcome either by philosophy or by religion, since what founds life and its meaning is ultimately life itself. The editor of the volumes 5–8 of Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften, Georg Misch (1878–1965), who was also Dilthey’s father-in-law, has rightly emphasized that such a metaphysical experience arises from the astonishment (Staunen) and the shiver (Schauern) before the riddle of the world and life.50 It has been pointed out that such feelings present the same fundamental character as Kierkegaard’s anxiety,51 but with an important difference, consisting in the fact that such a radical experience of finitude, in Dilthey, does not arise from its difference from God’s transcendence, but from the same intrinsic finitude of man’s life. So, one cannot really find something like a direct tangential point between Kierkegaard and Dilthey’s thought.52 Interestingly enough, however—as we have already pointed out at the beginning of the present article—both philosophers are often mentioned and used by some of the most influential contemporary Bottani, Wilhelm Dilthey. Coscienza storica, coscienza metafisica ed ermeneutica, pp. 118–19. 49 Wilhelm Dilthey, Der junge Dilthey. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern, 1852–1870, ed. by Clara Dilthey Misch, Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner 1933; 2nd ed., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1960, p. 140. 50 Georg Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl, Bonn: F. Cohen 1930; 2nd ed., Leipzig und Berlin: Teubner Verlag 1931, p. 242; pp. 250ff.; pp. 319ff. 51 Bottani, Wilhelm Dilthey. Coscienza storica, coscienza metafisica ed ermeneutica, pp. 46ff. 52 There does not exist a genuine secondary literature on Dilthey’s relation to Kierkegaard. This is why the most of the authors mentioned in the attendant bibliographical section in the present article do not compare Dilthey to Kierkegaard explicitly and directly, but they rather use them both in order to work out their own philosophical projects. 48

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philosophers. Among these, Heidegger stands out as the most evident, since he has himself emphasized the importance of both Kierkegaard and Dilthey at the origin of his philosophical project.53 In fact the two thinkers play a crucial role in the lectures that Heidegger gave at the University Freiburg between 1919 and 1923, in which he dwelt upon St. Augustine, Luther, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, and Aristotle, in order to renew the great problems of philosophy against the traditional theoretical categories of metaphysics.54 Kierkegaard and Dilthey are thus two important references at a time when Heidegger was dwelling upon the possibility of questioning the problems of historicity, existence, and life by starting from life itself Martin Heidegger, “Vorwort zur ersten Ausgabe” (1972), in his Frühen Schriften,” Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1, vol. 1, ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1975ff., pp. 55–7; see p. 56: “Was die erregenden Jahre zwischen 1910 und 1914 brachten, lässt sich gebührend nicht sagen, sondern nur durch eine Weniges auswählende Aufzählung andeuten: Die zweite um das Doppelte vermehrte Ausgabe von Nietzsches ‘Willen zur Macht,’ die Übersetzung der Werke Kierkegaards und Dostojewskis, das erwachende Interesse für Hegel und Schelling, Rilkes Dichtungen und Trakls Gedichte, Diltheys ‘Gesammelte Schriften.’ ” But see also Max Scheler, “Zusätze aus den Nachgelassenen Manuskripten” (1927), in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–15, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag 1954–98, vol. 7, ed. by von Manfred S. Frings, Bern-München: Francke, 1973, see p. 330: “ ‘Heidegger’: ‘11. Einfluss: Kierkegaard, Protestantismus, Scheler, Jaspers Dilthey, Graf Yorck.’ ” See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Erinnerungen an Heideggers Anfänge,” DiltheyJahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften, vol. 4, 1986–87, pp. 13–26, see p. 14: “Sicher gehört das Kierkegaard-Studium schon in diese frühe Zeit. Als 1923 die Religiösen Reden Kierkegaards auf deutsch erschienen (bei Diederichs unter dem Titel Leben und Walten der Liebe) war das für Heidegger wohl schon der Augenblick, in dem er das von Jaspers gebotene systematische Kierkegaard-Referat und Kierkegaard selbst kritisch zu sehen begann und in Kierkegaard mehr den religiösen Schriftsteller als den Denker würdigte. Dilthey spielte damals ebenfalls bereits eine bedeutende Rolle, was sich inzwischen aus den Ergebnissen der Forschung, über die Herr Rodi berichtet hat, bestätigt. In meinen Augen kann es kein Zweifel sein, daß für das Dilthey-Studium die entscheidende Epoche vor 1920 lag, und nicht etwa erst in den Marburger 20er Jahren, als die Komplettierung der DiltheyAusgabe durch den 5. Band einsetzte, dessen von Misch verfaßter Vorbericht von Heidegger in einer Marburger Vorlesung mit großem Respekt genannt worden ist. Auch hier muß man jedoch rückdatieren. Selbst der 1923 erschienene Briefwechsel zwischen Graf Yorck und Wilhelm Dilthey bedeutete für Heidegger eher so etwas wie den Beginn des Abgesangs auf Dilthey.” Jaspers also emphasizes Heidegger’s deep interest in Kierkegaard at the time of his friendship with the German philosopher: Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, Munich and Zurich: Piper 1977, pp. 93–6. (Chapter 10 of this work, on Heidegger, is not included in the first edition of Jaspers’ autobiography, which was first published in English in 1957: Philosophical Autobiography, in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, New York: Tudor Publishing Company 1957, pp. 5–94.) 54 See, in particular, Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) (1923), in his Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 2, Vorlesungen, vol. 63, ed. by Käte Bröcker-Oltmenns, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1982 (2nd ed., 1995), p. 14; p. 37; p. 42; p. 52; p. 68; p. 72; p. 106; p. 107 (Dilthey); p. 5; p. 17; p. 30; p. 41; p. 108; p. 111 (Kierkegaard); English translation: Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. by John van Buren, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1999, pp. 10–11; p. 29; pp. 33–4; p. 41; p. 54; p. 57; p. 81; p. 82 (Dilthey); p. 4; p. 13; p. 25; p. 33; p. 83; p. 86 (Kierkegaard). 53

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in its own movement, that is, what Heidegger calls its “facticity” (Faktizität). And, of course, one should also mention Heidegger’s Being and Time.55 But also certainly worth mentioning is Jaspers’ way of referring to both Dilthey and Kierkegaard. As the German psychiatrist and philosopher pointed out in his Philosophical Autobiography in 1957, very early—since his General Psychopathology of 191356—he adopted the approach outlined by Dilthey’s “verstehende Psychologie,” and “searched for the methodological justification and a systematic organization of these procedures.”57 But in those same years— which coincide with his first professorship in Heidelberg—Jaspers also discovered Kierkegaard, whom he put within “the magnificent tradition of the thinkers who had developed this kind of psychology,” and who “struck [him] as a revelation,” since he was “able to make communicable a universal and at the same time quite concrete insight into every corner of the human soul and to its very deepest sources.”58 Both Kierkegaard and Dilthey are crucial, not only in Jaspers’ approach to psychopathology, but also in his philosophy, as it is explicitly stated in his first philosophical work, the Psychology of the World-Views of 1919, where the two thinkers are both discussed at length.59 It would be certainly worth inquiring about the meaning of this presence, but accounting for it would merge with the complex history of the receptions of our authors, and it could be material for a study which would surpass the aim of the present article.60 The list of the thinkers who have taken into account the various Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, in his Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung 1, vol. 2, ed. by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1975ff., p. 62; p. 63, note 1; p. 272, note 8; pp. 277–8; p. 331, note 2; p. 499; pp. 525–33 (Dilthey); p. 191, note 4; p. 338, note 3 (Kierkegaard). English translation, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1962, pp. 46; 47 and note 2; p. 205, note 15; p. 209; p. 210 and note 19; p. 249, note 6; p. 377; p. 385, note 8; pp. 397–404 (Dilthey); p. 190, note 4; p. 235, note 6; p. 338, note 3. 56 Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913), 9th ed., Berlin: Springer 1973. See p. 250 (Dilthey); and p. 262; p. 274; pp. 291–2; p. 300; pp. 354ff.; p. 589; p. 613; pp. 630–1; pp. 646–7; p. 649; p. 680; p. 686 (Kierkegaard). 57 Jaspers, Philosophical Autobiography, in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, p. 18. 58 Ibid., p. 26. 59 Karl Jaspers, Psychopathologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin: Springer 1919; see p. 11; p. 98; p. 132; p. 142; p. 160 (Dilthey); p. 12; p. 13; p. 61; p. 65; p. 90; p. 12; p. 13; p. 61; p. 65; p. 90; p. 94; p. 95; p. 96; p. 101; p. 160; p. 198; pp. 217–8; pp. 225–6; p. 238; p. 242; pp. 245–6; p. 247; p. 294; p. 300; p. 302; p. 316; p. 329; p. 332ff.; p. 339; p. 341; p. 348; pp. 350–1; pp. 353ff.; p. 357; p. 358; pp. 359ff.; p. 370; pp. 371ff.; pp. 378ff. (Kierkegaard). 60 For a double reference to Kierkegaard and Dilthey as regards Jaspers’ position towards the problem of historicity, cf. Kurt Hoffman, “The Basic Concepts of Jaspers’ Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, New York: Tudor Publishing Company 1957, pp. 95–113, see p. 95; p. 100; pp. 101–2. According to Hoffman, Jaspers’ concept of “historicity” derives in part from the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey—according to which man is an exclusively historical being, unique and concrete, finite and temporal—but also from Kierkegaard’s concept of existence, as it “is on the one hand a record of changing circumstances, hopes and fears, while on the other hand, it reaches beyond the limits of the empirical world and of time. Its historicity is eternity embodied in time or history at the limits 55

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and different aspects of respectively Dilthey’s and Kierkegaard’s thought could go on. One could mention, for instance, Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) as regards the philosophy of history,61 or Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) as regards hermeneutics. The latter, in particular, explicitly maintains that “as the philosophical ideas of Dilthey and Kierkegaard entered into the foundations of twentieth-century Existenzphilosophie, this led to a philosophical radicalization of the hermeneutical problem.”62 And in his paper of 1985 “On the Transformation of the Human Sciences,” Gadamer emphasizes the role played by the rediscovery of Kierkegaard’s “pathos of existence” and Dilthey’s life-philosophy for the collapse of idealism in the contemporary philosophical world.63 In the field of psychology, both thinkers are largely present in the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), who has explicitly gathered together Kierkegaard’s questioning of existence and Dilthey’s concept of understanding as the two main sources of psychology as human science. According to Binswanger, Dilthey and Kierkegaard should indeed be considered as two of the most meaningful co-founders of a new kind of science, a “science of the individual,” lived life, one which would be able to grasp the psychic phenomena apart from any indirect hypostatization.64

of eternity” (p. 102). See also p. 103: “ ‘Historical’ for Jaspers is what eludes fixation by universal maxims and any integration into a system. ‘Historical’ is also every manifestation of transcendent reality, which in its very nature cannot be understood by means of universally valid dogma nor be integrated into a system of revelations.” 61 Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, in his Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–4, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1913–25, vol. 3, pp. 24–5; p. 63; p. 120; p. 125; p. 258; p. 281; p. 290; p. 294; p. 376; pp. 393–4; pp. 420–1; p. 437; pp. 509–30; pp. 549ff.; p. 577; pp. 594ff.; pp. 601–2; p. 646; p. 659 (Dilthey); p. 53; p. 178; p. 307; pp. 311–12 (Kierkegaard). 62 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik,” in his Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II, pp. 92–117, see p. 103. English translation, “Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics,” trans. by Richard E. Palmer, in Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. by Richard E. Palmer, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 2007, pp. 41–71, see p. 55. 63 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vom Wandel in den Geisteswissenschaften,” in his Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 179–84, see p. 181. On Gadamer’s relation to both Kierkegaard and Dilthey, see Fred Lawrence, “Gadamer, the Hermeneutic Revolution, and Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. by Robert J. Dostal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, pp. 167–200, see in particular p. 179. 64 Ludwig Binswanger, “Das Raumproblem in der Psychopathologie,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, vol. 145, 1933, pp. 598–647, see p. 620 (in his Ausgewählte Werke in vier Bänden, vols. 1–4, ed. by Hans-Jürg Barun, Heidelberg: Asanger 1992–94, vol. 3, pp. 123–77, see p. 146; also published in his Ausgewählte Vorträge und Aufsätze, vols. 1–2, Bern: Francke 1947–55, vol. 2, pp. 618–43).

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Dilthey’s Corpus “Biographisch-literarischer Grundriss der allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie,” in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1900–1905, in Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 1–26, ed. by Karlfried Gründer (vols. 1–15), Karlfried Gründer and Frithjof Rodi (vols. 18–26), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1970–2006, vol. 23, ed. by Gabriele Gebhardt and Hans-Ulrich Lessing, p. 157. II. Sources of Dilthey’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Bärthold, Albert, Sören Kierkegaard. Eine Verfasser-Existenz eigner Art, Halberstadt: Frantz 1873. — Aus und über Sören Kierkegaard. Früchte und Blätter, Halberstadt: Frantz 1874. — Noten zu Sören Kierkegaards Lebensgeschichte, Halle: Fricke 1876. — Lessing und die objective Wahrheit: aus Sören Kierkegaards Schriften zusammengestellt, Halle: Fricke 1877. — Die Bedeutung der ästhetischen Schriften Sören Kierkegaards, Halle: Fricke 1879. — Zur theologischen Bedeutung Sören Kierkegaards, Halle: Fricke 1880. — S. Kierkegaards Persönlichkeit in ihrer Verwirklichung der Ideale, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1886. Brandes, Georg, Sören Kierkegaard. Ein literarisches Charakterbild, Leipzig: Barth 1879. Heubaum, Alfred, [Review of Søren Kierkegaard, Angriff auf die Christenheit von A. Dorner und Chr. Schrempf, Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns; and Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph], in “Jahresbericht über die nachkantische Philosophie, Part IV, Schriften über Schleiermacher, Herbart, Grillparzer, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 12, 1899, pp. 358–60. Høffding, Harald, Psychologie in Umrissen auf Grundlage der Erfahrung, trans. by F. Bendixen, Leipzig: Altenburg 1887, see pp. 389–90; p. 409; p. 483. — “Die Philosophie in Dänemark im 19. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, 1889, pp. 49–74, see pp. 64ff. — Geschichte der neuren Philosophie. Eine Darstellung der Geschichte der Philosophie von dem Ende der Renaissance bis zu unseren Tagen, trans. by F. Bendixen, vols. 1–2, Leipzig: Reisland 1895, see vol. 2, pp. 317–22; p. 652 (Originally published as Den nyere Filosofis Historie: en Fremstilling

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af Filosofiens Historie fra Renaissancens Slutning til vore Dage, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1894–95). — Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896. Kierkegaard, Søren, Christhentum und Kirche. “Die Gegenwart.” Ein ernstes Wort an unsere Zeit, insbesondere an die evangelische Geistlichkeit, anonymous translation, Hamburg: Köbner 1861 (2nd ed., 1864). — Zur Selbstprüfung der Gegenwart anbefohlen, from the 3rd Danish edition trans. and ed. by Christian Hansen, Erlangen: Deichert 1862 (4th ed., 1895). — Einladung und Ärgernis. Biblische Darstellung und christliche Begriffsbestimmung, trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halberstadt: Frantz 1872. — Søren Kierkegaard. Eine Verfasser-Existenz eigner Art. Aus seinen Mittheilungen zusammengestellt, trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halberstadt: Frantz 1873. — Aus und über Søren Kierkegaard. Früchte und Blätter, trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halberstadt: Frantz 1874. — Zwölf Reden von Søren Kierkegaard, trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halle: Fricke 1875 (2nd ed., 1896). — Von den Lilien auf dem Felde und den Vögeln unter dem Himmel. Drei Reden Søren Kierkegaards, trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halberstadt: H. Meyer 1876. — Den Lilien auf dem Felde und die Vögel unter dem Himmel. Drei fromme Reden. Hoherpriester—Zöllner—Sünderin. Drei Beichtreden von Søren Kierkegaard, trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halle: J. Fricke 1877 (2nd ed., 1896). — Lessing und die objective Wahrheit: aus Søren Kierkegaards Schriften trans. and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Halle: Fricke 1877. — Einübung im Christentum, trans. by Albert Bärthold, Halle: Fricke 1878 (2nd ed.,1894). — Die Krankheit zum Tode. Eine christliche psychologische Entwicklung zur Erbauung und Erweckung, trans. by Albert Bärthold, Halle: Fricke 1881. — Hauptschriften, ed. by H.J. Bestmann, vol. 1: Furcht und Zittern: dialektische Lyrik von Johannes de silentio, trans. by H.C. Ketels, Erlangen: Deichert 1882. — Entweder-Oder: ein Lebensfragment, trans. by Alexander Michelsen and Otto Gleiss, Leipzig: Lehmann 1885. — Stadien auf dem Lebenswege, ed. and trans. by Albert Bärthold, Leipzig: Lehmann 1886 (2nd ed., Dresden: Ungelenk 1909). — Zur Psychologie der Sünde, der Bekehrung und des Glaubens. Zwei Schriften (Der Begriff der Angst; Philosophische Bissen), trans. by Christoph Schrempf, Leipzig: Richter, 1890. — Leben und Walten der Liebe, trans. and ed. by Albert Dorner, Leipzig: Richter 1890. — Was wir lernen von den Lilien auf dem Felde und den Vögeln unter dem Himmel. Drei Reden von Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Alfred Puls, Gotha: Thienemann 1891. — Richtet selbst! Zur Selbstprüfung der Gegenwart anbefohlen, trans. and ed. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896. — Angriff auf die Christenheit: Schriften und Aussätze 1851–1855, vols. 1–2, trans. by A. Dorner and Chr. Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896.

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— Ausgewählte christliche Reden von Søren Kierkegaard. Mit einem Anhang über Kierkegaards Familie und Privatleben nach den persönlichen Erinnerungen seiner Nichte, Fräulein Lund, trans. and ed. by Julie von Reincke, Giessen: Ricker 1901. — Aus den Tiefen der Reflexion. Etwas für den Einzelnen aus Søren Kierkegaards Tagenbüchern 1833–1855, trans. and ed. by F. Venator, Zweibrücken in Pfalz: Lehmann 1901. — Zwei etisch-religiöse Abhandlungen von Søren Kierkegaard, trans. and ed. by Julie von Reincke, Giessen: Ricker 1902. — Das Tagebuch des Verführers, trans. and ed. by Max Dathendey, Leipzig: Insel 1903 (2nd ed., 1905). — Søren Kierkegaards Verhältnis zu seiner Braut. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus seinem Nachlass, trans. by E. Rohr, ed. by Henriette Lund, Leipzig: Insel 1904. — Søren Kierkegaard. Buch des Richters, trans. and ed. by Hermann Gottsched, Jena and Leipzig: Diedrichs 1905. — Søren Kierkegaard, trans., introduced and ed. by Albert Bärthold, Hamburg: Agentur des Rauhen Hauses 1906. — Søren Kierkegaard und sein Verhältnis zu “ihr.” Aus nachgelassenen Papiren, trans. and ed. by Raphael Meyer, Stuttgart: Juncker 1905. — Søren Kierkegaard. Ein unfreier Pionier der Freiheit (excerpts from Søren Kierkegaards agitatorische Schriften und Aufsätze), trans. and ed. by Christoph Schrempf, introduced by Harald Høffding, Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag 1907. Münch, Philipp, Die Haupt- und Grundgedanken der Philosophie Sören Kierkegaards in kritischer Beleuchtung, Leipzig: Richter 1901. Troeltsch, Ernst, [Review of Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896], Theologischer Jahresbericht, vol. 16, 1896–97, pp. 539–40. Yorck von Wartenburg, Paul, “Brief an Dilthey, 12.10.1896,” in Briefwechsel Wilhelm Dilthey und Graf Paul York von Wartenburg, 1877–1897, ed. by Erich Rothacker, Halle: Max Niemeyer 1923, p. 224. III. Secondary Literature on Dilthey’s Relation to Kierkegaard Antoni, Carlo, Dallo storicismo alla sociologia, Florence: Sansoni 1940 (2nd ed., 1951), p. 145; English translation: From History to Sociology, Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1959, pp. 141–2. Betanzos, Ramon J., “Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History, trans. by Ramon J. Betanzos, Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1988, pp. 9–63, see p. 60. Bottani, Livio, Wilhelm Dilthey. Coscienza storica, coscienza metafisica ed ermeneutica, Vercelli: Edizioni Mercurio 1994, see p. 46; p. 119; p. 142. Ermarth, Michael, Wilhelm Dilthey: “The Critique of Historical Reason,” Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1978, p. 59.

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Gadamer, Hans-Georg, “Erinnerungen an Heideggers Anfänge,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften, vol. 4, 1986–87, pp. 13–26, see p. 14. Grondin, Jean, “Heideggers und Gadamers Konzeption der hermeneutischen Wende der Philosophie. Ein Vergleich mit Blick auf Dilthey,” in Dilthey und die hermeneutische Wende in der Philosophie. Wirkungsgeschichtliche Aspekte seines Werkes, ed. by Gudrun Kühne-Bertram and Frithjof Rodi, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008, pp. 109–118, see p. 113. Herrmann, Ulrich, “Vorbericht des Herausgebers. Einleitung zu den Bänden XV bis XVII,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 15, p. XII. Höfer, Josef, Vom Leben zur Wahrheit. Katholische Besinnung an der Lebensanschauung Wilhelm Dilthey, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co. 1936, p. 2; p. 172. Hoffman, Kurt, “The Basic Concepts of Jaspers’ Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, New York: Tudor Publishing Company 1957, pp. 95–113, see p. 95; p. 100; pp. 101–2. Hogrebe, Wolfram, Deutsche Philosophie im XIX. Jahrhundert. Kritik der idealistischen Vernunft. Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Kierkegaard, Engels, Marx, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1987. Jaspers, Karl, Philosophical Autobiography, in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, New York: Tudor Publishing Company 1957, pp. 5–94, see p. 18; p. 26. Lawrence, Fred, “Gadamer, the Hermeneutic Revolution, and Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. by Robert J. Dostal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, pp. 167–200, see p. 179. Makkreel, Rudolf A., Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975, Part III, chap. 8, “Interpretation of the Historical World,” pp. 305–42, see p. 328. Malik, Habib C., Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, pp. 326–7; p. 376; p. 394. Marini, Alfredo, Alle origini della filosofia contemporanea: Wilhelm Dilthey. Antinomie dell’esperienza, fondazione temporale del mondo umano, epistemologia della connessione, Florence: La Nuova Italia 1984, see p. 122, p. 143, p. 161, p. 214, p. 239. Misch, Georg, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl, Bonn: F. Cohen 1930; 2nd ed., Leipzig und Berlin: Teubner Verlag 1931, p. 2; pp. 192–3. Scheler, Max, “Zusätze aus den Nachgelassenen Manuskripten,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–15, ed. by Maria Scheler, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag 1954–98, vol. 7, ed. by von Manfred S. Frings, Bern, Munich: Francke, 1973, see p. 330. Schulz, Heiko, “Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard

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Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 307–87, see p. 320; p. 333. Stegmaier, Werner, “Diltheys Beitrag zu einer Philosophie der Orientierung,” in Dilthey und die hermeneutische Wende in der Philosophie. Wirkungsgeschichtliche Aspekte seines Werkes, ed. by Gudrun Kühne-Bertram and Frithjof Rodi, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2008, pp. 205–20, see p. 211. Zach, I., Existenziale phänomenologische Hermeneutik bei Martin Heidegger. Untersuchungen im Zusammenhang mit Husserl, Kierkegaard und Dilthey, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Vienna 1981.

Ferdinand Ebner: Ebner’s Neuer Mann Dustin Feddon and Patricia Stanley

A profound religious renunciation of the world, and of what is of the world, adhered in daily selfdenial, would be unthinkable to the youth of our time; yet every second theology graduate would be virtuoso enough to do something far more marvelous: he would be able to propose a social foundation with no less a goal than to save all who are lost. The age of great and good actions is past; the present age is the age of anticipation.1

I. Context On October 9, 1914, in the early months of World War I, Ferdinand Ebner (1882– 1931) wrote the following in his Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen: “Read Kierkegaard yesterday. One cannot read him as one does another writer or book. The frivolity, that is, the inner recklessness (in the truest sense of the word), all ‘intellectualism’ he makes immediately tangible for the reader as no one else does.”2 This was Ebner’s first mention of Kierkegaard. A day after this entry Ebner wrote concerning the indescribable effect Kierkegaard had on him: “Tangible effect of Kierkegaard—but I want to expose myself to it, although I don’t know what can come forth. In any case he speaks to possibilities in me that have lain ready in me for a long time.”3 The question is what exactly this effect that Kierkegaard had on Ebner was. Michael Theunissen points out that Ebner’s reflections on the metaphysics of individual existence, which Ebner wrote in 1914 in his Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, contain one of the first “existential” comments on Kierkegaard’s existentialism.4 Yet the timing of these comments should not be overlooked. What is important, then, is to consider the ethicopolitical situation that surrounded Ebner’s SKS 8, / LR, p. 62. Ferdinand Ebner, Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, in Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 2, p. 585 (trans. by Patricia Stanley). 3 Ibid. (trans. by Patricia Stanley). 4 Michael Theunissen writes: “Die Fragmente einer Metaphysik der individuellen Existenz, die er 1914, nach verschiedenen Vorarbeiten, unter dem Titel Ethik und Leben zusammen fasste, enthalten nicht zufällig die erste nachkierkegaardsche Existentenzphilosophie.” See Michael Theunissen’s Nachwort in the 1980 edition of Ferdinand Ebner’s Das Wort und die 1 2

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reception of Kierkegaard. This will help define the indescribable effect Kierkegaard had on Ebner, an effect, I believe, other religious thinkers experienced in their own respective receptions of Kierkegaard at this time of great political crises. Ebner’s physical difficulties left him tethered to Austria, where he worked as a Gymnasiumlehrer. His battles with tuberculosis, coupled with severe bouts of depression, restricted Ebner’s interactions with any thriving intellectual scene. Ebner, though, left behind an extensive and diverse list of thinkers in his Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen where we see that he read Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), Kierkegaard, and contemporaries like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Theodor Haecker (1879–1945), Karl Kraus (1874–1936), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Carl Dallago (1869–1949), and Otto Weininger (1880–1903), among many others. Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard is useful for understanding how Kierkegaard’s Existenzphilosophie appealed to a generation of religious intellectuals during World War I: this is important insofar as Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard anticipated the issues and themes that underscored other more wellnoted receptions of Kierkegaard. Like those who took part in the first wave of the Kierkegaard revival in early Weimar Europe, Ebner’s reception came at a time when critiques were leveled against an age dependent on a messianic faith in scientism and statism.5 Threatened by alienating elements embedded within modern liberalism, many of the academic mandarins in Protestant theology appropriated monistic thought that held that there was a fundamental unity between organic and inorganic nature. This appropriation of monism was carried out in order to strengthen the political bond between the individual and the state. Yet, many like Ebner would dissent from this binding of religious thought to the political. When Ebner completed his most substantial work, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, in 1919 the political question facing many religious thinkers was how to justify either their subjection to the New Republic, or, and perhaps even more problematic, their involvement in violent revolutions against the state. Along with geistigen Realitäten: pneumatologische Fragmente, Munich: Kösel Verlag 1980 [Innsbruck: Brenner 1921], p. 273. 5 Distinct theological and philosophical issues accompany the ascendancy of Kierkegaard’s corpus amidst what was clearly a fertile period in religious thought. Perhaps most notable are the substantial critiques of positivism made by various young thinkers. Douglas Cremer writes concerning this new generation: “Born in the 1880s and reaching their mature years after the First World War, this generation shared a perspective of the world that was disillusioned by the uncertainty of history and dominated by the irrational, the psychological, the ethical, and the aesthetic. Members of this generation focused on the inner crisis of their culture, a crisis characterized by the rejection of the dominant liberal myth and the general lack of intellectual coherency and authority.” See Douglas J. Cremer, “Protestant Thought in Early Weimar Germany: Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 289–307. The previous generation of theologians, in agreement with neo-Kantianism, had restricted philosophy and theology to a formal condition of knowledge rather than emphasizing what the next generation would take as their modus operandi: talk of transcendence, paradox, divine alterity, and absence. This shift in theological discourse is clearly initiated by a retrieval of Kierkegaard, among others.

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Protestant theologians like Karl Barth (1886–1968), Friedrich Gogarten (1887–1967), Emil Brunner (1889–1966), and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), the Catholic Ebner viewed modern theology’s mea culpa in identifying itself too closely with culture and politics. It is against this backdrop that I believe Heiko Schulz rightly classifies Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard as a “highly productive and original adaptation of Kierkegaard’s thought.”6 If read alongside other mounting religious critiques, most notably Barth’s second edition of Epistle to the Romans (1922) and Franz Rosenzweig’s (1887–1929) The Star of Redemption (1921), then Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard is not nearly as idiosyncratic as it appears.7 Ebner’s dialogical philosophy is difficult to follow, and for this reason Habib C. Malik was right to point out that “Kierkegaard became submerged in the labyrinths of Ebner’s linguistic pneumatics.”8 So while it is hard to tease out the precise originality in Ebner’s reception when reading his unwieldy dialogical approach to modern philosophy— as deeply indebted to the bygone-era of Weimarian thought as Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption was—I believe that what we can glean from Ebner’s Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen and his Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten is that Kierkegaard’s “existential commitment” to God as wholly transcendent became for Ebner an invaluable resource when advocating an existential renunciation of identifying religious ideals with political interest. Read in this light, Ebner fits nicely into the theological iconoclasm represented in the rise of neo-orthodoxy. Approaching Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard necessitates first considering what the conditions were in which Ebner received Kierkegaard and then how these conditions shaped Ebner’s reception that culminated in his writing of Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. We will start with Ebner’s reception as following from a sympathetic reading of Theodor Haecker’s religious and extremely polemical reception of Kierkegaard. Allan Janik approached his analysis of Haecker’s reception by addressing the socio-political context surrounding perhaps the most influential reception of Kierkegaard in early twentieth-century thought.9 Janik See Heiko Schulz, “Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), p. 349. 7 Rosenzweig would write in The Star of Redemption, which presents Kierkegaard as a path towards a new way of thinking, leaving behind the theological and social problems wrought by German idealism, that: “Whoever still wanted to raise an objection had to feel under his feet an Archimedean point outside of that knowable all. It is from such an Archimedean point that a Kierkegaard, and not only he, contested the Hegelian integration of revelation into the All.” See Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. by Barbara E. Galli, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press 2005, p. 7. 8 Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, p. 387. 9 Janik writes: “To begin with, his translation, which appeared almost on the eve of World War I was among the first reliable translations of a major work of Kierkegaard and, thus, helped to set the tone for the reception of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre generally…Haecker published his selection from Two Ages in a polemical context that did much to fix the image of Kierkegaard in the sense of associating him with certain individuals and movements and 6

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argued that Haecker’s polemical reception of Kierkegaard identified Kierkegaard with Haecker’s own role as a Zeitkritik who challenged what he considered were the social ills infecting European society, ills like scientism, nationalism, monism, militarism, utilitarianism, and positivism. The outcome of Janik’s analysis is that Haecker’s countercultural reception of Kierkegaard reflected Haecker’s own situation and thereby “saddled the Dane with prejudices and misunderstandings foreign to his text.”10 This is important since Haecker’s reception is no minor footnote in early twentieth-century intellectual thought. Haecker’s reception, in fact, extended to a diverse set of contemporary thinkers who, like Ebner, more than likely read and were influenced in their reception of Kierkegaard by Haecker’s translations/commentaries found in Der Brenner.11 II. Haecker, Kierkegaard, and Der Brenner In his article on the Brenner circle, Peter Lincoln stresses the journal’s humanistic yet religious tone: “Whereas many of the journal’s pages are dedicated to [Carl] Dallago’s [1869–1949] message concerning the enrichment of life and culture through the rediscovery of the spiritual…whether within or outside man’s being… the latter retain a firm belief in God, but in concentrating almost exclusively upon his distance or absence.”12 Specifically addressing Kierkegaard’s place in this conversation Lincoln writes: In 1913 Haecker’s book Søren Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit appeared, and came into Ficker’s hand shortly afterwards. Ficker then passed it on to Dallago, who in turn discussed it in a three-part review which was presented in Der Brenner in 1914. While one might expect Dallago to be hostile to Kierkegaard’s views, his review curiously contains a generally positive assessment.13

Lincoln then notes that Haecker’s Christian orthodoxy served as a correction to Dallago’s humanistic reading of Kierkegaard. He writes: “As a corrective to Dallago’s interpretation some essays and speeches by Kierkegaard himself, framed by Haecker’s introductions and epilogues, soon appear in Der Brenner, and themselves provide ample evidence of Kierkegaard’s ultimately non-humanistic orientation.”14 The Lincoln quotation reveals that the Dallago-Haecker exchange—an exchange dissociating him from others.” See Allan Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard and the Early Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the German-Speaking World,” Two Ages: The Present Age and the Age of Revolution. A Literary Review, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1999 (International Kierkegaard Commentary), p. 191. 10 Ibid. 11 The list includes Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Theodor W. Adorno, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann. See ibid., pp. 189–90. 12 See Peter Lincoln, Conflict & Continuity: Der Brenner in the Decade of Expressionism, Warwick: University of Warwick 1982 (Occasional Papers in German Studies), p. 28. 13 Ibid, p. 30. 14 Ibid, p. 31.

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that revealed the emerging conflicting trajectories of religious humanism and religious orthodoxy coming out of the early Der Brenner—was in large part the primary context that situated the first broad reception of Kierkegaard in Europe. Haecker’s translation of the third section of A Literary Review of Two Ages was published in Der Brenner on July 1 and 15, 1914, under the title Kritik der Gegenwart.15 In his translation, Haecker targeted not only liberal newspapers in Berlin and Vienna but also theologians who had endorsed the war for explicitly Christian reasons.16 In his “Nachwort,” on the eve of World War I, Haecker emphasized the Lutheran theological-political doctrine of Two Kingdoms in Kierkegaard’s political thought. Haecker wrote of Kierkegaard that he affirmed a clear separation between church and state: a separation, which, “like that of all great Christians, and most major philosophers, is based on the words of the Gospel: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”17 Haecker’s decision to translate the third part of A Literary Review of Two Ages at this particular time is not without a political motive. At the time of writing A Literary Review of Two Ages, Denmark was considered, much like Haecker’s Germany and Austria, in a transitional phase from the old order of conservative monarchism to a liberal democratic constitutionalism. This transitional phase from monarchy to democracy was seen by many as leaving the modern subject with greater responsibility regarding their association with society and the state. Much of Kierkegaard’s ire in A Literary Review of Two Ages was directed against the right Hegelians who represented what was considered the emerging Golden Age mainstream, which, as Bruce Kirmmse describes in the following, was essentially Rousseauian idealist: …the universe was whole; the outer was not irremediably sundered from the inner reality, but when properly interpreted could be understood in its connection to it. Liberalism’s epistemological “agnosticism,” which admits ignorance of the inner and concentrates only on the inner, on the empirical, was foreign, ice-cold, and even immoral to the Golden Age.18

In spite of the present age’s “ice-cold” concentration on the empirical, Kierkegaard writes in A Literary Review of Two Ages: “The skepticism of levelling is something no age can halt, no age itself, nor the present age, for the very moment it wants to halt levelling it will merely confirm the law once again.”19 Thus, in A Literary Review of Two Ages, Haecker had discovered a contemporary religious thinker who warned against returning to any political idealism which orders political authority hierarchically by referring to external power entities (monarchy, heroes, etc.), now 15 Søren Kierkegaard, “Kritik der Gegenwart,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, vol. 4, no. 19, 1914, pp. 815–49 and pp. 869–86 (which corresponds to SKS 8, 66–106 / LR, 60–101). 16 See Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard and the Early Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the German-Speaking World,” p. 208. 17 Theodor Haecker, “Nachwort,” Der Brenner, vol. 4, no. 20, 1914, p. 887. 18 Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1990, p. 158. 19 SKS 8, 83 / LR, 77.

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that individuals en masse have been granted the power of self-determination. The Kierkegaard Haecker read in A Literary Review of Two Ages was one who, though lamenting the modern liberal age, remained wary of any turn to either an idealistic or Romantic politics. In his “Nachtwort,” Haecker depicts Kierkegaard in a way a devotee might iconize a saint.20 Haecker writes of Kierkegaard: The Corsair Affair contains an example of the power of personality of Kierkegaard. Everybody who has read with some understanding The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death will see that there must be in the author of these books a power of personality which could compel people, to reveal to people what is good and what is bad; to loosen the demons in man and could make them speak, or scream and sob.21

Clearly, Haecker values Kierkegaard more for his religious persona than he did for any philosophical system that Kierkegaard introduced. Kierkegaard’s charismatic ability “to reveal” and “to compel” one to religious and moral perceptions of the self is not unlike the “tangible effect” we read about earlier as Ebner described his first encounter with Kierkegaard: it was “the inner recklessness (in the truest sense of the word), all ‘intellectualism’ he makes immediately tangible for the reader,” that reading Kierkegaard unleashed “possibilities in me that have lain ready in me for a long time.”22 Haecker continues his hagiography of Kierkegaard: What kind of fire must burn in a person that he can write these words and where is such a man that can lead such a life? I would bow before him as if he was the greatest hero. On the other hand, I am sick of fools who cannot even grasp the majestic greatness of this life. They prefer to deny the holy, ultimately as something they compare to themselves. They think because one year leads to another and because journals and newspapers print their garbage and because their poets are so “creative” that they acquire purely out of nothing a mountain of gold, suddenly the eternal things are plunged into an eternal ranking and there is no above and below between which a man has to choose. But whoever once looked into the life of Søren Kierkegaard in an hour of inwardness—whose eye once was in a state of receptivity that he read and recognized the biblical curse in every face, even the clearest and saw dark anxiety. For him life can be dangerous again as on the day he saw the face of death. He has it in his power to see the world again as it looked on the day that for the first time the recognition of the child’s dream was torn apart and the world was naked. And such recognition dug a secret mark onto his forehead that makes him recognizable to his spiritual brother who seeks the lost melancholy again. A strangeness will exist in his being against the world which will become suspect once he is lost, entangled in the world.23

Haecker appropriates Kierkegaard as one whose religious existence posited a transcendent reality that rendered the subject estranged from the world. This estrangement from the world then provided the distance necessary for the See Haecker, “Nachwort,” p. 890 and pp. 895–901. Ibid., pp. 891–2. 22 Ebner, Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, p. 585. 23 Ibid., pp. 907–8. 20 21

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individual to choose their existence. Whereas the old-world ethico-political order made recognizable officers, commanders, heroes, men of excellence, and the like, now these, as Kierkegaard wrote, “will be without authority precisely because they will have divinely understood the diabolical principle of levelling…they are unrecognizable, or like secret agents.”24 Following in the footsteps of Haecker, we will see how Ebner finds in Kierkegaard one who has awoken from dreams of progress to a dangerous existence whereby individual choice has in it once again the power of life and death. Unlike the evolutionary-self developed in sync with the Zeitgeist represented in Ernst Haeckel’s (1834–1919) monism, Haecker and Ebner countered this trend in German religious thought through their respective appropriations of Kierkegaardian individualism that stood apart from nature and society in its recognition of a despair that the modern age could not redeem.25 On January 20, 1915, Ebner notes his reading of Haecker’s translation of “Kritik der Gegenwart”: The two Kierkegaard pieces from Brenner came by post today. I began to read one of them, Critique of the Present, while at the coffeehouse. Whoever reads Kierkegaard reads intently, cannot remain oblivious to it but agree with it internally—and not just intellectually. Haecker, the translator, according to the Afterword at least, seems likable, for very understandable reasons.26

This entry shortly followed Haecker’s translation and commentary on the A Literary Review of Two Ages, which was published on the eve of World War I.27 It was in Haecker’s Der Brenner translations of Kierkegaard that Ebner found a contemporary ally reluctant to join the forces of cultural and political renewal.28 This is crucial since Janik has already established that Haecker’s translation of A Literary Review of Two Ages was an entrenched theological-political critique of those Christian leaders supporting the case for war. The influence Haecker’s reception of Kierkegaard had on Ebner is not subtle since we read in his prefatory remarks to Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten Ebner attribute to Haecker Kierkegaard-like qualities.29 Thus, the Austrian journal Der Brenner is an obvious place for an evaluation of Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard to begin since it would not only be that Ebner would first SKS 8, 102 / LR, 96. On April 21, 1916, Ebner wrote concerning the arrogance of modern science: “Arrogant und frech trat der Materialismus der Naturwissenschaften allerorts und bereite die grösste Blamage des Geistes vor, die sich das Volk der Dichter und Denker zu leisten vermochte: die Volksausgabe der Welträstel von Haecker mit ihrer ungeheuren Verbreitung.” See Ebner, Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 615–16. For more on Haecker, see Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, London: Macdonald 1971, pp. 1–54. 26 Ebner, Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, p. 589. 27 Haecker, “Kritik der Gegenwart,” pp. 815–49. 28 It is likely that Ebner first read Schrempf’s translations, especially on the concept of anxiety, before reading Haecker’s translation. However, it would be Haecker’s translations and commentary that interested Ebner more. 29 Ferdinand Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Innsbruck: Brenner 1921, p. 14 (in Schriften, vol. 1, p. 83). 24 25

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publish his work on Kierkegaard in the “Krisis und Christentum” essay published in 1919 in this journal, but it was Haecker’s work on Kierkegaard in this journal that influenced Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard. In his work on the reception of Kierkegaard, Malik writes, “For the next ten years, Kierkegaard exercised an enormous influence on the members of the ‘Brenner Circle,’ and through the translations and commentaries carried in the pages of Der Brenner, on the German-speaking world at large.”30 While other independent German translations of Kierkegaard’s works occurred outside of this journal, Malik demonstrates that if there was in fact a force which provided much of the stimulus behind the “Kierkegaard revival” in the early twentieth century, then Der Brenner would be that source. After reading of Haecker’s translation of A Literary Review of Two Ages, Ebner’s productive reception of Kierkegaard quickly turned into a similar theologicalpolitical response to the relation drawn between notions of Geist and Blut und Broden by the German monists. For Ebner, as well as for Haecker, Kierkegaard’s Existenzphilosophie countered what each saw as yet a new form of the deification of the state emerging in contemporary European political thought. In Ebner’s political critique of utopian idealism, it was Kierkegaard’s Existenzphilosophie that was able to withstand the desire to root the alienated subject in an indissoluble bond between the individual and the state. Take, for example, the critique of political nativism in this quotation from Ebner’s Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten: If man, because he cannot find in himself the sense of his life, wants to go back a generation and try to give his question about this sense the answer from its life (that is, the life of the generation), so the spiritual in him compels him to question and demand, to a more or less fantastic—metaphysical disillusion; it compels him to give a sense or meaning, even if only imagined and dreamed, to the life of the generation that in and of itself asks for no sense and demands none.31

For Ebner, what was required from the individual was an existential attitude capable of resisting any political hope for discovering Geist amidst the current political trends in Europe. Compare this to what another contemporary of Ebner, Barth, would later say to pastors and laymen in his famous Tambach lecture in 1919: “For when we find ourselves in God, we find ourselves committed to the task of affirming him in the world as it is and not in a false transcendent world of dream.”32 Ebner and Barth understood their time as a dangerously ripe season for theologians to begin developing new utopian ideals. A similar resistance is evident in Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review of Two Ages, where he wrote: For it will not be as it once was, that when things get a little hazy for them, individuals could look to the nearest eminence to regain their bearings. The time is now past; they

Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, pp. 370–1. Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, p. 228 (in Schriften, vol. 1, p. 253; trans. by Patricia Stanley). 32 Karl Barth, “The Christian’s Place in Society,” The Word of God and The Word of Man, trans. by Douglas Horton, [London]: Hodder and Stoughton 1928, pp. 272–327. 30 31

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must either be lost in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be infinitely saved in the essentiality of religiousness.33

It is not a stretch then to suggest that the anti-Romantic and anti-idealist reading of Kierkegaard that Ebner, Haecker, and Barth undertook, appropriated Kierkegaard primarily as a counter-example to Germany’s leading theologians who advocated a Volk politics undergirded by religious ideologies.34 III. Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten In June 1919, Ebner completed Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. It would not be published in full, however, until 1921 by “Brenner-Verlag.” In his preface to Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Ebner clues us into which side of the cultural and political reception of Kierkegaard he stood when he wrote: “The taste of our present society for everything occult and mystical is unaccountable. Perhaps the book in theosophical circles makes admirers, perhaps also it has to do with Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky.”35 Ebner’s existential pessimism regarding any naturalistic or psychological solution to his inner despair did not permit a mystically inclined appropriation of Kierkegaard like that found in Dallago.36 The nature of Ebner’s despair surfaces as Ebner reminisces on his introduction to Kierkegaard just before the war that would set the tone for his appropriation of Kierkegaard in Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. In a letter to his close friend Luise Karpischek, written on July 16, 1918, less than a year before completing Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Ebner wrote: And in spite of everything a year later I ventured on a metaphysical meaning of individual existence and then experienced, in early 1914, with the failure of this work— the collapse of my intellectual life. And then came the war. Then in the fall of 1914 I became aware of Kierkegaard. And from 1916 on I began to reflect on the war. In the same year I read that book by Kierkegaard that made the very strongest impression on me, the one about the sickness unto death.37

What this journal entry shows us is that to understand Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard it is essential for us to consider the extent to which the devastating experiences of the war and the general dark climate hanging over Europe during this period shaped Ebner’s intellectual pursuit of a metaphysical meaning of individual existence. The SKS 8, 102 / LR, 97. Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard and the Early Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the German-Speaking World,” p. 214. 35 Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, p. 12 (in Schriften, vol. 1, p. 10). 36 Harold Stahmer noted Ebner’s despair began early in life when he “often likened his own existence to that of his pet black squirrel, whose freedom was artificial, limited as it was by the bars of the cage and the treadmill which never went anywhere,” and that real existence was “nothing more than simulation—a mere illusion.” Harold Stahmer,“Speak That I May See Thee!”: The Religious Significance of Language, New York: Macmillan 1968, p. 222. 37 Ebner, Briefe, in Schriften, vol. 3, p. 214. 33 34

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effect Kierkegaard had on Ebner may have done nothing more than to remind Ebner of the existing danger in modern thought when one transposes religious ideals onto either nature or the state. Ebner’s pursuit of metaphysical meaning resurfaces when in his introductory remarks to Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Ebner counters those who would conflate the will of the individual to the will of the Volk: “it is definitely the opinion of these fragments that in the attitude just alluded to, man has the ultimate decision of his existence as that of a self-deciding being, because according to his innermost essence he is called and destined to make decisions.…”38 More than any other aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought, it was his decisionism that most appealed to Ebner. Ultimately we can read Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard as countering naturalistic or calculative reductions of the human person to various political programs. The political and theological context surrounding Ebner’s appropriation of Kierkegaard is further clarified when read in light of the fact that in December 1919 the editor of Der Brenner, Ludwig von Ficker, began publishing Ebner’s work precisely when Ficker ventured, as editor of the journal, to confront the relation between Christianity and the state in Der Brenner.39 In his study on the intersection between expressionism and theology in Der Brenner, Peter Lincoln points out that Ficker regarded “any attempt to take refuge in a purely theological terminology inexcusable at a time when it is no longer possible to overlook the disastrous outcome of an excessive identification of Christianity with the interests of the State.”40 This “excessive identification” dominated much of the cultural, theological, and political context that foregrounds Ebner’s first contributions to Der Brenner as chapters from his Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten were published in the journal at this time.41 The situation was such that after the war had ended, followed by the fall of the German Monarchy and failed attempts at a political revolution, many pastors, theologians, and laymen were in search of a new political theology to stabilize an already fragmented Europe. Wary that any natural or political theology could resolve the existential angst facing Europe in the post-war era, Ebner concluded his first published essay in Der Brenner, “Kultur und Christentum,” with the following: …the cultural and political bankruptcy of Europe left the social question, this creeping sickness in the body of mankind became acute. Do we not experience it as all of a sudden Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, p. 13. Ferdinand Ebner, “Kultur und Christentum,” Der Brenner, vol. 6, no. 2, 1919, pp. 141–60. 40 Lincoln, Conflict & Continuity: Der Brenner in the Decade of Expressionism, pp. 34–5. 41 Interesting to note that Rivka Horwitz writes concerning the development of Buber’s intersubjectivity: “Buber notes several encounters with [Ferdinand] Ebner’s work. He first came across chapters of the book in 1920 in the Austrian periodical Der Brenner, to which he subscribed regularly. He was personally acquainted with Carl Dallago, one of the frequent contributors; and the journal treated themes—religions of the Far East, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Pascal—of extreme interest to him.” See Rivka Horwitz, Buber’s Way to I and Thou: The Development of Martin Buber’s Thought and His Religion as Presence Lectures, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1988, p. 149. 38 39

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nature standing still in its path to the spirit and exposing its sketch of the individual? What came and still comes over Europe, two people saw it, two who sought to heal mankind in the spirit of Christianity: Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky.42

Ebner’s use of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as critics of the present political orders in Europe would appeal to Der Brenner since Ficker himself had requested that the contributors to the journal refrain from any ossified theological arguments. In ways similar to how Barth two years later would appropriate Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky in his Epistle to Romans—an appropriation functioning as a means to revive Protestant theology by appealing to religious thinkers outside of its traditional constellation of saints and theologians—Ebner also drew upon Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard as modern prophets who forcibly diagnosed the ills besetting Christianity’s reliance upon the modern state.43 Absent any convincing political or psychological solutions to his personal despair, Ebner pursued a new metaphysics of existence during the years he wrote Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. He expresses this in this journal entry from May 1915, shortly after the torpedoing of the Lusitania: A really remarkable thought troubles me now and then, that is, that everything would be nothing but a “neurotic arrangement” in order to make my inability to bear arms demonstrable. But perhaps, probably even, the “neurosis” lies more in the circumstance that I let myself, in my unwell condition, be troubled by thoughts like that, than in the actual legitimacy of this thought. Is this then that which is not to be called neurotic, that functions consistently in relation to itself as a police informant—damn it, all this spying on the human heart—but then would all depth psychology be neurotic? Incidentally for a considerable period of time I have burrowed down into the situation of my existence in such a way that I scarcely can free myself for a moment from a kind of very despairing resignation that lets everything go as it wants to go and seek refuge only in absolute indifference. Profession, philosophical studies, the work I have planned on the metaphysics of individual existence, all of that and not only that, sinks into an abyss.44

In this entry we can read how the fact that Ebner subjected himself to psychological reductions regarding the cause of his inner despair, ended up informing Ebner of a more profoundly existing absence. That it was the absence of any metaphysical meaning regarding individual existence which made possible in the first place Ebner’s legitimating these naturalistic reductions of existence. For example, his Ebner, “Kultur und Christentum,” p. 159 (trans. by Patricia Stanley). Janik notes that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were invaluable for this period in large part because “they were prime examples of the kinds of men who understand the human soul because they understand themselves” and that to understand this “is to be aware of the extent to which crisis and ambiguity are part and parcel of the human condition.” See Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard and the Early Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the German-Speaking World,” p. 203. For more on Barth’s reception of Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard see Paul Brazier, Barth and Dostoevsky: A Study of the Influence of the Russian Writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky on the Development of the Swiss Theologian Karl Barth, 1915–1922, Colorado Springs, Colorado: Paternoster 2007. 44 Ebner, Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, p. 592. 42 43

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“inability to bear arms” testified that existentially identifying with either brewing nationalism during World War I, or any subsequent political revolutions after the war, was not the antidote to his illness. In March 1918, a year after the Bolshevik revolution, and less than a year before the publication of Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Ebner wrote the following, confirming the role Kierkegaard had on him before and while writing this book: Truly I am always unable to solve the problem of my life: to find the spiritual determination of my existence in its relationship to God….Of course my activity with the reading of Kierkegaard—since the fall of 1914—plays less of a role of conveying than that of making me aware. Actually I have till now really understood only one of Kierkegaard’s writings. As for those two discoveries: I keep coming back again and again to the fact that in their consequences lies the revolutionizing of European spiritual life, indeed the spiritual life of all mankind. Is that presumptuousness, a great mad overestimation of its significance? I compare myself certainly of course to a man who is in a frightfully explosive position, who could conceive of blowing up an entire city all at once, who knows how it must be done and yet cannot work up the courage to go out and in fact blow up the city. What is lacking in me? The courage to risk my existence.45

Again we see in this entry how Kierkegaard functioned more as one who makes the reader more aware than conveying any system or idea. For much of Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten Ebner is critiquing the leveling effects modern psychology has had on the individual. While Ebner agreed that reason is influenced by the will, yet he believed that this reduction of cogito to volo eventually recedes into the unconscious. It is the psychologically determined “I” that now concerns those hoping to reinvigorate subjectivity. One is either psychologically determined, which for Ebner ultimately reduces the self to a crude materialism, or one is spiritually determined. Ebner witnessed a spiritual determination of subjectivity in Kierkegaard’s resistance of transposing his religiosity onto the political. The most substantial attention given to Kierkegaard by Ebner can be found in the fourth fragment in Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten. In this section Ebner reveals the iconic status he subscribes to Kierkegaard, when he writes, “Kierkegaard, one of the most powerful thinkers of all time, knew what one, however, until now still does not recognize, because he saw in his religious circumspection the reality of spiritual life.”46 This is what was at stake in Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard was an exemplary neuer Mann. Kierkegaard was one who decided to order his existence in light of his belief in God as wholly transcendent and thereby Kierkegaard exhibited an existential disposition able to resist romanticizing religious existence. In the fourth fragment Ebner distinguishes the life of the genius from the spiritual life. The genius, according to Ebner, is one who, unlike the philosopher’s cogito ergo sum, consciously experiences the “it thinks” in man. Unlike the religious state of consciousness, however, the genius ultimately is the one who stands behind the supposed “outside,” or what is otherwise experienced as otherness. With the genius, the outside is merely a “Chinese wall” upon which the idealized “I” is Ibid., p. 798. Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, p. 39.

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projected. What distinguishes Kierkegaard from other geniuses, according to Ebner, is how, because of his “religious circumspection,”47 Kierkegaard resisted idealizing the religious life. Though Kierkegaard is recognized as a genius—one whose existence provides culture with its ideals—he is unique in the eyes of Ebner in that he is self-aware of his genius nature. In Ebner’s reading of Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s awareness of these limitations was the direct result of his religiousness. According to Ebner, most geniuses, while stressing independence from the natural plane of existence, do so without ever escaping cultural mechanisms. Already Kierkegaard was counted among the unique individuals whose individuality became a referencepoint for a new humanity unhinged from any materially or biologically defined social telos. As with Kierkegaard in the A Literary Review of Two Ages, Ebner’s primary target are those advocating a return to cultural Christianity as a response to the deadening-effects of secularism and naturalism. For Ebner, Christianity is neither political in its trajectory, nor is it cultural in its foundations, rather it can only be properly appropriated individually by way of decision. Barth would later envision the neuer Mann in Romans, “Projected into the midst of human life, the new man seems no more than a void, his ‘passionate motions of eternity’ (Kierkegaard) are invisible. Seen from the human side, he is incomprehensible, a mere negation; and yet, it is this which marks him out for what he is.”48 The neuer Mann is one whose religiosity is incommensurate with any material, social, or political existence. Along with Barth, Ebner was already aware of how an age of crisis, evident by a disastrous war and failed revolutions, demanded for Christian theology a new ideal type of individual able to stand before an irrational world bereft of any discernible telos without either falling prey to renewed utopian delusions or succumbing to the temptation of retreat and nihilism. Writing to a disenchanted generation, Ebner wondered how one could think other than pessimistically and nihilistically. On January 1, 1919, six months before Ebner completed Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Barth delivered a sermon to his congregation which had undergone war, national humiliation and now were in the throes of a revolution: Those who can truly say “The Lord is my shepherd,” have made that leap…have not resisted God…have not swum with the current of opinion in the world…In them something has turned from the idols to God; they have submitted to judgment; they have let the truth rule in their hearts. They have at least inwardly separated themselves from the powers of the old world, when they were outwardly not yet superior to those powers. They have begun at least to think differently, to look in a different direction.49

For Ebner, Haecker, and Barth, any belief in the divine ordering of a cosmos now conceded to instrumental reasoning was now obsolete. This in turn induced the existential state of dizziness regarding the unlimited ways one may understand their Ibid. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns, London: Oxford University Press 1933, p. 149, our emphasis. 49 Karl Barth, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon, trans. by John E. Wilson, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press 2009, p. 93. 47 48

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relative yet personal relation to the social. The existential danger for Ebner, Haecker, and Barth, is that human freedom will eventually succumb to instrumental reasoning. Yet it is important how one will regain stability after this crisis of religious identity. Kierkegaard writes in A Literary Review of Two Ages: “the individual must then first of all break out of the prison in which his own reflection holds him, and if he then succeeds he still does not stand in the open but in the vast penitentiary formed by the reflection of the surroundings.”50 At the point of hierarchical collapse of the sociopolitical order, the collapse of the German Monarchy, the individual then realizes one can only break out of the iron cage through a religious turn toward inwardness. Neither avoiding despair nor succumbing to nihilism, Ebner writes to those disenchanted that they should “take in the bitter medicine by spoonfuls” which was administered by the one who “wrote the book about the sickness unto death, which is the most profound book written about the essence of man.”51 Ebner then concludes Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten by lifting from Haecker’s translation of A Literary Review of Two Ages and quoting from Kierkegaard: “behold, everything is prepared, behold, the cruelty of the abstraction makes finiteness in its deception apparent as such, behold, the abyss of infinity opens, the sharp scythe of leveling puts everyone to the sword, each in his turn—behold, God waits! So leap into the arms of God.”52 Nearly three years later, Barth responded with his own argument for restraining from mixing the religious with the political forces at the time by writing: “there are things willed and done by men which, in spite of their relativity, are pregnant with parabolic significance, powerful in bearing witness, capable of concentrating attention upon the ‘Beyond’; so there may be things not willed and not done which are endowed with like gravity.”53 Barth focuses on the experiment brought on by single individuals, stating he is “most anxious about the man who embarks upon revolution.”54 Turning the negation into a positive method means the “revolutionary Titan is far more godless, far more dangerous, than his reactionary counterpart— because he is so much nearer to the truth.” Barth continues: “For the honor of God we have to bring the revolutionary within the orbit of sacrifice, and his sacrifice is a sacrifice of quite peculiar dignity.”55 The devastation witnessed by these thinkers in the secularizing of Christianity meant that the new crop of theologians must learn more from a Hobbesian political realism regarding the impossibility of ever mediating religious ideals with political interest. In this sense Ebner, Haecker, and Barth offered up a critical examination of the role of the Christian individual in a post-Schleiermacher, post-Ritschlian Protestantism by appealing to another, though under-appreciated Protestant thinker, Kierkegaard. When Protestant theology was thrown into dissolution by the war, Ebner, Haecker, and Barth turned to religious “outsiders” for new directions. SKS 8, 78 / LR, 72. Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, p. 242 (in Schriften, vol. 1, p. 339). 52 Ebner, Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, p. 244 (in Schriften, vol. 1, p. 341). 53 Barth, The Epistle to The Romans, p. 461. 54 Ibid., p. 477. 55 Ibid., p. 478.

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IV. Conclusion During the two years spanning the publication of their respective Kierkegaardian texts, Ebner, Haecker, and Barth were relentless in their critique of modern liberalism and the idealizing of human autonomy. In equal measure, each saw an unfettered capitalist liberalism represented in bourgeois politics, and the quasireligious ideology violently represented in Bolshevism, as propagating a diabolical subjectivity. After 1922, due to bad health, Ebner can be found in Der Brenner only twice. Ebner’s reception of Kierkegaard would be among the first substantial cultural mediations on the life of Kierkegaard that became fashionable among those engaging in religious anti-modernist tirades against the cultural and religious accommodations made by mainstream theologians to the modern state. Of interest for those wary of redemptive politics, was the way Kierkegaard’s political realism advanced the idea that a modern religious conception of redemption does not advocate overcoming the world through conquering of modern, secular powers with a new theologicalpolitical power. Rather, for Ebner, Haecker, and Barth, spiritual redemption is best represented in transcending the external socio-political world through carving out an interior, existential space invulnerable to instrumental and external powers.56 Yet did “transcending” the socio-political necessarily mean for these thinkers that their respective Existenzphilosophies was fundamentally apolitical? Or, should we read in their respective receptions of Kierkegaard a thorough-going critique of the political construed as totalitarian which left the subject powerless to decide his or her fate? Perhaps it is best then to read Ebner’s need for a metaphysics of individual existences, which coincided with his appropriation of Kierkegaard, as along the lines of what we read from Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) when he wrote: “A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of the determinate causes.”57

For more on Bergson’s influence on Haecker see Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard and the Early Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the GermanSpeaking World,” pp. 199–201. 57 See Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” in Limited Inc., ed. by Gerald Gaff, trans. by Jeffry Mehlman and Samuel Weber, Chicago: Northwestern University Press 1988, p. 116. 56

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Ebner’s Corpus “Aus dem Tagebuche 1916/1917,” in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 24; p. 32; p. 56. “Fragment über Weininger,” Der Brenner, vol. 6, no. 1, 1919, p. 28 (in Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 284). “Kultur und Christentum,” Der Brenner, vol. 6, no. 2, 1919, p. 159 (in Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 341). “Das Kreuz und die Glaubensforderung,” Der Brenner, vol. 6, no. 3, 1920, p. 214 (in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 400). Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten, Innsbruck: Brenner 1921, p. 14; p. 39; p. 56; p. 93; p. 101; p. 194; p. 202; p. 205; p. 220; p. 242 (in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 79; p. 83; pp. 111–13; p. 129; p. 180; p. 284; p. 293; p. 297; p. 314; p. 341). “Glossen zum Introitus des Johannesevangeliums, Der Brenner, vol. 6, no. 8, 1921, p. 580 (in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 421). “Die Christusfrage,” Der Brenner, vol. 7, no. 2, 1922, pp. 3–62, see p. 3; p. 9; p. 29; p. 39; p. 58; p. 61 (in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 450; p. 456; p. 474; p. 483; p. 502; p. 505). “Die Wirklichkeit Christi,” Der Brenner, vol. 10, Fall, 1926, p. 14; p. 22 (in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 400; p. 421). “Das Wissen um Gott und der Glaube,” Der Brenner, vol. 6, no. 10, 1921, p. 799; p. 806 (in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 435; p. 441; p. 443). “Nachwort zur Mitarbeit am Brenner,” in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 610; p. 630. “Zum Problem der Sprache und des Wortes,” Der Brenner, vol. 12, Easter, 1928, pp. 3–50, see p. 6. “Versuch eines Ausblicks in die Zukunft,” in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 733; p. 756; p. 782; pp. 836–7. “Aphorismen 1931,” in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 1, p. 998; p. 1012. Notizen. Tagebücher. Lebenserinnerungen, in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 2, p. 119; p. 163; p. 175; p. 254; p. 302; pp. 386–7; p. 415; p. 449; pp. 517–18; pp. 527–8; p. 531; pp. 585–6; pp. 589–91;

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p. 605; p. 624; p. 629; pp. 632–3; p. 638; pp. 648–9; pp. 706–7; p. 736; p. 753; p. 761; pp. 770–1; p. 773; p. 779; p. 786; p. 788; p. 798; p. 822; p. 828; p. 851; p. 873; pp. 880–1; p. 883; p. 911; p. 916; p. 933; p. 935; p. 948; p. 952; p. 1050; p. 1091; p. 1097. Briefe, in his Schriften, vols. 1–3, ed. by Franz Seyr, Munich: Kösel 1963–65, vol. 3, p. 24; pp. 80–1; p. 84; p. 117; p. 137; pp. 141–2; p. 144; p. 147; p. 149; p. 164; pp. 176–8; pp. 184–5; p. 187; p. 190; p. 195; p. 202; p. 204; p. 214; p. 217; p. 230; p. 292; p. 309; pp. 313–15; p. 318; pp. 323–4; pp. 329–30; pp. 334–5; p. 364; p. 375; p. 386; p. 405; p. 425; p. 445; p. 484; p. 490; p. 493; p. 495; p. 500; p. 502; p. 505; p. 509; p. 523; p. 540; p. 548; pp. 568–9; p. 634; pp. 644–5; p. 647; pp. 649–50; p. 678; p. 680; p. 686; p. 704. II. Sources of Ebner’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Søren Kierkegaard, “Kritik der Gegenwart,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, vol. 4, no. 19, 1914, pp. 815–49 and pp. 869–86. — Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–12, trans. and ed. by Herman Gottsched and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diederichs 1909–22. III. Secondary Literature on Ebner’s Relation to Kierkegaard Kloeden, Wolfdietrich von, “Einfluss und Bedeutung im deutsch-sprachigen Denken,” in The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Maria Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Reitzel 1987 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15), pp. 58–9 and pp. 71–2. Malik, Habib C., Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, pp. 386–7. Ruttenbeck, Walter, Sören Kierkegaard. Der christliche Denker und sein Werk, Berlin und Frankfurt an der Oder: Trowitzsch & Sohn 1929, p. 323.

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Kierkegaardian Traits in Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics Luiz Rohden

As the ideas of Dilthey (and Kierkegaard) became part of the foundation of existential philosophy, the problem of hermeneutics underwent a philosophical radicalization.1

Although Kierkegaard is not explicitly quoted by Gadamer as often as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, he is one of the thinkers who had a decisive influence on Gadamer’s intellectual training and his view of hermeneutic philosophy. Kierkegaard’s influence on Gadamer derives basically from Gadamer’s reading of Kierkegaard’s work, primarily Either/Or, and indirectly from his grasp of Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s philosophy. I. Short Overview of Gadamer’s Life and Works Hans-Georg Gadamer (February 11, 1900–March 13, 2002), also known as the “contemporary Socrates,” was the last great philosopher of the twentieth century and the survivor of a productive generation of German philosophers who were trained and attained maturity in the period between the two World Wars. His university studies focused on German philology, history, art history, and philosophy. He became interested in literature very early and later devoted himself to the study of the so-called “sciences of the spirit” or human sciences. He experienced the collapse of Kantianism, which had been hegemonic in German philosophy until then, and the emergence of existential philosophy in Germany in the wake of the appropriation of Kierkegaard.

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik,” in his Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 103. (This text was originally published in Italian as “Ermeneutica,” in Encyclopedia del Novecento, Rome: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana 1975ff., vol. 2, pp. 731–40; the passage quoted does not appear in the original publication but only in the revised and reprinted version in Gesammelte Werke.)

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Gadamer2 became known worldwide for Truth and Method (1960).3 In a letter to Bultmann he summarized the basic idea of his main work: In my book I have tried to explain the fact that historical consciousness—entirely in my own field of experience, the experience of the philosophical classics, of art, and of the humanistic tradition—is permeated with a claim required by the content, which it seems to me is something that corresponds exactly to the situation of theology in recent decades….4

What essentially characterizes and determines Gadamer’s philosophical thinking is the fact that he raised hermeneutics to the status of a philosophical category. Initially hermeneutics was seen only as an interpretive technique peculiar to the fields of literature, theology, and law and more recently was reduced to a methodological science peculiar to the human sciences. Starting from the Greco-Roman literary, theological, and legal tradition as well as from Schleiermacher’s and Dilthey’s efforts to constitute hermeneutics as a science of interpretation and understanding, Gadamer established its foundations as a philosophy: I did not intend to produce a manual for guiding understanding in the manner of the earlier hermeneutics. I did not wish to elaborate a system of rules to describe, let alone direct, the methodical procedure of the human sciences. Nor was it my aim to investigate the theoretical foundation of work in these fields in order to put my findings to practical ends….My real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.5

It is by approaching and critically dealing with different areas and topics of knowledge, such as art, science, and language, that Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy is developed and structured, as will be shown below.

Gadamer taught in Marburg and Kiel, and in 1939 received the chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig. From 1947 to 1949 he taught at Frankfurt am Main and from the winter semester of 1949–50 until his retirement in 1968 he taught in Heidelberg as the successor of Karl Jaspers. 3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen: Mohr 1960. (English translation: Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed., trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Continuum 2006.) 4 Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eine Biographie, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1999, p. 316. 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vorwort zur 2. Auflage,” in his Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 2nd ed., enlarged with an afterword, Tübingen: Mohr 1965, p. 438 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 438; English translation: “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Truth and Method, pp. xxv–xxvi). 2

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A. Hermeneutic Philosophy as an Experience of the Work of Art According to Gadamer, the experience of the work of art “is the most insistent admonition to scientific consciousness to acknowledge its own limits,”6 as it is understood as a truth that is more encompassing than the truth in the hegemonic Western tradition, in which it is reduced to the notion of certainty. The first part of Truth and Method contains the critique of aesthetic consciousness, where Gadamer claims the validity of “the experience of truth that comes to us through the work of art against the aesthetic theory that lets itself be restricted to a scientific conception of truth.”7 Later, Gadamer reiterates that the starting point of his hermeneutic theory is that “the work of art is a challenge to our understanding because it continually escapes all interpretations and opposes a resistance, which can never be overcome, to its conversion to the identity of the concept.”8 The work of art is an event and as such, when we look at it, it produces in us something that cannot be submitted to the logic of the experimental model of knowledge. In our contact with the work of art, our expectations are broken down and a view of truth is established that is broader than the view determined by scientific knowledge. B. Hermeneutic Philosophy as Practical Philosophy The central question that Gadamer asked about the constitution of truth in the human sciences and that he tried to answer is this: is the method able to explain what truth is? His answer is one of the essential traits that reveal his view of hermeneutic philosophy: science and method are able neither to understand nor to exhaust both the concept of truth and the idiosyncrasies of human existence.9 His philosophical proposal is not anti-scientific or anti-methodological, but in his view “what method defines is precisely not truth. It in no way exhausts it,” and “what I sought to show was that the concept of method was not an appropriate way of achieving legitimation in the humanities and social sciences,”10 and “This is the reason I have suggested that the ideal of objective knowledge which dominates our concepts of knowledge, science and truth needs to be supplemented by the ideal of sharing in something, of participation.”11 This starting point justifies and explains his concept of “historically

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Einleitung,” in his Wahrheit und Methode, p. XXVIII (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 2; Truth and Method, p. xxii). 7 Ibid. 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 8. (This work was published for the first time in his Gesammelte Werke.) 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Selbstdarstellung Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen, vols. 1–3, ed. by Ludwig J. Pongratz, Hamburg: Meiner 1975–77, vol. 3, p. 81 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 495–6). 10 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. and trans. by Richard E. Palmer, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press 2001, p. 55. 11 Ibid., p. 40. 6

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effected consciousness” (Wirkungsgeschichte), according to which we ourselves are always involved in the process of knowing, of philosophizing. Gadamer not only showed the limitations of modern science, but also established the foundation of his hermeneutic philosophy as science by using Aristotle’s practical philosophy as a mirror. He describes the genesis of his hermeneutic philosophy in this way: it ultimately arises out of praxis and is expressed as an experience.12 Gadamer’s philosophical-hermeneutic rationality is similar to Aristotle’s practical philosophy and more specifically to the latter’s concept of phronesis: Determining what is rational in the specific, concrete situation in which you find yourself…is something you must do for yourself. What is rational in the sense of the right thing to do in this situation is not prescribed to you in the general orientations you have been given about good and evil in the same way that the instructions for use that come with a tool tell you how to use it. Rather, you have to determine for yourself what you are going to do. And to do this you have to arrive at a comprehension of your situation, reach an understanding with yourself about it. In other words, you have to interpret it! That, then, is the hermeneutical dimension of ethics and of practical reason. I think you can see immediately that this “coming to an understanding” of our practical situations and what we must do in them is not monological; rather, it has the character of a conversation.13

C. Hermeneutic Philosophy as Dialogical Language The topic of language occupies much space in Gadamer’s work, and it is not by chance that the epigraph of the third part of Truth and Method is Schleiermacher’s statement, “Everything presupposed in hermeneutics is but language.”14 It is by dealing with language and its correlate topics that the identity of Gadamer’s philosophy is fully developed. Being a critic of the scientistic language that reduces language to an instrument of communication, Gadamer developed the notion of language as an understanding of the world, which is summarized in his statement that “being that can be understood is language,” which can be read in the sense that “it does not mean that the one who understands completely dominates being but, on the contrary, that being is not experienced where something can be constructed by us and is to that extent conceived; it is experienced where what is happening can merely be understood.”15

Gadamer, “Selbstdarstellung. Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen, ed. by Ludwig J. Pongratz, vol. 3, p. 78 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 492). 13 Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, ed. and trans. by Richard E. Palmer, p. 79. 14 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 2nd ed. (1965), p. 361 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 387; Truth and Method, p. 383). 15 Gadamer, “Vorwort zur 2. Auflage,” in his Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 2nd ed. (1965), p. XXI (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 445–6; “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Truth and Method, p. xxxii). 12

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The full unfolding of Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy takes place in a dialogic manner, and whenever dialogue is broken or removed from human life, the latter is at risk of missing its authentic humanity. Authentic dialogue presupposes an attitude of openness towards what the other has to tell us. With the other we not only acquire information, but with the other’s experiences we also learn to become ourselves even more, to become more human. Only those who get involved in the movement of dialogue, who “get lost” in it, can reencounter themselves at a fuller, more fulfilled and, therefore, happier level. An excellent conceptual clue about hermeneutic philosophy as language is found in Gadamer’s statement that “this is hermeneutics: knowing how much remains unsaid when you say something.”16 II. The Reception of Kierkegaard in Germany up to Gadamer: Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger A decisive factor for the dissemination of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in Germany was the translation of his work in the Diederichs/Schrempf edition and its reception among Catholic authors and among philosophers after World War I,17 which challenged idealism and the cultural consciousness of the liberal period. Gadamer received Kierkegaard indirectly by appropriating Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s philosophy and directly by interpreting part of Kierkegaard’s work. A. How Kierkegaard Reached Jaspers and Gadamer’s Heidelberg The appropriation of Kierkegaard by Jaspers and consequently by Gadamer must be understood in the context of German philosophy in the period between the two World Wars: What Romanticism turned against the abstract generality of the concept in the discovery of the undecipherable secrets of individuality was repeated in the beginning of our century in the critique of the academic philosophy of the 19th century and of the liberal belief in progress. Not by chance, it was a disciple of German Romanticism, the Danish writer Sören Kierkegaard, who, in the 1840s, with a very talented writing, struggled against the academic domination of Hegelian idealism and now, in the 20th century, became influential in Europe through the translation of his work into German. It was here in Heidelberg (but also in some other places in Germany) that thinking opposed neo-Kantian idealism appealing to the experience of Thou and to the word that connects I and Thou.18 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dialogischer Rückblick auf das Gesammelte Werk und dessen Wirkungsgeschichte,” in Jean Grondin, Gadamer—Lesebuch, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1997, p. 286. 17 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität, Subjekt und Person,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 88. (This work was published for the first time in Gesammelte Werke.) 18 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” Universitas, vol. 26, 1971, p. 1299 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 210–11). 16

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Gadamer learned from Jaspers to criticize the founding of philosophy on a single principle, such as “consciousness as such.” In his book, Psychology of World Views Jaspers devoted a chapter to Kierkegaard, who provided the “new pathos of existence” that challenges the founding of neo-Kantian methodical self-understanding with themes essential to human consciousness, “such as freedom, death, guilt”; and these are “limit situations”19 that theoretical reason is not able to account for. “In this manner Jaspers’ first philosophical book above all reflected one of the great philosophical happenings of the early twentieth century: the discovery of Sören Kierkegaard, the great critic of German Idealism.”20 After World War I, according to Gadamer, “Jaspers had more and more success in neo-Kantian Heidelberg….But even in my student years, Heidelberg was more and more represented by Karl Jaspers among those studying philosophy at other universities.”21 Gadamer’s statement makes it possible to grasp the strength of Kierkegaard’s thinking not only in Germany, but also for his own philosophical proposal. B. How Kierkegaard Reached Heidegger and Gadamer’s Heidelberg Another path through which Kierkegaard reached Gadamer’s philosophy can be seen in the reception of the Dane’s thinking by Heidegger. The young Heidegger found in Kierkegaard the key to conceive of philosophy on the basis of the factum, through the theological concept of simultaneity, with which he opposed the model of knowledge characterized by “understanding at a distance.”22 Heidegger intended to do in philosophy, which at the time was limited by abstraction and mathematical logic, what Kierkegaard had done in the field of theology, namely, a critique of its dogmatism and abstraction and a defense of life in its dialectical concreteness. Heidegger’s earliest study on Kierkegaard is in the text “Introduction to Aristotle.”23 Heidegger became interested in Kierkegaard’s critique of the Hans-Georg Gadamer, “V. Philosophische Begegnungen. Karl Jaspers,” Ruperto Carola, vol. 21, no. 46, p. 52 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 394; English version: Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeship, trans. by Robert R. Sullivan, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1985, p. 161). 20 Gadamer, “V. Philosophische Begegnungen. Karl Jaspers,” p. 52 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 395; English version: Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeship, p. 161). On the same topic, see also Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 17. 21 Gadamer, “V. Philosophische Begegnungen. Karl Jaspers,” p. 52 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 395; English version: Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeship, p. 162). 22 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die deutsche Philosophie zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” Neue Deutsche Hefte, vol. 34, no. 3, 1987, p. 460 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 365). 23 Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Winter Semester 1921–22), in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilungen 1–4, vols. 1–102, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1975–, Abteilung 2 (Vorlesungen 1919–1944), vol. 61. On this see also Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 388–9. 19

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concepts of “infinite mediation and distance with which the Christian message was conveyed in the Christian church of his time,”24 “thus he reminded people again of contemporaneity as the genuine essence of the Christian message.”25 In Heidegger’s language, in philosophy one “must free oneself from understanding only ‘at a distance.’ ”26 Here one can see the opposition to logos in a strictly logical sense.27 In Gadamer’s words: When Heidegger’s Being and Time appeared in 1927, Existenzphilosophie as a revolutionary critique of the tradition adhered to it. Only the initiated knew that Heidegger’s work was a new approach in philosophy, one in which Kierkegaard and the philosophical themes of Jaspers’ Kierkegaard reception were unmistakably present, but were primarily used as points of departure for a fundamental new inquiry. To the larger public this book appeared as Existenzphilosophie, but the foundation for this preoccupation had above all been prepared by Karl Jaspers, who, in his capacity as an academic teacher in Heidelberg, was repeating Kierkegaard’s Existenz dialectic.28

Another path through which Kierkegaard’s thinking reached Heidegger was the constitution of the third stage of the history of phenomenology by Heidegger who appropriated the philosophy of existence. According to Gadamer, two basic influences were decisive in making Heidegger enrich Husserl’s phenomenological school: “On the one hand, he in a way introduced a moment of reality in consciousness, viz. the historicity of our thinking,”29 and the second one was “the rediscovery of Kierkegaard in the beginning of the 19th century…in his famous book Either/Or he accused the speculative philosophy of German idealism of not knowing any either/or because it dialectically mediates all contrasts.”30 In Gadamer’s own summary, “But Heidegger brought these two things together, the historical hermeneutics of Dilthey and the existential pathos of Kierkegaard. His concept, which he coined for this in Being and Time—later he dropped it—was ‘hermeneutics of facticity.’ ”31 The word “facticity” represented the beginning of a new way of doing philosophy and is in itself a word that stood for an opposition, that represented a correction of words used

Gadamer, “Die deutsche Philosophie zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” p. 460 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 365). 25 Ibid. 26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. by Ernst Behler und Jochen Hörisch, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh 1987, p. 253 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 128). 27 Ibid. 28 Gadamer, “V. Philosophische Begegnungen. Karl Jaspers,” p. 54 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 395; Philosophical Apprenticeship, p. 162). 29 Gadamer, “Die deutsche Philosophie zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” p. 460 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 363–4). 30 Gadamer, “Die deutsche Philosophie zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” p. 461 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 364). 31 Gadamer, “Die deutsche Philosophie zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” p. 462 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 365). 24

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by German idealism such as “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” “spirit,” and of Husserl’s transcendental ego.32 III. Kierkegaard’s Direct Influence on Gadamer In Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke Kierkegaard is explicitly mentioned in 89 passages. When he was a young university student in Marburg, reading Kierkegaard was essential for him, because it enabled him to assimilate the critique of the Hegelian system “and the polemic against the universal mediation which diminishes the sharpness of the Either/Or of the ethical stage.”33 According to Gadamer, it was through the character of Judge William in Either/Or that he adopted a critical stance toward Hegel’s concept of “infinite mediation.”34 Among Kierkegaard’s works, Either/Or is the one that Gadamer mentions and uses the most. It is explicitly cited twice in Wahrheit und Methode, once in Wahrheit und Methode II, twice in Neuere Philosophie I, once in Neuere Philosophie II and three times in Hermeneutik im Rückblick. He also cited Philosophical Fragments35 and The Concept of Anxiety.36 He referred countless times to the “Kierkegaard Report” written by Jaspers. Assuming that the ten volumes of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke are the locus where his philosophy is summarized, let us see the passages in which Kierkegaard is used or the context in which he is explicitly cited. I have not undertaken the task of exploring where the Danish thinker is cited indirectly. This occurs, for instance, when Gadamer uses Kierkegaard’s concepts of contemporaneity, repetition37 and others that are not contained in the subject index of his work. Although these are the most Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heidegger und die Griechen,” Alexander von HumboldtStiftung. Mitteilungen, no. 55, 1990, p. 31 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 34). See also Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 419–20. 33 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vernunft und praktische Philosophie,” in Vernunft und Kontingenz. Rationalität und Ethos in der Phänomenologie, ed. by Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Munich: Karl Alber 1986, p. 176 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 260). 34 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” in Philosophie und Poesie. Otto Pöggeler zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog 1988, p. 9. (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 143). 35 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 121 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 132, note 231; Truth and Method, p. 124, note 40). 36 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Der platonische ‘Parmenides’ und seine Nachwirkung,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog, p. 326. (This text was originally published in Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 51, 1983, pp. 39–51; it was revised and reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog, pp. 313–27. The passage quoted does not appear in the original publication but only in the reprinted version.) 37 On this see Luiz Rohden, “Repetition and Contemporaneity: Kierkegaardian Crumbs in Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 52, no. 1, 2007, pp. 25–32. 32

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common points between them, I will not draw an—explicit or implicit—parallel38 between them, but trace ideas, concepts, reflections taken from Kierkegaard that are present in Gadamer’s work. A. Kierkegaard as a Critical Representative of Hegel Mostly, when Gadamer cites Kierkegaard, he does so because in his view Kierkegaard is the critical representative par excellence of Hegel, that is, of idealist philosophy in the context of the growing critique of transcendental philosophy that did not give human existence its due value. The critical and symbolic representational strength of this aspect can be seen in the repeated remarks spread throughout Gadamer’s work, but particularly in Neuere Philosophie I, that refer to the Danish thinker as the critic of speculative idealism par excellence: With bitter sarcasm, Kierkegaard had asserted that Hegel, the absolute professor, had forgotten existence. “Mediation,” that is, the dialectical reconciliation of even the most sharply opposed ideas, takes from human existence the stringency of absolute decision, the unconditioned and irrevocable character of the choice that alone is appropriate to its finitude and temporality.39

Kierkegaard’s central critique of Hegel that Gadamer assimilated in his work can be summarized in the phrase “the absolute professor in Berlin has forgotten ‘to exist’ [das Existieren].”40 In the context of the economic, political, and religious crisis caused by the effects of the war, that shook liberal faith in progress, and promoted suicidal nationalism and religious dogmatism, Kierkegaard was rediscovered as a There are several texts presenting the similarities and differences between Kierkegaard and Gadamer: Joan Pegueroles, “Otra verdad, otra razón en Newman y Gadamer, Kierkegaard y Blondel,” Espíritu, vol. 47, no. 117, 1998, pp. 37–46; Joan Pegueroles, “Tres notas sobre Gadamer y una reseña,” Espíritu, vol. 48, no. 120, 1999, pp. 189–97; Roseline Lemire, “Gadamer et Kierkegaard,” Arguments: La revue de philosophie de l’Université de Montréal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 55–63; Patricia A. Johnson, “The Task of the Philosopher: Kierkegaard/ Heidegger/Gadamer,” Philosophy Today, vol. 28, 1984, pp. 3–18. 39 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die phänomenologische Bewegung,” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 110–11. (This text was originally published in Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 10, 1963, pp. 1–45; it was revised and reprinted in Gesammelte Werke. The passage quoted does not appear in the original publication but only in the reprinted version). English translation: “The Phenomenological Movement,” in HansGeorg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. by David E. Linge, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1976, p. 137). 40 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Existentialismus und Existenzphilosophie,” Neue Deutsche Hefte, vol. 28, 1981, p. 677 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 177; English translation: Heidegger’s Ways, p. 2). Gadamer repeats this several times. See Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 217–18; pp. 249–50; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Griechische Philosophie I, p. 122; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “V. Philosophische Begegnungen. Max Scheler,” Bilder und Zeiten. Beilage der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, no. 195, August 24, 1974, p. 4 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 385). 38

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critical representative and an advocate of the “pathos of existence.”41 In this way he challenged the philosophy of reflection structured upon the concept of “infinite mediation” and knowledge “at a distance.” Against the concept of “infinite mediation,” Gadamer takes up Kierkegaard’s critical position that defends the notion of “indirect mediation” and the “unforethinkability” (Unvordenklichkeit) of human existence. In Gadamer’s words: “Kierkegaard’s own situation in the 1840s was determined by his critique of Hegelian speculative idealism, a critique motivated by his Christian faith. It was out of this context that the word existence gained its specific pathos….”42 Gadamer also appropriated Kierkegaard’s critique of the concept of “knowledge at a distance,” which prevailed in theological thinking at that time, corrected it with the concept of contemporaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit)43 and applied it to his philosophical reflections on art, science, and history. In Gadamer’s words: “I was helped by the theory of contemporaneity that Kierkegaard, for religious and critical theological reasons, had set up against ‘understanding at a distance’ and that attained in 1924 a persuasive effectiveness through the Diederich edition of the ‘religious discourses’ (Life and Rule of Love).”44 Still on the same subject, he writes, Kierkegaard demonstrated that all “distant knowledge” of the fundamental moral and religious situation of humans is not satisfying. Just as it is the meaning of Christian teaching to be experienced and perceived “at the same time,” so the ethical choice is not a matter of theoretical knowledge but rather a matter of the clarity, sharpness, and affliction of conscience. All distant knowledge threatens to disguise or weaken the demand lying in the ethical condition of choice.45 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Auf schwankendem Boden: Vom Wandel in den Geisteswissenschaften,” Bilder und Zeiten. Beilage der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, no. 225, September 28, 1985, p. 4 (republished as “Vom Wandel in den Geisteswissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 181). 42 Gadamer, “Existentialismus und Existenzphilosophie,” p. 676 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 176; English translation in Heidegger’s Ways, p. 2, but see also p. 352 of the same volume). 43 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heideggers Rückgang auf die Griechen,” in Theorie der Subjektivität. Festschrift für D. Henrich, ed. by Konrad Cramer et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1987, p. 405 (published also as “Auf dem Rückgang zum Anfang,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 399). 44 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Das Erbe Hegels,” in Das Erbe Hegels. Zwei Reden aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Hegel-Preises 1979 der Stadt Stuttgart an Hans-Georg Gadamer am 13.6.1979, ed. by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, p. 46 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme. Gestalten, pp. 467–8; English translation in Reason in the Age of Science: Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. by Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge and London: MIT Press 1996, p. 44.) 45 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Über die Möglichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik,” in Sein und Ethos. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Ethik, ed. by P. Engelhardt, Mainz: MatthiasGrünewald-Verlag 1963, p. 13 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme. Gestalten, p. 177; English translation in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. by Ronald Beiner and William James Booth, trans. by Michael Kelly, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1993, p. 363). 41

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One might say that the key concepts that Gadamer takes up from Kierkegaard are under the great umbrella of what is conventionally called “philosophy of existence.” Concerning the word “existence,” Gadamer made the following comment: “The use of the word in this new, emphatic sense can be traced back to the Danish writer and thinker S. Kierkegaard. He wrote in the 1840s, but his effect on the world and especially on Germany was not felt until the beginning of this century.”46 In this context of the critique of neo-Kantianism, two phrases began to gain strength: one, from Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey, “was the irrationality of life, and of historical life in particular,” and the other “was Existenz, a term that rang forth from the works of S. Kierkegaard…. Just as Kierkegaard had criticized Hegel as the philosopher of reflection who had forgotten existence, so now the complacent system-building of neo-Kantian methodologism.…came under critical attack.”47 The very title of Kierkegaard’s work Either/Or attracted Gadamer’s attention: It programmatically expressed what was lacking in Hegel’s speculative dialectic: the decision between “either/or,” upon which human existence—and Christian existence in particular—is actually based. Nowadays one uses the word existence spontaneously in such contexts—as I just did—with an emphasis that translocates it completely from its scholastic origins.48

Now, this was essential for Gadamer, since in this way “the ideas of Dilthey (and Kierkegaard) became part of the foundation of existential philosophy.”49 Differently from the tradition that had understood hermeneutics either as a simple instrument of interpretation or strictly as a science, Gadamer proposed a new and important concept of hermeneutics as philosophy, which he could do on the basis of Kierkegaard’s philosophical tradition. B. The Experience of the Work of Art and the Concept of Truth The second recurring aspect in Gadamer’s work involving the presence and importance of Kierkegaard has to do with his reflections on the concept of experience of the work of art and its overlap with the concept of truth. With the help of Kierkegaard’s reflections on art, he tried to broaden the concept of aesthetics and truth that we find in the first part of Truth and Method, in the section titled “Critique of the Abstraction Inherent in Aesthetic Consciousness”: Gadamer, “Existentialismus und Existenzphilosophie,” p. 676 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 176; English translation: Heidegger’s Ways, p. 2). 47 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zur Einführung” in Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, Stuttgart: Reclam 1960, p. 94 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 249–50; English translation: Heidegger’s Ways, p. 96). 48 Gadamer, “Existentialismus und Existenzphilosophie,” p. 677 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 176–7; English translation: Heidegger’s Ways, p. 3). 49 Gadamer, “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 103. 46

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In the same part of Truth and Method, in chapter 2, “The Ontology of the Work of Art and its Hermeneutic Significance,” in the section, “The Temporality of the Aesthetic,” Gadamer resorts again to Kierkegaard. He does so in the context of his reflection on the spectator’s participation in the work of art where “that which presents itself to the spectator as the play of art does not simply exhaust itself in momentary transport, but has a claim to permanence and the permanence of a claim.”51 In the reflection developed by Kierkegaard this is expressed in the concept of contemporaneity. According to Gadamer: For Kierkegaard, “contemporaneity” does not mean “existing at the same time.” Rather, it names the task that confronts the believer: to bring together two moments that are not concurrent, namely one’s own present and the redeeming act of Christ, and yet so totally to mediate them that the latter is experienced and taken seriously as present….52

Still in Truth and Method, in the section, “The Example of the Tragic,” Gadamer refers to Kierkegaard in the context of the reflection on “the being of the aesthetic… as play and presentation” by saying that “modern thought about tragedy is always aware of the fact that, as Kierkegaard has remarked, what is now considered tragic reflects classical thought on the topic.”53 In Wahrheit und Methode II, Gadamer takes up again the concept of “contemporaneity” in relation to the study of history, saying the issue is not just a literal reconstruction of the past, but the specificity, and the central problem of understanding is that we are faced with something that concerns us, that affects us, that is, something with which we are always involved.54 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 91 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 101; Truth and Method, pp. 82–3). 51 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 120 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 131; Truth and Method, p. 123). 52 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 121 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 132; Truth and Method, p. 124). 53 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 123 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 134; Truth and Method, pp. 125–6). 54 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Was ist Wahrheit?” Zeitwende. Die neue Furche, vol. 28, 1957, pp. 236–7 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 55; English translation: “What is Truth,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. and trans. by Brice R. Wachterhauser, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1994, p. 45). 50

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C. Human Sciences and Facticity Gadamer refers to Kierkegaard in the context of his reflections on historical science. He contrasts the claim to absolute, unbiased and objective knowledge of modern science with the perspective of knowledge in its facticity, finitude, and historicity. He had this concern since his youth, but clarifies that he had no intention of constructing a philosophical system anchored in Kierkegaard’s critique of a systematic thinking that left out the experience of human existence.55 In Philosophical Apprenticeships, when writing about his academic training and the influence of philosophers on his life, Gadamer confesses that the second part of Either/Or had aroused his sympathy “for Judge William and, without knowing it, for historical continuity.”56 On the same topic he also remarks that the emphatic concept of “existence” that Kierkegaard contrasted with the concept of infinite mediation of speculative thinking can be traced back to him.57 D. Practical Philosophy Gadamer not only challenged the model of modern science, but even as a youth he also tried to justify a mode of knowledge in accordance with practical philosophy. Following Kierkegaard, he affirmed a practical knowledge in contrast with a theoretical, abstract, and absolute one: “When I arrived at Heidegger, inspired by the reading of Kierkegaard, I learned to read the Nichomachean Ethics like a resurrected Kierkegaard. It is really a critique of a dogmatic concept of the general good and a metaphysical system…as it had been made in the thinking of Hegel, in Kierkegaard’s view.”58 Gadamer’s initial works focused on questions such as “What is practical philosophy?,” or, “How can theory and reflection be directed to the realm of practice, as practice cannot stand any distance, but requires involvement? This question touched me from early on through Kierkegaard’s existential pathos.”59 On bringing

Gadamer, “Selbstdarstellung. Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen,” ed. by Ludwig J. Pongratz, vol. 3, p. 65 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 483). 56 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophische Lehrjahre, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1977, pp. 11–12 (English translation: Philosophical Apprenticeship, p. 5). 57 Gadamer, “Heideggers Rückgang auf die Griechen,” in Theorie der Subjektivität. Festschrift für D. Heinrich, ed. by Konrad Cramer, p. 403 (reprinted as “Auf dem Rückgang zum Anfang,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 398). 58 Gadamer, “Vernunft und praktische Philosophie,” in Vernunft und Kontingenz. Rationalität und Ethos in der Phänomenologie, ed. by Ernst Wolfgang Orth, pp. 178–9 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 262). 59 Gadamer, “Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 22. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Vom Anfang des Denkens,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, p. 389. 55

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together Aristotle’s practical philosophy and the defense of the pathos of existential philosophy present in Kierkegaard as opposed to modern science, Gadamer states: In relation to the Aristotelian theory of phronesis, of practical rationality, I had begun to learn how to clarify conceptually the pathos of Existenzphilosophie typical of the reception accorded Kierkegaard at the time. What Kierkegaard had taught us and what we then called “existential” (existenziell)…found its prototype in the unity of ethos and logos that Aristotle had thematized as practical philosophy, and especially as the virtue of practical philosophy that goes back to Aristotle ultimately fell prey to the pressure of the modern notion of science.60

Thus, in Gadamer’s words, “by basing myself on Aristotle’s practical philosophy, I could further develop the stimulus that I received initially from Kierkegaard and later from Heidegger, to the point of seeing the essence of language in conversation,”61 as can be seen below. E. Language: Perspective of the Thou, Dialogue Kierkegaard’s contributions were also decisive for the concept of language developed by Gadamer. The latter took up Kierkegaard’s critique of the concept of infinite mediation and of the absolutization of subjectivity and opposed to them the possibility of choice, of either/or, of the presence of the Thou. This perspective has been upheld by Gadamer since his early days: The true impulse of my hermeneutical philosophy was a different one, however. I was born into the crisis of subjective idealism, which had erupted in my youth with the return of the critique of Hegel by Kierkegaard. It indicated a completely different direction for the meaning of understanding. Here it is the Other who breaks my I-centeredness by giving me something to understand.62

Gadamer’s view of language develops fully in dialogue, which he learned from Plato, but also from Kierkegaard: However, I was focusing on the special phenomenon of the Other and consequently sought the foundation of the linguistic character of our attitude towards the world in

Gadamer, “Das Erbe Hegels,” p. 53 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme. Gestalten, p. 470; English translation in Reason in the Age of Science: Hans-Georg Gadamer, pp. 47–8.). On the same issue, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Ethos und Logos,” in ΑΝΟΔΟΣ. Festschrift für Helmut Kuhn, ed. by Rupert Hofmann et al., Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora 1989, p. 28. (published also as “Aristoteles und die imperativische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog, p. 388). 61 Gadamer, “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. by Ernst Behler und Jochen Hörisch, p. 253 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 128). 62 Gadamer, “Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 9. 60

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dialogue. In this way, a whole range of questions was opened up to me which had attracted me since my beginnings, from Kierkegaard….63

As we saw above, the value that began to be generally attributed to historicity in Germany was complemented and followed in an effective manner by “the renewed influence of Kierkegaard’s thinking…which, following the procedure and others, inspired a new critique of idealism and developed the point of view of Thou, the other I.”64 This refers to the topic of intersubjectivity, which slowly occupied the place of philosophy focusing on the absolutization of subjectivity. Gadamer states it in this way: “The Thou-relationship appears here as a counter-instance against the contemporary Kantianism and the primacy of the transcendental Ego….Saying ‘the Other’ is what changes the perspective here. At the same time an interaction is introduced in the constitution of I and Thou.”65 In this sense the mirroring of Kierkegaard’s and Gadamer’s philosophy in Socrates becomes visible.66 Faced with the absolutization of the modern subject, they emphasized the kind of philosophizing that involves a joint historical, dialogical construction. Thus, it is not an exaggeration to call them Socratic. This has to do with a statement made by Gadamer in the context of the critique of idealism driven by the translation of Kierkegaard into German: “It made clear to me once again that Kierkegaard’s turn to Socrates is not so completely misguided as we classical philologists are accustomed to consider it….One must try to understand the other and that means that one has to believe that one could be wrong.”67 In this context, reflecting on the experience of finding the right word in dialogue, in the encounter with the other and on the awareness of the instability of this constructed path, he mentions a statement by the Danish thinker that clarifies these issues and “may also justify the more profound sense of my insistence on dialogue, as it is only in dialogue that language is living. It is the title of a discourse that Kierkegaard once wrote: “The upbuilding that lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong.”68 Ibid., pp. 9–10. Gadamer, “Ermeneutica,” in Encyclopedia del Novecento, p. 735 (in Gesammelte Werke, as “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik,” in vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 103–4). 65 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität, Subjekt und Person,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 95. (This work was published for the first time in Gesammelte Werke.) 66 For further details on this, see Wilhelm Anz, “Die platonische Idee des Guten und das sokratische Paradox bei Kierkegaard,” in Die antike Philosophie in ihrer Bedeutung für die Gegenwart. Kolloquium zu Ehren des 80. Geburtstages von Hans‑Georg Gadamer, ed. by Reiner Wiehl, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag 1981, pp. 23‑36. 67 Gadamer, “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. by Ernst Behler und Jochen Hörisch, p. 255 (in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 130). 68 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und ontologische Differenz,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, p. 70. (This work was published for the first time in Gesammelte Werke.) 63 64

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IV. Interpretation of the Appropriation of Kierkegaard by Gadamer We might say that the appropriation of Kierkegaard by Gadamer was timely, appropriate and basic. It suffices carefully to read Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy, which we tried to outline in section I, to realize the remarkable presence of Kierkegaard’s thinking, although he is not mentioned as often and as systematically as Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. The appropriation of the critique of subjective idealism, the philosophical system that minimizes the value of life, experience, historicity, and freedom was invaluable for Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy. By taking up Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy, he was able to develop a hermeneutic philosophy with claims analogous to the Danish thinker’s reflection. In this way he was able to construct a philosophical project in which the I is displaced from its absolute position and put into a relationship of understanding and circular—personal, conceptual—constitution in the encounter with the other. After all, thinking cannot become hostage to a system or to concepts that abort life in its facticity. We also fully agree with Jürgen Habermas’ view that a dominant trait in Gadamer’s philosophy is his continued attempt to “build bridges,” “not only between people, but also between the different traditions of culture and thought.”69 This is expressed throughout his work, in which he intermingles classical thinking, Plato and Aristotle, and the reflections of modernity, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger.70 Having been inspired by Kierkegaard’s Socratic style, Gadamer might be called “the contemporary Socrates,” which Gianni Vattimo expressed in this way: “His forte always lay in dialogical, Socratic conversation, not in constructing abstract conceptual worlds…The soul of hermeneutics, he always emphasized in his last years, consists in the possibility that the other might be right.”71 This is also visible in Kierkegaard’s thinking. Besides the transdisciplinary posture that pervades his hermeneutic project, what deserves to be highlighted in Gadamer’s philosophy is the fact that he retrieved and incorporated into his thinking what is conventionally called the humanistic tradition. Thus, it is not by chance that his work is interwoven with ethical, aesthetic, methodological, literary, and poetic issues. We know that Gadamer’s guiding question at the end of his life was “What does it mean to be a human being?” In contrast to modern human beings, who think that they can find a definitive answer to the proposed question through their method, as if they were the absolute masters of their own lives and destinies, in Gadamer’s view “much of what we do, say, and are depends for its rightness on an ethos whose implicit effects involve more than we are actually conscious of.”72 Philosophy must not only seek absolute, infallible, and universal answers, but must also have “the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher…must…be aware of the tension Francisco Fernández Labastida, “Gadamer, el filósofo constructor de puentes,” Istmo. Humanismo y Empresa, vol. 44, no. 260, 2002, p. 1. 70 Ibid. 71 Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eine Biographie, p. 354. 72 Ibid., p. 357. 69

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between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.”73 It is in the joint articulation of these two models that Gadamer’s philosophy is sustained in the light of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Thus, “the point is to make us aware of our limitedness, in order to achieve a horizon and grow a little beyond the limits of our present standpoint, though we never succeed in getting beyond our finitude.”74 This is mirrored in the Socratic motto “I know that I know nothing.” After all, “what can be methodologically controlled is only a tiny part of our life experience.”75 Taking all this into account, I think that it would be worthwhile further to develop relations between Kierkegaard and Gadamer in terms of their retrieval of Socratic and Platonic philosophy both in its content—the idea of the good, beautiful, and true—and in its form of philosophizing. However, Gadamer’s appropriation of Kierkegaard’s philosophy did not prevent him from raising minor reservations about the latter’s thinking. Gadamer does not agree with Kierkegaard’s reformulation of the play Antigone.76 Although he agrees with Kierkegaard as the great critic of Hegel, he disagrees with the objection to the infinitude of Hegelian dialectics, preserving and integrating, in this respect, the advances of his dialectical view77 and developing a “dialogical dialectics.”78 According to Gadamer, Kierkegaard represents only a gesture of protest—and rightly so—against speculative idealism, but does not offer an appropriate and corrective solution to it.79 As far as ethics is concerned, although Kierkegaard is important to Gadamer, Aristotle is even better.80 Thus, the most correct and appropriate understanding of the hermeneutic philosophy developed by Gadamer must refer to Kierkegaard’s thinking, be it to an indirect reception, for example, his grasp of Jaspers’ and Heidegger`s philosophy, or be it to a direct influence, for example, his grasp of the ideas contained in Either/ Or. A careful look shows that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is woven with many threads of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Besides being critical towards Gadamer, “Vorwort zur 2. Auflage,” in Wahrheit und Methode (1965), pp. XXIII– XXIV (in his Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 448; “Preface to the Second Edition” in Truth and Method, p. xxxiv). 74 Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eine Biographie, p. 321. 75 Ibid. 76 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 125 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 137; Truth and Method, p. 128). 77 Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 326 (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 349; Truth and Method, p. 349). 78 Luiz Rohden, “Hermenêutica filosófica: uma configuração entre a amizade aristotélica e a dialética dialógica,” Síntese Nova Fase, vol. 31, 2004, pp. 191–212. 79 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Decostruzione e interpretazione,” Aut Aut: Rivista di filosofia e di cultura (Nuova Serie), no. 208, 1985, p. 8 (first published in German as “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 368–9). 80 Gadamer, “Ethos und Logos,” in ΑΝΟΔΟΣ. Festschrift für Helmut Kuhn, pp. 23–34, see p. 28 (reprinted as “Aristoteles und die imperativische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog, p. 388). 73

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knowledge detached from praxis, Gadamer’s hermeneutics challenges—in the wake of Kierkegaard—subjective idealism by correcting and supplementing it with the inclusion of temporality, facticity, and otherness. In this way it becomes a practical, dialogical philosophy. Although it would be possible further to explore the implicit presence of Kierkegaard in Gadamer’s work through concepts that are constitutive of the latter’s hermeneutic philosophy, we chose to describe Kierkegaard’s decisive presence on the basis of Gadamer’s direct quotations of Kierkegaard in his Gesammelte Werke, which could be summarized in the following statement: “ ‘Understanding’ no longer means an attitude of human thinking among others that can be methodically disciplined and turned into a scientific procedure, but constitutes the basic movement of human existence.”81

Gadamer, “Ermeneutica,” in Encyclopedia del Novecento, p. 735 (in Gesammelte Werke, as “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik” in vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, p. 103). 81

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Gadamer’s Corpus “Was ist Wahrheit?,” Zeitwende. Die neue Furche, vol. 28, 1957, pp. 226–37; see pp. 236–7. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 44–56, see p. 55.) Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen: Mohr 1960, see p. 91; p. 120; p. 121; p. 123; p. 125; p. 240; p. 326. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 1, see p. 101; p. 131; p. 132; p. 134; p. 137; p. 259; p. 349; English translation: Truth and Method, 2nd revised ed. trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Continuum 2006, see pp. 82–3; p. 123; p. 124; p. 126; p. 127; p. 246; p. 339.) “Zur Einführung,” in Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, Stuttgart: Reclam 1960, pp. 93–114, see p. 94. (Reprinted as “Die Wahrheit des Kunstwerks,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985– 95, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 249–61, see pp. 249–50.) “Die phänomenologische Bewegung,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 105–46; see pp. 110–11. (This text was originally published in Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 10, 1963, pp. 1–45; it was revised and reprinted in Gesammelte Werke. The passage in which Kierkegaard is mentioned does not appear in the original publication but only in the reprinted version.) “Über die Möglichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik,” in Sein und Ethos. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Ethik, ed. by P. Engelhardt, Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag 1963, pp. 11–24; see p. 13. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme. Gestalten, pp. 175–188; see p. 177.) “Vorwort zur 2. Auflage,” in his Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 2nd ed., Tübingen: Mohr 1965, pp. XIII–XXIV; see p. XXI; pp. XXIII–XXIV. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 437–48; see pp. 445–6; p. 438.) “V. Philosophische Begegnungen. Karl Jaspers,” Ruperto Carola, vol. 21, no. 46, 1969, pp. 50–6; see p. 52; p. 54. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 392– 400; see p. 394; p. 395.)

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“Die Unfähigkeit zum Gespräch,” Universitas, vol. 26, 1971, pp. 1295–1304; see p. 1299. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 207–15, see pp. 210–11.) “Selbstdarstellung Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Philosophie in Selbstdarstellungen, vols. 1–3, ed. by Ludwig J. Pongratz, Hamburg: Meiner 1975–77, vol. 3, pp. 59–100; see p. 65; p. 78; p. 81. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 479–508, see p. 483; p. 492; pp. 495–6.) “Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität, Subjekt und Person,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 87–99; see p. 88; p. 95. (This work was published for the first time in Gesammelte Werke.) Philosophische Lehrjahre, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1977, see p. 12; p. 44; p. 76; p. 202; p. 203; p. 206; p. 207; p. 234; p. 235. (English translation: Philosophical Apprenticeship, trans. by Robert R. Sullivan, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1985, see p. 5; p. 50; p. 68; p. 85; p. 161; p. 162; p. 164; p. 165; p. 171; p. 172.) “Ermeneutica,” Encyclopedia del Novecento, Rome: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana 1975ff., vol. 2, pp. 731–40; see p. 735. (The German version of this text was published under the title “Klassische und philosophische Hermeneutik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 92–117; see pp. 103–4.) “Das Erbe Hegels,” in Das Erbe Hegels. Zwei Reden aus Anlaß der Verleihung des Hegel-Preises 1979 der Stadt Stuttgart an Hans-Georg Gadamer am 13.6.1979, ed. by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, pp. 35–83; see p. 46; p. 53. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme. Gestalten, pp. 463–83, see pp. 467–8; p. 470.) “Existentialismus und Existenzphilosophie,” in Neue Deutsche Hefte, vol. 28, 1981, pp. 675–88; see p. 676; p. 677. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 175–85, see p. 176, pp. 176–7.) “Der platonische ‘Parmenides’ und seine Nachwirkung,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog, pp. 313–27; see p. 326. (This text was originally published in Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 51, 1983, pp. 39–51; it was revised and reprinted in Gesammelte Werke. The passage in which Kierkegaard is mentioned does not appear in the original publication but only in the reprinted version.) “Auf schwankendem Boden: Vom Wandel in den Geisteswissenschaften,” Bilder und Zeiten. Beilage der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, no. 225, September 28, 1985, p. 4 (Reprinted as “Vom Wandel in den Geisteswissenschaften,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 179–84; see p. 181).

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“Zwischen Phänomenologie und Dialektik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 3–23; see p. 8; p. 9; p. 22. (This work was published for the first time in his Gesammelte Werke.) “Decostruzione e interpretazione” Aut Aut: Rivista di filosofia e di cultura (Nuova Serie), no. 208, 1985, pp. 1–11, see p. 8. (The German version of this text was first printed as “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 2, Hermeneutik II. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen. Register, pp. 361–72; see pp. 368–9.) “Vernunft und praktische Philosophie,” in Vernunft und Kontingenz. Rationalität und Ethos in der Phänomenologie, ed. by Ernst Wolfgang Orth, Munich: Karl Alber 1986, pp. 174–85; see p. 176; pp. 178–9. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 259–66; see p. 260; p. 262.) “Die deutsche Philosophie zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen,” Neue Deutsche Hefte, vol. 34, no. 3, 1987, pp. 451–67; see p. 460; p. 461; p. 462. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 356–72; see pp. 363–4; p. 365). “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” in Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, ed. by Ernst Behler and Jochen Hörisch, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh 1987, pp. 251–60; see p. 253; p. 255. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 125–37; see p. 128; p. 130.) “Heideggers Rückgang auf die Griechen,” in Theorie der Subjektivität. Festschrift für D. Henrich, ed. by Konrad Cramer et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1987, pp. 397–424; see 403; p. 405. (Reprinted as “Auf dem Rückgang zum Anfang,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 3, Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, pp. 394–416; see p. 398; p. 399). “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” in Philosophie und Poesie. Otto Pöggeler zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog 1988, pp. 3–15; see p. 9. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 138–47; see p. 143.) “Ethos und Logos,” in ΑΝΟΔΟΣ. Festschrift für Helmut Kuhn, ed. by Rupert Hofmann et al., Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora 1989, pp. 23–34; see p. 28. (Reprinted as “Aristoteles und die imperativische Ethik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III. Plato im Dialog, pp. 381–95; see p. 388.) “Hermeneutik und ontologische Differenz,” in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 58–70; see p. 70. (This work was published for the first time in Gesammelte Werke.) “Heidegger und die Griechen,” in Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Mitteilungen, no. 55, 1990, pp. 29–38; see p. 31. (Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, pp. 31–45; see p. 34.)

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II. Sources of Gadamer’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Heidegger, Martin, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Freiburg, Winter Semester 1921–22), in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilungen 1–4, vols. 1–102, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1975–, Abteilung 2 (Vorlesungen 1919–1944), vol. 61, ed. by Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (1985), p. 24; p. 182. — Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität (Freiburg, Summer Semester 1923), in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilungen 1–4, vols. 1–102, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1975–, Abteilung 2 (Vorlesungen 1919–1944), vol. 63, ed. by Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (1988), see p. 5; p. 17; p. 30; pp. 41–2; p. 108; p. 111. Jaspers, Karl, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin: Springer 1919, p. 12; p. 61; p. 90; pp. 94–6; p. 99; pp. 217–18; pp. 238–9; pp. 245–7; pp. 255–6; pp. 238–9; p. 329; pp. 332–5; p. 339; p. 341; pp. 348–9; p. 351; pp. 354–5; p. 357; p. 359; pp. 370–81. Kierkegaard, Søren, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–12, trans. and ed. by Hermann Gottsched and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diederichs 1909–22: — vols. 1–2, Entweder-Oder (1911–13); — vol. 5, Der Begriff der Angst (1912); — vols. 6–7, Philosophische Brocken. Abschließende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift (1910); — vol. 12, Der Augenblick (2nd printing, 1909). — Leben und Walten der Liebe, trans. and ed. by Albert Dorner, Leipzig: F. Richter 1890 (2nd ed., trans. and ed. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, introduced by Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diederichs 1924 (vol. 3 in Søren Kierkegaard, Erbauliche Reden)). III. Secondary Literature on Gadamer’s Relation to Kierkegaard Anz, Wilhelm, “Die platonische Idee des Guten und das sokratische Paradox bei Kierkegaard,” in Die antike Philosophie in ihrer Bedeutung für die Gegenwart. Kolloquium zu Ehren des 80. Geburtstages von Hans‑Georg Gadamer, ed. by Reiner Wiehl, Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag 1981, pp. 23‑36. Delecroix, Vincent, “Gadamer et l’herméneutique post-romantique de Kierkegaard,” in L’Héritage de Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. by Guy Deniau and Jean-Claude Gens, Paris: Éditions Sborg 2003 (Collection Phéno), pp. 133–42. Dunning, Stephen N., “Paradoxes in Interpretation. Kierkegaard and Gadamer,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995 (Studies in Continental Thought), pp. 125–41. García Pavón, Rafael, “La idea de contemporaneidad en la hermenéutica filosófica: para un diálogo entre Søren Kierkegaard y Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Boletín Informativo de la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos, no. 10, 2002, pp. 8–19.

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Grondin, Jean (ed.), Gadamer-Lesebuch, Tübingen: UTB/Mohr Siebeck 1997, pp. 4–9; p. 43; p. 88; p. 116; p. 174; pp. 240–3; p. 249; p. 278. — Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eine Biographie, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1999, p. 20; pp. 59–66; p. 70; p. 119; pp. 123–39; p. 171; p. 192; p. 194. Johnson, Patricia A., “The Task of the Philosopher. Kierkegaard/Heidegger/ Gadamer,” Philosophy Today, vol. 28, 1984, pp. 3–18. Labastida, Francisco Fernández, “Gadamer, el filósofo constructor de puentes,” Istmo. Humanismo y Empresa, vol. 44, no. 260, 2002, pp. 1–9. Lemire, Roseline, “Gadamer et Kierkegaard,” Arguments: La revue de philosophie de l’Université de Montreal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 55–63. Pegueroles, Joan, “Otra verdad, otra razón en Newman y Gadamer, Kierkegaard y Blondel,” Espíritu, vol. 47, no. 117, 1998, pp. 37–46. — “Tres notas sobre Gadamer y una reseña,” Espiritu, vol. 48, no. 120, 1999, pp. 189–97. Rohden, Luiz, “Repetition and Contemporaneity: Kierkegaardian Crumbs in HansGeorg Gadamer,” Soren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 52, 2007, pp. 25–32. — Hermenêutica filosófica. Entre a linguagem da experiência e a experiência da linguagem, São Leopoldo: Ed. Unisinos 2002, pp. 93–108; pp. 179–220. Schweiker, William Alexander, The Play of Texts—The Way of Discipleship: A Theological Reconstruction of Imitation Through the Thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Soren Kierkegaard, Ph.D. Thesis, The University of Chicago, Chicago 1985.

Edmund Husserl: Naturalism, Subjectivity, Eternity Jamie Turnbull

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) began a philosophical project which became the greatest single influence on continental European philosophy in the twentieth century. Husserl undertook a Ph.D. in mathematics before turning to philosophy. Applying his mathematical rigor to philosophical inquiry, Husserl developed a philosophical system, including his phenomenology: the science of the essence of consciousness. We now know Husserl’s work to comprise a system covering logic, mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. In this article we will take a brief look at Husserl’s thought, before considering a number of remarks he makes about Kierkegaard. In this I shall argue that Kierkegaard had little, or no substantive, influence on Husserl’s thinking. I will close by attempting to locate Kierkegaard in the more general context of Husserl’s views. While Husserl and Kierkegaard appear to be engaged in similar projects, and while Husserl may have envisaged parts of his project to be reflected in Kierkegaard’s work, they are in fact very different. I. Husserl’s Philosophical Project Husserl’s philosophy stands at the center of twentieth-century European continental philosophy. Husserl was influenced by, amongst others: Aristotle, Gottfried Leibniz (1647–1716), David Hume (1711–76), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and Franz Brentano (1838–1917). His thinking subsequently influenced his pupil Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), as well as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Maurice MerleauPonty (1908–61), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Husserl is famous for the development of phenomenology, and the phenomenological method: the science of the essence of consciousness. His writing also marked the beginning of mereology (the study of part–whole relations) as an independent discipline, as well as being the source of numerous other concepts, distinctions, and arguments. Husserl scholars are divided when it comes to the question of the unity and coherence of his thought. Some claim that Husserl’s thought is subject to radical change over the course of his intellectual life, shifting from realism to idealism, whilst others hold his views to be more consistent. This section offers a general outline of Husserl’s thinking.

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In 1891 Husserl published the results of his habilitation thesis as the Philosophy of Arithmetic.1 In this work Husserl attempted to account for our concepts of number in terms of psychic acts, such as our ability to count groups of items. The Philosophy of Arithmetic was subsequently, and famously, criticized by the founder of modern logic Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) as advocating psychologism: the view that logical laws are grounded in, extrapolated from, or explicable in terms of psychological processes. There is some debate as to whether the Philosophy of Arithmetic actually expresses a psychologistic position, but in any case Frege’s critique seems to have had a profound effect on Husserl. Following Frege’s remarks, Husserl spent ten years reflected upon the relationship between logic and psychology before publishing Logical Investigations,2 which itself begins with a trenchant critique of psychologism. With the Logical Investigations Husserl did not simply seek to attack psychologism in the philosophy of mathematics, but began to think of that view as symptomatic of a more serious malady afflicting rationality, philosophy, and ultimately humanity. To grasp why Husserl’s concern with psychologism could be so extended we need to understand something of his assessment of the philosophy of his day, why he thinks that philosophy leaves mankind in crisis, and hence the need for a renewal or rebirth of philosophy. For Husserl, contemporary philosophy can be divided into various forms: naturalism, historicism, and different species of irrationalism. What these share, according to Husserl, is a disregard for the nature of reason, a misunderstanding of the nature and role of philosophy, and so of what it is to be a human being. As already noted, the psychologicist holds that logic and its laws are grounded in, extrapolated from, or explicable in terms of, psychological processes. In this the psychologicist does not take logic to comprise an independently existing subject matter, worthy of its own discipline of study, but ultimately as accountable for in terms of human psychology. According to the psychologicist, logic is the subject matter of empirical psychology; and so is to be studied as a branch of it. Husserl takes psychologism to result in untenable and absurd consequences. For if psychologism’s doctrines about the nature and status of logic are true, they undermine their own claim to be taken seriously, leaving the psychologicist in an untenable predicament. Put otherwise, if true, the psychologist’s claims amount to no more than descriptions of his or her own psychology; and as such cannot account for the generality or This article would not have been possible without the assistance of Thomas Vongehr and John Noras. I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Ullrich Melle, Director of the Husserl Archives in Leuven, for permission to cite from unpublished Husserl-manuscripts. References to these manuscripts are to documents housed at the Husserl Archives, Leuven. 1 Edmund Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologie und logische Untersuchungen, Halle: Pfeffer 1891. (English translation: Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901, trans. by Dallas Willard, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher 2003 (Edmund Husserl Collected Works, vol. 10.) 2 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vols. 1–2, Halle: Niemeyer 1900–01. (English translation: Logical Investigations, vols. 1–2, trans. by J.N. Findlay, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and New York: Humanities Press 1970 (translation of the second revised German edition, Halle: Niemeyer 1913–21).)

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validity they would need to be taken seriously. For the psychologicist’s claims are, presumably, not just advanced about the psychology of their proponent, but as holding universally. For Husserl psychologism does not more adequately account for our psychological nature but would, in attempting to reduce rationality to psychology, betray it. For Husserl, psychologism is not merely a mistaken view in the philosophy of mathematics, or empirical psychology, but pervasive in one of the most corrupting forces in contemporary philosophy: naturalism. Naturalism is the view that human beings are basically natural phenomena, and can be explained as such: that is, in terms of the natural sciences. Naturalism also treats consciousness and the human capacities for reason and logic as accountable for in terms of empirical investigation and is thereby, Husserl thinks, subject to the same absurd consequences as psychologism.3 Husserl’s other main concern is with historicism, which he also holds to result in absurdity—historicism being the view that logic and its laws are relative to a particular point in time and history. The absurdity, presumably, is that if the historicist’s claim is true, it is relative to the historicist’s own historical situation, and as such lacks the generality and validity it would need to be taken seriously. The historicist claim is advanced as not simply true at the point in history at which it is made, but as ahistorically so.4 According to Husserl, both naturalism and historicism operate with reductivistic views of human beings and their nature. While naturalism attempts to reduce human beings to physical things, historicism attempts to reduce human consciousness and experience to history. In this Husserl conceives of naturalism and historicism as united by a common confusion, namely that of treating the ideas of human beings as if they were facts. In this way both naturalism and historicism are said to adhere to a “superstition of facts.”5 Yet the result of trying to account for human nature wholly in terms of scientific or historical fact is, Husserl thinks, nonsense. When we try to take these positions seriously the ultimate consequence of them is, according to Husserl, “skeptical subjectivism.”6 Both views leave us unable to say more than is true of our own case, and would thereby rob us of the generality and validity required to hold claims about human beings and their nature as such. If these views were to win out, the result would be that “the ideas of truth, theory, and science would, then, like all ideas, lose their absolute validity,” which for Husserl would leave us in absurdity.7 The other force Husserl takes to be at work in contemporary philosophy is that of irrationalism. Irrationalism is the view that rationality and philosophy cannot Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos, vol. 1, 1910–11, pp. 289–341, see pp. 294–5. (English translation: “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 1981, pp. 169–70). 4 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” pp. 324–5. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 186.) 5 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” pp. 336–7. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 193.) 6 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” p. 324. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 186.) 7 Ibid. 3

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account for what it is to be human and so must be given up on. (Husserl later came to think of the existentialism that was superseding his work in popularity as just such an irrationalism.) While naturalism and historicism seek to give an account of human reason and to proceed by it, they fail to operate with adequate conceptions of it. In contrast, irrationalism gives up on attempting to give an account of human nature in terms of reason altogether. What unites all of these movements for Husserl is a failure, or inability, to do justice to human beings and their natures as rational beings. For while naturalism and historicism attempt to give a rational account of human beings, irrationalism constitutes a rejection of man’s belief, or faith, in his own rational nature and his attempt to give an account of himself in its terms.8 In the face of the irrational and unsatisfactory forces at work in contemporary philosophy, what is required, Husserl thinks, is a return to a more ancient philosophical quest, normally to give a rational account of human nature and the cognitive capacities of human beings. What is at issue is nothing less than the nature of human reason and our nature as rational beings. In this situation it is important for us to get clear about the nature of logic, its laws, and the nature of our own existence as cognizers. In this way Husserl, like many philosophers before and after him, offers a critique of the subject matter, methods, and aims of previous philosophies, while proposing a novel conception of our subject. What is needed, according to Husserl, is a renaissance of philosophy. For this to be achieved we need to begin conducting philosophy in a rigorous and scientific fashion. As Husserl writes in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”: “I do not say that philosophy is an imperfect science; I say simply that it is not yet a science at all, that as science it has not yet begun.”9 Philosophy can have this status because of its subject matter. For Husserl, the subject matter of philosophy is our ideas, which do not derive from history or psychology but have an independent, necessary, and eternal existence. In investigating our ideas, philosophy is, then, not simply making psychological observations, or stating historical facts, but examining what is of the essence of human beings and their rational natures. In studying ideas, philosophy can achieve the status of a science although not a natural science. Ideas differ in kind from the phenomena studied by the natural sciences, and so the methods required to investigate them differ from those of the sciences. For Husserl philosophy is, in part, a theory of our ideas: not a scientific theory, or like a theory in mathematics or geometry, but a theory nonetheless. Central to Husserl’s philosophy and phenomenological method is the notion of intentionality: the aboutness, or directed nature, of human consciousness. In being conscious, I am, nearly always, conscious of something. What I am conscious of Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, posthumously ed. by Walter Biemel, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954, pp. 10–11 (Husserliana, vol. 6). (English translation: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. by David Carr, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 1970, pp. 12–13.) 9 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” pp. 290–1. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 167.) 8

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are ideas, or meanings, and these are the subject of philosophical investigation. In applying the phenomenological method, we are asked to bracket the question of the ontological existence of objects and pay attention to our experience of the objects themselves and their meanings. In investigating these ideas or meanings, the phenomenological method would proceed as follows. For instance, if I were to offer a phenomenological report on my current experience, I might say: “I see my desk, on top of which are my computer and pencil.” In terms of the phenomenological method we would bracket the question of the ontological existence of the entities to which my report refers: desk, computer, pencil. What the sense of my report subsequently expresses is not merely something about my own psychology, but the essence of things themselves. Indeed, my report expresses an essential structure of human consciousness, something shared by all conscious beings. Philosophy, for Husserl, is the study of intentionality and the essential structures of human consciousness. In studying intentionality, we are doing justice to something that is of the essence of human consciousness; it is something that cannot be reduced to, or accounted for in terms of, natural processes. Indeed, for Husserl, this is precisely where the programs of naturalistic or historicist reductionism go wrong. For in attempting to account for human beings wholly in terms of natural or historical processes, they are unable to account for, and do justice to, the intentional structure of consciousness. Husserl suggests that such reductionisms thereby miss out on the human soul.10 In his last great work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl continued to examine the relationship between our scientific and everyday conceptions of ourselves. Indeed, the confusion of these conceptions, according to Husserl, gives rise to crisis. One of the key notions advanced in this text is that of the Lebenswelt or life-world. The Lebenswelt is our surrounding, common world. It is the world structured by the intersubjective experiences of human beings, in which values are constituted by us and so in which experience is infused with value and culture. The Lebenswelt is the background against which our disputes and disagreements make sense. It is the world that the empirical sciences presuppose and depend upon, but promptly forget. Having undertaken a brief introduction to Husserl’s motivations, ideas, and conception of philosophy, we are now in position to consider his relationship with Kierkegaard. What, if anything, did Husserl take from Kierkegaard’s thought and work? II. Husserl and Kierkegaard Given the above brief sketch of Husserl’s philosophy, one might think that there is little in the way of connection with Kierkegaard. For this reason one might be surprised to find that, prima facie, the following general connections can be drawn between them. Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” p. 307. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 177.)

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For instance, both figures would list amongst their interests: subjectivity, objectivity, reason, finitude and infinity, history, the nature of philosophy, the human soul, the loss of our humanity or selves, time, recollection, inter-subjectivity, actuality, passion, and love. Both Kierkegaard and Husserl envisage themselves to be confronted by an age that is obsessively objective, and which overlooks human subjectivity, an age which fails to pay attention to the how of experience. The problem, for both, is an excessive focus on objective truth, at the expense of overlooking our relationship to that truth. Both hold our situation to be one in which we are, per impossibile, attempting to become wholly objective. Indeed, both thinkers conceive of their ages as lacking, or as subject to forgetfulness about, human subjectivity. Part of this, for both, is being confronted by a naturalism, which they take to embody the spirit of their times. Against naturalism, and against the prevailing spirit of their ages, both figures put forward views in which the human subject has a central role to play. Consider the following passages: “an objectivity after the fashion of natural science is downright absurd when applied to the soul, to subjectivity, whether as individual subjectivity, individual person, and individual life or as communally historical subjectivity, as social subjectivity in the broadest sense”;11 “since the intuitively given surrounding world, this merely subjective realm, is forgotten in scientific investigation, the working subject is himself forgotten.”12 One would be forgiven for thinking that these passages were to be attributed to Søren Kierkegaard, as opposed to Edmund Husserl. In diagnosing his age as subject to a forgetfulness about the nature of human subjectivity, is Husserl remembering Kierkegaard? These general connections might lead one to suspect that the answer is “Yes,” that there is some substantial connection between Kierkegaard and Husserl, and that Husserl was influenced by Kierkegaard. The evidence, however, tells a different story. Evidence that Husserl held Kierkegaard in some regard is to be found in “In Memory of a Great Philosopher,” Lev Shestov’s (1866–1938) recollections of Husserl. Shestov only survived Husserl by some seven months, but in that time he reports: [D]uring my visit to Freiburg, learning that I had never read Kierkegaard, Husserl began not to ask but to demand—with enigmatic insistence—that I acquaint myself with the works of the Danish thinker. How was it that a man whose whole life had been a celebration of reason should have led me to Kierkegaard’s hymn to the absurd? Husserl, to be sure, seems to have become acquainted with Kierkegaard only during the last years of his life. There is no evidence in his works of familiarity with any of the writings of the author of Either/Or. But it seems clear that Kierkegaard’s ideas deeply impressed him.13

Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 271. (The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 337.) 12 Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 343. (The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 295.) 13 See Lev Shestov, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl,” trans. by George L. Kline, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 22, no. 4, 1962, pp. 449– 71, see pp. 453–4. (Originally published in Russkiye zapiski, no. 12, 1938, pp. 126–45 and no. 1, 1939, pp. 107–16.) 11

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According to Shestov, Kierkegaard’s thought made a deep impression on Husserl. Shestov thinks that Husserl only became acquainted with Kierkegaard in the last few years of his life, and if this is correct, it cannot be that Kierkegaard had any substantive influence on Husserl’s philosophy (the main tenets of which were, arguably, already in place at the time of the publication of Logical Investigations in 1900). However, Shestov is wrong on this point, since there is evidence that Husserl was acquainted with Kierkegaard’s thought and work much earlier than the last few years of his life. Perhaps the most telling evidence with regards to Kierkegaard’s relationship to Husserl is as follows. In the course of his life Husserl published five books. At the time of his death he left volumes of lectures, some 40,000 pages of short-hand, and many letters. Kierkegaard is not mentioned in Husserl’s published works, or his lectures, but makes a number of small appearances in his notes and letters. These facts alone I think bear testament to Kierkegaard’s significance for Husserl, and the influence the Dane had on Husserl’s thinking. Nonetheless, let us take a look at the appearances Kierkegaard makes in Husserl’s writing. Given that references to Kierkegaard are scant, it is worth treating what we do have in some detail. Husserl first mentions Kierkegaard in a letter, dated February 11, 1920, to his student Dietrich Mahnke (1884–1939). There Husserl informs Mahnke: “As a recreation I am now reading Kierkegaard which is to be the dissertation topic of an excellent student (from the general Christian student union, actually a theologian).”14 Despite the fact that Husserl is reading Kierkegaard as the background to a student’s dissertation, he seems to have found some light relief or enjoyment in doing so. Unfortunately Husserl does not tell Mahnke which of Kierkegaard’s work he is reading. The student to which Husserl refers was no other than the now famous German Kierkegaard scholar Martin Thust. The story of Thust’s dissertation on Kierkegaard continues in Husserl’s correspondence. In a letter to Winthrop Pickard Bell (1884– 1965), on August 11, Husserl reports: “Sizeable works by students are underway: a philosophy of religion via Kierkegaard (Martin Thust, Søren Kierkegaard, 1931) (a big Kierkegaard movement is now sweeping through Germany, in unity with the great religious longing which has captured the best [people] of all public circles).”15 Husserl appears to envisage Thust’s work on Kierkegaard as part of a more general cultural interest that is taking hold in Germany. Indeed, Husserl takes such interest to be part of the cultured public’s religious longing. There are a couple of other scant references to Kierkegaard in the correspondence of Husserl’s contemporaries and in formal documents. For instance, in 1924 Husserl is reported to have invited several people to his house for dinner, at which he spoke about several figures including Kierkegaard.16 Just what Husserl had to say must, Husserl to Mahnke, February 11, 1920, see Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente, 3.1–3.10: Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. by Karl Schuhmann, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994, vol. 3.3 (Die Göttinger Schule), p. 424. 15 Husserl to Winthrop Bell, August 11, 1920, see ibid., p. 15. 16 “Husserl invited the participants of the seminar to his residence one evening. Husserl spoke about Rickert, Scheler, Theodor Haecker and Kierkegaard.” See Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente, 1: Husserl-Chronik. Denk-und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls, ed. by Karl 14

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however, remain a mystery. Similarly, in reporting upon a student’s dissertation, Husserl writes: “From thenceforth he found access to the Kierkegaard-Jaspersian concept of freedom as it becomes manifest (clear) itself.”17 Yet the exact nature of the connection that Husserl envisages between Kierkegaard and Jaspers’ conceptions of freedom is also left mysterious. The most sizable and informative passages in which Husserl mentions Kierkegaard are to be found in his notes, from 1920 and 1930 respectively. The first of these passages is as follows: Even the endlessness of science, art, etc., has not led to any limit which one could approximate. Then what is the endless cultural drive for? Isn’t the accumulation of goods, i.e., of genuine goods senseless? Isn’t the addiction to science or art a wicked or vain cause? On the other hand, can people find themselves without first losing themselves? Can they be good without doing anything good? And isn’t the Good itself also relevant for this, that is, the Good of good works and even the Good of the external culture, even if not for any particular person, then nonetheless for humanity, and for particular people often indirectly through their noble consumption, through their noble use—although they are in a certain way initially lost in it. That naturally raises the question of to what extent people can become good through the culture that they bring about, or that they acquire as brought about by others and that they preserve for their part or improve upon, to what extent they become good or can become good by means of cultural work. And to what extent cultural enthusiasm and the commitment to cultural achievements is a sin. In addition, however, there is the great fact of the irrationality of contingency, which was actually discovered or rediscovered by Kierkegaard. Nature is relative to the individual and, regarded as its surrounding world, a world full of contingency. He is immersed in the world through contingency, [e.g.,] his birth and upbringing are contingent. The meeting with other people who codetermine him and his life: “fate” is the big word for the particular person and for the communities.18

This passage is not so much an argument as a series of reflections and questions, which lead Husserl to make reference to Kierkegaard. Nonetheless, the passage is telling with regards to Husserl’s view of Kierkegaard and what he takes to be at issue in Kierkegaard’s work. Kierkegaard is credited with having discovered, or rather rediscovered, “the great fact of the irrationality of contingency.” What Husserl takes Kierkegaard to have “discovered” is, basically, the accidental nature of our social and cultural identity, and relationship to the Good. In this passage’s occupation with the relationship between human beings, culture, and the Good, it is easy to see Kierkegaardian themes and issues reflected. Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1981, p. 286 (November 13, 1924). See also the unpublished letters in the Husserl Archives under the signature R III; Herbert Spiegelberg, “Change of Perspectives,” Phaenomenologica, vol. 4, 1959, pp. 56–63, see p. 59, and Herbert Spiegelberg, “Doing Phenomenology: Essays on and in Phenomenology,” Phaenomenologica, vol. 63, 1975, pp. 278–83. 17 Husserl reports on Hans Reiner’s dissertation, July 12, 1926, see Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente, 3.1–3.10: Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 3.4 (Die Freiburger Schüler), p. 465. 18 Husserl Archive, A VI 30/104a, 1920.

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Husserl begins by expressing concern at the apparent limitlessness of science and art, and that this has failed to furnish a standard to which human beings might approximate. Kierkegaard is also concerned with the issue of whether the standard against which human beings are to be measured is to be found in culture, determined by intellectual endeavor, or found elsewhere. Husserl’s observation transposes into a series of questions about the purpose of culture and the accumulation of material goods. Husserl counters his somewhat pessimistic questions about the purposes of culture with the suggestion that men might first have to lose themselves before such a limit can be determined. One might see reflected in this Kierkegaard’s claim that to attain genuine selfhood one must first pass through infinite resignation, and die to immediacy. Husserl then moves on to reflections about the nature of the Good and its relationship to action, culture, humanity, and particular men. The nature of the Good and its relationship to humanity, and to single individuals in particular, is also one of Kierkegaard’s primary concerns. These reflections on the nature of the Good lead Husserl to a further question: the question of the degree to which a human being’s identity and relationship to the Good is determined by their cultural heritage, or the extent to which it is due to the culture that they appropriate, create, and sustain in their own lives. This is the question of the degree to which human beings can be said to be good as a result of their inheritance of, and conformity to, a particular culture (a problem of moral luck?), and the role that their own contribution to culture might have to play in this. This appears to be connected to the question of the extent to which the pursuit of culture and its goods might have theological significance (that is, be considered a sin), at which point Kierkegaard rather aptly makes an appearance. It is, presumably, in respect to the end of determining the extent to which a human being is responsible for his or her own identity and relationship to the Good that Kierkegaard makes his appearance. Specifically, in regards to “the great fact of the irrationality of accidents,” that human beings are subject to certain conditions that are beyond their control and which are not amenable to their capacities for ratiocination. Specifically, the problem would seem to be that the identity offered to man by nature is relative, or accidental: it is contingent and conditioned by one’s relationship to other men. In this Husserl apparently takes Kierkegaard to have formulated, or articulated, a problem concerning what it is to be human. On the basis of this passage alone one cannot draw any conclusion about the influence that this discovery has on Husserl’s thinking, but that Husserl attributes this discovery and problem to Kierkegaard is noteworthy. The next passage in which Kierkegaard is mentioned, from the beginning of 1930, runs as follows: The return from “nature” (which has its ultimate meaning from natural science) to the ego—to the religious, to the self-responsibility before God—has recently been tied to Kierkegaard, and in several transformations this return leads to existential philosophy. [It does so] also by transformation of the allegedly “abstract” phenomenological ego into this [religious] ego, by the removing of positive religion with its ecclesiastical traditions.19

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Husserl had clearly been making connections in his own thinking between what it is to be human and Kierkegaard’s project. It is noteworthy and remarkable that Kierkegaard makes an appearance, once again, in relation to apparently theological ideas and concerns. Again, while Kierkegaard’s role in these reflections must remain mysterious, we might take Kierkegaardian concerns and issues to be present: for instance, in the idea that the self moves from abstraction to concretion in relation to religion. Having considered these somewhat dislocated references to Kierkegaard in Husserl’s writing, we can conclude the following. While these references are insufficient to determine which of Kierkegaard’s works Husserl read, something positive can be said. For, the evidence does suggest that Kierkegaard was more significant for Husserl than the mere frequency of references to him alone would lead one to believe. Husserl appears, first, to have taken some of his own concern with the nature of value, naturalism, and subjectivity to have been at issue in Kierkegaard’s work and, second, to have taken Kierkegaard to have articulated a problem concerning the nature of value, identity, and the Good for human beings. With this said, there is little, or indeed no, reason to think that Kierkegaard had any substantive influence on Husserl’s philosophy. For the issues explored by Husserl in making reference to Kierkegaard do not figure prominently in the context of his overall philosophy and philosophical legacy. III. Naturalism, Subjectivity, Eternity One might balk at the above conclusion. How, one might ask, given the connections drawn at the beginning of the last section, can it be that Kierkegaard had little or no influence on Husserl? For the connections between them appear too numerous and the natures of the respective projects too similar to be mere accident. These connections on their own, surely, establish something. Might it be the case that, despite the evidence, Kierkegaard did have a substantial influence on Husserl? Could Husserl have been so steeped in Kierkegaard’s thought and work that he never made reference to him, simply because he did not need to? From questions such as these conspiracy theories are commonly born. Nevertheless I think I owe it to the reader to outline how Husserl and Kierkegaard’s projects can appear so similar, while in reality being very different. Husserl and Kierkegaard are engaged in radically different projects because the objectivity and naturalism to which they are reacting, the subjectivity of which they seek to remind us, and their respective conceptions of the nature of philosophy, are all very different. For instance, the objectivity against which Husserl rallies is that furnished by the natural sciences: the scientific image of human beings. The objectivity Kierkegaard protests against is that engendered by the Hegelian system: of thinking that the theological nature, and spiritual life, of human beings are amenable to reason. Kierkegaard is not really interested in the natural sciences, or the relationship between our scientific and everyday conceptions of ourselves. Similarly, Husserl is not concerned with the relationship between Christian faith and philosophical reason.

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It is true that both Kierkegaard and Husserl’s thought target naturalisms, but these naturalisms differ dramatically. The naturalism with which Husserl is concerned is the view that human beings are ultimately, or really just, natural phenomena, and so can be accounted for in terms of the methods of natural science. Naturalism for Kierkegaard, by contrast, is the view that the theological nature of human beings can be wholly accounted for in terms of their cognitive capacities, and without reference to a transcendent God. Both Husserl and Kierkegaard view their respective naturalistic targets as reductionisms that would miss the essential and eternal natures of human beings. For Husserl, scientific naturalism attempts to reduce human beings to natural processes, to treat human beings as mere matters of fact. Yet, for Husserl, this belies the nature of human consciousness, its ability to grasp the essential nature of things, including itself, as well as our everyday conception of ourselves and our world. For Kierkegaard, Hegelian naturalism attempts to reduce Christ’s divinity to his humanity, and thereby Christian faith to human reason. What this leaves out of account, according to Kierkegaard, is that human beings can come into a relationship with a transcendent God, and thereby achieve an eternal happiness. These considerations bring us to our figures’ respective views of subjectivity and experience. For Husserl, subjectivity is the world of everyday experience, that in which human beings are capable of grasping the essential nature of things. For Kierkegaard, subjectivity comprises one’s existence as a Christian: the eternal part of one’s own nature realized in relationship to God. In both Kierkegaard and Husserl what is important in subjectivity is the how of experience, although, again, what each means by this is very different. For Husserl, “the how” is the way in which the world presents itself to us in intentionality, and by extension the relationship between our everyday and scientific conceptions of ourselves.20 For Kierkegaard, “the how” is the “passion of the infinite,” the baptism of the Christian believer by the Holy Spirit.21 Human subjectivity provides the way to the essential and eternal nature of human beings, for both our thinkers. By applying the phenomenological method, human beings, for Husserl, can arrive at the essential nature of things and determine the essential structures of human consciousness. For Kierkegaard, it is in subjectivity that, through faith and grace, human beings take on a new life in Christ. A life in which, through coming into a relationship with God, one realizes one’s essence as a human being. Both Kierkegaard and Husserl can be said to be realists when it comes to the nature of essences. Similarly, what is at issue for both is eternity. Husserl is concerned that logic and philosophy treat the essential and eternal nature of things. What is at issue for Kierkegaard is the essential and eternal nature of God, Christianity, and the human soul. According to both Kierkegaard and Husserl, we go wrong in forgetting about subjectivity, although, given the above, what is forgotten is remarkably different. For Husserl, the scientific conception of ourselves, the mathematization of nature, Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 299; p. 311. (The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 320; p. 332.) 21 SKS 7, 185–6 / CUP1, 202–3. SKS 7, 554 / CUP1, 610. On this point see my paper “Kierkegaard on Emotion: A Critique of Furtak’s Wisdom in Love,” Religious Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 2010, pp. 489–508. 20

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abstracts from the everyday world in which we exist. Science deals with an idealized abstraction of the actual world, not the world in its concrete reality. Husserl fears that we are coming to confuse the world revealed by science with our everyday world. In this we forget that science proceeds by means of a technique of abstraction from the actual world.22 Husserl is concerned that this confusion is leading to our losing touch with our everyday conception of the world and our place in it. What we risk forgetting is nothing short of an essential feature of our humanity and the source of our values in the Lebenswelt. For Kierkegaard, what we are in danger of forgetting is not our worldly but our theological nature. Part of the secularization of Christianity, Kierkegaard fears, is our forgetting our place in a divine order of things, in terms of which the end of human nature is realized by coming into a relationship with God. Against this background we might understand both figures’ contention that we go wrong in an obsessive focus on objective truth, while overlooking our subjective relationship to it. For Husserl, we focus on the results of natural science, while overlooking our relationship to those results,23 namely, that science itself is conducted by scientists, who are engaged in research programs, which in turn occur against the background of the Lebenswelt. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, our concern with objective truth is with attempting to establish the truth of Christianity on the basis of the conceptual or truth content of Christian doctrine alone. Such a focus belies the fact that the truth of Christianity is a matter of one’s relationship to the Truth: a personal relationship of faith and grace.24 The difference between Kierkegaard and Husserl is cast in sharp relief when we come to consider their respective views of rationality. For Husserl, the problem in contemporary philosophy, the crisis facing humanity, is a problem concerning the nature of human reason. To solve this problem, and the crisis, what is required is a better conception of human reason: a rational, philosophical account of our own rational natures. For Kierkegaard, by contrast, the threat of losing our spiritual existence is not to be combated by furnishing a better or alternative conception of rationality, but by drawing a limit to reason per se. To understand our natures correctly, for Husserl, we need to think in terms of the right methodology, a methodology addressed to the conscious nature of human beings. Understanding our natures, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of better thinking our way into relationship with God, for one cannot think one’s way into that relationship at all.25 While Husserl rejects scientific naturalism as a satisfactory account of human nature, his views are still naturalistic, in the more general sense that they are grounded in the cognitive capacities of human beings (albeit a richer and more satisfactory conception of those capacities than natural science alone can afford). This more general notion of naturalism is the one with which Kierkegaard is Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 343. (The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 295.) 23 Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 4. (The Crisis of European Sciences, pp. 6–7.) 24 SKS 7, 182 / CUP1, 199. 25 This is not to say that a correct conception of the Christian message, and of our relationship to God, has no role to play in our becoming Christian for Kierkegaard. 22

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operating. Whatever view Husserl arrives at in answer to the crisis of humanity will, as long as he remains committed to reason and leaves no room in his thinking for a transcendent Christian God, count as naturalistic for Kierkegaard. The choice, for Kierkegaard, is not between one naturalistic view and another, one rational account of our nature and another better able to do justice to it, but between naturalism and supernaturalism.26 These points are reflected in our figures’ conceptions of philosophy. On the one hand, Husserl is seeking to distinguish philosophy from natural science, empirical psychology, and history, while, on the other, formulating a scientific and systematic conception of philosophy capable of grounding all knowledge. By contrast, Kierkegaard’s aim is to keep philosophy and theology, or Christianity, absolutely apart. While Husserl seeks a new beginning to philosophy, Kierkegaard seeks an end and limitation to philosophy with respect to Christian faith. The end of our nature is to be fulfilled in philosophy for Husserl, while for Kierkegaard that end lies outside of philosophy: in the relationship between Christian believer and transcendent God.27 What would Kierkegaard and Husserl make of each other? Husserl must, I think, regard Kierkegaard’s project as giving up reason and philosophical science. Kierkegaard’s thought would, one suspects, appear to Husserl as part of the movement of post-Hegelian philosophy that comprises a “weakening of philosophy’s scientific impulse,” a rejection of the “scientific doctrine that constituted the great progress of modern philosophy up to Kant’s time.”28 Husserl would, ironically, consider Kierkegaard one of those “men who set the goal in the finite,”29 as opposed to attempting to do justice to the eternal nature of reason. To Husserl, Kierkegaard’s thought must be counted as a species of the very irrationalism that he is concerned to defend philosophy against. To Kierkegaard, Husserl’s project must be one more attempt by human beings to understand themselves in terms of their own limited cognitive capacities and without the help of God. As such, Husserl’s thought must be regarded by Kierkegaard as a misrepresentation of the theological nature of human beings and the spiritual existence available to them in coming into relationship with God in faith. In not perpetuating the Christian message as an absolute paradox, and drawing a limit to human reason in respect to divinity, phenomenology would foreclose the means by which human beings can come to God. In Kierkegaard’s lexicon, “phenomenology” can be nothing but “paganism” under another name. For Husserl, scientific naturalism, and its consequent “skeptical subjectivism,” are overcome by objectivity and philosophy, by getting to the eternal nature of things as they are held in kind by human beings. In stark contrast, for Kierkegaard the On the nature of Kierkegaard’s supernaturalism see Jamie Turnbull, “Kierkegaard’s Supernaturalism,” in Kierkegaard and Christianity, ed. by Roman Králik et al., Šaľa: Kierkegaard Society of Slovakia; Toronto: Kierkegaard Circle, University of Toronto 2008 (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 3), pp. 72–88. 27 Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, p. 275. (The Crisis of European Sciences, p. 341.) 28 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” pp. 292–2. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 168.) 29 Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” pp. 337–8. (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 194.) 26

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Hegelian attempt to naturalize divinity is halted precisely by identifying the essence of Christianity with a subjectivist realm of hidden inwardness. The subjectivity that Husserl seeks to save philosophy from is precisely that which Kierkegaard seeks to save from philosophy. On the basis of this section the reader can hopefully understand how, despite appearances to the contrary, attention to the more general context of Kierkegaard and Husserl’s thought reveals them to be engaged in radically different projects. IV. Conclusion This article began by taking a brief look at Husserl’s philosophy, before considering a number of remarks he makes about Kierkegaard. In considering these remarks I have argued that Kierkegaard had little, or no substantive, influence on Husserl’s thinking as the issues explored by Husserl when referring to Kierkegaard do not figure prominently in the context of Husserl’s philosophy. This conclusion might strike one as counterintuitive given both figures’ concerns with naturalism, subjectivity, and eternity. For this reason I have closed by outlining how, despite appearances to the contrary, Husserl and Kierkegaard’s intellectual projects radically differ. If Husserl envisaged parts of his philosophy to be reflected in Kierkegaard’s work, he was very much mistaken.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Husserl’s Corpus Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente, 1: Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls, ed. by Karl Schuhmann, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers 1977, p. 286. Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Dokumente, 3.1–3.10: Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. by Karl Schuhmann, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994, vol. 3.3 (Die Göttinger Schule), p. 15; p. 424; vol. 3.4 (Die Freiburger Schüler), p. 465. II. Sources of Husserl’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Undetermined. III. Secondary Literature on Husserl’s Relation to Kierkegaard Caputo, John D., Radical Hermeneutics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1987, pp. 36–7; p. 47. Giusto, Roberto, “Life and Negativity. Towards an Ontology of Human Lack,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 60, 1999, pp. 441–60. Heinamaa, Sara, “The Background of Simone de Beauvoir’s Metaphysical Novel: Kierkegaard and Husserl,” Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 79, 2006, pp. 175– 90. Izzi, John, “The Place of Doubt in Kierkegaard,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 51, 1997, pp. 227–37. Michelsen, John M., “Kierkegaard on Choosing Oneself and the Ground of the ‘Moral Sense,’ ” Analecta Husserliana, vol. 22, 1987, pp. 227–38. Robert, Jean-Dominique, “Approche retrospective de la phénomenologie husserlienne,” Archives de Philosophie, vol. 28, 1972, pp. 320–34. Shestov, Lev, “In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl,” trans. by George L. Kline, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 22, no. 4, 1962, pp. 449–71. (Originally published in Russkiye zapiski, no. 12, 1938, pp. 126–45 and no. 1, 1939, pp. 107–16.) Spiegelberg, Herbert, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Existentialism,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 57, 1960, pp. 62–74. Valls, Alvaro L.M., “Nas fontes do Existencialismo. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche e Husserl,” Cadernos da FAFIMC (Viamão), vol. 19, 1998, pp. 7–26.

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Valori, Paolo, “Husserl e Kierkegaard,” Archivio di Filosofia, no. 2, 1953, pp. 191– 200. Vancourt, Raymond, “Deux conceptions de la philosophie: Husserl et Kierkegaard,” Mélanges de Science Réligeuse, vol. 2, 1945, pp. 193–234. Wahl, Jean, Petite histoire de “l’existentialisme”: suivie de Kafka et Kierkegaard commentaires, Paris: Editions Club Maintenant 1947, p. 47; p. 63. Zecchi, Stefano, “Il paradosso della rinascita. Tra Kierkegaard e Husserl,” Aut-Aut, nos. 214–15, 1986, pp. 97–110.

Karl Löwith: In Search of a Singular Man Noreen Khawaja

Löwith’s engagement with Søren Kierkegaard developed from the rich personal passion of a young philosophy student to a sustained historical and philosophical confrontation that would span Löwith’s entire career. He wrote numerous essays on Kierkegaard, devoted book chapters to him, and read and reviewed Kierkegaard literature with an eagerness and intensity scarcely matched among twentieth-century philosophers. To considerable controversy, Löwith maintained that Kierkegaard’s proper place in was not within the history of Christian thought, but alongside G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and Karl Marx (1818– 1883). He saw in Kierkegaard a wealth of discoveries that would require decades of phenomenological analysis to unpack, including a cogent and nearly prophetic diagnosis of problems only later made familiar with the terms “nihilism” and “capitalism,” and helped to make Kierkegaard part of a wide range of conversations on the problem of modernity. I. Brief Outline of Löwith’s Life and Work Karl Löwith was born in Munich on January 9, 1897 and died in Heidelberg on May 26, 1973, where he was an emeritus professor of philosophy alongside Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929). The path from Munich to Heidelberg, however, was a circuitous one.1 Löwith’s father, a prominent painter in Munich, was a proud German citizen, and though he raised his son as a Protestant, the family was, and would increasingly come to be regarded as, ethnically Jewish. At the tender age of 17, Karl enlisted as a soldier in the German Army and was sent first to the Western Front in France and then to the south, where he was badly injured and taken prisoner of war by the Italians. What could have been a time of unfathomable There is no better starting point to understand Löwith’s life and career than his own autobiography, which was written in 1940 as an entry to an essay competition launched by Harvard University on the social and emotional impact of the rise of the Third Reich. Löwith did not win the competition, but his book came to be among the most influential of its entries and drew an indelible portrait of the intellectual and political culture of twentieth-century Germany. See Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht, Stuttgart: Metzler 1986. (English translation: My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. by Elizabeth King, London: Athlone Press 1994.) 1

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hardship, however, came to stand for Löwith as something else entirely. He was more than literally captivated by the Italians, by their warmth and “humanity”––which he later contrasted sharply with the basic character of his “fellow” Germans––and by their countryside. In a remarkable passage from his autobiography, Löwith writes: I had, however, the first notion of the perfect beauty of the South during my captivity in Finalmarina and in the old fortresses above Genoa, through whose iron bars I could see the sun rise from the sea. There I experienced some of the happiest moments of my life, being completely at one with myself.2

That he would come to regard his year of captivity more under the lens of inspiration than of hardship bespeaks the extent of Löwith’s alienation and the force of his search for a cultural form outside the “Germanness” from which he had been barred. Upon returning to Munich after the war, Löwith enrolled in both biology––the early form of his enduring interest in nature and the natural world––and philosophy at the university. In Munich he was a member of the Freistudentenschaft, the student group that in 1919 invited Max Weber (1864–1920) to deliver the lecture that ultimately became “Science as a Vocation.” Precisely in distancing himself from the enthusiasm of the search for a prophet and savior, Weber made an impression on Löwith that would remain as a kind of center of gravity in the years to come. Weber stood, as Löwith describes it, as an antipode to the diabolical mix of acquiescence, opportunism, and outturned resentment that characterized so many members of the German professoriate.3 “Since that day,” Löwith wrote in 1959 of Weber’s famous speech, “I know what it means to talk about an important person.”4 Later in the same year, Löwith moved to Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), from this point focusing on philosophy alone, but his early interest in nature would remain a thread throughout his career. He went to Freiburg to study with Husserl, but it was in Martin Heidegger (1889– 1976) that he found his first genuine mentor. At the time Heidegger was one of Husserl’s assistants but “the magician from Messkirch,” as his students would come to refer to him, soon revealed himself to be possessed of an intensity and depth of intellectual drive that attracted not only Löwith, but also a number of brilliant young philosophy students with whom both Löwith and Heidegger would grow quite close. These first years in Freiburg were a “uniquely rich and fruitful period,” in which “everything that intellectually sustains my generation even today was

Löwith, Mein Leben, p. 6; My Life, p. 6. Löwith, Mein Leben, p. 17; My Life, pp. 17–18: “The German universities have not had another teacher of his caliber since, and if he had lived to experience 1933, I am certain that he would have remained steadfast to the extreme in the face of the contemptible coordination [Gleichschaltung] of the German professoriate. The mass of apprehensive, weak, and indifferent colleagues would have found a relentless opponent in him, and his words might possibly have averted the pathetic fate that the German ‘intelligentsia’ had prepared for itself like an explanation by contraries. He did not talk about ‘character formation,’ since he had both.” 4 Löwith, Mein Leben, p. 149; My Life, p. 160. 2 3

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said.”5 While there he made connections with a number of other young and soonto-be-important philosophers, including Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), Hans Jonas (1903–93), Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964), and Edith Stein (1891–1942). When Heidegger went to teach in Marburg, Löwith followed, and in 1928 submitted, under Heidegger, his habilitation thesis, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, a phenomenological study and critique of the individual, which was motivated in part by Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1804–72) formulation of the irreducibility of the “Ich-Du” relationship.6 Löwith was soon appointed as a lecturer at Marburg. And when Heidegger was called back to Freiburg to assume Husserl’s chair, Löwith inherited his students. He lectured on Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard––all figures who would become central in his work in the coming years on the history of nineteenthcentury philosophy. An early product of this work was published as a short monograph in 1933 under the title Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, oder philosophische und theologische Überwindung des Nihilismus.7 And although in 1931 his statefinanced position at Marburg was made “permanent,” this would prove far from the case. One of the primary reasons that his status as a Jew had not already long ago interfered with the advancement of his career was the fact of his war service. Discrimination against Jews in the university had become increasingly prevalent, but there was widespread feeling that those who had served––specifically, those who had served at the front––should be excluded from such disenfranchisement. When Hitler was able to officially revoke this “exception” for the veterans and systematically prohibit all Jews from employment in the civil service (university instruction being a part of this service), however, Löwith’s “permanent” position was annulled; he and his wife Ada left Germany for Rome, where he had received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In Rome Löwith fell into a growing community of intellectual expatriates and was able to remain quite active in his work. While there he published two important books, on Nietzsche and on Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), as well as a critical, timely article on “decision” in Carl Schmitt (1888–1985)––which he was forced to publish pseudonymously.8 Even as the reality of the “axis” developed, making the situation of Löwith and his fellow refugees as untenable in Rome as it had been in Germany, Löwith maintained his sympathy for the Italians, who, at least and unlike the Germans, were not devoted to their fascism as an end in itself.9 A visit from Heidegger to Rome in 1936––now infamous thanks to Löwith’s account, which was Löwith, Mein Leben, p. 147; My Life, p. 158. Karl Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, Munich: Drei Masken 1928; see especially p. 13 for the guiding passage from Feuerbach. 7 Karl Löwith, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, oder philosophische und theologische Überwindung des Nihilismus, Frankfurt: Klostermann 1933. 8 Karl Löwith, Jacob Burckhardt: Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte, Luzern: Vita Nova 1936; and Hugo Fiala (pseudonym), “Politischer Dezisionismus,” Revue internationale de la théorie du droit / Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie des Rechts, vol. 9, no. 2, 1935, pp. 101–23. 9 Löwith, Mein Leben, pp. 82ff.; My Life, pp. 86ff. 5 6

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translated into English and published separately during the height of the so-called “Heidegger controversy” of the late 1980s––only confirmed this comparison.10 For the duration of his stay in Rome, Heidegger wore a swastika affixed to his arm, which, combined with what Löwith perceived to be a narcissistic and distorted view of what was happening in Germany, sealed the fate of their once intimate friendship. Existence in Italy was meager, and Löwith was continually trying to obtain some more stable source of income, particularly after the official revocation of his German teaching license in 1935. Political pressures also made conditions in Italy increasingly difficult. By the end of 1936, and after a number of failed attempts to secure posts in Bolivia and Istanbul, Löwith managed to obtain a professorship in Sendai, Japan, where he taught philosophy until 1941. He resumed the lectures that had been broken off in Marburg and continued his work. It was here that he published one of his best-known books, From Hegel to Nietzsche, which brought the vast array of radical philosophical movements in the nineteenth century into view under one lens.11 In 1941, about two weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Löwith and his wife met luck once again in leaving Japan for America, where Paul Tillich (1886– 1965) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) had arranged a post for him.12 He taught there for 11 years, first at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and then at the New School for Social Research (which would later hire Hannah Arendt (1906–75) and Hans Jonas, also former students of Heidegger, and Jews). Löwith continued his work actively. He wrote book reviews and published articles in a number of major philosophical and theological journals. And in 1949 he published Meaning and History, a work aiming to show the impossibility of a philosophy of history by tracing the roots of history itself back to Jewish and Christian eschatologies.13 Along with From Hegel to Nietzsche, Meaning in History is one of Löwith’s most original and influential works. It thrust him into an important debate about secularization and progress with philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920–96), which is foundational in much of the thinking about modernity. In 1952, after two decades of exile, Gadamer invited Löwith to take up a chair in the philosophy faculty at Heidelberg. Löwith taught there until retiring as an emeritus, in 1964. His work in this final stage of his career spanned an enormous breadth, ranging from a critical book arguing for the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and National Socialist politics, which remains until today one of the most important works on Heidegger, to important monographs on Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Paul Valéry (1871–1945).14 He also took to editing and republishing in German 10 See Löwith, Mein Leben, pp. 56–8; Karl Löwith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936,” trans. by Richard Wolin, New German Critique, vol. 45, 1988, pp. 115–16. 11 Karl Löwith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, Zürich: Europa Verlag 1941. 12 Löwith, Mein Leben, pp. 150–1; My Life, p. 162. 13 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949. 14 Karl Löwith, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit, Frankfurt: Fischer 1953; Karl Löwith, Vicos Grundzatz: verum et factum convertuntur, Heidelberg: Carl Winter 1968; and Karl Löwith, Paul Valéry: Grundzüge seines philosophischen Denkens, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1971.

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many of his writings which until then had only appeared abroad. Perhaps the most dominant thread in his writings of this later period is a concern with alienation of the human being from nature, which brought him back to his early concerns about the relation between history, philosophy, and the legacy of Christianity.15 II. Löwith’s Reading of Kierkegaard: Christianity in Context As a scholar, Löwith is perhaps best known as an exponent of intellectual history, and much of his work on Kierkegaard has the basic aim of understanding the Dane in the history of philosophy, that is, in the wake of the speculative thought of Hegel and on the verge of existentialism and phenomenology. But intellectual history is a somewhat ambivalent genre, for while the majority of Löwith’s work centers on the history of nineteenth-century thought, this work was driven unmistakably by contemporary concerns and problems. According to one biographer, Löwith understood “the delusionary excesses of the two World Wars, of the Nazi regime, and of that generation of German anti-democratic thinkers who intellectually prepared the way for German fascism” to have been “inseparable from the phenomenon of ‘European nihilism’––a nineteenth-century inheritance that was appropriated and radicalized in the twentieth.”16 It is in the context of this unrolling tragedy of nihilism that Löwith first understood the significance of Kierkegaard’s work. In the 1933 monograph, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, oder philosophische und theologische Überwindung des Nihilismus, Löwith describes the relation between the two thinkers––one the champion of “existence,” the other of “life”––as a crossroads: “their paths away from nihilism meet and diverge, and in such a way that Kierkegaard’s ‘paradox of faith’ through ‘repetition’ is differentiated from Nietzsche’s no less paradoxical doctrine [Glaubenslehre] of the ‘eternal recurrence of the same.’ ”17 He defines the condition of nihilism for Kierkegaard as the defiant despair in which a person grasps her own finitude and the nothing of the world into which she is “thrown,” but “has not yet dared the leap into faith.”18 From this we can glean two primary traits of Löwith’s reading of Kierkegaard. First, there is the positioning of “faith” as a counter-concept to temporality, as a way of overcoming ironic petrification of the modern response to history by “willing the being of eternity, in which time as such becomes inconsequential.”19 Kierkegaard’s argument against the existential significance of “world history” indeed See Karl Löwith, Wissen, Glaube und Skepsis, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1956; Karl Löwith, Zur Kritik der christlichen Überlieferung, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1966; and Karl Löwith, Gott, Welt und Mensch in der Metaphysik von Descartes bis zu Nietzsche, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1967. 16 Richard Wolin, “Introduction,” in Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. by Richard Wolin, trans. by Gary Steiner, New York: Columbia University Press 1995, p. 16. 17 Löwith, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 7. 19 Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft des Gleichen, Berlin: Die Runde 1935, p. 54. 15

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formed a major part of his appeal for Löwith, whose larger project of a critique of historical consciousness claimed precedent in these nineteenth-century responses to nihilism. What Löwith takes from all this, it should be noted, is more the diagnosis than the cure: “Kierkegaard’s ‘eternal instant’ and his discourse on ‘immutability’ as well as Nietzsche’s paradoxon of the ‘eternal recurrence’ sprung from the insight that we need eternity to be able to withstand the time. But convincing in all this is not the eternity they were aiming at, but the criticism of time with which they started.”20 The second issue that emerges from these citations is the way in which Löwith presents the leap as Kierkegaard’s answer to the (pseudo-)fundamental problem of “the nothing.” Löwith sees Kierkegaard from within his own, twentieth-century intellectual context, in which Kierkegaard is the single thread joining the philosophy of existence of Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (1882–1969), on the one hand, with the dialectical theology of Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Friedrich Gogarten (1887– 1968), on the other. “In the either-or of despair and faith,” Löwith writes, “the human being comes to stand, not before the nothing but before God….Through faith in God, the positive twist on nihilism is realized. For only ‘before God’ can the human being become ‘nothing’ in the positive sense.”21 Löwith understands this standing before the nothing, or despair, to have a positive value only in its transitional function (drawing from Nietzsche’s account of nihilism as a transitional but necessary phase as well as from Kierkegaard’s account of despair itself). But, he argues, this stance of despair is the very condition that Heidegger will call “being-in-the-world,” removing the theological moment to form an unconditional and non-transitory affirmation of finitude.22 Löwith’s reading of Kierkegaard also bears some traces of his erstwhile mentor, Heidegger. Rather than appropriating Heidegger’s specific criticisms of the Dane, or explicitly confronting Kierkegaard with Heidegger’s philosophy, Löwith reveals this pedigree more subtly, in his sense of what Kierkegaard’s most important ideas are, and in the language with which he approaches those ideas. He describes Kierkegaard on numerous occasions as an “existenziell” thinker, which is a term from Heidegger that refers to the relation of philosophy to one’s own, personal life. Passing discussions––such as the account of “standing before the nothing” in The Concept of Anxiety and the young man’s description of contingency in Repetition–– are made into guiding tropes and titled with a language sharply reminiscent of Being and Time––“the void” and “thrownness,” respectively. What is more, Löwith also perceives subtle continuities between Heidegger and Kierkegaard that have escaped the notice of many a commentator. Perhaps the most important of these is the relation between Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication,” which aims to “call attention” to Christianity utterly “without authority,” and Heidegger’s strategy of “formal

Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig on Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 3, no. 1, 1942, pp. 76–7. Emphasis in original. 21 Löwith, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 8. 22 See, for example, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 276; and Karl Löwith, “Die Freiheit zum Tode,” in Was ist der Tod? ed. by Hans Schafer, Munich: Piper 1970, pp. 171ff. 20

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indication,” a formal, non-objective use of philosophical concepts that leaves it to each individual to fill out the immediate existential content.23 What remains in this transition from Kierkegaard to the twentieth-century philosophy of existence is that which Löwith took to be Kierkegaard’s most “fundamental concept”: the “singular one,” or “individual,” as it is usually translated.24 Löwith devoted a number of his writings on Kierkegaard to this concept, beginning with a short section in his habilitation thesis, but also the 1956 essay “Jener Einzelne: Kierkegaard,” the title of which he takes from Kierkegaard’s own epitaph. This singularity, Löwith emphasizes, is not something that each person simply has at birth, but a possibility that anyone can become, provided that he has the “courage” to pass through that “bottleneck” where one is alone with oneself and before God. Löwith understood this idea of the singularity that each person is to develop for herself as Kierkegaard’s “corrective” to the age of “leveling” and homogenization. It is achieved, for Löwith, through the appropriative practice Kierkegaard calls “repetition,” that is, the “retrieval of oneself out of the world’s spell [aus dem Verfallensein an die Welt].”25 And while the unimaginable terror of events in the first half of the twentieth century confirmed unequivocally for Löwith nearly all that Kierkegaard had to say about the growing power of the masses and the dangers of a depersonalized public, it was the very persistence of these forces that eventually brought Löwith to look beyond Kierkegaard’s critique. In the same essay from 1956, Löwith questions Kierkegaard’s championing of singularity as a counterforce to the ever-growing “public,” asking whether this emphasis had not itself simply amounted to “the other side of the amassing and leveling that he battled.”26 Karl Löwith, “Phänomenologische Ontologie und Protestantische Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 11, 1930, pp. 334–5; and Karl Löwith, “Die philosophische Kritik der christlichen Religion im 19. Jarhhundert,” Theologische Rundschau, vol. 5, 1953, pp. 208ff. 24 See Karl Löwith, “Jener Einzelne: Kierkegaard,” Merkur, vol. 10, no. 2, 1956, p. 149. The German der Einzelne, along with Kierkegaard’s original Danish term den Enkelte, is usually translated as “the individual.” There is a certain etymological disparity between the terms, since both the German and Danish term stem from the root “one” and mean something like “single” or “solitary,” whereas the English “individual,” meaning literally that which cannot be divided, tends to imply a certain metaphysics of self-subsistence, indeed of a self determinable in complete isolation from others. Because it is precisely Löwith’s point to critique this notion of the individual, and because he draws on Kierkegaard precisely insofar as he takes his notion of den Enkelte to be distinct from “the individual” (both German and Danish have distinct, Latinate words for this idea), I translate the phrase by the “singular one.” Löwith’s French writings also use the term singulier rather than individuel. See, for example, Karl Löwith, “L’achèvement de la philosophie classique et sa dissolution chez Marx et Kierkegaard,” Recherches Philosophiques, vol. 4, 1934–35, pp. 256ff. 25 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. by J. Harvey Lomax, Berkeley: University of California Press 1997, p. 168; Nietzsches Philosophie, p.149. 26 Löwith, “Jener Einzelne,” p. 151. In this respect Löwith may have been guided by Arnold Ruge (1802–80), whose criticism of Lutheran “egoism” is merely the negated form of universality Löwith discusses in “On the Historical Understanding of Kierkegaard,” Review of Religion, vol. 7, no. 3, 1943, pp. 240–1. 23

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This metaphor of the two-sided phenomenon appears quite frequently in Löwith’s attempts to situate Kierkegaard historically. We saw the figure above, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche standing at opposite sides of the “crossroads” of nihilism. In the later writings on Kierkegaard, however, Löwith tends to favor a comparison with Marx over Nietzsche.27 Both Kierkegaard and Marx recognized that Hegel’s mediation of reason with reality lacked reality, they opposed to mediation a decision: Marx for a new earthly world and Kierkegaard for the old Christian God….Kierkegaard’s critique of the age (1846) corresponds so precisely to the Communist Manifesto that Marx’s critique of the bourgeois capitalist world and Kierkegaard’s critique of the bourgeois Christian world complement one another like the front and back sides of the same thing.28

This reading was based primarily on the late journal entries and critical essays, such as A Literary Review and The Moment, which demonstrate a marked intensification of Kierkegaard’s socio-political critique. Löwith emphasized this critique over the other, equally famous polemic against Hegel, effectively closing the ranks between Kierkegaard and Hegel’s more explicit followers. Löwith undertook this Hegelian reading of Kierkegaard during the 1930s and 1940s, in a number of articles and books on the history of Hegelianism and nineteenth-century thought, but also in 1960 and more explicitly, when Löwith included Kierkegaard in an anthology of works by a group he called “The Left Hegelians.”29 Löwith was perhaps the first scholar, certainly in Germany, to make a serious case for the connections between Kierkegaard and Marx; it was one of the most influential points of his reading of Kierkegaard. Suggesting, however, that the shared enemy of the bourgeois status quo brought Marx closer to Kierkegaard than their conflicting attitudes toward religion pulled them apart, was also one of Löwith’s most controversial claims. It inspired a sharp rebuke on the Marxist side from György Lukács (1885–1971), who referred to Löwith’s comparison as another “night in which all cows are black,” and

In 1941 he writes that the comparison between Marx and Kierkegaard stands as a “corrective to the comparison of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which up to the present has been considered the only meaningful and fruitful comparison. The author himself contributed to this comparison before he saw the historical connection with Marx in full scope.” From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. by David E. Green, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1964, p. 411, note 37. German original: Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 196, note. 28 Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, p. 201; Karl Löwith, “Der europäische Nihilismus,” in Sämtliche Schriften, vols. 1–9, ed. by Klaus Stichweh and Marc B. de Launay, Stuttgart: Metzler 1981–88, vol. 2, 1983, p. 503. 29 See Löwith, “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” pp. 232–67; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 148–53 and passim; and “On the Historical Understanding,” pp. 227–41. The anthology was first published in an Italian translation, La Sinistra Hegeliana, ed. by Karl Löwith, trans. by Claudio Cesa, Bari: Laterza 1960; and two years later in the German original, Die Hegelsche Linke, ed. by Karl Löwith, Stuttgart: Frommann 1962. 27

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sought to maintain a sharp differentiation between the religious “irrationalism” of Kierkegaard and the methodical materialism of Marx.30 One might, nonetheless, argue that it was not out of naiveté or ignorance that Löwith obscured the differences between the revolutionary anti-religion of Marx and the inward, apparently apolitical religiosity of Kierkegaard,31 but out of a desire to critique these terms themselves. Löwith read Kierkegaard more politically and less religiously, perhaps, than either Kierkegaard himself or many “Kierkegaardians” would allow. He frequently criticized other interpreters for ascribing broad philosophical positions to Kierkegaard such as “irrationalism” and “subjectivism.”32 Where he differed from most of the critical theorists of the twentieth century, with whom he often conversed, was in his willingness to measure the work in question not only by its conceptual content and explicit claims, but also by the form and movement of its thinking itself. To take just one example from his book on Nietzsche: The belief in the productive power of contradiction characterizes not only Hegel’s formal dialectic and Schelling’s construction of the universe but also Nietzsche’s reversal of nihilism into the willing of the eternal recurrence. The same faith in the absurd lies at the bottom of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical leap from the sickness unto death into Christian faith as well as at the bottom of Marx’s theory of crisis, according to which only at the critical climax of the most extreme self-alienation can the change into complete self-reacquisition succeed. They all draw nourishment from Saint Paul’s dialectic in the relationship of sin and grace, even if they pretend to be anti-Christian.33

This is just the type of reasoning that provoked Blumenberg to enter into a debate with Löwith about the legitimacy and secularity of the modern age. One might say that it was only insofar as Löwith understood the Left Hegelians as pseudo-atheists that he could also see Kierkegaard, in turn, as a Left Hegelian.34 This subtlety in handling the complex web of affiliation and antagonism in nineteenth-century history extends to nearly every aspect of Löwith’s reading of Kierkegaard. If there is a red thread to Löwith’s interpretation, it is the way György Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, in Werke, vols. 1–18, Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand 1962–, vol. 9, pp. 18–19, p. 221. Though Löwith’s reception among scholars of Kierkegaard is generally rather thin, the claim about Kierkegaard as a Left Hegelian has prompted criticism from at least one place. See Wang Qi, “China: The Chinese Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome III, The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), p. 108. 31 Pace, among others, Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, New York: Fordham 2000, pp. 19–20, note. 32 See Löwith’s remarks on Walter Ruttenbeck’s 1929 book on Kierkegaard in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 156. 33 Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, p. 82; Karl Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft des Gleichen, 2nd ed., Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1956 [1935], p. 86. 34 Löwith also has a number of concrete grounds for comparison of Kierkegaard with the likes of Feuerbach and Marx. In Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 96–8, he cites their common reliance on private, as opposed to state-derived funds, as well as the bleeding together of life and work. On both points, Löwith adds, the three are also distinguished from Hegel. 30

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in which he read Kierkegaard “between” his many roles, voices, and personae. Kierkegaard was a “religious writer” at the borderline between “poetic and religious existence,”35 for whom “neither the common world nor the community of the church meant something to which he could be admitted or to which he could adhere…. He held himself to nothing and this nothing was for him the point of departure for his ‘religious movement;’ ”36 Kierkegaard was no “apostle,” and if he was a “genius,” it could only be ironically.37 Löwith perceived the irreducible tension in Kierkegaard’s notion of the “exception” and pursued its “universal consequences” to a point further than most interpreters, recognizing that even indirect communication was eventually made to yield to a direct and critical act of “bearing witness” to the truth.38 Inverting the usual image of Kierkegaard as a kind of recluse, Löwith sets him up as a counterpoint to Jacob Burckhardt. In contrast with Burckhardt, who attempted to follow the stoics and to become a “private man living in concealment,” “Kierkegaard,” he writes, “was a reformer by nature. On the model of the Christian martyr, he wanted to be an open witness as a ‘singular man.’ ”39 Löwith saw Kierkegaard as a thinker who held himself upon the utmost peak of religious existence, always in danger of falling, and from every side: from apologetics into religious reform, from religiosity into poetry, poetry into philosophy, and even from a state of “inclosing reserve” to “open witness.” Löwith not only observes the many tensions at the heart of Kierkegaard’s life and work, he effectively valorizes them by viewing them as symptoms of a deep complexity of purpose and of a wide-ranging wisdom. Indeed, this perennial danger of collapse, the precariousness of Kierkegaard’s attempt to push himself to extremes, forms one of the principal reasons for Löwith’s continued fascination with Kierkegaard. “No one will mistake the earnestness of his attempt to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom,” Löwith wrote in 1956, “but nor can this be denied: that the unintended result of his writings for the most part consists in the fact that he––much better than Schleiermacher–– made Christianity once again interesting for its ‘cultured despisers.’ ”40 III. Reception Details At the turn of the twentieth century, Kierkegaard’s works were among German intellectuals a bit like the spiritual equivalent of rationed sugar––slowly released and quickly devoured. Particularly in his most stringent critical works––A Literary Review and Attack upon Christendom, which latter was translated just before the turn of the century as a volume entitled Sören Kierkegaard’s Fomenting Writings and

Löwith, “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 209. Löwith, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 14. 37 Ibid. 38 Löwith, “On the Historical Understanding,” pp. 235–6. Also see Löwith, “Jener Einzelne,” pp. 149ff.; “Philosophische Kritik,” pp. 206–11; and the review of Thust, cited below in note 79. 39 Löwith, Jacob Burckhardt, p. 135. 40 Löwith, “Jener Einzelne,” p. 149. 35 36

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Essays41––Kierkegaard’s voice was nearly as powerful as Nietzsche’s, particularly presented in the translators’ razor-sharp Weimar prose.42 Löwith seems essentially to have read everything he could get his hands on, particularly during his Freiburg and Marburg days, when the collected works were still being rolled out and Löwith was surrounded by a number of other Kierkegaard enthusiasts, such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), Heidegger, and the itinerant students of Jaspers. In 1921, in a letter to Heidegger, Löwith lists the “many beautiful things” he has been reading: Nietzsche’s letters with Erwin Rohde (1845–98), Wilhelm Dilthey’s (1833–1911) essay on Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), René Descartes’ (1596– 1650) Passiones animæ, and, last but not least, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Repetition.43 In another letter two years later, Löwith refers to a certain “Pastor Stolly,” who, despite a mediocre thesis on Kierkegaard, nevertheless introduced him to Kierkegaard’s Leben und Walten der Liebe (sc. Works of Love), which he compares favorably to the Christian Discourses and to Practice in Christianity, thus also revealing the range of his early familiarity with the signed works.44 Löwith’s 1928 habilitation thesis, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, cites liberally from Kierkegaard’s texts and devotes a section to the Dane’s notion of the “singular one” (der Einzelne), which he takes to represent a distinct countercategory to the “individual” (das Individuum).45 In Das Individuum, Löwith makes reference to a number of pseudonymous and edifying works, which are cited individually in the following pages and footnotes of this article, as well as to Theodor Haecker’s (1879–1945) two-volume translation of a selection of Kierkegaard’s journals.46 The journals are a resource of considerable importance for Löwith, who saw them as demonstrating the rootedness of Kierkegaard’s “theological problematic” in the place “where the actual problems of life arise, namely, in that ‘history,’ which Søren Kierkegaards agitatorische Schriften und Aufsätze, 1851–1855, trans. and ed. by August Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896. 42 See notes 48–50 below. 43 Letter from Löwith to Heidegger dated January 22, 1921. Sincere thanks to Dr. Hermann Heidegger for permission to copy and quote from these letters. As with the Hong English edition, the first standard German translations of Frygt og Bæven and Gjentagelsen were made part of one volume within Kierkegaard’s collected works. See Søren Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern; die Wiederholung, trans. by H.C. Ketels, Hermann Gottsched, and Christoph Schrempf, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–12 (henceforth Gesammelte Werke followed by volume number), Jena: Diderichs 1909–22, vol. 3, 1909. 44 “The pastor Stolly was promoted in 1915 under Falchenberg, with a dissertation on Kierkegaard….He gave me his dissertation—a clean excerpt and not very compromising, since it consists of only « » sentences. However through him I also received a text of Kierkegaard’s that I did not know before, which I borrowed: Leben und Walten der Liebe, Leipzig, 1890, Richter, translated by Donner. It appeared before Practice and is similar, if even less tightly put together. The chapters are not all of equal worth, but it is methodical in its tendency of interpretation and often just as penetrating and stylistically pure as the Christian Discourses and Practice.” Letter from Löwith to Martin Heidegger, sent from Malchow, Mecklenburg, August 6, 1923. 45 See note 24 above. 46 For the reference to Haecker’s edition, see note 48 below. 41

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precedes all ‘intellectual’ history, in the biography of personal existence-relations.”47 The journals and papers are in fact the most frequently quoted of Kierkegaard’s writings, and Löwith appears to have been familiar with a wide array of selections and translations. He cites frequently from Haecker’s two-volume translation, Die Tagebücher, 1834–1855, but also from a selection and translation of earlier journal entries, Sören Kierkegaard: Die Tagebücher 1832–39.48 He also refers to the 1905 edition of journals edited by Hermann Gottsched (b. 1849) and published under the title Buch des Richters.49 A number of shorter excerpts from Kierkegaard’s papers were published in periodicals; Löwith cites most frequently a small selection published under the title “Das Eine, was not tut” in the Munich journal Zeitwende.50 The entries included in this selection, which date from around 1848 and discuss the rise of the proletariat, the press, and the “demonic religiosity” of communism, were of particular interest to Löwith as a keen student of European revolutionary philosophy and politics.51 Löwith, Das Individuum, p. 177, note 2. Søren Kierkegaard, Die Tagebücher, 1834–1855, vols. 1–2, trans. by Theodor Haecker, Innsbruck: Brenner-Verlag 1923 and Die Tagebücher, 1832–1839, Part 2 of Sören Kierkegaard, (Parts 1 and 2 in one volume) ed. and trans. by Hermann Ulrich, Berlin: Hochweg-Verlag 1925–30. Löwith cites the journals in Das Individuum, p. 177, note; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 140, note; p. 203, note; p. 209, note; “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 11, 1933, pp. 57–8; “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” pp. 257ff.; “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” pp. 58–9; Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 170, note 140; p. 172, note 198; Jacob Burckhardt, pp. 134– 5; pp. 137ff.; p. 362, notes; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 70–1; pp. 152ff., p. 162; pp. 199ff.; p. 213; p. 216; p. 336; p. 437; pp. 491–2; p. 497; p. 499; Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, p. 87, note 18; p. 88, note 13; and Das Verhältnis von Gott, Welt und Mensch in der Metaphysik von Descartes und Kant, Heidelberg: Carl Winter 1964, p. 25. Löwith also includes a passage on singularity and the public from Haecker’s translation in La Sinistra Hegeliana, pp. 449–50; Die Hegelsche Linke, p. 269. In “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 236, note; p. 241, note; Löwith refers to the English translation: The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Alexander Dru, London: Oxford University Press 1939. 49 Søren Kierkegaard, Buch des Richters: Seine Tagebücher, 1833–1855,” ed. and trans. by Hermann Gottsched, Jena: Diderichs 1905. For Löwith’s citations of this edition see “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” p. 59; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 148, note; p. 203, note; Nietzsches Philosophie, pp. 153ff.; pp. 182, notes; Jacob Burckhardt, p. 361, note 67; p. 362, note 82; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 156–7; p. 215; p. 500. In “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 203, note; Löwith also refers to the selection of journal entries collected under the title So spricht Sören Kierkegaard: Aus seinen Tage- und Nächtebüchern, ed. and trans. by Robert Dollinger, Berlin: Furche 1930. 50 Søren Kierkegaard, “Das Eine, was not tut,” trans. by Hermann Ulrich, Zeitwende, vol. 3, no. 1, 1927, pp. 1–7. 51 Löwith cites these entries in “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” p. 66; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 212, note; “Politischer Dezisionismus,” p. 105, note; “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” p. 234, note; Jacob Burckhardt, p. 362, note 74; “Der europäische Nihilismus,” p. 503; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 334, p. 336; and “Heidegger and Rosenzweig,” p. 77, note. He republishes the excerpt in his own anthology of “Left Hegelian” writings, La Sinistra Hegeliana, pp. 469–78; Die Hegelsche Linke, pp. 270–6. 47 48

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Among the other texts that played a prominent role in Löwith’s interest in Kierkegaard as social and religious critic were A Literary Review and Attack on Christendom, both of which were enormously popular in the Weimar period, as well as the series of polemical pamphlets published under the title The Moment.52 As was mentioned above, Kierkegaard’s critique of modernity and of the State Church played a central role in the way Löwith understood Kierkegaard, whom Löwith at one point described as a “reformer according to his nature,” albeit one opposed to the growing cultural demand for reform.53 Kierkegaard’s pseudonymously penned antidote to these problems with Danish Christendom, Practice in Christianity, also figures into Löwith’s reading, albeit with less frequency than the more expressly polemical writings.54 Another anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings on Luther and Protestantism, titled Der Einzelne und die Kirche and put together in 1934, made it into Löwith’s hands to be cited in the Burckhardt book of two years later.55 Over the course of his career, Löwith also refers to, quotes from, and discusses a wide array of Kierkegaard’s philosophical and pseudonymous writings. The Concept of Anxiety is of particular significance to him as an erstwhile student of

The editions Löwith referenced were Kritik der Gegenwart, trans. by Theodor Haecker, Innsbruck: Brenner-Verlag 1914; and Angriff auf Christenheit, trans. by August Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Stuttgart: Frommann’s 1896; and Der Augenblick, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, trans. by Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1923. For Kritik see “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” p. 66; “Politischer Dezisionismus,” p. 104,note; p.121, note; “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” p. 257, note; Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 183, note 18; Jacob Burckhardt, p. 135; p. 361, note 69; p. 662, notes 74–9; “Der europäische Nihilismus,” p. 503; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 150; pp. 201–2; p. 213; p. 336; p. 437; and the passages quoted in La Sinistra Hegeliana, pp. 451–9. Löwith refers to the English translation, The Present Age, trans. by Alexander Dru and Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford 1940, in his essay “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 229, note; p. 236, note. For references to Angriff see Das Individuum, p. 174, note; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 202, note; p. 206, note; p. 208, note; p. 210, note; Jacob Burckhardt, pp. 136–7; p. 361, notes; p. 362, notes; “Heidegger and Rosenzweig,” p. 77, note; “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 236, note; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 111; pp. 149–50; p. 153; p. 275; p. 336; pp. 496ff.; and the passages translated in La Sinistra Hegeliana, pp. 460–8. In Meaning and History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949, p. 46; p. 229, note 10; p. 246, note17; Löwith is able to cite the first English translation, Attack on Christendom, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944. Augenblick is cited in “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” p. 244, note; pp. 262ff.; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 67; p. 69; p. 214; and “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 232, note. 53 Löwith, Jacob Burckhardt, p.135. 54 Søren Kierkegaard, Einübung im Christentum, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, trans. by Hermann Gottsched, Jena: Diderichs 1912; cited in Das Individuum, p. 175, note; “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” p. 261, note; Jacob Burckhardt, p. 134, p. 361, note; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 67; p. 218. Löwith also refers to the English––Training in Christianity, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1941––in Meaning in History, p. 251. 55 Löwith, Der Einzelne und die Kirche: über Luther und den Protestantismus, ed. and trans. by Wilhelm Kütemeyer, Berlin: Wolff 1934; cited in Jacob Burckhardt, p. 362, note 82. 52

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Heidegger’s, as are The Sickness unto Death and Repetition.56 To the lattermost text, as I mentioned above, Löwith devotes a chapter in his 1935 book on Nietzsche, arguing that Kierkegaard’s repetition and Nietzsche’s eternal return represent divergent responses to the same root problem of the nihilistic tendencies of historical consciousness.57 Indeed, Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition, understood as a move by which the past acquired an intensified, subjective importance for the individual, and thereby presented an alternative to the speculative idea of relating to the past through an expanding and objective “historical consciousness,” was of crucial importance for Löwith. In his Burckhardt book, Löwith writes: “Kierkegaard sought in the experiment to retrieve [wieder zu holen] Christianity, ‘as if the 1800 years simply had not been,’ in order to again become a disciple of Christ.”58 This account demonstrates the extent to which Löwith interpreted Kierkegaard’s idea of “repetition” or “retrieval” through Heidegger’s later explication of “repetition” in Being and Time.59 Since Löwith saw Kierkegaard not only as a reaction against Hegel but––or perhaps therefore––also a Hegelian himself, Löwith draws frequently from those of Kierkegaard’s texts that are most deeply engaged with Hegel and speculative philosophy: particularly The Concept of Irony, Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus dubitandum est, Philosophical Fragments, and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.60 Löwith commonly cites longer passages from these texts, particularly Kierkegaard, Der Begriff der Angst, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, trans. by Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1912; cited in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 156–7; p. 276; and “Heidegger and Rosenzweig,” p. 77. Also see The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944; cited in Meaning in History, p. 254, note 8. Die Krankheit zum Tode, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, trans. by Hermann Gottsched, Jena: Diderichs 1911; cited in Das Individuum, p. 174, note; Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 8; pp. 15–16; “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” pp. 62–3; Jacob Burckhardt, p. 173, note 240. Wiederholung, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, trans. by H. C. Ketels, Hermann Gottsched, and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1909; cited in Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 7; “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” p. 51; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 276; p. 437. Löwith also cites his favorite passage about the hero of Repetition being “thrown” into the ranks of the world as a crucial moment in the pre-history of existentialism in “Heidegger: Problem and Background of Existentialism,” Social Research, vol. 15, 1948, p. 367. He cites the English: Repetition, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941. 57 Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, pp. 148–56. 58 Löwith, Jacob Burckhardt, p. 134. 59 See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1967, § 68, § 75, § 76. 60 Søren Kierkegaard, Über den Begriff der Ironie, mit ständiger Rücksicht auf Sokrates, trans. by Hans Heinrich Schaeder, Munich: Oldenbourg 1929; cited in Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 14; p. 16; “Politischer Dezisionismus,” p. 104, note; Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 167, note 1; Jacob Burckhardt, p. 361, note 68; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 147; p. 198; p. 488; p. 195. De omnibus dubitandum est, trans. by Wolfgang Struve, Darmstadt: Claassen & Roether 1948; cited in Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, p. 40; p. 88, note 13; and Nietzsches Philosophie [2nd ed.], p. 237, note 11. Philosophische Brocken, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, trans. by Hermann Gottsched and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1910; cited in “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” p. 65, note; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 202, note; pp. 204–5; pp. 207–8; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 200ff.; p. 276; p. 437; p. 488; pp. 492ff.; p. 499; and 56

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from the latter two, when presenting Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian objectivity and reconciliation and when discussing the concept of the “leap.” This issue of the leap would then serve as the primary topic of a chapter in Löwith’s 1956 monograph Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis.61 One interesting feature of Löwith’s reception is the relatively minimal attention he pays to two of Kierkegaard’s most read and most discussed books, no less in early twentieth-century Germany than today: Fear and Trembling and Either/Or.62 The former is never explicitly named by Löwith, though he it refers to it obliquely at least once.63 Either/Or is of marginal importance for Löwith, particularly the presentation of boredom and melancholy, as well as Judge William’s account of “decision,” which Löwith clearly connects with the notion of resolve in Heidegger. Löwith stays clear of most discussions of the relation between the “spheres,” however, thus relinquishing one primary reason to treat Either/Or.64 As for Fear and Trembling, it is telling that Löwith quotes far more frequently from the text with which it was published together, Repetition, which was and is, however, far less influential the reading of Abraham. Löwith was keenly aware of the interlocked problems of interpretation and authorship in Kierkegaard. Some of these questions are dealt with explicitly by him in the reviews of Kierkegaard literature, discussed below, particularly with Fischer and Adorno. Passages from The Book on Adler that deal with the question of religious authority make frequent appearances in Löwith’s writings as reflections of Kierkegaard’s own authorial strategy.65 Löwith also quotes from The Point of Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, p. 39; p. 88, note 12. Abschliessende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, Jena: Diderichs 1910; Das Individuum, p. 5, note; “L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie,” Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, vol. 17, 1938, p. 333, note; Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 15; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 202, note; p. 208, note; Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 179, note 13; “Heidegger and Rosenzweig,” p. 77, note; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 77, p. 105, pp. 150ff., pp. 156–7; pp. 200ff.; p. 438; pp. 489–90; “On the Historical Understanding,” pp. 233ff.; p. 238, note; p. 240, note; and Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, p. 39; p. 88, note 13. 61 See Karl Löwith, “Kierkegaards Sprung in den Glauben,” in Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, pp. 49–67. 62 Søren Kierkegaard, Entweder/Oder, in Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–2, trans. by Wolfgang Pfleiderer and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1911–13; cited in Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 8; p. 10; p. 15; “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” pp. 55–6; “Politischer Dezisionismus,” p. 106, note; “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” p. 257, note; Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 183, note 18; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 199; p. 217; p. 335; pp. 385ff., pp. 437–8; p. 488. 63 Søren Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3; referred to as Kierkegaard’s “eulogy to Abraham” in Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 30. 64 The other classic resource for those interested in Kierkegaard’s “existence-spheres,” Stages on Life’s Way, is mentioned only twice in Löwith’s corpus, in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 218; p. 290; and “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 237, note. He refers to the English: Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1940. 65 Søren Kierkegaard, Der Begriff des Auserwählten, trans. by Theodor Haecker, Hellerau: J. Hegner 1917. Cited in “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 209, note; pp. 210–11; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 153; pp. 497–8.

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View,66 and repeats on a number of occasions how it was the tension between the “genius” and “apostle” that characterized Kierkegaard’s own authorship, constantly forced to assert its being “without authority.”67 These references indicate the notes on the notion of “the singular one” in particular, the development of which Löwith understood from The Point of View and elsewhere to be the guiding thread and purpose of Kierkegaard’s work. With this idea of the “singular one” as the guiding principle of all of Kierkegaard’s work, that which the Dane sought to achieve and that to which he aimed to speak, Löwith did not restrict himself to reading the philosophical and pseudonymous works, but also took a keen interest in the edifying discourses. The connection between philosophy and theology was certainly not so weak in Löwith’s formative period as it is today in either Europe or America, but even then, his interest in the edifying works is notable for a decisively secular philosopher. He clearly saw Kierkegaard as a “border-figure,” caught between religious and poetic existence, and distinguishes the religious and Christian discourses sharply from sermons.68 Löwith refers to “Purity of Heart” and “On Patience and the Expectation of Eternity” directly,69 as well as to larger volumes like Works of Love and Christian Discourses, and once to For Self-Examination.70 In From Hegel to Nietzsche, Löwith also cites from a number of smaller collections of discourses.71

66 Søren Kierkegaard, Der Gesichtspunkt für meine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1922. Cited in “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” p. 52; Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, pp. 54–5. He also refers to the English––The Point of View, trans. by Walter Lowrie, London: Oxford University Press 1939––in “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 227, note; p. 235; and Meaning in History, p. 246, note 20. 67 See Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, pp.13–14; “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 209. 68 Löwith, “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 209. 69 Søren Kierkegaard, Die Reinheit des Herzens, trans. by Lina Geismar, Munich: Kaiser 1924; cited in Das Individuum, p. 174, note. “Über die Geduld und die Erwartung des Ewigen,” in Religiöse Reden, trans. by Theodor Haecker, Leipzig: J. Hegner 1938; cited in “Heidegger and Rosenzweig,” p. 77; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 275. 70 Søren Kierkegaard, Das Leben und Walten der Liebe, Erbauliche Reden, vol. 3, trans. by Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1924; cited in Das Individuum, p. 75, note; p. 168, note; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 438. Löwith also cites the English––Edifying Discourses, trans. by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing 1943––see Meaning in History, p. 252, note 19; p. 255, note 4. Christliche Reden, Erbauliche Reden, vol. 4; cited in “L’achèvement de la philosophie,” p. 264, note. Löwith refers to For Self-Examination in “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” on p. 56; although he does not specify the edition, it would most likely have been Zur Selbstprüfung der Gegenwart anbefohlen, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11, trans. by Albert Dorner and Christoph Schrempf, Jena: Diderichs 1922. 71 Søren Kierkegaard, Die Lilien auf dem Feld und die Vögel unter dem Himmel: Drei fromme Reden, trans. by Albert Bärthold, Halle: S. Fricke, 1877; cited in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, 386. Also see Ausgewählte christliche Reden, trans. by Julie von Reincke, Giessen: Töpelmann 1909; cited in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, pp. 386–7.

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IV. Among the Interlocutors Like most of his German contemporaries, Löwith’s reading of Kierkegaard was profoundly shaped by the translations of and commentaries that appeared in the influential Austrian journal Der Brenner. Theodor Haecker, who regularly published Kierkegaard translations in Der Brenner, also put out a number of his own writings on the Dane. Löwith cites Haecker’s “Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Sören Kierkegaard,”72 as well as two of his own theological works which were deeply inflected by Kierkegaard, Christentum und Kultur and Der Christ und die Geschichte.73 He appends to this reference to Haecker the following remark: “Th. Haecker, whose service as a translator of Kierkegaard is undisputed, is as an interpreter of Kierkegaard a questionable authority, since he has ‘appropriated’ Kierkegaard so much that it often can no longer be differentiated where Kierkegaard is speaking and where it is only Haecker.”74 More esteem appears in his remarks on Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who is quoted within the section devoted to Kierkegaard in Löwith’s habilitation thesis. Löwith writes: “Brandes’ ‘character sketch’ of Kierkegaard is, in my view, the only clear-sighted attempt until now to see Kierkegaard’s theological ‘maschera’ anthropologically ‘nuda.’”75 Löwith never explicitly developed this idea of viewing the theological in Kierkegaard as a “mask,” but it resonates with many of his characterizations of Kierkegaard as existing between the religious and poetic “spheres.” Jaspers was an important early interlocutor. He may in fact have been the original inspiration behind Löwith’s frequent pairing of Kierkegaard with Nietzsche. A passage from Jaspers’ introduction to the Psychology of Worldviews, which was written in 1919 and would have been read carefully by Löwith, could well have come out of any of Löwith’s later writings on Nietzsche: “Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who, for the superficial observer are merely the most extreme opposites (e.g., one Christian, the other anti-Christian), have come up against the problem of existence through a most original experience…both lived in an inner opposition to the seduction of being observingly content with [the infinite] horizon [of history]; what matters, for them, is one’s life as a present individuality, what matters is ‘existence.’ ”76 Löwith would later come to deal extensively with a number of these elements: Kierkegaard’s deep See Theodor Haecker, “Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Sören Kierkegaard,” Hochland, vol. 26, 1929, pp. 476–93. Cited in Löwith, “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 15; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 492; p. 496. 73 Theodor Haecker, Christentum und Kultur, Munich: Kösel & Pustet 1927; cited in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 492; and Der Christ und die Geschichte, Leipzig: Hegner 1935; cited in Meaning in History, p. 235, note 75. 74 See Löwith, “Philosophische Kritik,” p. 202, note; Haecker was also the subject of an article of Max Horkheimer’s in the volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in which Löwith reviewed Alois Dempf’s influential Kierkegaards Folgen (see note 79 below). See Max Horkheimer, “Zu Theodor Haecker: Der Christ und die Geschichte,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 5, 1936, pp. 372–83. 75 Löwith, Das Individuum, p. 177, note. 76 Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin: Springer 1919, p. 12. 72

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connection with Nietzsche despite their respective stances on Christianity, their shared war on historicism, their development of the “singular” individual as a counterforce to the universalizing tendency of the philosophy of the day.77 And while he will later refer to Jaspers’ reading of Kierkegaard in Reason and Existence quite critically,78 there is little doubt of Jaspers’ role as an important early influence on Löwith. Löwith was actively engaged with the burgeoning field of Kierkegaardliteratur as were many of Kierkegaard’s translators––and as were few of his colleagues in philosophy. Over the course of his career, Löwith took to reviewing significant recent work on Kierkegaard, first on four recent German publications during the stay in Rome, and later in America, for the Journal of Religion and for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.79 Among the most important of these were the reviews of F.C. Fischer’s Die Nullpunktexistenz and Theodor W. Adorno’s (1903– 69) Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen. In both of these reviews, Löwith shows the extent and sophistication of his concern with the meaning of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity and with the complexity of his authorship in general. From Fischer’s Nullpunkt, Löwith seemed to take a cue regarding the possibility of leaving the thorniest of tensions surrounding Kierkegaard’s image “unresolved.” Fischer allows Kierkegaard only to be characterized by “fundamental existential conflict” and argues that his “actual standpoint” is “no unambiguous position, but rather a wavering here and there in the null-point of an ambiguous and unresolved existence.”80 This recalls sharply Löwith’s description of Kierkegaard, quoted above: “He held himself to nothing and this nothing was for him the point of departure for his ‘religious movement.’ ”81 This way of understanding the movement of history takes on a particularly potent political cast when Löwith applies it to the Germany of his day: “In these decisive years after the collapse of 1918, my friendship with P. Gothein confronted my with the choice of either joining the circle around Stefan George and Gundolf, or of becoming the lone follower of Heidegger, who––albeit in a completely different fashion––exercised a no less dictatorial power over young minds, although none of his listeners understood what he was really driving at. During periods of dissolution there are different types of ‘Führer’ who resemble each other only in so far as they radically reject what exists and are determined to point a way to ‘the one thing that matters.’ I decided for Heidegger” My Life, p. 159; Mein Leben, pp. 147–8. 78 Karl Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz, Groningen: Wolters 1935; cited in Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 196, note; “On the Historical Understanding,” p. 227, note; and quite critically in Nietzsches Philosophie, rev. ed., Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1956, p. 221. In Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 496, note, Löwith also cites Jaspers’ Philosophie, vol. 1, Berlin: Springer 1932. 79 These include a very summary review of Alois Dempf’s Kierkegaards Folgen in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 5, 1936, p. 265; and three reviews in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, of Martin Thust’s Sören Kierkegaard, der Dichter des Religiösen: Grundlagen eines Systems der Subjektivität, Munich: Beck 1931; F.C. Fischer’s Die Nullpunktexistenz, dargestellt an der Lebensform S. Kierkegaards, Munich: Beck 1933; and Theodor WiesengrundAdorno’s Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: Mohr 1933. The review of Thust appeared in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, vol. 5, no. 1, 1934, pp. 13–19; Fischer and Adorno were reviewed together some months later; see Deutsche Literaturzeitung, vol. 5, no. 4, 1934, pp. 156–77. For the English-language reviews see note 86 below. 80 Löwith, “Review of Fischer,” p. 157. 81 Löwith, Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, p. 14. 77

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With Adorno’s book Löwith is more guarded; he describes it as insightful and original, but also criticizes it as “dictatorial” and “mannered” in its writing. Löwith argues that Adorno’s attempt at an extreme sociological “reduction” of Kierkegaard’s thought misses the entire point of his understanding of the human.82 In the Nietzsche book from the following year, Löwith mentions Adorno as one of those who fails to see the “new form of communication” issuing from Kierkegaard’s writings, and sees only an obscure and strange “mixture of truth and poetry.”83 Among those who fare better is Martin Thust (1892–1969), a Pietist and fellow ex-student of Husserl, whose 1931 Sören Kierkegaard, der Dichter des Religiösen is frequently lauded by Löwith.84 In his review Löwith describes the work as “the ripe fruit of a long familiarity,” which, although it refrains from genuine critique and confrontation, makes of Kierkegaard a legend something like Ernst Bertram’s (1884– 1957) mythological approach to Nietzsche.85 The review of David F. Swenson’s (1876–1940) Something about Kierkegaard is quite laudatory (and contrasts with his comments on Walter Lowrie’s (1868–1959) Kierkegaard interpretation).86 Löwith also cites Jean Wahl’s (1888–1974) Études kierkegaardiennes relatively favorably throughout Von Hegel bis Nietzsche,87 and on a number of occasions celebrates an article written by a theologian close to Bultmann that accounts for the critical relation between Heidegger and Kierkegaard’s work.88 A full account of the secondary literature mentioned by Löwith can be found in the bibliography that follows. All in all, it must be said that Löwith engaged with Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard scholarship far more devotedly than that scholarship did with him. Whether due to the linguistic and geographical marginalization he suffered during decades of exile, or to the disciplinary marginalization that accompanies being a little bit philosopher and a little bit historian (and therefore, to some members of these camps, neither the one nor the other), Löwith’s interpretation of Kierkegaard has received scarcely more than anecdotal attention over the many years since his work began.89 His approach to Kierkegaard has, however, been influential in quieter ways, by setting up paradigms of reading that cut across the familiar categories––rational/irrational, theist/atheist, Löwith, “Review of Adorno,” pp. 176–7. Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 166, note 30. 84 See his review of Thust, cited in note 79 above. Also see Mein Leben, p. 59; My Life, p. 62. 85 Löwith, “Review of Thust,” pp. 14ff. 86 Karl Löwith, “Review of David F. Swenson, Something about Kierkegaard,” Journal of Religion, vol. 26, no. 2, 1946, pp. 155–6. For the comments on Lowrie, see “Recent Kierkegaard Literature,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 4, no. 4, 1944, pp. 574–8. 87 Löwith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 150; p. 196; p. 447; p. 491; p. 496. 88 Gerhardt Kuhlmann, “Zum theologischen Problem der Existenz,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 28–58; cited in “Phënomenologische Ontologie,” pp. 334ff.; and Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, p. 276, note. 89 See, for example, Robert L. Perkins’ “Introduction” to The Book on Adler, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University 2008 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 24), p. 2, note; Harvie Ferguson, “Before the Beginning: Kierkegaard’s Literary Hysteria,” in ibid., p. 48, note. 82 83

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subjective/objective, singular/universal––which can often obscure more than they clarify. Not least among these paradigms is that of the “unity achieved through a shared foe,” which allowed Kierkegaard to be placed “at home” in the company of Marx and Nietzsche, while still maintaining the sense of Kierkegaard’s claim that his work rose and fell with the aim of “becoming a Christian.” And to those who would claim that Kierkegaard’s primary contribution to twentieth-century philosophy consisted in a kind of ambient impetus, a “mood lighting” set to anxiety, boredom, and despair, Löwith responded with the observation that Kierkegaard’s religious reflections on authority and “singularity” served as the basic method and point of departure for the three of the century’s most consequential currents: dialectical theology, existentialism, and phenomenology.90

Gadamer is usually the one to get credit for this connecting of Kierkegaard’s speech “without authority” to Heidegger’s method of formal indication. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutik im Rückblick, Gesammelte Werke, vols. 1–10, Tübingen: Mohr 1985–95, vol. 10, 1995, pp. 17–18. This claim is credited to Gadamer, to take just one example, in Helmuth Vetter, “Hermeneutische Philosophie und Dialektische Theologie,” in Metaphysik der praktischen Welt, ed. by Andreas Grossmann and Christoph Jamme, Amsterdam: Rodolpi 2000, p. 280. 90

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Löwith’s Corpus Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, Munich: Drei Masken 1928, pp. 174–7. “Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie zur Philosophie und ihr Verhältnis zur protestantischen Theologie,” Theologische Rundschau, vol. 2, 1930, pp. 334–8. “Phänomenologische Ontologie und Protestantische Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 11, 1930, pp. 365–99. Kierkegaard und Nietzsche, oder philosophische und theologische Überwindung des Nihilismus, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1933. “Kierkegaard und Nietzsche,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 11, 1933, pp. 43–66. “Die philosophische Kritik der christlichen Religion im 19. Jahrhundert,” Theologische Rundschau, vol. 5, 1933, pp. 201–12. Review of Martin Thust, Sören Kierkegaard, der Dichter des Religiösen, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, vol. 5, no. 1, 1934, pp. 13–19. Review of F.C. Fischer, Die Nullpunktexistenz and Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, vol. 5, no. 4, 1934, pp. 156–77. “L’achèvement de la philosophie classique par Hegel et sa dissolution chez Marx et Kierkegaard,” Recherches Philosophiques, vol. 4, 1934–35, pp. 232–67. “Politischer Dezisionismus,” Revue internationale de la théorie du droit / Internationale Zeitschrift für Theorie des Rechts, vol. 9, no. 2, 1935, pp. 101–23, especially pp. 104ff.; p. 121. Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft des Gleichen, Berlin: Die Runde 1935, see pp. 149–56. “La conciliation hégélienne,” Recherches Philosophiques, vol. 5, 1935–36, p. 393; pp. 395–6; pp. 403–4. Review of Alois Dempf, Kierkegaards Folgen, in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. 5, 1936, p. 265. Jacob Burckhardt: Der Mensch in mitten der Geschichte, Luzern: Vita Nova 1936, pp. 133–51. “L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie,” Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, vol. 17, 1938, p. 333, note. 「ヨーロッパのニヒリズム」 [“Yohroppano Nihilizumu”], trans. by 柴田治 三郎 [Jisaburoh Shibata], 『思想』 [Shisoh], vol. 220, 1940, pp. 1–25; vol. 221, 1940, pp. 137–60; vol. 222, 1940, pp. 1–39. (The original German text was

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published later: “Der europäische Nihilismus,” in Sämtliche Schriften, vols. 1–9, ed. by Klaus Stichweh and Marc B. de Launay, Stuttgart: Metzler 1981–88, vol. 2, 1983, pp. 502–5; pp. 515–16.) Von Hegel bis Nietzsche, Zürich: Europa 1941, pp. 148–53; pp. 198–204; pp. 213– 18; pp. 334–6; pp. 386–9; pp. 436–9; pp. 488–500. “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig on Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 3, no. 1, 1942, pp. 53–77, especially pp. 76–7. “On the Historical Understanding of Kierkegaard,” Review of Religion, vol. 7, no. 3, 1942, pp. 227–41. “Recent Kierkegaard Literature,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 4, no. 4, 1944, pp. 574–8. Review of David F. Swenson, Something about Kierkegaard, Journal of Religion, vol. 26, no. 2, 1946, pp. 155–6. “Can there be a Christian Gentleman?” Theology Today, vol. 5, no. 1, 1948, pp. 58–67. “Heidegger: Problem and Background of Existentialism,” Social Research, vol. 15, 1948, p. 367. Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949, p. 3; p. 35; p. 46; pp. 157–8; p. 165; p. 208; p. 211; p. 229; p. 235; p. 246; pp. 251–4. Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit, Berlin: Fischer 1953, pp. 11–12; p. 20; p. 36; pp. 45–6; p. 55; p. 74; p. 77; p. 96. “Jener Einzelne: Kierkegaard,” Merkur, vol. 10, no. 2, 1956, pp. 147–62. “Christentum und Geschichte,” Numen, vol. 2, 1955, pp. 154–5. “Kierkegaards Sprung in den Glauben,” in Wissen, Glaube, Skepsis, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1956, pp. 49–68. La Sinistra Hegeliana, ed. by Karl Löwith, trans. by Claudio Cesa, Bari: Laterza 1960 pp. 447–78. Die Hegelsche Linke, ed. by Karl Löwith, Stuttgart: Frommann 1962, pp. 269–87. Das Verhältnis von Gott, Welt und Mensch in der Metaphysik von Descartes und Kant, Heidelberg: Carl Winter 1964, p. 25. Gott, Mensch und Welt in der Metaphysik von Descartes bis zu Nietzsche, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1967, p. 115. Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht, Stuttgart: Metzler 1988, p. 12; p. 28; p. 30; pp. 45–7; p. 59; p. 66; p. 106; p. 140; pp. 149–50. II. Sources of Löwith’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Tübingen: Mohr 1933. Bäumler, Alfred, Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte, Berlin: Junker & Duennhaupt 1937, pp. 55–98. Brandes, Georg, Søren Kierkegaard: Ein literarisches Charakterbild, Leipzig: J.A. Barth 1879.

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Chaning Pearce, M., The Terrible Crystal: Studies in Kierkegaard and Modern Christianity, London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner 1940. Dempf, Alois, Kierkegaards Folgen, Leipzig: J. Hegner 1935. Fischer, Friedrich Carl, Die Nullpunkt-Existenz, dargestellt an der Lebensform Sören Kierkegaards, Munich: Beck 1933. Haecker, Theodor, Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Sören Kierkegaard, Innsbruck: Brenner-Verlag 1932. — Der Christ und die Geschichte, Leipzig: J. Hegner 1935. — Christentum und Kultur, Munich: Kösel & Pustet 1927. Hirsch, Emanuel, Kierkegaard-Studien, vols. 1–3, Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann 1930– 33. Jaspers, Karl, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Berlin: Springer 1919, p. 12; p. 61; p. 90; pp. 94–6; p. 99; pp. 217–18; pp. 238–9; pp. 245–7; pp. 255–6; p. 329; pp. 332–5; p. 339; p. 341; pp. 348–9; p. 351; pp. 354–5; p. 357; p. 359; pp. 370–81. — Philosophie, vols. 1–3, Berlin: Springer 1932, vol. 1, Philosophische Weltorientierung, p. 12; p. 15; p. 300; p. 317; p. 337; vol. 2, Existenzerhellung, p. 151; p. 274; p. 320. — Vernunft und Existenz. Fünf Vorlesungen, Groningen: J.B. Walters 1935, pp. 1–27. Kuhlmann, Gerhardt, “Zum theologischen Problem der Existenz,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 10, 1929, pp. 28–58. Lowrie, Walter, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University 1942. Oppel, Horst “Kierkegaard und Goethe,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 16, 1938, pp. 128–59. Patrick, Denzil G.M., Pascal and Kierkegaard, vols. 1–2, London: Lutterworth 1947. Ruttenbeck, Walter, Sören Kierkegaard: Der christliche Denker und sein Werk, Berlin: Trowitsch 1929. Swenson, David F., Something about Kierkegaard, rev. ed., Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing 1945. Thust, Martin, Sören Kierkegaard, der Dichter des Religiösen: Grundlagen eines Systems der Subjektivität, Munich: Beck 1931. Wahl, Jean, Études Kierkegaardiennes, Paris: F. Aubier 1938. III. Secondary Literature on Löwith’s Relation to Kierkegaard Donaggio, Enrico, Una sobria inquietudine: Karl Löwith e la filosofia, Milan: Feltrinelli 2004, pp. 23–4; pp. 36ff., pp. 77–82; pp. 107–11. Ferguson, Harvie, “Before the Beginning: Kierkegaard’s Literary Hysteria,” in Prefaces and Writing Sampler, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 2006 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 9), p. 48, note. Merlan, Philip, “Toward the Understanding of Kierkegaard,” Journal of Religion, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, p. 78, note 7; p. 82, notes 17–18.

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Riedel, Manfred, “Der Doppelblick des Exilanten: Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger und die deutschen,” in Hannah Arendt: Verborgene Tradition, unzeitgemässe Aktualität? ed. by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2007, pp. 127–30. Riesterer, Berthold P., Karl Löwith’s View of History, The Hague: Nijhoff 1970, pp. 28ff. Taylor, Mark C., “The Strategy of the Authorship,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vols. 1–4, ed. by Daniel W. Conway and K.E. Gover, London: Routledge 2002, vol. 1, pp. 250–77; see pp. 272–3.

Michael Theunissen: Fortune and Misfortune of Temporality Stefan Egenberger

Whoever might be looking for proof that working on classical philosophical works does not inevitably entail dispensing with a horizon of thought governed by renewal and expansion should turn to the works of Michael Theunissen. Born in Berlin in 1932, Theunissen should be seen as one of the most influential modern-day philosophers who has uncovered unexpected and innovative theoretical potential with his reconstruction of philosophical history. Having studied philosophy and German in both Bonn and Freiburg, he chose Kierkegaard as the subject of his Ph.D., which he obtained under Max Müller’s mentorship in 1955. In 1965 he published his post-doctoral thesis on social analysis: Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart.1 In the times that followed Theunissen not only made a lasting mark with his manifold publications that met with a wide appreciative audience—it was also as an academic teacher that he made a lasting impression on generations of students, initially in Basel and later on in Heidelberg and Berlin. Having been inspired by Heidegger and Adorno, it is nonetheless Kierkegaard and Hegel whom Theunissen chooses as coordinates for his philosophical thought.2 Integrating these two—in many ways very different—positions of thinking was particularly important to him because he aimed to anchor a Kierkegaardian interpretation of the human individual within the wholeness of human experience of reality. While his work on Kierkegaard leads to fascinating and individual theological deliberations, the “later work” opens itself towards art: it is dedicated to Pindar.3 In his large-scale interpretation of this Greek poet Michael Theunissen explores the pre-philosophical prerequisites for philosophy. While the method chosen may be Michael Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1965. (English translation: The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1986.) 2 Extensive research on the philosophy of Hegel took place in the 1970s, see, for example, Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1970; Michael Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion der Hegelschen Logik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1978; and Michael Theunissen, Hans Friedrich Fulda, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Kritische Darstellung der Metaphysik. Eine Diskussion über Hegels “Logik,” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1980. 3 Michael Theunissen, Pindar. Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit, Munich: C.H. Beck 2000. 1

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inspired by Heidegger, the theme has its origin in the study of Kierkegaard: the experience of time in human life and the theology that springs from this experience. Starting with his dissertation Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard (1958)4 and with his most recent publication being a paper on Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside,” Michael Theunissen has spent the best part of half a century studying Kierkegaard.5 Or rather, he has pursued philosophical contemplation using Kierkegaard’s thoughts as a starting point. His interpretations do not make do with paraphrasing the matter and will by no means submit to Kierkegaard’s hermetic terminology—they surpass contemporary Copenhagen discourse. In fact, his writings map out their own philosophy, which—under the influence of Kierkegaard—aims to understand and provide a foundation for the experience of human life. It is for precisely this reason that Theunissen’s work was bound to attract attention in the debates of Kierkegaard scholars—as can be seen by the broad debate his most recent book on Kierkegaard Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard has sparked.6 The underlying thought of Theunissen’s manifold contemplations is the question of how to live a life that works, while being subjected to the conditions of time. In his dissertation, Theunissen already touches upon the significance of the temporal structure of our reality. In Negative Theologie der Zeit published in 19917 he updates his ideas further before fully developing them in Der Begriff Verzweiflung from 1993. Kierkegaard, for Theunissen, is first and foremost an anthropologist. There are two aspects of this anthropology he accentuates: on the one hand Kierkegaard’s anthropology accommodates the contemporary experience of nihilism. Kierkegaard has come to represent a noteworthy diagnostic of nihilism for Theunissen. On the other hand, traditional anthropology—which is characterized by a body–soul dualism—is superseded by the fact that human existence is described with a temporal interpretation: humanity stands between the facticity of the past and the future as the open space within which it can project itself.8 The question of meaning and lack of meaning manifests itself in relation to time. Moreover, Theunissen agrees with Kierkegaard in as much as such an image of man will nearly inevitably lead towards religious depth. And even more, Kierkegaard’s anthropology not only gains clarity Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard, Freiburg: Alber 1958. Michael Theunissen, “Das Erbauliche im Gedanken an den Tod: Traditionelle Elemente, innovative Ideen und unausgeschöpfte Potentiale in Kierkegaards Rede An einem Grabe,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2000, pp. 40–74. 6 In his response to criticism of his Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993; English translation: Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. by Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 2005) Theunissen gives a brief outline of the history of his own research in his article “Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 62–8. 7 Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991. 8 See Michael Theunissen, “Das Menschenbild der Krankheit zum Tode,” in Materialien zur Philosophie Sören Kierkegaards, ed. by Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, pp. 496–510, see pp. 500–1. 4 5

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and tangibility through the explication of psychological phenomena—it also sets a standard by which it can be comprehended in a methodically controlled way. I. Early Interpretation: The Concept of Seriousness Theunissen’s dissertation Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard focuses on a central systematic term of Kierkegaard’s contemplation, namely that of reality. The fact that the term used in the title is “seriousness” rather than “reality” is because of the way Kierkegaard defines reality: reality is not a self-perpetuating, external configuration which a person can devote attention to callously or indifferently. Rather, reality manifests itself as a motivation for ethical action and as a reason for religious faith. In short, seriousness is what constitutes reality. On this definition— and this leads to Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication—reality can only be communicated as a serious “call to the realization of one’s own existence.”9 If Theunissen is seeking to map out this realization as a “phenomenal concretion of life’s unity,” then it must be at this point that certain motives arise which later are to influence his work considerably.10 For one, there is a focus on the question of meaning, which reveals Kierkegaard’s work as a diagnosis of nihilism. If seriousness is the “structure of being-a-self in its unity,” then this speech has a theoretical dimension concerned with meaning because in this seriousness—directed as it is towards achieving unity—is “contained” the “sense of being,”11 because this “containment” is a decidedly constructive process. However, a further consideration is made straightaway: unity of life is a projection into the future which is obtained by seizing it as a possibility yet to be realized. Here Theunissen is paving the way for a particular structure of time applicable to a human design for life he will later be referring back to, and on the theological implications of which he will undertake further research. These theological implications are that unity of life—projected into the future, as it is—appears to be the realization of the concept of eternity. The eternal appears as a code for a fulfilled life designed with a perspective towards unity—entering the present as something “not-yet happened.” The transcendent aspect of this projection is that its realization is never entirely within the power of the subject, it can never be fully realized, and therefore can only be anticipated by an act of faith. “Temporality can be ‘transcended’ ” only with the help of the eternal:12 only so can the wholeness of one’s life be mapped out uninhibitedly, be shaped and realized—if only in fractured synthesis. The fact that this meaning for life, characterized as it is by a sense of unity, is threatened by the expectation of death in an immediate and forceful way is another subject of study Theunissen applies to his readings of Kierkegaard.13 The seriousness Theunissen, Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard, p. X. Ibid., p. 131. 11 Ibid., p. 135. 12 Ibid., p. 136. 13 See Michael Theunissen, “Die Gegenwart des Todes im Leben,” in his Negative Theologie der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991, pp. 197–217 and Theunissen, “Das Erbauliche im Gedanken an den Tod.” 9

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of the realization of death serves the purpose of reflecting upon one’s own temporality and mortality in order to seize and live one’s own life decidedly in the light of the “nothingness” of death. II. Suffering Caused by Temporality and Faith in the Eternal Whereas in his dissertation Theunissen had described the threat to human life posed by death, he consolidates this danger even further in the anthology Negative Theologie der Zeit, published in 1991. It is not only mortality which is experienced as critical, it is even the basic structures of time that are cause for distress, because time itself is experienced as an estranged mastery. Theunissen initially merely takes up a traditional, metaphysical supposition: the mastery of time estranges, because it exposes us to nothingness.14 However, these basic suppositions are not simply expanded upon; rather, the attempt is made to verify them in conversation with psychopathology. If perceived in a pathological way, then time becomes the eternal return of the same—regardless of whether time is experienced as something fleeting or something stagnant. The future closes its doors—and yet a change of behavior only becomes meaningful if its doors are open.15 Theunissen’s interpretation of Kierkegaard argues that this lack of meaningful action and behavior manifests itself in a non-achieving relationship to time. He develops the theoretical structure of this failure as a part of the so-called theory of double movement. It is this theory rather than the theory of stages which he perceives to be at the center of Kierkegaard’s thought. The theory describes how a fulfilled present develops from the synthesis of past and future: by “the double movement of the seizing into the future and the return from it.”16 The present which constructs itself from the past gathers the wholeness of time within itself by this seizing into the See Michael Theunissen, “Können wir in der Zeit glücklich sein?” in his Negative Theologie der Zeit, pp. 37–86, see p. 41. 15 Theunissen sees an objectification of time in psychopathological types of illnesses, in as much as time loses its medial character and turns into its own, threatening power. In a depressed condition the passing of time is experienced as something that makes action impossible. Theunissen quotes a patient suffering from manic depression in order to express how part of the ailment is due to the passing of time: “I cannot stop thinking about how time passes” (Theunissen, “Können wir in der Zeit glücklich sein?,” p. 49). As opposed to this a schizophrenic experience of time is such that it is not the passing of time, that is in the center of attention but one’s own standstill that is projected onto time. Thus, time is experienced as standing still. The endless reproduction of this “frozen eternity” is what constitutes the terror of it. The dominion of time, which can be seen in both these forms of illness, is one and the same: it expresses itself by the subject being subjected to an eternal return of the same. Real action, which would entail a fundamental change, seems impossible. It is not in a pathological way, but in a very day-to-day way that this kind of suffering from time can be defined as boredom (see ibid., p. 45). 16 Theunissen, “Können wir in der Zeit glücklich sein?,” p. 59; see Michael Theunissen, “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” in his Negative Theologie der Zeit, p. 346 (originally published in Jesus, Ort der Erfahrung Gottes, ed. by Bernhard Casper, Freiburg: Herder 1976, pp. 13–68). 14

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future. Now, there are two ways in which this double movement can go wrong: either the subject fails to return from the future back to themselves in the present or they do not even endeavor to reach out for it in the first place. In other words, the relationship to time is not achieved if either the perpetrator loses their sense for the present by dwelling in the past or the future or they lose themselves in the moment, entirely. What is important for a first theological interpretation of a human relationship towards time is that while Theunissen does understand the present as a part of time as described by the theory of double movement, he also sees an additional aspect. The present—as the unity of time that it is—surpasses time and opens time to its other: eternity. Eternity does not signify that which is the opposite of time, as it does with in the Platonic-metaphysical tradition. It describes a depth of time—possibly best termed as fulfilled time. Where Kierkegaard, as we know, had described the future as an incognito of the eternal, Theunissen also perceives the eternal aspect of time in the act of reaching out for the future. This becomes more obvious when appreciating that the fatality of time is its fixation with the past: “The fact that what is past rules over that which is to come reveals the compulsive need of reality to be redeemed.”17 Compared with a past stretching into the never-ending, a new sense of time becomes apparent, the future is a time that allows for the projection of the entirely new and thus represents the otherness of time. Only once the present is perceived as being open, thanks to a perspective the future allows, does it become a place of action; does it become possible to experience fulfilled time. Referring back to Kierkegaard, Theunissen thus can say: “The other time, that otherness which is concealed within time, is eternity as future, the future as eternity.”18 By saying this, Theunissen’s negative theology of time takes on an eschatological hue, which distinguishes itself from its traditionally Christian form by that kind of subjective reshaping, that—so extraordinarily—can be found with Kierkegaard. In this context, we might then refer to the research paper “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins” first published in 1976 and reprinted in his Negative Theologie der Zeit. It describes in more detail how handling time successfully involves drawing on the future. The starting point here is the question of the specific temporality of the kingdom of God Jesus had announced. If, according to Mark 1:15, the kingdom of God is near while at the same time has already arrived, then there is “a connection between the present and the future…that surpasses the horizon of how time modes habitually are understood.”19 Here, we have the possibility of applying the openness of the future to the present and of making use of it in a way conducive to the present. Theunissen describes the temporal structure of faith with the words attributed to Jesus in Luke 11:9–10 and Matthew 7:7–8: “Ask and you shall receive…Because whoever asks shall receive.” These words express a sense of security, which Theunissen, “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” p. 370; see Jürgen Habermas, “Kommunikative Freiheit und negative Theologie,” in Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Emil Angehrn et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992, p. 17. 18 Theunissen, “Können wir in der Zeit glücklich sein?” p. 65. 19 Theunissen, “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” p. 326. 17

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guarantees that the prayer will come true by the very prayer itself. This certainty of faith, alien to natural existence “also revolutionizes the natural relationship between the present and the future.”20 Even if the prayer is yet to be granted, it can be described as having been granted already thanks to the sense of security which accompanies it: “By the promise not yet having been fulfilled, the promise itself turns into fulfillment.”21 The prayer itself commences that which is prayed for. For the future really to start in the present, it needs to be absolutely certain. Such a sense of security, so human reasoning dictates, can only be attributed to the past. This means the “contemporaneity of the future” can only be realized by faith,22 in trust in the infinite power of God. This is where Theunissen introduces the idea of God—as inspired by Kierkegaard—which he will remain true to from then on: God is the one to whom everything is possible, or rather, whom we experience in the opportunities made open to us. The downside of this faith in the omnipotence of God lies in the realization that man has no power over the future. If faith means to trust in God, then what is implied is: “to let go of oneself…faith therefore is the freedom man has of him—or herself.”23 Faith means, therefore, to rid oneself of the worry about the future. This induces a change in the future itself: anxiously we prepare for a future we anticipate from within the experience of the present. Seemingly inevitably, this future evolves from this present, without allowing something fundamentally different to develop. Against this determination of the future, called “protensive” by Theunissen, he advocates a “prospective” way of dealing with it: rather than anticipating the future by worrying about it, the idea is to realize the future in the present with a vision of it.24 It is no longer slumbering in the present but rather represents what has not yet appeared, and might thus not be in any relation to that which is now. This allows for the self to become apparent in a way not possible when restricted to the present: the loss of self leads to a deeper, or rather true self-discovery.25 It is precisely in this self-discovery, devoid of all self-induced power, that Theunissen sees the real meaning of the kingdom of God. Knocking at the gates of the Eternal Kingdom means to hand oneself over in trust to the omnipotence of God and thus also to the openness of the future, which—as opposed to the past—is in the possession of “utopian fantasy.”26 This is Theunissen’s concrete understanding of the hope for the kingdom of God: to comprehend the utopian potential of the future, the knowledge that things could be different and to realize this in one’s actions. In other words, by pre-empting “the wholeness of one’s being that essentially is yet to come” the presence opens itself to a fulfilled time and therefore also to a fulfilled Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., pp. 330–1. 22 Ibid., p. 331. 23 Ibid., p. 336. 24 See ibid., pp. 336–7; Theunissen, “Können wir in der Zeit glücklich sein?” pp. 63–5. 25 Referring to Matthew 10:39 and 16:25, Theunissen writes of a “unity of losing self and finding self”; “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” p. 337. 26 Ibid., p. 336; see Theunissen, “Können wir in der Zeit glücklich sein?” p. 65: “Truth lies in the utopian content.” 20 21

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self.27 We can only be redeemed from the “essential, plain powerlessness” which results from perceiving time exclusively from the perspective of the unchangeable past—dooming any kind of action that might be taken as sure to fail—if the future is freed from the burden of the past.28 “Redemption, as the action of God, restores the sovereignty of the future towards the past.”29 III. Dialectical Negativity: Being-a-Self and Despair As early as in the religious-philosophical essay from 1976, Theunissen had pointed out a specific detail of Kierkegaard’s theory in The Sickness unto Death: namely, that successfully being-a-self can only be described by its negative, perceived— as it is—from the vantage point of despair.30 Theunissen systematically expands this observation in his article “Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,” first published in 1981, where he elaborates upon it as the methodical framework of a definition of self.31 The concrete context of the argument concerns itself with Kierkegaard’s influence on more recent American psychology. Current psychology can lay its foundation in Kierkegaard both because he pinpoints the self as being a fundamental point in orientation when it comes to explaining the reason for despair, and because his theories do not allow a clear distinction between psychological normality and anormality. Against this background, Michael Theunissen distils his theory of “dialectical negativity,” which takes its starting point with Kierkegaard in the fact that the latter defines despair as a form of not-being-a-self in The Sickness unto Death. What sequences this observation is the question of how to describe the interaction between despair and non-despair, between not-being-a-self and being-a-self. Theunissen claims that “Kierkegaard by no means takes his understanding of the self as a premise for his theory of despair, but rather takes despair as a starting point, as it were, and lets despair tell him what the self is.”32 This insight, namely, that Kierkegaard defines successful being-a-self by describing the dysfunctional forms of it, is not only important for the psychological and psychiatric context within which Theunissen is researching his subject. It is a wider horizon which these contemplations cover. Theunissen, “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” p. 347. Ibid., p. 365. 29 Ibid., p. 371. 30 See Theunissen, “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” pp. 353–4; see p. 8. However, in “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” pp. 358–9, he had still dismissed with this concept of being-a-self because it was only to establish as a “momentary existence” in aesthetical life by means of a continual battle against deficient execution. 31 Michael Theunissen, “Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,” Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. by Joseph H. Smith, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1981 (Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol. 5), pp. 381–423; in German as Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode, Frankfurt am Main: Anton Hain 1991. 32 Theunissen, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, p. 16. 27 28

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Theunissen is trying to highlight a basic, philosophical structure of cognition that could already be glimpsed in his writings on Hegel and undoubtedly owes much to Adorno’s negative dialectics.33 It is only possible to describe how to successfully be yourself by defining the negative, that is, its dysfunctional forms.34 Theunissen realizes that Kierkegaard is drawing up an image of self from the perspective of despair by the fact that the possibility of an immediately healthy spirit does not even figure in The Sickness unto Death.35 If health is not a given condition— namely the one which precedes illness—then it is only possible to understand it by looking at its opposite. This also becomes apparent in as much as that in his definition of self, Kierkegaard attributes it with a negative form—thus turning it into something which can only be defined negatively. The self cannot be defined in a positive way because it only appears as “a process…as a constant destruction of the possibility of despair.”36 This is also the deeper reason why Kierkegaard does not speak of a self which is at the root of all self-realization, but rather of a continual becoming-a-self. Theunissen analyzes the first paragraph of The Sickness unto Death, chapter A.a. for an explanation of this theory. He structures this chapter by describing an anthropology that contains three theses: (1) man is at the center of a synthetic relationship of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity. (2) The self is the self-reflexive enforcement of this relationship. (3) This self is a given self (by God). The second part of the chapter defines two kinds of despair, namely “desperately wanting to be oneself” and “desperately not wanting to be oneself.” Theunissen’s theory claims that—with Marx—the result of the research has slipped in at the beginning of the argument. This means that the definition of self only can be gathered from the analysis of despair. Kierkegaard introduces his analysis of despair in such a way that it is only from the structure of the given self that its two forms—desperately not wanting to be oneself and desperately wanting to be oneself—are understandable. If the human self had not been given, the only kind of despair left to think about would be the one arising from not wanting to be oneself. Theunissen interprets this to mean that the described structure of self provides the necessary condition for the two forms of despair to exist in the first place. The starting point is thus the analysis of despair, from which theoretical contemplations about the self can be deduced. This renders Regarding Hegel’s Dialectics, see Michael Theunissen, “Krise und Macht. Thesen zur Theorie des dialektischen Widerspruchs,” Hegel-Jahrbuch 1974, 1975, pp. 318–29; regarding Adorno, see Michael Theunissen, “Negativität bei Adorno,”Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. by Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1983, pp. 41– 65. Theunissen describes the “secret brotherhood in arms” between Kierkegaard and Adorno in his Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat, pp. 27–32. 34 Whether Kierkegaard’s definition of faith also “only appears in the analysis of its negation” (Theunissen, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, p. 18) has already been questioned by Walter Dietz; see Walter Dietz, Review of Michael Theunissen’s Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 18, no. 3, 1993, p. 86. 35 See Theunissen, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, p. 31. 36 Ibid., p. 33. 33

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the definition of the self as being dependent upon the phenomenology of despair. The anthropological thesis, too, would otherwise simply be “completely superfluous” and have a purely “dogmatic character.”37 Theunissen’s method can be illustrated best by the thesis of givenness. From a point of view of reason, givenness is a condition for the desperation of wanting to be oneself. From a point of view based on cognition, however, this is not so: rather, the phenomenology of despair sets the context within which the theory about the self can be discovered. The definition of the given self as a reason for despair is nothing but a hypothesis, according to Theunissen, “which needs to be formed” in order to understand such a phenomenology of despair.38 To perceive oneself as a self given by God only makes sense if there is a desperate wish to be oneself, that is, a kind of desperate defiance which wants to free itself from the giving power at all costs.39 Theunissen continues his research, holding on to the idea that Kierkegaard defines the state of successfully being oneself—something which for him is always synonymous with being oneself in faith40—negatively from the analysis of despair.41 However, even in this paper, first doubts become apparent regarding how consistently Kierkegaard applies this program—in other words: whether there may not be some implicit preliminary decisions which enter the analysis of despair. It is precisely with this question that Theunissen engages in his essay Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, published in 1993. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 36. 39 It is also when defining the self as one relating back to itself that reference to the analysis of despair becomes apparent. Successfully being a self is characterized by the elements of human synthesis—finitude and infinitude, the temporal and the eternal, possibility and necessity—being held together in a synthesizing way. This claim can only be made under the presupposition that the desperate self remains in a unilateral condition and thus does not manage to achieve the synthesis—the double motion of faith. 40 On the relationship of being-a-self and faith, see, as previously, Theunissen, “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” pp. 349–55. 41 At this point it becomes apparent why Theunissen always referred back to Kierkegaard after Heidegger. As a matter of fact, he interprets Kierkegaard’s temporal anthropology in distinctive proximity to Heidegger’s work on facticity and design of being. The fact that Heidegger has dismissed theology and therefore also distanced himself from the concept of eternity—which is a very important concept for Theunissen—may be a reason for him to turn to Kierkegaard so resolutely. Next to this, however, there is the methodical pursuit of negativism. It was Kierkegaard who drew the methodically appropriate conclusions from the observation that the temporal position of man between the past and the future not only is instable but that man on top of that will always find himself in a condition marked by failure. No one but Kierkegaard uses the negative in a consistent way in order to describe life that works out. The positive only exists in the negation of the negative. Heidegger only pretended to follow this method of dialectic negativism while in actual fact designing a— methodically not so declared—positive ideal of existence with the idea of “determination” (German, Entschlossenheit). See Theunissen’s excellent analysis of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Heidegger in his Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993, pp. 45–51; and in “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christseins,” pp. 340–52. 37 38

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IV. Theology of Hope Founded upon Despair Using a negativistic method, Theunissen recognized the phenomenon of the desperate wish of man to be himself leading to the rebellion against his creator, as a starting point of a theology. This is why Kierkegaard chooses to understand the self as one founded in God. It is precisely this reference to theology, however, that is taken up in Korrekturen an Kierkegaard which is the subtitle to Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Theunissen argues that the desperate effort of wanting to be oneself provides inexplicit theological conditions which cannot but contradict his programmatically purely philosophical take on the matter. The theme of the Korrekturen is to provide a criticism and a new construction of the analysis of despair of The Sickness unto Death. Theunissen’s aim here is not to eliminate theology. Rather, the idea is for the analysis of despair no longer merely to reproduce theological preliminary decisions but rather to provide a basis for a rational theology. Theunissen even continues on his theological errand of enlightenment by trying—retrospectively— exclusively to define theological premises as either “justified” or “justifiable.”42 Enlightenment therefore does not mean the elimination of religion but, rather, rational transformation and education of itself. The study is structured in two parts: “reconstruction” and “transcending critique.” Methodically, Theunissen initially tries to define the basic assumption from which the analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death can be reconstructed. Whereas the reconstruction already reveals immanent criticism, Theunissen applies himself to a “transcending critique” in the second part of his paper. This entails him reassessing the conditions of the very principle itself. The content of the “reconstruction” concerns itself with the way in which desperately not wanting to be oneself and wanting to be oneself relate to each other and reconstructs this in such a way, that notwanting-to-be-a-self becomes the underlying principle of real despair. “Transcending critique” opposes Kierkegaard’s supposition that despair is nothing but a deficient implementation of self-relation. Furthermore, in “transcending critique,” theology is founded anew in the reconstructed analysis of despair. A. Reconstruction Theunissen perceives the underlying principle of Kierkegaard’s theory of despair as lying in the experience of man immediately not wanting to be what he is.43 As mentioned previously, Kierkegaard had discriminated between two forms of conscious despair: not wanting to be oneself and wanting to be oneself. The principle, as reconstructed by Theunissen, now favors desperately not wanting to be oneself and declares it to be the fundamental destiny of the human condition— thereby opposing what Kierkegaard had favored, namely, desperately wanting to be oneself. Desperately wanting to be oneself, that is, the defiant rebellion against the givenness of self, so Theunissen claims, is no more than an extreme form of despair, which Kierkegaard—without defining it as such—has made an absolute. Theunissen, “Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard,” p. 64. See Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 18.

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Other forms of despair cannot be focused on under these conditions, however: upon first glance there seems to be nothing desperate about wanting-to-be-a-self. The real desperation of wanting-to-be-a-self only appears at a very high level. Admittedly, Kierkegaard also presents a first form of desperately wanting to be oneself. When looked at carefully, however, it becomes clear that the state he describes ought to be called something else entirely—namely, trying to be something that one is not. Or, to put it more precisely, we want to be “a constructed or hypothetical self,” which we are not.44 But even if we focus on this wish to be someone different or simply different in nature, the wish to rid oneself from oneself is more immediate still. Prior to the wish of being someone else, after all, there is always the wish of not wanting to be oneself. As opposed to this, the wish of not wanting to be oneself need not necessarily be motivated by wanting to be someone different.45 Accordingly, even though it is possible to think about the fact of desperately not wanting to be oneself without considering its opposite, it is not possible to think about desperately wanting to be oneself without the desperate wish of ridding oneself from oneself. In this way Kierkegaard’s attempt to establish defiance against God—which becomes apparent in the desperate wanting to be oneself—as the basis of all despair, fails. If this were the case, desperately not wanting to be oneself ought to indicate this defiance just as much as desperately wanting to be oneself does. Theunissen searches for the proof of this failure by shedding light on the different meanings of the term “defiance” as used in the The Sickness unto Death. He distinguished between three kinds of defiance: (1) defiant rebellion against God, (2) independent, arbitrary construction of one’s own being and (3) the conscious act of wanting the impossible. Kierkegaard’s theory would only be comprehensible if he could prove either defiance against God (1) or at least its anthropological former state (2) as also being apparent in the desperate wish of not wanting to be oneself. Instead, Kierkegaard orients himself towards the third kind of defiance, the defiance of wanting the impossible. Wanting something impossible, however, by no means illustrates the privileged position of desperately wanting to be oneself, seeing that the desperate wish not to be oneself is just as much expression of wanting the impossible: “For it is not only impossible to be something one is not; it is as impossible not to be, who one is.”46 Finally, Theunissen tries to invalidate one more argument that could be used to prove Kierkegaard’s state of desperately wanting to be oneself as being a fundamental form of despair after all: namely, that the state of wanting to be rid of oneself which is a part of desperately not wanting to be oneself cannot but revert into a desperate state of wanting to be oneself. What Theunissen holds against this argument is that wanting to get rid of yourself in view of the impossibility of being able to do so does not necessarily lead to feeling a sense of defiant self-preservation. Instead, so Theunissen argues, wanting to get rid of yourself can “dig deeper and deeper into the state of not wanting to be oneself.”47 He explains: “Every time we are faced with despair anew we attempt once again to get rid of ourselves, and the vanity of this Ibid., p. 24. See ibid., pp. 27–8. 46 Ibid., p. 29. 47 Ibid., p. 40. 44 45

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attempt cannot but make us feel all the more desperate.”48 So what remains is the reconstruction of the privilege of not wanting to be oneself: “The fact that we do not want to be what we are makes for the whole of the actual despair.”49 B. Transcending Critique Looking at the result of Theunissen’s reconstruction from a religious-philosophical perspective, any possibility of distilling a theology from the analysis of despair seems to have been thwarted. However, it is only Kierkegaard’s attempt to find a divinely given self in the defiance of desperately wanting to be oneself that has been rejected. That Theunissen is not trying to put an end to theology itself can be seen from the fact that he is trying to excavate a different theological approach. The apparent revision of theology originates from the change of context that despair is perceived in. Whereas Kierkegaard had juxtaposed despair with faith, Theunissen perceives the opponent of despair as being hope. This, in turn, changes the nature of despair (in Danish, fortvivlelse). Whereas Kierkegaard had described this as totalization of doubt (in Danish, tvivl), Theunissen sees it as a return of the tradition of desperatio—Kierkegaard had thought this tradition to be superseded—which means the determination of despair as hopelessness.50 Not the dogmatically constricted “theology of sin” ought to provide the framework for the analysis of despair, but, rather, the fate of nihilism.51 It is from this spiritual disposition of modernism— that was expressed in full for the first time during German Romanticism—that Kierkegaard’s understanding of despair takes its origin, too, and it was expressed as such initially in Either/Or. In this perspective a theology of hope slides into focus, in which the Christian idea of God as a reason for hope can be received. Theunissen develops his religious-philosophical deliberations within the framework of the central criticism of Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair: the fact that despair is contemplated only from the perspective of the self is the most elementary preliminary decision which “has always defined the territory within which exclusively decisions on content could be made.”52 What forms the basis for transcendental criticism are “dissident tendencies” of Kierkegaard’s thoughts, which act as a mouthpiece for all that has been suppressed.53 It is upon such “self-transcendings,” where Kierkegaard “gives himself away,” so to speak, that Theunissen’s theology of non-despair is founded. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 30. 50 I would like to draw attention in this context to the fabulous analysis of the relationship between the idea of desperatio as can be found with Thomas Aquinas and that of fortvivlelse as can be found in Kierkegaard’s work: Der Begriff Verzweiflung, pp. 125–32. 51 Michael Theunissen, “Anthropologie und Theologie bei Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference ‘Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It’ Copenhagen, May 5–9, 1996, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 1), pp. 177–90, see p. 180. 52 Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 64. 53 Ibid., p. 60. 48 49

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Such self-transcendings become apparent in a very particular way in the piece about the despair of weakness (The Sickness unto Death, first part, C. B.b(α)). The despair of weakness subconsciously rebels against the intended change from desperately not wanting to be oneself into the defiance of desperately wanting to be oneself. Kierkegaard—it is claimed—groups together two different definitions of weakness: desperately not wanting to be oneself, on the one hand, and despair as a form of suffering, on the other, with the cause of despair being external. While it may be correct for Kierkegaard to see the change from weakness to defiance as overcoming the wish not to be oneself, he is deceiving himself when thinking this would overcome the operative nature of despair as well. The operative nature of despair is more original than desperately not wanting to be oneself, which can be interpreted as a deficient relationship to oneself. The despair about “him being the way he is” is prior to the wish not to be oneself.54 This operational nature of despair, so Theunissen claims, is also, continually, present in the different stages of despair, even if this is not so intended by Kierkegaard himself. When at the end Kierkegaard even defines the state of desperately wanting to be oneself as a suffering one, then what is suppressed is expressed explicitly. Because what becomes apparent is that human activity, which takes the form of man trying to construct himself of constructing himself or herself, only seems desperate because this arbitrary construction of self meets an insurmountable obstacle. The defiance is nothing but a “possible—by no means inevitable—reaction to this suffering,” which is due to the fact that the possibility to construct oneself is limited.55 The weakness of suffering therefore can be found on all levels of despair. It needs to be given priority over active defiance, just as desperately not wanting to be oneself was given priority over wanting to be oneself. In the light of weakness and defiance, Theunissen now explicates an alternative definition of the relationship between active participation and suffering. Kierkegaard’s belief that in each form of despair there is a moment of action contains an element of truth—as long as the active participation does not seek to orient itself by the active guilt implied in the idea of sin. Rather, the moment of activeness contained in despair derives from the totalization of the reason for despair. This is actually proven by Kierkegaard’s different levels of despair over weakness: “Whoever despairs over something earthly turns this something—which always is something individual— into the earthly as a whole. He could not do so if he was not living in despair over the eternal.”56 Each form of despair contains the element of action in as much as it is only subjective activeness that turns a something into a whole. Despair is always about everything, and therefore about the eternal. This is why despair should not be described as a totalization of doubt but rather as a negative totalization of loss or hopelessness. Whereas this aspect of action can rightly be understood as a necessary aspect of despair, Kierkegaard is wrong to turn this action into an absolute and to take despair to be nothing but action as such. What Theunissen wishes to prove is that the unity Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 83. 56 Ibid., p. 89. 54 55

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of action and suffering that he explores is essentially in line with Kierkegaard’s contemplations, and even that Kierkegaard himself would have to adapt such a unity, and he tries to do so by referring to the proprium of The Sickness unto Death lying in the impossibility of self-redemption. The fact that Kierkegaard had “given up faith in the self-healing powers of the desperate” shows the futility of trying to define despair as action alone.57 When seen from the perspective of this realization it would only be consistent to continue the aspect of Kierkegaard’s argumentation that concerns itself with the despair of weakness, describing despair as an experience of loss. If man despairs about something because he has lost this particular something, then the whole meaning of despair is that this loss is made absolute and is experienced under suffering as the loss of the eternal. If the eternal is lost, however, in such a way that faith in the eternal is abandoned, then this shows the “suffering of an unavailable something,” because the eternal seems to withdraw from the subject.58 This loss of the eternal, according to Theunissen, cannot be confined to the performances of self-relation. This frees the analysis of despair from its last, inappropriate condition. It is exactly the despair at the eternal—defined as it was by Kierkegaard as an intermediate step in the process of understanding despair—which, according to Theunissen, describes the most original “absolute, all-encumbering” form of despair.59 However, Kierkegaard’s understanding of the eternal is difficult to comprehend, in as much as he locks the eternal into a metaphysical time–eternity dualism, on the one hand, and into the self, on the other hand, “confining it to the self.”60 The term of the eternal becomes more comprehensible when one understands that what lies behind the despair about the eternal is the loss of trust in what could save one from one’s despair. The eternal therefore needs to be deciphered as a “pseudonym for that what saves” and understood from the perspective of Christian salvation.61 Making reference to his earlier essay “Der Gebetsglaube Jesu,” this substitution of the “eternal” with “that what saves” is defined more closely. Kierkegaard apparently sees the notion of God guaranteed because all is possible: in “each annulment of the boundaries of our possibilities God becomes apparent.”62 Accordingly, it is equally valid that the formulae of founding-oneself-transparently, which describes a particular notion of faith in The Sickness unto Death, too, is precisely about that: to have trust that everything is possible. With this thought Theunissen returns to the previous deliberations, according to which faith manifests itself in the fact that the trust in possibility and thus in the future is restored to action.63 It is at this point, too, that the real question concerning theology lies. If his “deconstruction” of the metaphysics of the eternal is not geared towards the farewell to theology, but rather aims at providing space for it, then this deconstruction cannot culminate in a dissolution of the notion of eternity. In Kierkegaard’s theory Ibid., p. 99; see pp. 96–101. Ibid., p. 101. 59 Ibid., p. 106. 60 Ibid., p. 108. 61 Ibid., p. 109. 62 Ibid., p. 112 63 See ibid., pp. 121–4. 57 58

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the mention of the eternal involves “a kind of functional necessity”—and it is this necessity which Theunissen claims for himself.64 This necessity appears if the notion of despair is understood as serving a function in the interpretation of nihilism. A nihilistic experience of loss initially appears at that point, where the loss of something earthly turns into the loss of the earthly itself. An appropriate understanding of nihilism does not develop from what is only a pessimistic view of the world, it develops when the earthly is transcended so that “in the loss of the earthly the eternal is lost.”65 Here, the eternal has to be declared as the eternal, because it is only in this way that it can be interpreted as “metaphor for the living source of all meaning of life.”66 God as the eternal is therefore the point of reference for a trusting faith which “can save us from the distress of a meaningless existence.”67 V. Epilogue: Correcting the Corrections—An Examination of Michael Theunissen The stir that Michael Theunissen caused—particularly with his latest book Der Begriff Verzweiflung—has had a great impact on Kierkegaard research and has been reason for a new interest in Kierkegaard, even for that of non-specialists. It is beyond question that the discussion about The Sickness unto Death as initiated by Theunissen has become a new benchmark for research. Marius Mjaaland calls it “certainly the most comprehensive debate about this work since it was published in 1849.”68 Arne Grøn wishes to emphasize that Theunissen has also freed Kierkegaard research from the hermetic interpretation that at times it has been prone to: “what contributes to making this interpretation so important is that key terms such as defiance, weakness, suffering and action—and this is not even mentioning despair itself—are no longer treated with the same implicitness as before in Kierkegaard literature.”69 Obviously, the question at the center of the debate is which of the two forms of despair has a claim to priority. It decides and brings into relief the tension between a mainly theological and a mainly philosophical Kierkegaard exegesis. Alastair Hannay has drawn attention to Kierkegaard’s preference to desperately wanting to be oneself, saying that it was the only way of maintaining the theological context of his thinking. Contrary to what Theunissen thinks, Kierkegaard does not see the despair we face in not wanting to be what our random “pre-given existence” allows us to be. It is rather, that we do not want to be our “true,” “God-established self.”70 Every kind of despair (if initially at a subconscious level) has to do with us not wanting to be the God-established self and defiantly insisting upon being ourselves. This dimension is formative in Kierkegaard’s explication of despair from the very Ibid., p. 116. Ibid. 66 Ibid., p. 117. 67 Ibid. 68 Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2008, p. 168. 69 Arne Grøn, “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, p. 47. 70 See Alastair Hannay, “Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 14–32, see pp. 24–5. 64 65

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start. Following this criticism, Marius Mjaaland accuses Theunissen of shifting the founding categories: “The danger of a category mistake is the result of his desire to replace the dialectic between the self and the other by a supposed dialectic between ‘that which we are’ and ‘that which we are not.’ ”71 However, this problem by no means describes fully the extensive debate that Theunissen’s Kierkegaard reconstruction has sparked. Arne Grøn, in particular, has worked out further questions in his two papers published in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook in 1997: the problem of non-intrinsic or subconscious despair, the processuality of despair, the question about negativism in respect of method and content or the function of phenomenology in Kierkegaard’s writing are addressed in the discussion with Theunissen. Another topic that was discussed broadly as a consequence is the logic of construction behind The Sickness unto Death, in particular the interrelationship of the two main parts and thus the relationship of philosophy, or rather psychology and theology.72 To close I would like to suggest a possible continuation of Theunissen’s theological program which would serve to clarify a certain woolliness in his thought. What makes it woolly is Theunissen’s definition of “the saving”—that is, the saving principle or that what saves—which in some places seems to be nothing but a modernized lore of the biblical idea of God as a savior. The standards Theunissen sets elsewhere, of maintaining rationality, seem not to apply to this idea. This makes it all the more important to do so anyway, and the best way of doing so is within the framework of a fundamental explication of this category. The problem is that the initially mild weakening of the paradigm of being-a-self— to the effect that in extreme cases, at least, it is possible to experience despair that has nothing to do with the condition of the self, but rather has its cause in the condition of the world—bears problematic consequences in theological reflection: “[T]he fact that Kierkegaard could not allow any theology that dismisses the foundation of the relationship with God as lying in the relationship with self” is precisely what secures the rationality of his theology:73 It is not possible to speak about God as such; it is only possible to do so from the perspective of a more profound relation to self. According to Kierkegaard, it is only possible to think about theology in a rational Mjaaland, Autopsia, p. 172; see Grøn, “Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” pp. 36–40; Grøn, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 102–9; Hermann Deuser, “Grundsätzliches zur Interpretation der Krankheit zum Tode. Zu M. Theunissens Korrekturen an Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 117–28. Theunissen replied to the questions from Hannay and Grøn in “Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard.” On a slightly different level this discussion appears when Theunissen contemplates the relationship between anthropology and theology (Theunissen, “Anthropologie und Theologie”). Alastair Hannay responded to this in “Paradigmatic Despair and the Quest for a Kierkegaardian Anthropology,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 149–63. 72 See Arne Grøn, “The Relation between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness unto Death,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1997, pp. 35–50; Joachim Ringleben, “Zur Aufbaulogik der Krankheit zum Tode,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1997, pp. 100–16; Jon Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1997, pp. 117–43. 73 Theunissen, “Anthropologie und Theologie bei Kierkegaard,” p. 179. 71

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kind of way, by searching out the very roots of being-a-self and symbolizing them with biblical and dogmatic images of God. Thinking about how to relate to God without thinking about how to relate to oneself is not rationally tenable. The act of questioning the paradigm of being-a-self thus does not only have a strong bearing on the form despair assumes, but it also decides upon the rationality behind a theology that is derived from the analysis of despair. When Theunissen mentions “that what saves,” however, the link to being-a-self is broken, and no other rational criterion is given. If the doom leading to despair is defined as an “objective condition of the entire world,”74 then the solution sounding the most obvious is that the salvation can only lie in adjusting this condition. In particular, Theunissen’s great theory, according to which that what saves is a “metaphor for the living source of all meaning of life,” is very much in need of further explanation, considering that the problem of subjective acquisition of meaning is by and large not mentioned at all.75 Rationally, however, it is possible only to consider the reflection of that which saves in the hope of the believer and the freedom to act which this sets free. Last but not least, Theunissen himself holds, after all, that what saves does not only do so once it gets to appear in a world-changing manner but rather does so at a far earlier stage: at the point when the image of another world is anticipated and translated into action. The analysis and reconstruction of this process remains wanting—particularly in respect of the theory of meaning—and it appears to be overshadowed by the slightly undiscerning image of “that what saves.” In fact, Theunissen’s theological reflections on Kierkegaard are so impressive that they deserve attention, further research, and reflection. Translated by Rebecca Sanger

Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 122. Ibid., p. 117.

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Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Theunissen’s Corpus “Das Kierkegaardbild in der neueren Forschung und Deutung 1945–1957,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 32, 1958, pp. 576–612. Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard, Freiburg: Karl Alber 1958. “Sören Kierkegaard,” in De Homine. Der Mensch im Spiegel seines Gedankens, ed. by Michael Landmann, Freiburg: Karl Alber 1962 (Orbis Academicus, vol. I/9), pp. 496–510. Review of Anton Mirko Koktanek’s Schellings Seinslehre und Kierkegaard, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 71, 1963, pp. 176–7. Review of Edo Pivcevic’s Ironie als Daseinsform bei Sören Kierkegaard, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 71, 1963, p. 442. “Die Dialektik der Offenbarung. Zur Auseinandersetzung Schellings und Kierkegaards mit der Religionsphilosophie Hegels,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch, vol. 72, 1964–65, pp. 134–60. Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1970, pp. 27–32. “Augenblick (Kierkegaard),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1, 1971, columns 649–50. “Ausnahme I (Kierkegaard),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1, 1971, columns 667–8. “Denkprojekt (Kierkegaard),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, 1972, column 109. “Entweder-Oder (Kierkegaard),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, 1972, column 550. “Ernst,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, 1972, columns 720–3. Review of Alastair McKinnon’s Fundamental Polyglot Konkordans til Kierkegaards Samlede Vaerker, Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 20, 1973, pp. 304–5. Review of Kresten Nordentoft’s Kierkegaards psykologi, Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 20, 1973, pp. 305–6. “Gleichzeitigkeit I (theol.),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3, 1974, columns 674–5. “Krankheit zum Tode (Kierkegaard),” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 4, 1976, column 1190. “Das Menschenbild der Krankheit zum Tode,” in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. by Michael Theunissen and Wilfried Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, pp. 496–509.

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Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. by Michael Theunissen and Wilfred Greve, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979. “Kierkegaard’s Negativistic Method,” Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. by Joseph H. Smith, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1981 (Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol. 5), pp. 381–423 (in German as Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode, Frankfurt am Main: Anton Hain 1991). Negative Theologie der Zeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991. Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1993. (English translation: Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. by Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 2005.) “Kierkegaards philosophisches Profil,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 6–27. “Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu den Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 61–90. “Kierkegaards Schwermut,” in his Vorentwürfe von Moderne. Antike Melancholie und die Acedia des Mittelalters, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1996, pp. 44–8. Review of Arne Grøn’s Begrebet angst hos Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 225–8. “Anthropologie und Theologie bei Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference ‘Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It’ Copenhagen, May 5–9, 1996, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997 (Kierkegard Studies Monograph Studies, vol. 1), pp. 177–90. “Melancholie und Acedia. Motive zur zweitbesten Fahrt in die Moderne,” in Entzauberte Zeit. Der melancholische Geist der Moderne, ed. by Ludger Heidebrink, Munich: Hanser 1997, pp. 16–41. “Das Erbauliche im Gedanken an den Tod: Traditionelle Elemente, innovative Ideen und unausgeschöpfte Potentiale in Kierkegaards Rede An einem Grabe,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2000, pp. 40–74. (English translation: “The Upbuilding in the Thought of Death. Traditional Elements, Innovative Ideas, and Unexhausted Possibilities in Kierkegaard’s Discourse ‘At a Graveside,’” in “Prefaces” and “Writing Sampler”/“Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions,” ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 2006 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vols. 9–10), pp. 321–58.) “Verzweiflung,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 11, 2001, columns 1028–34. “Wahl,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 12, 2004, columns 19–22. “Wiederholung,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 12, 2004, columns 738–46. “Zwischen,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 12, 2004, columns 1543–9.

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II. Sources of Theunissen’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Fahrenbach, Helmut, Kierkegaards existenzdialektische Ethik, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann 1968. Hirsch, Emanuel, Kierkegaard-Studien, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1933. Holl, Jann, Kierkegaards Konzeption des Selbst. Eine Untersuchung über die Voraussetzungen und Formen seines Denkens, Meisenheim: Anton Hain 1972. Meerpohl, Bernhard, Die Verzweiflung als metaphysisches Phänomen in der Philosophie Sören Kierkegaards, Würzburg: C.J. Becker 1934. Pattison, George, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London: Macmillan 1992. Sack, Max, Die Verzweiflung. Eine Untersuchung ihres Wesens und ihrer Entstehung. Mit einem Anhang: Sören Kierkegaards “Krankheit zum Tode,” Kallmünz: Mich. Laszleben 1930. Schulz, Walter, “Existenz und System bei Sören Kierkegaard,” in Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen. Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1957, pp. 107–28. Sløk, Johannes, Die Anthropologie Kierkegaards, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde und Bagger 1954. Wilshire, Bruce, “Kierkegaard’s Theory of Knowledge and new Directions in Psychology and Psychoanalysis,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 3, 1963, pp. 249–61. III. Secondary Literature on Theunissen’s Relation to Kierkegaard Anghern, Emil et al. (eds.), Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992. Deuser, Hermann, “Grundsätzliches zur Interpretation der ‘Krankheit zum Tode.’ Zu M. Theunissens ‘Korrekturen an Kierkegaard,’ ” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 117–28. Deuser, Hermann and Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, “Perspectives in Kierkegaard Research,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 1–14. Dietz, Walter, Review of Michael Theunissen’s Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 18, no. 3, 1993, pp. 85–8. —“Kierkegaard im Licht der neueren internationalen Forschung,” Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 46, 1999, pp. 224–41. Fahrenbach, Helmut: “Die gegenwärtige Kierkegaard-Auslegung in der deutschsprachigen Literatur von 1948 bis 1962,” Philosophische Rundschau. Sonderheft. Kierkegaard-Literatur, 1962, pp. 1–77, see pp. 20–5. Greve, Wilfried, “Wo bleibt das Ethische in Kierkegaards ‘Krankheit zum Tode’?” in Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Emil Angehrn, et al., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992, pp. 323–41. Grøn, Arne, “Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 91–116.

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—“Der Begriff Verzweiflung,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 33–60. Habermas, Jürgen, “Kommunikative Freiheit und negative Theologie,” Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Emil Anghern, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1992, pp. 15–34. Hannay, Alastair, “Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 14–32. —“Paradigmatic Despair and the Quest for a Kierkegaardian Anthropology,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1996, pp. 149–63. Hanson, Jeffrey, Review of Michael Theunissen’s Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 59, no. 3, 2006, p. 685. Hattstein, Markus et al. (eds.), Erfahrung der Negativität. Festschrift für Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, Hildesheim: Olms 1992. Kodalle, Klaus-Michael, Die Eroberung des Nutzlosen. Kritik des Wunschdenkens und der Zweckrationalität im Anschluß an Kierkegaard, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh 1988, p. 247. Malantschuk, Gregor, “Michael Theunissen: Der Begriff Ernst bei Sören Kierkegaard” (review), Kierkegaardiana, vol. 3, 1959, pp. 111–12. Mjaaland, Marius Timmann, Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2008, pp. 168–79; pp. 181–3; pp. 248–50; pp. 259–62. Ringleben, Joachim, Aneignung. Die spekulative Theologie Søren Kierkegaards, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1983, p. 76; p. 78; p. 104; p. 143; p. 258. Scharf, Susanne, Zerbrochene Zeit—gelebte Gegenwart. Im Diskurs mit Michael Theunissen, Regensburg: Pustet 2005. Schultzky, Gerolf, Die Wahrnehmung des Menschen bei Søren Kierkegaard, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1977, pp. 54–6. Schulz, Heiko, Eschatologische Identität. Eine Untersuchung über das Verhältnis von Vorsehung, Schicksal und Zufall bei Sören Kierkegaard, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1994, pp. 458–60.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Origin of Analytic Philosophy Thomas Miles

“Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Ludwig Wittgenstein1

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is often considered to be the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. As the quotation above suggests, Wittgenstein was himself greatly influenced by the thinker he considered the most profound thinker of the previous century, Søren Kierkegaard. As scholars have recently demonstrated, Wittgenstein’s work, including his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922, and later Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953, was greatly inspired by his encounter with Kierkegaard’s thinking. Kierkegaard also profoundly influenced the transition in Wittgenstein’s thought between this early and later work, as we can see in the 1930– 37 Denkbewegungen (“Movements of Thought”) notebooks only recently published in 1997 and in his 1938 “Lectures on Religious Belief.” Inspired by Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein’s work in turn inspired the movement that is sometimes called “analytic philosophy.” This became the dominant philosophical movement in the English-speaking philosophical world throughout most of the twentieth century; in one form or another, it largely remains so today. Although analytic philosophy has its earliest manifestations in the work of Wittgenstein’s mentors Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), and its historical roots trace back to British empiricists like David Hume (1711–76), Wittgenstein’s work is arguably the first fully realized instantiation of analytic philosophy.2 In any case, it certainly formed the central inspiration for the movement of analytic philosophy that followed. The name “analytic philosophy” can be understood in relation to the method of seeking philosophical clarity through an analysis of concepts or language, a method Wittgenstein often applies. Yet the label “analytic philosophy” is not just used for M.O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. by Rush Rhees, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984 [1981], pp. 87–8. 2 For this argument see Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1993, p. 127. 1

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philosophy that employs this method; it includes many different schools of thought, often in disagreement with each other. Competing schools of analytic philosophy have claimed Wittgenstein as their primary influence, some preferring his earlier work and some his later work. Looking back in 1959, Bertrand Russell declared: “During the period since 1914 three philosophies have successively dominated the British philosophical world, first that of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, second that of the Logical Positivists, and third that of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.”3 In fact, the Logical Positivists, otherwise known as the Vienna Circle, were also greatly influenced by Wittgenstein; they regarded his Tractatus as articulating their conception of philosophy. Another early school of analytic philosophy, known as ordinary language philosophy, was primarily influenced by Wittgenstein’s later work. We know from accounts of several key figures in early analytic philosophy that Wittgenstein’s influence on them was not simply as a source of philosophical methods or particular ideas. Above all, Wittgenstein offered an inspiring new vision of what philosophy is and ought to be.4 Although many of the ideas and methods of analytic philosophy preceded Wittgenstein, I think it is fair to say that the widespread movement of analytic philosophy grew out of a passionate response to Wittgenstein’s call to pursue philosophy in a new way, according to a strict new conception of philosophical excellence. To his credit, Wittgenstein’s vision of philosophical excellence continued to be inspirational even for later schools of analytic philosophy that identified themselves as breaking with Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Wittgenstein’s normative vision for philosophy, his “metaphilosophy” or more properly his “ethics of philosophy,” was as austere as it was demanding. One early, enormously influential formulation of it is expressed in his call for clarity or silence in the Tractatus: “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”5 Since the Tractatus states (and shows) that subjects like aesthetics, ethics, and religion cannot be spoken about clearly, it concludes by calling for us to remain silent about these subjects, rather than talking “nonsense” about them. Later analytic philosophers were greatly inspired by this vision for philosophy. As they understood it, Wittgenstein showed how philosophy could attain the clarity and precision of a science. It could do so in large part by 3 Quoted in P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, p. 1. 4 Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place, p. 1; p. 40. Wittgenstein remained the central figure in analytic philosophy until the 1970s. After this time analytic philosophers tended to turn to W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000), rather than Wittgenstein, as their leading figure. Although these later schools of analytic philosophy often understand themselves as a reaction against Wittgenstein, they nonetheless remain influenced by Wittgenstein in important respects. (This is true if only in that Quine was a member of the Vienna Circle and very much influenced by it and thus, at least indirectly, by Wittgenstein.) See Brian Leiter, “Introduction,” in The Future for Philosophy, ed. by Brian Leiter, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004, p. 2. 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung” in Annalen der Naturphilosophie, ed. by Wilhelm Ostwald, vol. 14, 1921, p. 186. In what follows, I will quote from the English translation: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by C.K. Ogden, New York: Routledge 1988 [1922], Preface, p. 27.

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dismissing as nonsense the traditional questions of philosophy like “What is the best and most meaningful life?” Given that this is the central question in Kierkegaard’s work, it is surprising to find that Wittgenstein read and greatly admired Kierkegaard.6 Whereas most analytic philosophers think philosophy ought to model itself on science, Kierkegaard’s work is, as he himself insists, unscientific. In fact, in numerous books Kierkegaard roundly criticizes the supposedly “scientific,” systematic philosophy of his time. It seems likely that many of these criticisms could apply to analytic philosophy, and that in turn analytic philosophy could criticize Kierkegaard for failing to be rigorously clear. Thus, there seems to be an inherent animosity between the thinking of Kierkegaard and the tradition of analytic philosophy (including, one would think, Ludwig Wittgenstein). Historically, at least, this has been the case. For the most part, the followers of Wittgenstein and the followers of Kierkegaard have regarded each other warily, each side accusing the other of not doing serious, worthwhile philosophy. It is all the more surprising, then, that Kierkegaard was almost certainly Wittgenstein’s favorite thinker and that Wittgenstein consistently looked to Kierkegaard as his own normative model of personal and philosophical excellence. Wittgenstein had no formal training in philosophy and tended strongly to dislike the philosophy he did learn about (including that of his friends). Yet Wittgenstein’s admiration for Kierkegaard has been confirmed by several friends and colleagues with whom Wittgenstein discussed Kierkegaard.7 More importantly, it is plainly evident in the many direct references to Kierkegaard in Wittgenstein’s notes, most of which were published only fairly recently, in 1997.8 Wittgenstein treats Kierkegaard as more Bertrand Russell expressed surprise, and perhaps also disdain, upon first hearing that Wittgenstein “reads people like Kierkegaard.” Wittgenstein had apparently brought up Kierkegaard as a way of explaining the ethical and mystical parts of the Tractatus that Russell found mystifying. Creegan cites a letter from Bertrand Russell to Lady Ottoline Morrell, December 20, 1919. Charles Creegan, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, New York: Routledge 1989, p. 17. 7 For example, Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984, p. 60 and G.H. von Wright, “A Biographical Sketch” in the same volume, p. 19. 8 Wittgenstein published little in his lifetime, but left instructions for his executors to posthumously organize and publish his notes. One collection of notes from Vermischte Bemerkungen, translated as Culture and Value, contains three references to Kierkegaard. Vermischte Bemerkungen, ed. by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1977, pp. 31–3; p. 38; p. 53. (See Culture and Value, ed. by G.H. von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980, pp. 31–3; p. 38; p. 53.) It was not until 1997 that a notebook of Wittgenstein’s called the Koder diaries, manuscript 183, or Denkbewegungen (Movements of Thought) was made public. This notebook (English translation: Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occassions, ed. by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, trans. by Alfred Nordmann, New York: Rowman & Littlefield 2003) contains nine more passages that explicitly mention Kierkegaard: pp. 68–9; pp. 102–3; pp. 122–4; pp. 135–6; pp. 166–7; pp. 176–7; pp. 204–5; pp. 210–11. (In this translation see p. 77; p. 83; p. 111; pp. 131–3; pp. 143–5; pp. 175–7; p. 185; p. 213; p. 219.) In what follows I will cite the original page numbers of this manuscript. 6

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than just an intellectual and ethical mentor; half of these passages show Wittgenstein establishing Kierkegaard as the standard by which he judges himself, sometimes quite severely.9 (Like Kierkegaard, and with his encouragement, Wittgenstein was often plagued by intense feelings of failure, guilt, and moral worthlessness.) As other studies of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein have shown, Wittgenstein owned and read widely in Kierkegaard’s works, although exactly what texts he read remains somewhat unclear. Wittgenstein explicitly names or references four of Kierkegaard’s texts: Either/Or,10 Philosophical Fragments,11 Concluding Unscientific Postscript,12 and Practice in Christianity,13 suggesting that he read part or all of these texts. In addition, on the basis of textual comparisons between specific passages and ideas in Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, scholars have argued that Wittgenstein probably read from The Moment,14 The Concept of Anxiety,15 Repetition,16 The Sickness unto Death,17 Fear and Trembling,18 and the concluding section of A Literary Review of Two Ages entitled “The Present Age.”19 Even with respect to works we know 9 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 38; Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 102–3; pp. 135–6; pp. 166–7; pp. 176–7; pp. 204–5. 10 As I will explain shortly, in a letter from his sister Hermine from November 20, 1917 she writes that she has sent him several volumes of Kierkegaard’s work, but she mentions only the section of the first volume of Either/Or entitled “The Diary of a Seducer.” Wittgenstein’s 1938 “Lectures on Religious Belief” (p. 70) contain a reference to a story told in the second volume of Either/Or (SKS 3, 254 / EO2, 266–70). See Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, p. 5; p. 16. 11 Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief” (p. 54) also contain a reference to Philosophical Fragments (SKS 4, 245 / PF, 40). See Roe Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein som religionsfilosof—og spesielt forholdet til Kierkegaard og kristendommen i ‘Denkbewegungen,’” Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, vol. 41, 2006, pp. 219–20; p. 222 and Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, p. 31. 12 In his memoir, Norman Malcolm recalls Wittgenstein confirming that he had read the Postscript but saying that he found it “too deep” for him. Malcolm, A Memoir, p. 60. See Roe Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the Ethico-Religious,” Ideas in History, vol. 1, no. 2, 2006, pp. 116–17, and Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 31. 13 In a letter to Wittgenstein from October 14, 1921, Wittgenstein’s friend Ludwig Hänsel writes about his difficulty in finding Practice in Christianity, which Wittgenstein had apparently requested that he send to him. Ludwig Hänsel—Ludwig Wittgenstein: Eine Freundschaft, Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag 1994, p. 56. See also Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 116, and Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 24. 14 See Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 117. 15 See Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 117, and Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 17; p. 25. 16 See Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 117, and Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 25. 17 See Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 117, and Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 24. 18 See Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 117. 19 See Allan Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard, and the Early Brenner,” in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vols. 1–4, ed. by Daniel Conway and K.E. Gover, New York: Routledge 2002, vol. 4, p. 141.

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Wittgenstein owned and read, it is not clear what parts of these books he read.20 Given this uncertainty, it is generally impossible to trace Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein to particular passages or works in Kierkegaard. Nonetheless, what Wittgenstein said and wrote about Kierkegaard provides a good general indication of the scale and nature of Kierkegaard’s influence on him. Many of Wittgenstein’s most central ideas bear the mark of Kierkegaard’s influence. As the quotation at the beginning of this article indicates, Wittgenstein admired both the philosophical profundity of Kierkegaard’s work and the ethical profundity of his life. Profundity was not the only virtue Wittgenstein admired in Kierkegaard. Of the 12 passages in the notebooks in which he mentions Kierkegaard by name, ten associate Kierkegaard with a virtue that Wittgenstein admires. (The two exceptions are minor references, one simply noting Kierkegaard’s use of irony,21 and another simply defending his greatness.22) Profundity or depth (Tiefe) may be the quality Wittgenstein valued most in Kierkegaard, explicitly associating it with Kierkegaard in two moving passages.23 In a separate letter and conversation, Wittgenstein even declared that Kierkegaard was “too deep” for him.24 These and other passages show that Wittgenstein agreed with Kierkegaard that philosophical depth is not just a matter of finding the most basic, fundamental truths or principles. Philosophical depth is a matter of addressing actual human life and the most important issues that life itself presents.25 Perhaps more surprisingly, Wittgenstein learned from Kierkegaard about clarity, precisely the quality that most followers of Wittgenstein might find lacking in Kierkegaard.26 As I will show, what Wittgenstein learned from Kierkegaard about different criteria of clarity may have been influential for the important transformation of Wittgenstein’s thinking between his early and later work. Among other things, Wittgenstein seems to have learned from Kierkegaard that there are different forms of clarity appropriate to different uses of language. Wittgenstein also revered Kierkegaard for his honesty; in two confessional passages, Wittgenstein turns to Kierkegaard for his conception of sincerity (Aufrichtigkeit) in the sense of honesty with respect to oneself.27 Lastly, four passages address the important quality by which ideas can move us and change our lives. This quality is a virtue of philosophy that, for lack of a better word, we might call

Wittgenstein’s friend O.K. Bouwsma reports that near the end of his life Wittgenstein told him “he could not read [Kierkegaard] much. He got hints. He did not want another man’s thought all chewed. A word or two was sometimes enough.” O.K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949–1951, ed. by J.L. Craft and Ronald Hustwit, Indianapolis: Hackett 1986, p. 46. 21 Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, p. 68. 22 Ibid., p. 211. 23 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 38; Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 176–7. 24 Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 60; p. 106. 25 See, for example, Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, p. 147; pp. 176–7. 26 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 31; Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 135–6. 27 Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 102–3; pp. 166–7. 20

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creativity.28 One of these last mentioned passages also credits Kierkegaard with great intellectual courage (Mut), although it is critical of the (Socratic) trickery involved in what Kierkegaard called his method of indirect communication.29 Other conversational references to Kierkegaard credit him with the virtues of elegance and seriousness as a philosopher.30 In keeping with Wittgenstein’s practice, I will use the framework of these virtues to examine Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein. Since Wittgenstein did not tend to make a distinction between personal and philosophical excellence, the virtues he associates with Kierkegaard are both ethical and philosophical virtues. It will sometimes be helpful to consider these meanings separately, however. As I will show, the historical and textual evidence conclusively suggests that Kierkegaard was a significant influence on Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics as well as on his conception of how philosophy ought to be practiced. Not only does this establish Kierkegaard as an important and almost completely overlooked source behind analytic philosophy, it also allows us to understand Wittgenstein’s work in a new light. Additionally, it enables us to explain Wittgenstein’s frustrated disappointment in the first schools of analytic philosophy that he had inspired. Lastly, it will suggest ways in which Wittgenstein’s work, especially the parts influenced by Kierkegaard, may continue to be valuable for contemporary forms of analytic philosophy. In the first section to follow, I will consider Wittgenstein’s knowledge of Kierkegaard and its likely influence on the content of Wittgenstein’s existential conception of ethics in his early work. Then, in the second section, I will discuss Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein’s normative conception of what philosophy is and ought to be. This will establish the context in which we should understand Wittgenstein’s thoughts on ethics. It will also help to explain why Wittgenstein thought that his work was fundamentally misunderstood by the first analytic philosophy to be inspired by it, the Logical Positivists. I will end this second section by considering Kierkegaard’s influence on the period of transition in which Wittgenstein was rethinking his earlier philosophy and trying to address misunderstandings of it. I. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’s Existential Ethics It is impossible adequately to explain either Wittgenstein’s existential conception of ethics or his broader conception of philosophy without considering the extraordinary life experiences that contributed to them. Like Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein was born into a family of great wealth; before he gave away all of his money in 1919, Wittgenstein was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He was born in Vienna in 1889, the youngest son of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. Like Kierkegaard’s Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 53; Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, p. 75; pp. 122–4; pp. 204–5. 29 Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 122–4. Towards the end of his life Wittgenstein said that he could no longer read Kierkegaard, complaining that he was “too long-winded” and “too deep” for him. (At this time Wittgenstein mainly liked pulp detective novels.) See Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” pp. 87–8. 30 Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” pp. 87–8; Bouwsma, Conversations, p. 46. 28

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father, Karl Wittgenstein was a self-made millionaire who retired from business at a fairly young age and devoted himself to intellectual and cultural pursuits. Karl Wittgenstein’s children were accordingly raised in an atmosphere of great cultural and artistic appreciation.31 As they were growing up Ludwig’s older sister Margarete (Gretl) was acknowledged to be the family intellectual, and she served as Ludwig’s first intellectual mentor. (She would later direct him to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) when in his student years Ludwig was having a crisis of faith.)32 The fact that Kierkegaard was Margarete’s favorite philosopher makes it very likely that Wittgenstein first came to know about Kierkegaard from her and at a fairly young age.33 The Wittgenstein children were taught to uphold excellent aesthetic taste as a matter of good, upstanding character. The Wittgenstein family ethos revolved around the virtue of Anständigkeit (respectability, genuineness) which was understood as a strict and uncompromising adherence to one’s value judgments, whether aesthetic or ethical.34 (This explains one way to understand Wittgenstein’s later declaration, “Ethics and aesthetics are one.”)35 The Wittgenstein children were encouraged to be astute and severe critics not only of the arts but also of themselves. In particular, they were encouraged to be scrupulously self-critical and to uphold a sometimes merciless sense of genuineness and honesty towards themselves and others. In his adult life, Wittgenstein would sometimes take this demand to extremes, sending melodramatic letters to friends and family members confessing his “sins” and frequently falling into suicidal despair over thoughts of his own worthlessness and moral failings. Early in his life Ludwig was considered the dullest of the Wittgenstein children, but he showed mechanical aptitude that endeared him to his father. He was sent to a technical high school, the Realschule in Linz where his schoolmate, whom he did not know at the time, was Adolf Hitler. Although he was not a very good engineering student, Wittgenstein went on to study mechanical engineering at a technical university in Berlin. After graduating, he moved to Manchester, England where he pursued research in aeronautics by designing and building kites. Here his interest in engineering led to an interest in pure mathematics and this, in turn, led to an interest in logic. Reading Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics, Wittgenstein felt he had finally found a field in which he could contribute something great.36 After reading and consulting with Frege, Wittgenstein went to Cambridge to study with Russell, arriving unannounced at Russell’s door in October 1911. The family’s aristocratic palace in Vienna became a center of musical excellence, and events there were attended by great composers like Johannes Brahms (1833–97) and Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Leopoldine Wittgenstein was herself an extremely talented pianist and engendered a deep love of music in her children; Ludwig’s older brother Paul went on to become a famous concert pianist, achieving great success even after losing an arm in World War I. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York: Penguin 1990, pp. 8–14. 32 Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 4–18. 33 Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, pp. 13–14. 34 Wijdeveld, Architect, p. 18. 35 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.421, p. 183. 36 Biographical information from Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 11–35. 31

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Although his manners were usually impeccable, when it came to discussing philosophy Wittgenstein was demanding and persistently argumentative to an almost unbearable degree. Russell, however, appreciated Wittgenstein’s intellectual honesty and passion; he later described Wittgenstein as “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”37 In the fall of 1913, Wittgenstein abruptly decided that he must leave Cambridge in order to work on logic in solitude. He moved to Skjolden, a village in Norway north of Bergen. The year he spent there was one of the most productive and happy of his life. He quickly learned Norwegian and befriended many of the local villagers, whom he found much more congenial and genuine than his acquaintances in Cambridge.38 It seems clear that it was during this time in Norway that Wittgenstein first read Kierkegaard, if he had not already done so. In a later conversation, Wittgenstein claimed that he had learned Danish in order to read Kierkegaard in the original.39 This is confirmed by another conversation in which Wittgenstein complained about Walter Lowrie’s English translations of Kierkegaard, saying that Lowrie “completely failed to reproduce the elegance of the original Danish.”40 It is also quite likely that around this time Wittgenstein read the German translations of some of Kierkegaard’s works by Theodor Haecker (1878–1945), published in the Austrian cultural journal Der Brenner. From 1913 until 1922, Der Brenner published several translations of work and journal entries by Kierkegaard, including the section of Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review of Two Ages entitled “The Present Age,” as well as a number of other discourses and passages from other works.41 Wittgenstein became interested in it after reading in the German journal Die Fackel that Der Brenner published and supported Austrian writers, including writers like Georg Trakl (1887–1914) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), whom Wittgenstein greatly admired. In July 1914, Wittgenstein wrote to the editor of Der Ibid., p. 46. At this period of his life Russell was hoping for a protégé to carry on his work on logic and mathematics; after only a few months he had selected Wittgenstein for this role. A year later, Wittgenstein had gone from being Russell’s most brilliant student to being Russell’s teacher, raising devastating objections to Russell’s work that Russell himself could not fully understand but that he sensed must be right. Russell described it as “an event of first-rate importance in my life” when, faced with Wittgenstein’s intense criticisms, “I saw he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.” Quoted in ibid., p. 80. Russell was also the reluctant audience for Wittgenstein’s nightly bouts of ethical self-recrimination. Wittgenstein would sometimes pace back and forth in Russell’s rooms for hours, absorbed in contemplation of his worthlessness and “sins.” 38 Ibid.,, pp. 93–4. 39 H.D.P. Lee, “Wittgenstein 1929–1931,” Philosophy, vol. 54, no. 208, 1979, p. 218. 40 Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” pp. 87–8. Even if Wittgenstein did not learn Danish, given the very close similarity at this time between written Norwegian and Danish, Wittgenstein’s knowledge of Norwegian would have allowed him to read Kierkegaard in the original. (I thank Roe Fremstedal for this insight and for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.) 41 Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard, and the Early Brenner,” p. 126. For a complete list of Kierkegaard translations published in Der Brenner, see Part II of the bibliography below. 37

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Brenner, Ludwig von Ficker (1880–1967), proposing that he distribute to worthy Austrian artists in need an anonymous gift from Wittgenstein of 100,000 crowns (equivalent to about US $400,000 today).42 Astounded, Ficker at first thought Wittgenstein was joking. He later traveled to Vienna and stayed for two days at the Wittgenstein Palace, discussing cultural matters with Wittgenstein and arranging the transfer and distribution of the money. While it remains unclear exactly what Wittgenstein read in Der Brenner, it seems likely that Wittgenstein was at least familiar with the current issues of it at the time of his visit with Ficker. Kierkegaard’s “The Present Age,” published in two parts, appears as the first piece in the July 1st and 14th issues, making it highly likely that Wittgenstein read it.43 While Wittgenstein was meeting with Ficker to oversee the transfer of this money in July 1914, Europe was descending into the chaos of World War I. Taken by surprise, Wittgenstein tried to return to Norway but found that he could not. Although he was exempted from compulsory service for medical reasons, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian army. In March of 1916 his request to be sent to the Russian front as an ordinary soldier was granted; once there, he volunteered for the most dangerous duties. Like many of his generation, Wittgenstein hoped that the war would give his life meaning and make him into a better person. A diary entry from May 1916 reflects this sentiment: “Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen.”44 This passage is also representative of Wittgenstein’s religious orientation at the time. Wittgenstein’s parents, who both came from assimilated Jewish families, baptized and raised their children in the Catholic faith of their mother. Although as a college student Wittgenstein had lost his childhood faith and had ruthlessly criticized those with religious beliefs while at Cambridge, he had been greatly moved by reading Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief in the first few months of the war, and now expressed himself as a religious believer.45 It is likely that the religious beliefs Wittgenstein expressed at this time were also influenced by Kierkegaard. Even after Wittgenstein stopped expressing himself as a religious believer, Kierkegaard continued to influence his understanding of religious belief and practice.46 On June 4, 1916 Wittgenstein’s unit bore the brunt of the attack known as the Brusilov Offensive in which Russian forces brutally crushed the Austrian defenses, 42 Ficker selected Haecker to receive 2,000 crowns. Among the other recipients was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whom Wittgenstein had read and greatly admired; Rilke received 20,000 crowns. Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 106–9. 43 It is also likely that he discussed Kierkegaard with Ficker during this visit. The fact that Wittgenstein mentioned Haecker in a later letter to Ficker further supports this supposition, and may also suggest that Wittgenstein was familiar with Haecker’s book Søren Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit. See Fremstedal, “Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” p. 111; Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 179. 44 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 138. 45 Ibid., pp. 115–16. 46 See Roe Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein som religionsfilosof—og spesielt forholdet til Kierkegaard og kristendommen i ‘Denkbewegungen,’ ” Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, vol. 41, 2006, pp. 213–28.

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driving them into retreat. The Brusilov Offensive was not only the bloodiest battle of World War I, with 1.6 million casualties in just two months, it was the bloodiest single battle in all of human history.47 Although Wittgenstein would often chastise himself for his cowardice, in the face of battle he acted with extraordinary courage. For his bravery in the first days of the battle, he was recommended for a medal of honor.48 It goes without saying this experience had a profound impact on Wittgenstein personally. This experience also had a profound impact on his philosophy and, thereby, on the history of philosophy. Previously, all of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work had focused on the foundations of logic and mathematics. He had fretted verbosely over his own ethical and religious state, but he kept these personal worries separate from his philosophical work. Now, faced with the worst horrors imaginable, Wittgenstein turned to philosophy to make sense of life and death.49 He concentrated his intense intellectual efforts on what mattered to him most, and the philosophical work in his notebooks suddenly shifts from notes on logic to existential meditations. On June 11, 1916, seven days after the start of the Brusilov Offensive, Wittgenstein abruptly demands: What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it— by renouncing any influence on happenings.50

Wittgenstein now turned to philosophy as a way of addressing questions that life itself demanded of him, such as why courage in the face of death is part of the best, most happy life. Although Wittgenstein did not abandon his work on logic, most of the notes in the rest of the 1916 notebook are on what we might call existential matters (for example, the meaning of life, the nature of ethical good and evil and their connection to happiness, and the proper orientation towards death). It is from these notes that most of the ethical and “mystical” parts of the Tractatus are derived.

For a comparison, see Paul Brewer, The Chronicle of War, London: Carlton Books 2007, p. 142. 48 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 146. 49 Ibid., pp. 140–2. 50 Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984 [1961], pp. 72e–73e. 47

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These existential passages bear the mark of several intellectual influences, including Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.51 In addition, they seem to be greatly influenced by Kierkegaard. Perhaps most noticeably, Kierkegaard’s influence is evident in Wittgenstein’s holistic, existential conception of ethics that he develops here and repeats in the Tractatus. Like Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein believed that ethical success or failure, goodness or badness, was most importantly a matter of one’s overall existential attitude towards life (rather than performing particular actions aimed at changing the facts of the world in some particular way). One’s fundamental existential attitude or “ethical will” establishes the structure of one’s life-world as a whole. Although they may face the same set of factual circumstances in life, the person with a fundamentally good ethical orientation will experience the totality of these facts in a very different way to the person with the opposite existential orientation. Thus Wittgenstein concludes that “the world of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy.”52 As other scholars have pointed out, this holistic approach to ethics and the idea of different life-worlds both seem to be influenced by Kierkegaard’s notion of different existential “spheres” or ways of life, each established by one’s fundamental existential orientation.53 This was an idea that Wittgenstein explicitly associated with Kierkegaard, as seen in a later conversation in which Wittgenstein discussed “the three categories of life-style that play such a large part in Kierkegaard’s writing,” namely “the aesthetic, where the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands renunciation; and the religious, where this very renunciation itself becomes a source of joy.”54 It is perhaps no coincidence that the Tractatus names aesthetics, ethics, and religion (“the mystical”) as establishing the structure of one’s life-world as a whole. Wittgenstein later developed this idea of different “worlds” of meaning into the idea of different “forms of life” structured by shared practices and uses of language (“language games”). So it seems that Wittgenstein’s conceptions of “forms of life” and “language games,” two of the most central themes in his later work, Philosophical Investigations, were influenced by Kierkegaard’s conception of different ways of life, each with its own paradigm of meaning and value.55 In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein also follows Kierkegaard in taking this holistic conception of ethics to entail a holistic, internal conception of ethical reward and punishment. For Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, the worth of a way of life is not determined by comparing it to some objective, external standard. Rather, a good way See Monk, Wittgenstein, pp. 143–4; p. 116; pp. 121–3. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 77e. 53 Stanley Cavel is generally credited with first pointing out this important parallel. See Stanley Cavell, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1969, p. 172. 54 Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” pp. 87–8. This general schema is one that Wittgenstein could have learned by reading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or or Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 55 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, originally published as Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell 1953, especially Part I, § 19, p. 8; §§ 23–4, pp. 11–12; §§ 241–2, p. 88; Part II, § I, p. 174; § xi, p. 226. 51 52

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of life contains its own reward, and a bad way of life contains its own punishment. Like Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard associates this reward or punishment with a harmony or disharmony within oneself and with a subsequent accession or loss of meaning in one’s life.56 What Kierkegaard calls “despair” (fortvivlelse) in both Either/Or and The Sickness unto Death is a state of being in which one’s fundamental existential orientation establishes a disharmony within oneself. In a despairing life, one misrelates to oneself in a self-defeating way such that what was supposed to bring meaning to one’s life instead renders it meaningless. For example, the aesthete who seeks fulfillment and meaning in enjoyment finds his life robbed of fulfillment and meaning precisely by this central preoccupation with enjoyment. This understanding of moral failure in which a way of life loses its meaning is one that Wittgenstein would later explicitly associate with Kierkegaard. In a note in which he mentions Kierkegaard with admiration, Wittgenstein writes: “I would much rather hear ‘If you don’t do that, you will gamble away your life,’ than: ‘If you don’t do that, you will be punished.’ The former really means: If you don’t do that, your life will be an illusion, it does not have truth & depth.”57 Whether or not he was already aware of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s work in 1916, Wittgenstein offers a parallel account in the 1916 notebook entries and again in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein writes that there “must be a kind of kind of ethical reward and of ethical punishment but these must be involved in the action itself.”58 The life established by the good ethical will is not rewarded with happiness as a further consequence of being good; rather, this happiness simply is the harmonious pattern established by the good ethical will. The “punishment” of an evil ethical will is likewise not a further consequence, but is immediately manifested in the disharmony and loss of meaning established by the “evil” orientation toward the world. The reward or punishment for having a certain existential orientation toward life, good or evil, is living this life, having this as the structure of your life. Good and evil, like happiness and unhappiness, are not established by the particular facts of one’s life, but are the fundamental pattern of one’s life as a whole: “If good or evil willing affects the world it can only affect the boundaries of the world, not the facts, what cannot be portrayed by language but can only be shown in language. In short, it must make the world a wholly different one.”59 The good ethical will is one that establishes a harmonious pattern within oneself and with the world. For Wittgenstein whether or not one has a meaningful life depends on one’s fundamental ethical will: “The world must, so to speak, wax or wane as a whole. As if by accession or loss of meaning.”60

See Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 146. Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 176–7. 58 Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 78e. Compare with Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.422, pp. 183–5. 59 Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 73e. Compare with Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.43, 6.431, p. 185. 60 Ibid. 56 57

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II. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Clarity, Depth, and Silence So far I have been discussing the content of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on existential, ethical matters almost as if Wittgenstein presented them straightforwardly, as his theory of ethics. But of course this is not the case. In fact, in the Tractatus Wittgenstein even revokes these ethical thoughts, likening them to a “ladder” that must be thrown away once one has climbed up it. As I mentioned in the introduction, Wittgenstein’s demand for clarity or silence seems to prohibit philosophical work on ethics altogether. This is the straightforward conclusion both of the Tractatus and of his 1929 “Lecture on Ethics.” Why then should we take seriously either Wittgenstein’s thoughts on existential matters or, much less, the ideas of Kierkegaard behind them? It seems much more reasonable, and in keeping with Wittgenstein’s own stated wishes, both to cease from philosophically pursuing such profound things and to remonstrate with those who do for being unclear. This is a very natural way of responding to Wittgenstein if you agree with what he says, and this has been the response of most analytic philosophers, including the first group of philosophers to read and respond to him, the Logical Positivists. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein strongly disagreed with this way of understanding his work; in fact, he was incensed and horrified by it. In order to see why, we need properly to understand Wittgenstein’s normative conception of philosophy. This will also allow us to understand how his thoughts on ethics are to be grasped. Wittgenstein’s ethics of philosophy, even more than his ethics, seems to be greatly influenced by Kierkegaard. The central idea of an inability clearly to express the profound, and of a silence that is the proper response to this inability, is a main theme in several of Kierkegaard’s works, including works Wittgenstein had likely read like Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “The Present Age,” and Fear and Trembling. Wittgenstein’s conception of the philosophical virtues of clarity, depth, and silence became the framing theme of the Tractatus. This normative conception of philosophy is one that he greatly developed in the period between his harrowing experiences during the Brusilov Offensive and the completion of the Tractatus in the summer of 1918. It is not a coincidence that during this time Wittgenstein was intensely interested in Kierkegaard. He seems to have had conversations with his new-found friend Paul Engelmann (1891–1965) about Kierkegaard while he was in officer training in the fall of 1916.61 Sometime in 1917, Wittgenstein seems to have made a blanket request to his family to purchase whatever Kierkegaard books they could find and send them to him at the front. A letter from his sister Hermine from November 20, 1917 indicates that he had sent two notes requesting Kierkegaard books, the first of which did not arrive, but, she writes “I’ve just been out for them and a number of Kierkegaard volumes are already on the way.” She gives no indication which books she sent except for The Diary of a Seducer, a section of Either/Or: “I hope they are the ones you want, because, given that I don’t know anything about him or his writings, I simply chose a few at random. The Diary of a Seducer, which I bought in a different bookshop, will follow.”62 Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 17. Quoted in ibid., pp. 14–15.

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As Wittgenstein insisted, the progression of the Tractatus mirrors the progression of his thoughts as he developed them.63 In the Tractatus, as in his life, an extended discussion of logic and the nature of language transitions into a meditation on ethics, aesthetics, and “the mystical.” But whereas in the 1916 notebooks Wittgenstein abruptly shifts from discussions of logic and language to discussions of existential matters (and back again), in the Tractatus he tries to show the transition between them. Put simply, Wittgenstein thought that his work on language in the beginning of the book (especially what is called his “picture theory” of language) explains why his statements on ethics, aesthetics, and “the mystical” at the end of the book are attempts to express “the inexpressible.” The picture theory of language holds that language is able to express the world because words correspond to objects and the relationship between words in a sentence mirrors the relationship between objects in the world. A key premise of Wittgenstein’s conception of language here, one that he would later reject, is that all language, or at least all language that makes any sense, takes the form of a factual description: “A proposition is the description of a fact.”64 Wittgenstein also holds that statements about things like aesthetics, ethics, and religion are not attempts to describe particular facts, but rather attempts to describe something about the fundamental patterns of existence as a whole. In his terminology, they are about “the form of the world” as a whole, not about some particular factual situation in the world. They may appear to be stating a matter of fact because they have the same grammatical structure as a factually descriptive statement, but this is an illusion of language. Since the words of these statements do not refer to particular objects, these statements fail to state anything; strictly speaking, they are nonsense. Wittgenstein thinks that “the form of the world” can be shown in language, and “the meaning of life” is something one can become inwardly “clear” about, but these things cannot be stated or explained.65 Since Wittgenstein thinks that a great amount of confusion and anxiety is created by attempts theoretically to explain these things as if they were factual matters, he calls on us to stop trying to do so. Factual matters can and should be stated clearly, but existential matters are not the type of thing that can be stated clearly and we should not pretend otherwise. Hence the great either/ or of the Tractatus: either clarity or silence. As quoted above, in the preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein declares “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”66 This last phrase is also the book’s conclusion. Adopting Wittgenstein’s own practice, one way of explaining this conception of philosophy is in terms of virtues. Wittgenstein realized that two of the most important and essential virtues of philosophy, clarity and profundity, tend to be mutually exclusive. As Wittgenstein understands it, what is profound (including existential matters dealing with aesthetics, ethics, and religion) cannot be expressed clearly, and what can be expressed clearly (particular matters of fact) cannot be profound. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 177. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 4.023, p. 67. 65 Ibid., § 6.521, 6.522, p. 187. 66 Ibid., Preface, p. 27. 63 64

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What Wittgenstein accomplished in the Tractatus was creatively to bring to a head the tension between these virtues. As he saw it, the essential incompatibility between these two essential virtues reveals that the entire enterprise of philosophy, as it has traditionally been understood, has been misguided. Philosophers have managed to muddle through only by compromising on clarity or profundity (or, more likely, on both.) If philosophers were more demanding of themselves with respect to these virtues, and if they were honest with themselves about their incompatibility, then they would try to express only what can be expressed clearly (factual matters) and would remain silent about matters of depth (existential matters). Since Wittgenstein thinks factual matters are properly the domain of science, not philosophy, there is nothing left for philosophy to do, except perhaps to clarify these differences, as the Tractatus seeks to do. Thus, Wittgenstein thinks of the Tractatus as bringing philosophy in the traditional sense to an end. Near the end of the book, he states: The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.67

Of course, it may seem odd for Wittgenstein to recommend this method since he himself does not follow it in the Tractatus. This passage follows dozens of statements about aesthetics, ethics, and “the mystical,” precisely those things about which we are supposed to remain silent. Wittgenstein tries to reconcile this apparent contradiction by revoking these statements in a certain way. Using the metaphor of a ladder, Wittgenstein suggests that we can “throw away” his philosophical propositions (by ceasing to regard them as making sense) once we have climbed up and over them: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)”68 The goal of the Tractatus is not to leave us with some particular thesis or explanation, but to leave us in silence, a silence in which no thesis or explanation is needed. No part of the Tractatus was more influential than its call for clarity or silence, and no part of the book was more thoroughly misunderstood, at least according to Wittgenstein. This call became the rallying cry for analytic philosophy beginning with the members of the Vienna Circle, also known as the Logical Positivists. This was a group of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers brought together around Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), professor of the philosophy of inductive sciences at the University of Vienna. The members of the Vienna Circle read the Tractatus line by line and met weekly to discuss it in 1924 and again in 1926. Expressing the reverence the group felt for the Tractatus, Schlick declared that it “in my unshakeable conviction is the most significant philosophical work of our time….The scope of these ideas is Ibid., § 6.53, pp. 187–9. Ibid., § 6.54, p. 189.

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in truth immeasurable: anyone who reads them with understanding must thereafter be a changed man from a philosophical point of view.”69 Another member of the group testified that the ideas in the Tractatus “have on essential points determined the view of the Circle on philosophy and its relation to the special sciences.”70 As this suggests, the Vienna Circle was particularly influenced by Wittgenstein’s normative conception of philosophy, especially as it relates to the sciences. The Vienna Circle welcomed Wittgenstein’s apocalypticism with respect to traditional philosophy. As they saw it, the destruction of World War I had the beneficial outcome of toppling the traditional beliefs and structures of European society, thereby clearing the way for new ideas and a new kind of society. In the Vienna Circle’s utopian vision, science was to become the new foundation for this society. They looked to science not only as the model for all scholarly inquiry, but more importantly as a vehicle for moral and social progress. They grouped traditional forms of philosophy such as metaphysics with religion and theology, regarding them as unscientific at best and, at worst, a hindrance to this moral and social progress. As they understood it, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus had deftly exposed traditional forms of philosophy to be mere nonsense.71 Moreover, as they saw it, Wittgenstein had properly enthroned clarity as the central philosophical virtue. If Descartes’ demand for certainty was a central inspiration for early modern philosophy, Wittgenstein’s (additional) demand for clarity was a central inspiration for analytic philosophy. For the Logical Positivists, as for many analytic philosophers to follow, philosophical excellence consists primarily in attaining clarity, preferably a level of clarity comparable to that of a scientific or mathematical formula. Like Wittgenstein at this time, the Logical Positivists denied that this level of clarity was attainable in ordinary language. Instead, they sought to construct an ideal, universal language (something like logical notation) that would be “freed from the slags of historical languages” and able to express ideas unambiguously, with absolute clarity.72 Later on Wittgenstein would reject this hope for an ideally clear language; in fact, his later work was a central inspiration for the reaction against this ideal by ordinary language philosophy. Even here, however, clarity remained the most central philosophical virtue for analytic philosophy. In contrast to this exaltation of clarity, the Logical Positivists saw the Tractatus as revealing profundity and depth to be merely sham values. All the supposedly deep questions, problems, and theories of philosophy were but misuses of language, products of unclarity which in turn perpetuated and multiplied unclarity in the minds of anyone exposed to them. In their manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World, the Vienna Circle declared: “Neatness and clarity are striven for, and dark distances and unfathomable depths rejected. In science there are no ‘depths’: Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place, p. 40. As Hacker, ibid., p. 41, writes “The Tractatus put metaphilosophical questions at the heart of the agenda of the Circle.” 71 Ibid., p. 40. 72 Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis (originally published in 1929), the manifesto of the Vienna Circle translated as The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle, Dordrecht: Reidel 1973, p. 8. 69 70

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there is surface everywhere.”73 Clarity was seen not only as the antithesis of depth, but as the solution to problems caused by depth (or, more properly, the illusion of depth.) Wittgenstein had written that the “solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.”74 This “vanishing” of the great problems of life was not a matter of solving them, but of dissolving them by revealing them to be mere illusions of language. In this spirit, the Vienna Circle declared: “Clarification of the traditional philosophical problems leads us partly to unmask them as pseudoproblems, and partly to transform them into empirical problems and thereby subject them to the judgment of experimental science.”75 Wittgenstein was at first unaware that the Tractatus had become so influential. Since he thought that the book had brought philosophy to an end in silence, he accordingly retired from philosophy. He had returned from the war a changed man; he was to a great extent emotionally and intellectually shattered, but he was also more determined than ever to live a morally upstanding life. In September 1919 he gave away all of his money, signing it over to his family with legal assurances that it never be returned. He trained to become a schoolteacher and went off to teach in a poor rural village. He hoped to improve his students inwardly by teaching them mathematics (to develop their intellects), the classics of German literature (to develop their cultural awareness), and the Bible (to improve them morally).76 He gave up teaching in 1926 after his harsh treatment of students led to conflict with the local parents. Once again facing suicidal despair, Wittgenstein inquired about becoming a monk in a monastery just outside Vienna; the Father Superior dissuaded him from becoming a monk, but allowed him to live in the tool shed of the monastery and tend its garden as therapy. This work, and later, his work as an architect designing and building a modernist house for his sister, Gretl, probably saved Wittgenstein from suicide.77 It was about this time that Wittgenstein first met Moritz Schlick, who had hoped that Wittgenstein would meet with the Vienna Circle to discuss his work. Wittgenstein refused to meet with a large group, but in 1927 he agreed to meet with Schlick and, later, with a few other chosen members of the Circle, including Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). These conversations are often credited with bringing Wittgenstein back to philosophy, but it is just as accurate to say that Wittgenstein returned to philosophy because he was so disturbed by how his work was being interpreted. For their part, the members of the Vienna Circle who were allowed to meet Wittgenstein were disturbed by his personality and behavior. They shared an attitude of almost religious reverence for Wittgenstein, but were not prepared for him to take things like religion seriously. Having built up Wittgenstein into a guru of a new scientific utopia, they had expected him to be scientific. Instead, as Carnap later reported, Wittgenstein’s attitude and point of view “were much more similar to Ibid., p. 8. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.521, p. 187. See also § 6.52, p. 187. 75 The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle, p. 8. 76 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 192. 77 Ibid., pp. 171–236. Wittgenstein’s suicidal tendencies ran in the family; three of his brothers committed suicide. 73 74

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those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer.”78 Predictably, the central philosophical contention and misunderstanding between Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists involved the ethical and mystical statements in the Tractatus. Carnap confessed that “I had not paid attention to the statements in his book about the mystical, because his feelings and thoughts in this area were too divergent from mine.”79 As explained above, the Logical Positivists had regarded the Tractatus as debunking the existence of anything deep or mystical. That Wittgenstein continued to take such things seriously baffled and disappointed them. For his part, Wittgenstein seems to have been baffled and disappointed at their failure to grasp the importance of profundity as a philosophical virtue. Specifically, he felt that they had completely misunderstood the aesthetic, ethical, and mystical aspects of the Tractatus. They took him to be dismissing and debunking the importance of such things, when in fact we know from his biography and his notebook entries that these things are what he cared about most. As Carnap’s account confirms, the Logical Positivists had simply overlooked or dismissed what Wittgenstein saw as the main contention of the book, that what cannot be said can nonetheless be shown: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”80 This mutual misunderstanding was evident during one meeting in which Wittgenstein turned his back to them and read aloud poems by the mystical Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, precisely the kind of thing the Logical Positivists abhorred.81 As this episode indicates, Wittgenstein was not very good at articulating why he thought the Vienna Circle misunderstood the Tractatus. Nonetheless, I think we can become clearer on this point if we consider the Kierkegaardian influence on Wittgenstein’s normative conception of philosophy in the Tractatus. Kierkegaard seems to have greatly influenced the Tractatus’ central conception of a collision between the philosophical virtues of depth and clarity, as well as the idea that silence is the appropriate response to this collision. As mentioned above, this is a theme in many of Kierkegaard’s works, including Fear and Trembling, a meditation on the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, presented by the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John of Silence). In this work what is most profound, the faith of Abraham, is shown to be something that remains forever beyond (and occasionally contrary to) clear rational comprehension. In terms of explaining faith, Johannes is himself is reverently silent; he merely offers to explain and show that rational attempts to understand Abraham fail. Or, put another way, he aims to show that accounts of faith that do make rational sense are not, in fact, accounts of faith at all, but of some watered-down approximation of faith. Johannes de silentio instead recommends silence as a virtue for philosophers: “Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to

Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 243. 80 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.522, p. 187. Russell had also dismissed this part of the Tractatus, much to Wittgenstein’s annoyance. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 182. 81 Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 243. 78 79

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offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing.”82 What philosophy can offer, and what Johannes himself offers in the form of three problemata, is to point out the conflict between clarity and profundity and thereby evoke silence before the profound. In the longest of these problemata Johannes considers the necessity and tragedy of Abraham’s silence. He points out that it would have been comforting for Abraham to have explained himself to Isaac or Sarah, but that the incomprehensibility of faith made this possible: “Abraham is silent—but he cannot speak, therein lies the distress and anguish. For if when I speak I cannot make myself understood, I do not speak even if I keep talking without stop day and night.”83 There is also the closely related conflict between profundity and clarity that Kierkegaard points to in arguing that systematic rational philosophy (“the System”) necessarily neglects the actuality of individual human life: “the particular human lies below the level of the concept: one cannot think an individual human being, but only the concept ‘man.’ ”84 As Kierkegaard presents it, this conflict is endemic to modern systematic (Hegelian) philosophy, but he suggests that Greek philosophers, namely Socrates, found a way to address actual human existence and ethics.85 Yet, as Kierkegaard sees it, the paradox of faith lies beyond even the grasp of the existential form of philosophy he calls “the Greek or existence-dialectic.”86 Like the ethical life, faith needs to be subjectively appropriated and lived, not merely understood as something objective. But whereas Kierkegaard thinks in the ethical life one can explain oneself to others, he insists that this is impossible in the life of faith.87 The parallel between these ideas and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on clarity, depth, and silence in the Tractatus is one that Wittgenstein himself pointed out. In a conversation in 1929 with Friedrich Waismann (1896–1959), one of the members of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein said: “Nevertheless we thrust against the limits of language. Kierkegaard, too, recognized this thrust and even described it in much the same way (as a thrust against paradox). This thrust against the limits of language is ethics.”88 As we might expect, there are important differences between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on how they understand this issue. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein disagree about the details of what remains inexpressible (for example, ethics) and why it is so (Kierkegaard has no picture theory of truth and Wittgenstein rejects the

SKS 4, 129 / FTP, 63. SKS 4, 200 / FTP, 137. 84 SKS 11, 230 / SUDP, 152. 85 See, for example, SKS 7, 282 / CUP1, 309–10. SKS 7, 290 / CUP1, 352. 86 SKS 7, 282 / CUP1, 309. 87 See, for example, SKS 4, 172 / FTP, 109. 88 Friedrich Waismann, “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein,” trans. by M. Black, The Philosophical Review, vol. 74, 1965, p. 13. Of course it is possible that Wittgenstein became aware of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s work only after independently formulating his own parallel account. But given the centrality of this idea in Kierkegaard’s works and Wittgenstein’s intense reading in Kierkegaard while he was developing his ethics of philosophy in the Tractatus, it seems much more likely that Kierkegaard played some role in influencing Wittgenstein’s thinking here. 82 83

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notion of a paradox.)89 What Wittgenstein seems to have learned from Kierkegaard is the general structure of a conflict between profundity and clarity that results (at best) in silence. For Wittgenstein, the conflict between clarity and profundity is unfortunately often met not with silence but with “nonsense,” expressions that may appear to be deep because they are unclear. As other scholars have pointed out, this complaint may bear the mark of Kierkegaard’s influence.90 In the concluding section of Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review of Two Ages, published separately in Der Brenner, Kierkegaard calls this kind of nonsense “talkativeness” (Snaksomheden). In his analysis, it is the result of doing away with the vital distinction between talking and keeping silent. Only someone who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk—and act essentially. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life. Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it. But someone who can really talk, because he knows how to remain silent, will not talk about a variety of things but about one thing only, and he will know when to talk and when to remain silent.91

As this quotation suggests, Kierkegaard’s main objection to talkativeness is ethical: talkativeness “weakens action by forestalling it.” The same can be said for Wittgenstein’s objection to nonsense.92 For both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, empty talk about profound things such as ethics not only sows confusion, it serves as a distraction and hindrance to personally appropriating these things into one’s life. This is why Kierkegaard associates talkativeness with the modern process he calls “leveling” in which all qualitative distinctions are eroded, replacing reverence for what is truly important with smug mediocrity in which nothing is considered important. Like the silence of Abraham, the silence of Wittgenstein’s happy life expresses reverence for what is most profound and an awareness of one’s personal responsibility with respect to it. Thus, the silence that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein both advocate is not the silence of neglect, expressing the absence of any consideration of the profound. On the contrary, their silence expresses a passionate reverence for the profound, a reverence that manifests itself in action rather than words and passion rather than understanding. Yet like Abraham’s silence in Fear and See, for example, Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 32. These differences have led Schönbaumsfeld to assert (mistakenly, in my judgment) that there is a fundamental “disanalogy” between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein regarding inexpressibility. Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 139. Schönbaumsfeld focuses on Kierkegaard’s distinction between what can be objectively grasped and what must be subjectively appropriated, but as I have just shown Kierkegaard is also concerned about the inexpressibility of faith due to its paradoxical nature. 90 Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard, and the Early Brenner,” p. 141; Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” p. 112. 91 Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. by Alexander Dru, New York: Harper 1962, p. 69. (SKS 8, 98 / TA, 97–8.) 92 Wittgenstein insisted that the purpose of the Tractatus was primarily ethical, and he also claimed that what he was silent about in the text was more important than what he said in it. Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 178. 89

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Trembling, the silence Wittgenstein strives for is an aware silence. In Kierkegaard’s life of faith and Wittgenstein’s life of the happy man, one is silently clear within oneself about one’s life and what one must do with respect to what is most important to this life. In his notebooks, Wittgenstein calls this happy life of existential clarity “the life of knowledge.”93 This comparison between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on silence helps to explain why Wittgenstein thought the Logical Positivists had misunderstood his work. As Hacker explains, the “typical reaction of the Circle” was exemplified by Otto Neurath (1882–1945).94 Responding to the concluding line of the Tractatus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Neurath wrote: “It sounds as if there were a something of which one could not speak. We should rather say: if one really wishes to avoid the metaphysical attitude entirely, then one will ‘be silent,’ but not ‘about something.’ ”95 The Logical Positivists thought the Tractatus advocated a silence of neglect in which we cease to trouble ourselves with supposedly “profound” things because we have realized that all apparent profundity is merely the result of linguistic confusions. As I explained above, the Logical Positivists no longer considered profundity a legitimate virtue for philosophy at all. In contrast, Wittgenstein retains a reverence for what is deep and profound, but he just thinks it cannot be clearly expressed. For Wittgenstein, the silence for which the Tractatus strives, the silence attained after having “thrown away the ladder” of his statements in the Tractatus, is a way of expressing reverence before the profound, not a way of denying its existence. That Wittgenstein strives for an aware silence can be seen if we consider the kind of clarity attained in this state of aware silence. The Logical Positivists seem to have overlooked the fact that there is more than one sense of clarity in the Tractatus. On one hand, there is what we might call “factual clarity,” the quality of depicting a fact just as it is. This is the kind of clarity Wittgenstein usually has in mind when discussing clarity in the Tractatus, and this includes his call for clarity or silence. On the other hand, there is another kind of clarity, which we might call “existential clarity,” that Wittgenstein also writes about: “The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the meaning of life became clear (klar), could not then say wherein this meaning consisted?)”96 Here we see that what can be existentially clear (the meaning of life) cannot be made factually clear (by explaining it). Existential clarity is not and cannot be a quality of philosophical expressions, although it can be their goal. Existential clarity can only be a quality of an existing person; it names a state of being in which she is clear within herself about the orientation of her life as a whole (what Wittgenstein calls the “form” or “meaning” of her “world”).

Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 81e. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place, p. 44. 95 Otto Neurath, “Sociology and Physicalism,” trans. by Morton Magnus and Ralph Raico, in Logical Positivism, ed. by A.J. Ayer, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press 1959, p. 284. 96 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, § 6.521, p. 187. Here I have altered the translation somewhat, substituting “meaning” instead of “sense” to translate Sinn. 93 94

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The question remains how philosophy can contribute to existential clarity. It is easy to misread Wittgenstein as denying any helpful role to philosophy here, but this is not the case. For Wittgenstein, existential clarity cannot be attained until one has cleared away all the theoretical explanations and pseudo-problems that sow confusion in one’s mind and hinder action. As Wittgenstein understands it, factual clarity can be brought to bear in clearing away these confusions. The point here is not to replace flawed theories and explanations with sound ones, but to clear one’s mind of all such theories and explanations, leaving only an aware silence. This is the task of what Wittgenstein calls the “correct philosophical method,” pointing out the unclarity of other theoretical attempts to describe the profound. This method ultimately aims to help bring about existential clarity, if only indirectly and through this negative task of clearing away unclarity. In addition to this negative task, is there something more that philosophy can do to help to bring about existential clarity?97 That there may also be a positive role for philosophy to play here is suggested by Wittgenstein’s remarks about providing a ladder of ideas to climb up and over, before throwing this ladder away. As I have said, the Logical Positivists were disconcerted by the ethical and mystical statements in the Tractatus, but they were no doubt comforted by the fact that Wittgenstein urges us to “throw away” these ideas, regarding them as “nonsense.” Like many readers of the Tractatus, the Logical Positivists took this to mean that we should disregard these ideas from the start, pre-emptively dismissing them as mere nonsense. But it is a very different thing to throw away a ladder that one has already used to climb up to a higher level than to throw away a ladder than one has not yet climbed, which is what the Logical Positivists’ response amounts to. The ladder metaphor suggests that Wittgenstein envisioned his remarks as having some use in bringing us to an importantly higher level, namely, a state of existential clarity. It is only after having fulfilled this use that we can disregard them, lest they now begin to cloud and hinder this clarity. The question then becomes how the remarks of the Tractatus could possibly be used as a ladder its readers could climb to reach a state of existential clarity. Since this state cannot be produced through the usual philosophical tools of direct description, explanation, and analysis, how can philosophy positively contribute here at all? This is a question that Wittgenstein himself may not have been clear about in the Tractatus, and his later philosophy includes a substantial reconsideration of his initial answer. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein sometimes seems to suggest that there is nothing more to climbing the ladder of his ideas than the negative task just mentioned, the task of clearing away nonsense. Although the Tractatus tells us this, I think the book shows us otherwise. His remarks on ethics, aesthetics, and “the mystical” cannot The main debate among studies comparing Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein centers on this question and on the extent of Wittgenstein’s revocation. I tend to agree with the “traditional” view in which the propositions revoked in the Tractatus are still regarded as being useful in some way. Against this, there are those (for example, James Conant and Cora Diamond) who offer a “resolute” view in which only the “framing” passages that establish this revocation are to be taken as making any sense. See Schönbaumfeld, Spheres, especially pp. 87–8. I consider Schönbaumsfeld to have successfully defended the “traditional” reading. 97

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serve as direct descriptions of these things, but they are clearly more than arbitrary negative examples of the kind of “nonsense” we should avoid. We know from their original formulations in Wittgenstein’s notebooks that they reflect his own most sincere meditations on these topics. Thus, these remarks are not lacking in content. But they do not seek to convey this content didactically, by presenting us with a theory or explanation that would relieve readers from having to meditate on these topics for themselves. To the contrary, I think they are best understood as prompting readers to meditate on these topics for themselves.98 They elegantly call attention to these profound topics and their interrelatedness in a thought-provoking way, and the impression they leave continues to shape the contours of the aware silence that follows their revocation.99 To further understand this difficult point, I think a comparison with Kierkegaard’s ideas can once again be helpful. The method of writing and then revoking a text as a way of creatively addressing the conflict between clarity and profundity is one that Kierkegaard also employs. As his pseudonym Johannes Climacus insists when revoking what he has said in the Postscript: “to write a book and to revoke it is not the same as refraining from writing it.”100 Like Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard devoted much of his career to addressing the challenge of how creatively to communicate matters whose profundity precludes straightforward description. Kierkegaard’s entire apparatus of pseudonyms and authorial distancing, what he called his method of “indirect communication,” was developed as a way of addressing this challenge. This is a method Kierkegaard associated with Socrates. As Kierkegaard understood it, Socratic irony and the Socratic method of asking questions but never asserting answers were elegant attempts to address what straightforward didactic teaching could not address. This method allowed Socrates to act like a midwife, drawing individual thoughts (and individuality itself) out of others without allowing them to follow him as a teacher, which would in turn hinder this individuality. Part of this Socratic task is to challenge the way we think and live by revealing the falsity and contradiction in our beliefs; this is the method of elenchus (refutation). But Socrates does not just drive us away from the false, unjust life; his arguments and images seduce us to the life of truth and justice. Likewise, Kierkegaard envisioned and enacted a kind of philosophy that not only prompts us to abandon inferior ways of life but also draws us toward the life of faith he thought was best.101

What Wittgenstein says of the Philosophical Investigations in the preface to that work can be applied to the Tractatus as well: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. vi. 99 To use a musical metaphor Wittgenstein might prefer, the pregnant silence in a pause in music is very different from simply the absence of sound altogether; the silence of the pause has musical content, and it can convey just as much meaning as a note. Just as the content of this silence is shaped by the notes that surround it, the content of the aware silence evoked by the Tractatus is shaped by the remarks in the text. 100 SKS 7, 564 / CUP1, 621. 101 Like Kierkegaard and probably at his prompting, Wittgenstein saw Christianity as undertaking a parallel task. See for example, Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 64. 98

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This ability of ideas to challenge a person existentially and to move them towards a better way of life is what I have called the philosophical virtue of creativity. This is an ability that Wittgenstein often associated with Kierkegaard. In one notebook passage Wittgenstein describes Kierkegaard’s method of creatively presenting different ways of life in order to challenge and move others existentially: “On Kierkegaard. I represent a life for you & now see how you relate to it, whether it tempts (urges) you to live like that as well, or what other relation to it you attain. Through this representation I would like to as it were loosen up your life.”102 In another passage, Wittgenstein confesses that he finds Kierkegaard so penetrating (“cutting”) in this regard that he is tough to bear.103 Wittgenstein himself employed numerous creative methods of philosophizing. It is not just in the Tractatus that Wittgenstein employs creative methods of philosophy to address profound concerns. For example, I agree with Fremstedal that Kierkegaard’s influence can also be seen in Wittgenstein’s use of a dialogue between two points of view in the Philosophical Investigations.104 Yet Wittgenstein also grew impatient with Kierkegaard’s Socratic method of indirect communication, complaining that this kind of “teasing” reflects “courage” but also a lack of sympathy for its intended audience: The idea that someone uses a trick to get me to do something is unpleasant. It is certain that it takes great courage (to use this trick) & that I would not—not remotely—have this courage; but it’s a question of whether if I had it, it would be right to use it.105

Wittgenstein’s complaint here seems to be that it is cruel for Kierkegaard to use indirect communication and Socratic trickery with respect to matters of great importance for life. If the concern is so important, does it not merit a more direct approach? Wittgenstein later seems to have seen the error in this complaint, namely, that he has assumed, contrary his own better judgment, that Kierkegaard could have communicated directly about these profound matters. In a later notebook entry on Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein seems to address and repudiate his own early objection to Kierkegaard. Like Kierkegaard’s use of language, the language of Scripture is indirect by necessity and design, not as a fault: Kierkegaard writes: If Christianity were so easy and cozy, why should God in his Scriptures have set Heaven and Earth in motion and threatened eternal punishments? — Question: But in that case why is this Scripture so unclear? If we want to warn someone of a terrible danger, do we go about it by telling him a riddle whose solution will be the warning? —But who is to say that the Scripture really is unclear? Isn’t it possible that it

Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 74–5. See also Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 53. 103 Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 204–5. 104 As Roe Fremstedal points out, we can also understand this dialogue as akin to the “double movement” of resignation and faith in Kierkegaard. See Fremstedal, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” pp. 119–20. 105 Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen, pp. 122–3. 102

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was essential in this case to “tell a riddle”? And that, on the other hand, giving a more direct warning would necessarily have had the wrong effect?106

Here we find Wittgenstein learning a valuable lesson from Kierkegaard about the diversity of uses of language and, thereby, a diversity of criteria for what counts as clarity. What I have called “factual clarity” is the clarity we can appropriately demand from factual descriptions, but Wittgenstein now explicitly realizes that there are other uses of language than factual description, and that these might have their own criteria of clarity. This addresses Wittgenstein’s previous objection to Kierkegaard. More importantly, it suggests that what Wittgenstein learned from Kierkegaard about religious language may have been influential for the great transformation in Wittgenstein’s thought between his early work and his later work. Although Wittgenstein revised many of his central ideas in this period of transition, his normative conception of philosophy remained largely the same. The greatest difference is that the austere silence demanded by the Tractatus is replaced by a generous openness in the Philosophical Investigations. This is largely the result of Wittgenstein’s realization that, contrary to his assumption in the Tractatus, language can be used for much more than asserting factual propositions. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein explicitly repudiates the views of “the author of the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus,” as he refers to himself: “It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)”107 This diversity opens the possibility that what is profound may be addressed by forms of language other than factual description, thereby lifting the necessity of remaining silent about what we cannot factually describe. To put the point in the terms of the Philosophical Investigations, there are other “language games” than that of factual description. For example, artistic and religious expressions do not render straightforward description or analysis and do not seek to do so, but they may express what is profound in other ways. This is a lesson that Wittgenstein learned at least in part from Kierkegaard. In the passage on Kierkegaard and clarity quoted above, as in many of others from the same period,108 Wittgenstein reflects on religious uses of language and how they are completely misunderstood if we mistake them for other uses of language, for example, theoretical explanation. On one hand, these uses of Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 31. As Glebe-Møller points out, this passage seems to reference Kierkegaard’s The Moment: SKS 13, 162 / M, 121. See Jens Glebe-Møller, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991, pp. 57f. 107 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 23, pp. 11–12. 108 Kierkegaard seems to have influenced many of these notebook passages beyond simply the ones in which he is explicitly named. As Schönbaumsfeld suggests, almost all of Wittgenstein’s notes on religion during this period seem influenced by Kierkegaard. Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 24. As I see it, passages that may be influenced by Kierkegaard without naming him explicitly are to be found on the following pages: Culture and Value, p. 28; p. 29; p. 32; p. 33; p. 56; p. 64; p. 72; p. 73; p. 82; p. 83 and Denkbewegungen, pp. 132–3; pp. 160–1; pp. 213–14; pp. 216–17; pp. 238–9. 106

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language “break the silence” imposed by the Tractatus, insofar as they artistically and religiously express what cannot be analytically described. But, on the other hand, they preserve the reverence for the profound that is expressed by this silence. Wittgenstein saw his Philosophical Investigations as a critical companion piece to the Tractatus, and even considered publishing them together in one volume.109 I suggest that we can best understand the passages in the Tractatus on aesthetics, ethics, and “the mystical” in light of the Philosophical Investigations’ more open conception of how the profound might be addressed in language. As Wittgenstein learned from Kierkegaard, certain creative forms of philosophy can also accomplish this task of communicating the profound, and can succeed where supposedly “scientific” forms of philosophy fail. Kierkegaard recognized his own creative use of indirect communication as following in the tradition of Socrates and “the Greek or existence-dialectic.” I hope to have demonstrated that Wittgenstein also contributed to this tradition of existential philosophy, thanks in large part to the influence of Kierkegaard. Contemporary analytic philosophers often take it for granted that the analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein went beyond and rendered obsolete the kind of philosophy Kierkegaard pursued. It is also taken for granted that later analytic philosophers in turn went beyond and rendered Wittgenstein’s kind of philosophy obsolete. I think what I have presented here has overturned the first of these assumptions. Kierkegaard was Wittgenstein’s normative model for what he called “serious” philosophy, philosophy that addressed the existential depths of human life without abandoning clarity. Wittgenstein did not credit himself with having realized this possibility in his own work, but for Wittgenstein Kierkegaard’s work, and its undeniable effect on Wittgenstein as a person, served as proof that this kind of philosophy could be done. Influenced by Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein envisioned a kind of existential analytic philosophy that would employ analytic methods and factual clarity in the service of bringing about existential clarity.110 We can now understand why Wittgenstein found that his vision for philosophy was not understood, let alone brought to fruition, by the analytic philosophers who were first inspired by it. For better or worse, the movement of analytic philosophy that Wittgenstein inspired departed radically from the kind of philosophy Wittgenstein envisioned. Perhaps this movement was correct insofar as it parted ways with Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard; but we should not be surprised to find them paired. Perhaps it is to his credit that Wittgenstein inspired many different, highly individual responses to his work, as it is to Kierkegaard’s credit that he inspired the kind of individual response that we see from Wittgenstein. In any case, given this more robust understanding of Wittgenstein’s vision for philosophy, I think we should also call into question the second assumption mentioned above. Just as Kierkegaard asks whether modern philosophy has really gone beyond Socrates, I think we should ask whether contemporary analytic philosophy has really Monk, Wittgenstein, p. 457. I agree with Schönbaumsfeld that this is the “ethical lynchpin” underlying and uniting the work of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, although, as I have argued, I think Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein foresee a much more positive role to play here than merely removing conceptual confusions, as Schönbaumsfeld suggests. Schönbaumsfeld, Spheres, p. 13. 109 110

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gone beyond Wittgenstein. What I have shown here locates Wittgenstein’s work, especially the parts of it influenced by Kierkegaard, as an important source for a recent manifestation of analytic philosophy that seeks to apply the rigor and clarity of analytic methods to ethical and existential questions traditionally rejected by earlier schools of analytic philosophy. This form of analytic philosophy is exemplified by thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum, Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell.111 While this movement is sometimes called “post-analytic philosophy,” what I have established here suggests that this movement can best be understood as reviving a normative vision of analytic philosophy that Wittgenstein promoted from its very inception.

111 For Kierkegaard’s influence on figures of this movement, see Edward Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve, London: Routledge 1996, especially pp. 65–6.

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Wittgenstein’s Corpus “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung” (later published as Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus) in Annalen der Naturphilosophie, ed. by Wilhelm Ostwald, vol. 14, 1921, especially the Preface and § 6.41–7, pp. 185–6; pp. 260–2. Philosophische Untersuchungen, originally published as Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell 1953, especially Part I, § 19, p. 8; §§ 23–4, pp. 11–12; §§ 241–2, p. 88; Part II, § I, p. 174; § xi, p. 226. “Lecture on Ethics,” delivered in November 1929 to the Heretics Society, Cambridge University. Published as “Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review, January 1965, pp. 3–12. “Lectures on Religious Belief” in Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, compiled by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees, and James Taylor, ed. by Cyril Barrett, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1967, especially p. 54; pp. 57–8; p. 70. Vermischte Bemerkungen (later translated as Culture and Value), ed. by G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1977, pp. 31– 3; p. 38; p. 53. Denkbewegungen, ed. by Ilse Somavilla, Innsbruck: Haymon 1997, p. 68; p. 75; pp. 102–3; pp. 122–4; pp. 135–6; pp. 166–7; pp. 176–7; pp. 204–5; p. 211. II. Sources of Wittgenstein’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Boesen, Emil, “Die Letzten Tage Sören Kierkegaards,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1923, vol. 8, pp. 70–6. Kierkegaard, Søren, “Der Pfahl im Fleisch,” trans. and foreword by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1914, vol. 4, issue 2, no. 16, pp. 691–705 (foreword), pp. 706–12; Der Brenner, 1914, vol. 4, issue 2, no. 17, pp. 797–814. — “Vorworte,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1914, vol. 4, issue 2, no. 14, pp. 666–83. — “Kritik der Gegenwart (Aus ‘En literair Anmeldelse’, Kopenhagen 1846),” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1914, vol. 4, issue 2, no. 19, pp. 815–49; Der Brenner, 1914, vol. 4, issue 2, no. 20, pp. 869–86; pp. 886–908 (afterword). — “Vom Tode. Aus ‘Drei Reden bei gedachten Gelegenheiten’ [An einem Grab],” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, vol. 5, 1915, pp. 15–55. — “Die Sünderin,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1919, vol. 6, issue 1, no. 2, pp. 133–40.

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— “Eine Möglichkeit,” Der Brenner, 1919, vol. 6, issue 1, no. 1, pp. 47–59 (anonymously trans.). — “Tagebücher,” selected and trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1920, vol. 6, issue 1, no. 3, pp. 225–9; Der Brenner, 1920, vol. 6, issue 1, no. 4, pp. 259–72 (part II); Der Brenner, 1920, vol. 6, issue 1, no. 5, pp. 336–41 (part III); Der Brenner, 1921, vol. 6, issue 2, no. 8, pp. 590–4 (part IV). — “Gottes Unveränderlichkeit,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1922, vol. 7, issue 1, pp. 26–40. — “Tagebuchaufzeichnungen (1837),” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1922, vol. 7, issue 2, 1922, pp. 63–71. — “Die Kraft Gottes in der Schwachheit des Menschen. Eine Rede,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1921, vol. 6, issue 2, no. 10, pp. 735–44. — “Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1849–1855,” trans. by Theodor Haecker, Der Brenner, 1923, vol. 8, pp. 48–69. III. Secondary Literature on Wittgenstein’s Relation to Kierkegaard Akyağıl, Recep, Kierkegaard ve Wittgenstein’dan Hareketle Din Felsefesi Yapmak [To Conduct Philosophy of Religion Departing from Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein], Istanbul: Anka Publications 2002. Bell, Richard H., “Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein: Two Strategies for Understanding Theology,” The Iliff Review, vol. 31, 1974, pp. 21–34. Bell, Richard H. (ed.), The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1988. Bell, Richard H. and Ronald E. Hustwit (eds.), Essays on Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein: On Understanding the Self, Wooster, Ohio: Wooster College 1978. Cavell, Stanley, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1969, pp. 163–79. — “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy,” in Themes Out of School, San Francisco: North Point Press 1984, pp. 195–234. Clair, André, “Ethique et absolu: Wittgenstein en débat avec Kierkegaard,” in his Ethique et humanisme. Essai sur la modernité, Paris: Éd. du Cerf 1989, pp. 29– 34. — “Wittgenstein en débat avec Kierkegaard: la possibilité d’un discours éthique,” in Les Cahiers de Philosophie, no. 8–9, 1989 (issue Kierkegaard. Vingt-Cinq Études), pp. 211–26. Conant, James Ferguson, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?” in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. by Fleming and Payne, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press 1989, pp. 242–83. — “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense,” in Pursuits of Reason, ed. by Ted Cohen et al., Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press 1993, pp. 195–225. — “Putting Two and Two Together. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors,” in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious

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Belief, ed. by Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr, New York and London: St. Martin’s Press 1995, pp. 248–331. Cook, John W., “Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” Religious Studies, vol. 23, 1987, pp. 199–219. Creegan, Charles L., Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality, and Philosophical Method, London and New York: Routledge 1989. Dip, Patricia Carina, “Etica y Sinsentido. Kierkegaard y Wittgenstein,” Tópicos. Revista de Filosofía, no. 24, 2003, pp. 9–29. Drewniak, Erik, “Two Postmodern Philosophies of God,” Dialogue, vol. 36, 1993, pp. 13–22. Edwards, James, “Deconstruction and the End of Philosophy: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Hope of Salvation,” in Religion, Ontotheology, and Deconstruction, ed. by Henry L. Ruf, New York: Paragon House 1989, pp. 183– 210. Eronen, Annika, “Etiikan ja uskonnollisen tiedon luonne Wittgensteinin ja Kierkegaardin mukaan” [The Nature of Ethics and Religious Knowledge According to Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard], in Filosofin tieto ja filosofinen taito, ed. by Petri Räsänen and Marika Tuohimaa, Tampere: Tampere University Press 2003 (Acta Philosophica Tamperiensis, vol. 2), pp. 347–55. Fahrenbach, Helmut, “Kierkegaards untergründige Wirkungsgeschichte. (Zur Kierkegaardrezeption bei Wittgenstein, Bloch und Marcuse),” in Die Rezeption Søren Kierkegaards in der deutschen und dänischen Philosophie und Theologie. Vorträge des Kolloquiums am 22. und 23. März 1982, ed. by Heinrich Anz, Poul Lübcke, and Friedrich Schmöe, Copenhagen and Munich: Fink 1983 (Text & Kontext, Sonderreihe, vol. 15), pp. 30–69. Fairley, James, Method in Theology. Possibilities in the Light of Barth, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen 1991. Ferreira, M. Jamie, “The Point Outside the World. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion,” Religious Studies, vol. 30, 1994, pp. 29–44. Fremstedal, Roe, “Wittgenstein som religionsfilosof—og spesielt forholdet til Kierkegaard og kristendommen i ‘Denkbewegungen,’ ” Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, vol. 41, 2006, pp. 213–28. –– “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the ethico-religious,” Ideas in History, vol. 1, no. 2, 2006, pp. 109–50. Gallagher, Michael P., “Wittgenstein’s Admiration for Kierkegaard,” The Month, vol. 39, 1968, pp. 43–9. Glebe-Møller, Jens, “Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991, pp. 55–68. Haden, Norris Karl, Sufferings of Inwardness. An Analysis of Religious Belief and Existence in the Thought of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 1991. Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982, p. 11; p. 139; p. 149; pp. 151–2; p. 156; p. 165; p. 221; pp. 331–3; p. 347; p. 356; p. 377.

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— “Refuge and Religion,” in Faith, Knowledge, and Actions: Essays Presented to Niels Thulstrup, ed. by George Strengren, Copenhagen: Reitzels Forlag 1984, pp. 43–53. — “Solitary Souls and Infinite Help: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” in History of European Ideas, vol. 12, no. 1, ed. by Ann Loades and George Pattison, Oxford: Pergamon Press 1990, pp. 41–52. Hodges, Michael, “Faith: Themes from Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Robert Arrington and Mark Addis, New York: Routledge 2001, pp. 66–84. Hustwit, Ronald E., “Understanding a Suggestion of Professor Cavell’s: Kierkegaard’s Religious Stage as a Wittgensteinian ‘Form of Life,’ ” Philosophy Research Archives, vol. 4, no. 1271, 1978, pp. 329–47. Kuypers, Etienne, “In gesprek met Wittgenstein,” in Wittgenstein, ed. by Etienne Kuypers, Kampen: Kok Agora 1991, pp. 9–32; p. 148. — “Wittgenstein en het spel van het onuitsprekelijke. Brengt de filosofie ons dichter bij de kunst?” in Wittgenstein in meervoud, ed. by Etienne Kuypers et al., Leuven/ Apeldoorn: Garant 1992, pp. 65–89. — “Filosoferen als ethische bezinning. Een confrontatie tussen Spinoza en Wittgenstein in epistemologisch opzicht,” in Sporen van Spinoza, ed. by Etienne Kuypers, Leuven and Apeldoorn: Garant 1993, pp. 19–59. — Liefde—Niets dan liefde, Leuven and Apeldoorn: Garant 1993. — “Lof der schemering. Het dilemma tussen de contingentie van het bestaan en de fundering van een historisch-cultureel universalisme,” in Over Heidegger gesproken, ed. by Etienne Kuypers, Leuven and Apeldoorn: Garant 1993 (Rondom Filosofen, vol. 5), pp. 99–117. — “De wereld volgens Kierkegaard en Wittgenstein,” in De levende Kierkegaard, ed. by Etienne Kuypers, Leuven and Apeldoorn: Garant 1994, pp. 51–60. Lippitt, John and Daniel Hutto, “Making Sense of Nonsense. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 98, 1998, pp. 263–86. .136–115 ‫ עמ‬,2000 ,49. ‫ עיון‬,”‫ “וויטגנשטיין על משמעות החיים‬,‫ יובל‬,‫לוריא‬, [Lurie, Yuval, “Wittgenstein on the Meaning of Life,” Iyyun, no. 49, 2000, pp. 115–36.] Marini, Sergio, “La presenza di Kierkegaard nel pensiero di Wittgenstein,” Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, no. 2, 1986, pp. 211–26. Micheletti, M., “Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard e il ‘problema di Lessing,’ ” in Kierkegaard e la letteratura, ed. by Massimo Iritano and Inge Lise Rasmussen, Rome: Città Nuova 2002 (NotaBene. Quaderni di Studi Kierkegaardiani, vol. 2), pp. 143–54. Morsing, Ole, “Om det der gør sig gældende! Et ping pong spil imellem Wittgenstein og Kierkegaard,” Fønix, vol. 16, 1992, pp. 183–99. Mulhall, Stephen, Inheritance and Originality. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001. Nientied, Mariele, Kierkegaard und Wittgenstein: ‘Hineintäuschen in das Wahre,” Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 7).

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Phillips, D.Z., “Authorship and Authenticity. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. by Peter A. French et al., Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1992 (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 17), pp. 177–92. (Reprinted in his Wittgenstein and Religion, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1993, pp. 200–19.) Putnam, Hilary, Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1992, see Chapter 7, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief,” pp. 134–57. Quinn, Wylie Savanas, in Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. The “Religious” as a “Form of Life,” Ph.D. Thesis, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 1976. Rigal, Élisabeth, “Wittgenstein, lecteur de Kierkegaard,” Kairos, vol. 10, 1997 (Actes du Colloque franco-danois, “Retour de Kierkegaard / Retour à Kierkegaard,” Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, les 15 et 16 novembre 1995), pp. 193–214. Roberts, Robert C., “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of ‘Virtue Ethics,’” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995 (Studies in Continental Thought), pp. 142–66. Rollefson, Richard Griffith, Thinking with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. The Philosophical Theology of Paul L. Holmer, Ph.D. Thesis, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California 1994. Schönbaumsfeld, Genia, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. Schweidler, Walter, “Die Ethik des Augenblicks. Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein,” in Karl Jaspers: Philosopher among Philosophers/Philosoph unter Philosophen, ed. by Richard Wisser and Leonard H. Ehrlich, Würzburg and Amsterdam: Königshausen & Neumann 1993, pp. 202–14. Stewart, T. Wesley, Paul L. Holmer and the Logic of Faith. A Utilization of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein for Contemporary Christian Theology, Ph.D. Thesis, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky 1991. Strawser, Michael J., “Welcome to the Jungle. The Problem of Language in Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” Topicos, vol. 2, no. 3, 1992, pp. 97–110. Taels, Johan, “De grammatica van het religieuze. S. Kierkegaard en L. Wittgenstein over filosofie en religie,” in Rationaliteit en religieus vertrouwen, ed. by Paul Cortois and Walter van Herck, Leuven: Peeters Publishers 1999 (Tertium datur, vol. 5), pp. 121–63. Torralba, Francesc, “El lenguaje de la fe y del culto. A vueltas con Kierkegaard y Wittgenstein,” Phase vol. 39, no. 232, 1999, pp. 327–42. Turnbull, Jamie, “Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy,” in Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers, ed. by Roman Králik et al., Mexico City and Šaľa: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos 2007 (Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 2), pp. 173–86. Uchida, Katsutaka, “Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,” Kierkegaard-Studiet (Kierkegaard-Study), vol. 23, 1993, pp. 39–47. Wimmer, Reiner, “Wittgensteins Wiederholung der Einsicht Kierkegaards in die Paradoxalität des Begriffs des Ethischen und des Religiösen,” in Philosophy of Religion. Proceedings of the 8th International Wittgenstein Symposium, 15th to

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21st August 1983, Kirchberg am Wechsel (Austria), ed. by Wolfgang Gombocz, Vienna: Kluwer 1984 (Schriftenreihe der Wittgenstein-Gesellschaft, vol. 10), vol. 2, pp. 187–89. Zijlstra, Onno, “De wandelaar en de ober. Wittgenstein en Kierkegaard over esthetiek en ethiek/religie,” Katern, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 47–57. — “A Labyrinth of Paths: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Word and Image, Ethics and Aesthetics,” Bijdragen, vol. 62, 2001, pp. 414–33. — “The Early Wittgenstein: A Late Modern Kierkegaardian Esthete?” Bijdragen, vol. 58, 1997, pp. 399–406.

PART II Scandinavian Philosophy

Hans Brøchner: Professor of Philosophy, Antagonist— and a Loving and Admiring Relative Carl Henrik Koch

I. Of all the contemporary accounts of Søren Kierkegaard as a human being and a person, the philosopher Hans Brøchner’s (1820–75) “Recollections of Kierkegaard,” written between December 27, 1871 and January 10, 1872, is the most extensive and at the same time an account that presumably gives a better insight behind the façade than any of the many other scattered recollections from the time. Without Brøchner’s recollections we would today have far less knowledge about the person Søren Kierkegaard than is the case. The prose Brøchner uses in his scholarly works is heavy and long-winded, and, stamped as it is by Hegelian philosophy, the level of abstraction is high; his systematic works are almost impenetrable for the modern reader. But in his letters and diaries, and especially in his account of Kierkegaard, he shows himself to be a lively storyteller, who is able to give a clearly defined and tender portrait of a man whom he loved and admired.1 Brøchner’s “Recollections of Kierkegaard” was printed for the first time in the March issue of Edvard and Georg Brandes’ journal Det nittende Aarhundrede, 1876–77, pp. 337–74. The text was edited by the later professor of philosophy Harald Høffding (1843–1931), who like Georg Brandes (1842–1927) had been a student of Brøchner. Later the recollections were reprinted several times following the original manuscript, which is found at The Royal Library in Copenhagen (Add. 415d, 4o). It has been translated into English by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen in Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, pp. 225–48. Høffding later published Brøchner’s correspondence with his friend, the poet Christian K.F. Molbech (1821–88), in Hans Brøchner og Christian K.F. Molbech. En Brevvexling (1845–1875), Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1902, a publication which contains numerous transcription errors and a number of omissions, which are not noted. Brøchner’s diaries have been published with introduction and commentaries by Carl Henrik Koch and Vibeke Koch in Hans Brøchners rejsedagbøger fra årene 1847 og 1852–1853, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1996. Brøchner’s thought is described in Harald Høffding, Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1909, pp. 196–206, in Søren Holm, “Hans Brøchner’s Religionsfilosofi,” in his Religionsfilosofiske Essays, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1943, pp. 64–94, in S.V. Rasmussen, Den unge Brøchner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1966, and in Carl Henrik Koch, Den danske idealisme, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2004, pp. 497–522. Brøchner also appears in the memoir literature, see, for 1

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Brøchner was a distant relative of Kierkegaard, since Kierkegaard’s father’s cousin, Michael Andersen Kierkegaard (1776–1867) was married to a sister of Brøchner’s mother, and Brøchner, who was born in Fredericia, met Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, immediately after he had passed the entrance exam at the University of Copenhagen in 1836, at the home of Michael Andersen Kierkegaard, a common uncle whom they both appreciated. Until the summer of 1855 they met regularly, took walks together, and the elder of the two asked the younger about his reading and his interests. Although Brøchner already at the age of 20, after a study of the writings of David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), and Bruno Bauer (1809–82) rejected the central dogmas of Christianity and, in his conception of religion, became a follower of Feuerbach, albeit not an uncritical one, he never lost Kierkegaard’s sympathy. The two men were conscious of the fundamental difference between them with regard to religion, and although Feuerbach was often the subject of their conversations, they never seem to have discussed their disagreement, presumably because the breach between them on this point seemed to both of them to be insurmountable.2 There can hardly be any doubt that Kierkegaard preferred an honest atheist to a lukewarm Christian. The good relation between Kierkegaard and Brøchner, seven years his junior, apparently did not suffer any harm when Brøchner in 1844 played the role of the student Søren Kirk in Christian Hostrup’s (1818–92) student comedy Gjenboerne, a figure, who in his manner of expression was stamped by themes taken from the “Διαψάλματα” in Either/Or, but without an intention of attacking Kierkegaard personally.3 Brøchner played the role in such a way that Kierkegaard was not brought into “a comic light.”4 Nevertheless Kierkegaard groaned in his journal from 1846— and again later—at being brought onto the stage,5 showing a thin-skinnedness which Brøchner had not noticed when he spoke about his performance. On the other hand, Brøchner implied that Kierkegaard had used him as a model for “the young person” in Stages on Life’s Way from 1845.6 It has been later called into question whether this was the case, but the description of “the young person” which can be read in Stages on Life’s Way7 does in fact fit very well with Brøchner, judging from contemporary portraits of him.8 example, S. Schandorph, Oplevelser, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1889, vol. 1, pp. 207ff., Georg Brandes, Levned. Barndom og første Ungdom, Copenhagen and Kristiania: Gyldendal 1905, pp. 129ff. and Harald Høffding, Erindringer, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1928, pp. 77ff. Karl Gjellerup has portrayed Brøchner in the novel Germanernes Lærling. Et Livsafsnit fra vore Dage, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1882. 2 Kirmmse (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 243. 3 Ibid., pp. 60–1, Christian Hostrup, Erindringer fra min Barndom og Ungdom, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1891, pp. 142–3. In the printed edition of the comedy Hostrup changed the name to Søren Torp. 4 Kirmmse (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 61. 5 SKS 20, 45, NB:43 / JP 5, 5940 and Pap. VIII–1 A 654 / JP 6, 6089. 6 Kirmmse (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 226. 7 SKS 6, 27 / SLW, 21. 8 The idea that Brøchner is supposed to be the model for “the young man” was first asserted by Knud Jensenius in “ ‘Det unge Menneske’ hos Søren Kierkegaard,” Nordisk

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II. After Brøchner, at age 16, began to attend the university and had passed what was called the “Second Examination” in a number of propadeutic disciplines,9 he began his study of theology. But when in December of 1841 in his petitum, that is, his application to take the final theological examination, he acknowledged his agreement with Strauss’ and Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, he was turned down. The affair caused a great stir and was discussed in Copenhagen’s press and mentioned in a number of provincial newspapers. As a response to Brøchner’s application, the Theological Faculty stated, among other things, that it must be regarded as incommensurable with the Theological Faculty’s relation to a Christian Church in a Christian state to allow a student who had declared himself a nonbeliever to take the final theological examination, which gave access to positions in the clergy.10 The label “Godless” or “atheist” was subsequently attached to Brøchner, and he himself felt later that this seemed to exclude him from a university position. In a letter dated March 4, 1853 to a friend of his youth, the later director of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the jurist Peter Vedel (1823–1911), in which he gave an account of his future plans, he wrote that he expected by persistent labor to be able to make himself qualified for a respectable position and expressed the hope that the most reasonable people at the university would realize that it was foolish to write him off as an atheist.11 After the rejection Brøchner continued by working on a Danish translation of Strauss’ Die christliche Glaubenslehre12 at the same time as he intensified his philosophical and philological studies, which he had already begun in connection with his theology major. In 1843 in a short piece he criticized the then professor of theology and later bishop Hans Lassen Martensen’s (1808–84) conception of baptism,13 and in 1845 with the treatise On the Jewish People’s Condition in the Tidsskrift för Vetenskap, Konst och Industri, New Series 6, 1930, pp. 340–50. Jensenius was refuted by Rasmussen in Den unge Brøchner, pp. 32–41. 9 Examen philosophicum, propadeutic examination in philosophy, mathematics, languages, and history. 10 The affair is described in detail by S.V. Rasmussen in Den unge Brøchner, pp. 16–26. 11 Rigsarkivet, private archive 6498. 12 David Friedrich Strauss, Fremstilling af den christelige Troeslære i dens historiske Udvikling og i dens Kamp med den moderne Videnskab, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: Klein 1842– 43. 13 The discussions in the 1840s about baptism were due to the fact that in December 1842 it was ordered that the children of the Baptists should be baptized by force. This order was refused by some pastors including Kierkegaard’s brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805–88). On this occasion H.L. Martensen published his somewhat unclear conception of baptism in Den christelige Daab betragtet med Hensyn paa det baptistiske Spørgsmaal, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1843. In the piece Nogle Bemærkninger om Daaben foranlediget ved Professor Martensens Skrift ‘Den christelige Daab,’ Copenhagen: Philipsen 1843, the student Brøchner sharply reprimanded the professor of theology. In 1872 Martensen wrote to his friend Otto Laub (1805–82) on occasion of Georg Brandes’ lectures at the University of Copenhagen as privatdocent, lectures which Martensen characterized as “atheistic,” “anti-

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Persian Period he finished his Master’s degree in Semitic philology with Greek, Latin, and Philosophy as minors.14 The treatise is interesting, not least of all since Brøchner here borrowed some views about the history of philosophy from the “Interlude” in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (see Section IV below). Four years later he became privatdocent in philosophy before he was appointed extraordinary lecturer in 1857 and three years later as titular professor with the duty of giving instruction in the philosophical disciplines alongside the two ordinary professors Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785–1872) and Rasmus Nielsen (1809–84). With Sibbern’s departure in 1870, he was named ordinary professor. Only five years later he died of tuberculosis. If one ignores for the moment Brøchner’s authorship on the history of philosophy, which consists of a monograph on Spinoza, a historical account of the development of philosophy, and a history of philosophy in two volumes which describes the development of philosophy from the Presocratics to Hegel,15 his philosophical thought moved in the field of tension between the religious and the human—between faith and knowledge—or between Kierkegaard and Feuerbach, who both had argued for the incommensurability of the religious and the human. Kierkegaard had done so at the cost of the human, and Feuerbach of the religious. In his thinking, Brøchner resolved this dilemma in the manner of the epigone, namely, by uniting the religious and the human. The title of his systematic magnum opus from 1869, On the Religious in its Unity with the Human, is a fanfare first and foremost respectfully directed toward Kierkegaard, but also intended for Feuerbach.16 The book is a positive Christian,” and “unethical”: “It would be very regrettable if he [Brandes] would manage to obtain an appointment at the University. We already have enough of these socially detrimental doctrines in Brøchner’s lectures, which due to their abstract and scholastic character are hardly able to be understood by many people. But it is highly regrettable that at the University the youth are not offered healthy views in the opposite direction, which they could take with them in life.” (Biskop Otto Laubs Levnet. En Livsskildring i Breve, ed. by F.L. Mynster, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: Schønberg 1885–87, vol. 2, pp. 269–70.) In his memoirs Martensen wrote with a more reconciliatory tone about Brøchner, “There was much that was respectable about him,” Martensen writes, “especially, a serious and thorough study.” (Hans Lassen Martensen, Af mit Levnet, vol. 1–3, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1882–83, vol. 3, p. 96.) Brøchner for his part writes in a letter from 1875 to Georg Brandes about Martensen’s “usual domineering ambition and desire for intrigues.” (Georg og Edv. Brandes’ Brevveksling med nordiske Forfattere og Videnskabsmænd, vols. 1–8, ed. by Morten Borup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1939–42, vol. 1, p. 230.) 14 Hans Brøchner, Om det jødiske Folks Tilstand i den persiske Periode, Copenhagen: Bianco Luno 1845. 15 Hans Brøchner, Benedict Spinoza. En Monographie, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1857; Hans Brøchner, Bidrag til Philosophiens historiske Udvikling, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1869; Hans Brøchner, Philosophiens Historie i Grundrids, vols. 1–2, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1873– 74 (vol. 1, Den græske Philosophies Historie i Grundrids; vol. 2, Den nyere Philosophies Historie i Grundrids). 16 Hans Brøchner, Om det Religiøse i dets Eenhed med det Humane. Et positivt Supplement til “Problemet om Tro og Viden,” Copenhagen: Philipsen 1869. Brøchner gave a more accessible presentation of his conception of the relation between the religious and the human under the pseudonym Constans in the articles “Det Kristelige og det Humane som

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supplement to a critical treatment of three contemporary Danish accounts of the relation between faith and knowledge, which he published the previous year under the title The Problem of Faith and Knowledge.17 At a time when a threat to Christian faith seemed to be looming from the side of the natural sciences and not least of all from the theory of evolution, Brøchner’s colleague Rasmus Nielsen attempted to protect faith by arguing that faith and knowledge are based on principles that are different in kind and therefore cannot fall into an internal conflict.18 This became the occasion for a polemical dispute on the Danish Parnassus about the relation between faith and knowledge,19 a conflict which lasted from 1865 to 1870, and which evoked a large number of polemical writings and newspaper articles. Among these was a piece from H.L. Martensen, in which the learned bishop asserted the supremacy of faith and thus theology in relation to the natural and the human sciences.20 In his book on faith and knowledge Brøchner attacked both Martensen and Nielsen, but since the latter thought that he was building on Kierkegaard’s distinction between the spheres of faith and knowledge, Kierkegaard was also criticized; the criticism was, however, far more respectful than what was issued to the other two (see Section V below). III. Most of the young Danish philosophers in the period from 1840 to 1880 were Hegelians in some sense, since the Hegelian dialectic, Hegel’s terminology, and his conception of the nature of philosophy stamped them for better or worse. The best dialectician of them all, Søren Kierkegaard, was something of an exception. In his Modsætninger i vor Tids Bevidsthed,” Nyt dansk Maanedsskrift, vol. 2, 1871, pp. 289–99; pp. 433–56; and pp. 492–510. 17 Hans Brøchner, Problemet om Tro og Viden. En historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1868. 18 See, for example, Rasmus Nielsen, Philosophisk Propædeutik i Grundtræk, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1857, p. 77. Rasmus Nielsen quotes Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1859) in Forelæsninger over “Philosophisk Propædeutik” fra Universitetsaaret 1860–61, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1862, p. 246 and p. 258. 19 See Koch, Den danske idealisme, pp. 435–61. On Rasmus Nielsen see also P.A. Rosenberg, Rasmus Nielsen. Nordens Filosof, Copenhagen: Schønberg 1903; Eduard Asmussen, Entwicklungsgang und Grundprobleme der Philosophie Rasmus Nielsens, Flenborg: Laban & Larsen 1911; and Koch, Den danske idealisme, pp. 379–434. 20 Hans Lassen Martensen, Om Tro og Viden. Et Leilighedsskrift, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1867. Concerning Martensen, see Hermann Brandt, Gotteserkenntnis und Weltentfremdung. Der Weg der spekulativen Theologie Hans Lassen Martensens, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1971 (Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie, vol. 25); Koch, Den danske idealisme, pp. 271–92 and pp. 443–47; Robert Leslie Horn, Positivity and Dialectic: A Study of the Theological Method of Hans Lassen Martensen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 2); and Curtis L. Thompson, Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 4).

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rejection of Hegel, he followed his teachers, the professors of philosophy Frederik Christian Sibbern and Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838).21 In the beginning all three had a positive disposition towards Hegel but then turned against Hegelianism when it was transplanted on Danish soil. Brøchner, too, joined the movement of Hegelian idealism, where by “idealism” it should be understood that the finite is seen from the infinite, or that what exists in time is seen from the eternal. As the leading figure of Danish Hegelianism, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860), wrote in his speculative logic: “This basic thought that the finite rests in the infinite and only exists by it, and that the infinite itself is the comprehensive sublation of the finite—this basic thought is idealism, and every true philosophy is therefore idealist.”22 In the terminology of the age this idealism was also called “speculation” since speculative knowledge was precisely the understanding of the finite and the limited from the infinite and the unlimited, from the Idea, that is, from the goal and final goal of the development of the world, or the absolute. Against the background of his affiliation with Strauss’ and Feuerbach’s criticism of Christianity, Brøchner is often characterized with the somewhat imprecise designation of “left Hegelian.” He was, moreover, in agreement with Feuerbach’s and others’, for example, Rasmus Nielsen’s, criticism of Hegel for not sufficiently taking into account the empirically given, concrete actuality. In the Hegelian system, thought and being, when they are seen from the perspective of the absolute, are one and the same. Reason realizes itself in the world. Idea and actuality will be united. For this reason there is a correspondence between the determinations of thought and those of being. But is this, asks Brøchner, not an illusion? Is the being, which in the Hegelian system is mediated with thought, the actual concrete being?23 Brøchner found the answer in Feuerbach, who in his Philosophie der Zukunft from 1843 had criticized Hegel’s concept of being, which is the fundamental category of speculative logic. An abstract thinking being, Feuerbach writes here, has no notion of being, existence, and actuality. Being is the limit of thinking and not an object for abstract philosophy, which even, claims Feuerbach, is evident from Hegel’s speculative logic, in which being is identified with nothing; but a nothing cannot be thought.24 On the poet Poul Martin Møller as professor of philosophy, see Koch, Den danske idealisme, pp. 249–69. On the period’s Danish Hegelianism, see also Jon Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome I, The Heiberg Period: 1824–1836, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3), and Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837–1842, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 3). The third volume of this study is currently being produced. 22 [Johan Ludvig Heiberg], Ledetraad ved Forelæsningerne over Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik ved den kongelige militaire Høiskole, [Copenhagen] 1831–32, § 25, p. 10. (Reprinted in Heiberg’s Prosaiske Skrifter, vols. 1–11, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1861–62, vol. 1, pp. 111–380; English translation in Heiberg’s Speculative Logic and Other Texts, ed. and trans. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2006 (Texts from Golden Age Denmark, vol. 2), pp. 39–213, see p. 54.) 23 Brøchner, Om det jødiske Folks Tilstand, p. 6. 24 Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 26, in his Sämmtliche Werke, vols. 1–10, Leipzig: Wigand 1846–66, vol. 2, p. 309. 21

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By “being” Feuerbach understood concrete, perceived being. The Idea does not actualize itself in abstract being, but in a being which is given to the senses, and which the human being strives for or is repelled by, that is, which they love or hate. But love and hate are passions, and only what can be an object for passion can be actual or possible. Cold abstract thinking eliminates the difference between being and not-being, but for passion this difference is a reality.25 Hegel had not, according to Feuerbach and Brøchner with him, overcome the dualism between thinking and being. In spite of his criticism of Hegel, Feuerbach was also not successful in overcoming this dualism, claimed Brøchner. Thought moves in the abstract world of concepts, that is, in the sphere of the universal, but the objects of sense are always concrete. In the human being thought and sense are assumed to constitute a unity. But what unites them? Feuerbach did not answer this question. For this reason Brøchner attempted to construct a monism, in which thought and being or spirit and nature were unified. He found points of unification in the striving for unity, which in the human being connect the two sides of its being (corporality and spirit), that is, in what he called the creating power of the personality.26 Brøchner’s philosophical thinking must thus be characterized as a philosophy of personality. In his treatise On the Jewish People’s Condition in the Persian Period, Brøchner compared Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel with the criticism of Hegelianism, which was presented by the Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Johannes de silentio and Vigilius Haufniensis. For them, also, being or existence was the limit of thought.27 This was the first time that Kierkegaard was referred to in an academic treatise. Although Brøchner agreed with Feuerbach in the latter’s criticism of Hegel, he did not give up the Hegelian conceptual apparatus and the teleological view of history, which Hegel shared with his age. In Brøchner’s monism the fundamental principle is neither—as in Hegel—of an ideal nature nor—as with the French materialists—of a real nature, but is of an ideal-real principle of unity, namely, life understood as a process directed towards an end and constituting a unity. In the unity-creating energy, which constitutes the human personality’s being, a bridge is built between thought and being. In the introduction to the first volume of Brøchner’s history of philosophy, he gives an account of his conception of the nature of philosophy.28 The object of philosophy, Brøchner believed, is the entire concrete actuality understood as a unity in space and time. This unity, which can be compared with what Hegel called “the Idea,” is the fundamental principle of existence, that is, “the principle of existence” on which the individual specialized sciences should be grounded and from which the limits for their validity should be determined. The individual sciences are concerned with their object spheres, the given, whereas philosophy is concerned with how the given is known, regardless of its nature. What was later called the problem of knowledge is thus the main problem of philosophy. The problem presupposes that doubt can be raised about to what extent there is a conception of the given that Feuerbach, Philosophie der Zukunft, § 33, in his Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 2, p. 323. Brøchner, Om det jødiske Folks Tilstand, p. 11. 27 Ibid., pp. 7–8, note. 28 Brøchner, Philosophiens Historie i Grundrids, vol. 1, pp. 1–3. 25 26

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is faithful to actuality. Here the distinction is between the object of consciousness and consciousness of a given object of consciousness, that is, between the object of consciousness and self-consciousness or between immediate consciousness and reflection. The problem of knowledge thus concerns the relation between, on the one hand, the immediate conception of being and, on the other hand, thought or reflection. How can the two be united? In order for philosophy to be able to answer this question, it must go back to the principle that unites existence’s basic opposition between being and thought, which means precisely that the singular should be understood from the “principle of existence.” When this is the task of philosophy, the correct philosophical knowledge becomes universal. Just as for the German idealists, the object of consciousness was, also for Brøchner, a product of consciousness’ striving to maintain its unity. It was this striving toward unity that Brøchner conceived as the essence of personality. While the immediate object of consciousness is representations of phenomena, thought or reflection generates concepts. The unity of thought and being consists in the fundamental striving for unity, eliminating the difference between representation and concept or between object of consciousness and self-consciousness, with which the sensible given is determined as thought or concept. It becomes, to use Brøchner’s expression, “the image of spirit,”29 since consciousness in a Hegelian manner finds itself in what it conceives. As a philosopher of religion, Brøchner was inspired by both Kierkegaard and Feuerbach. In agreement with Kierkegaard, he determined the essence of religion as an absolute relation to the absolute. But whereas the absolute, the divine, for Kierkegaard is a transcendent personality, Brøchner distinguishes the divine from both transcendence and personality, and in agreement with Feuerbach he determines the absolute as the essence of the human being; since the relation to the absolute encompasses all the “basic activities of spirit,” it is a relation to the “true infinite.” The eternal and infinite therefore are not—as in Kierkegaard—placed in a transcendent sphere but are found immanently in the sphere of existence. When the human being is understood as a unity of infinity (that is, its essence as human being) and finitude (that is, as this existing human), then the absolute relation to the absolute becomes a “relation of faith and submission; a relation through which the human spirit, snared in finitude, bound in guilt, finds reconciliation with itself and with its origin.”30 Just as in the Aristotelian manner the essence of the human being it is the absolute τέλος of its existence, so also for Brøchner it is ethically binding. The ethical will to realize the individual living in finitude as a morally acting individual is one of the characteristic features of the human essence, and its task is to translate the knowledge of the command of duty to action. The human being’s lack of ability to completely and wholly actualize its essence, which is due precisely to its finitude, its existence, provides the occasion for consciousness of guilt; but since it reconciles itself with its essence by taking upon itself the command of duty, and since every individual is a more or less complete actualization of human essence, it is at the same Ibid., p. 2. Brøchner, Om det Religiøse i dets Enhed med det Humane, p. 42.

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time reconciled with its origin. With this Brøchner builds a bridge to the traditional religious ideas at the same time that the divine remains in the sphere of immanence or the human. At this point he sees a certain agreement between what Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript had designated “religiousness A,” whereas Brøchner’s human religious view of life stands in sharp opposition to “religiousness B,” the Christian or the paradoxically religious.31 Brøchner could not accept the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” which Johannes de silentio describes in Fear and Trembling. IV. As noted above, the first references to Kierkegaard’s authorship in an academic work appear in Brøchner’s treatise On the Jewish People’s Condition in the Persian Period from 1845. Hegel had, in his philosophy of history, assumed that a people’s history is determined by one and only one immanent principle, which necessarily determines the individual phases in its development, which is a part of humanity’s collective development towards freedom. Hegel had thus mediated the opposition between freedom and necessity.32 Hegel had determined the principle or essence of Judaism from the fact that the God of the Jews is exclusively the Lord for the Jewish people, that is, that the Jews’ conception of the world and their actions are unambiguously determined by the relation to a free and transcendent deity. In agreement with this, he determined the essence of the Jewish people as the universal or free subjectivity which Brøchner calls “abstract subjectivity.”33 However, this principle is, Brøchner believed, only a formal principle and cannot explain Jewish history since an explanation must also include an account of the relation to the neighboring tribes and bordering nations. But Brøchner also took a more principled position on the Hegelian philosophy of history by following Johannes Climacus’ argumentation in the “Interlude” in Philosophical Fragments that the necessary cannot come into being but must always exist. The necessary is a thought determination and not a determination of being. Since historical events come into being and pass away, they cannot be subject to the law of necessity, but must be expressions of freedom. “The truth,” writes Brøchner, of the Hegelian view rests on the affirmation of the question: “Is the past more necessary than the future?” If this is denied, then history cannot be conceived under a category, and its development cannot be conceived as the development of this thought determination; for every development in thought is necessary. But can what is necessary come into

Ibid., p. 43. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, § 344, in Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe, vols. 1–20, ed. by Hermann Glockner, Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag 1928–41, vol. 7, p. 448. 33 Brøchner, Om det jødiske Folks Tilstand, p. 4. See G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Zweiter Band, in Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 16, pp. 47ff. 31 32

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Brøchner thus attacks Hegel’s philosophy of history with arguments borrowed from the Kierkegaardian arsenal. Only ten years after this work Brøchner wrote about Kierkegaard once again. The occasion was Kierkegaard’s death on November 11, 1855. On December 1 the newspaper Fædrelandet published on the front page a long article with the title “On Søren Kierkegaard’s Activity as Religious Author” signed “-r,” which was the signature that Brøchner was accustomed to use for his newspaper articles. In agreement with the understanding of his authorship, which Kierkegaard himself had presented in On My Work as an Author from 1851, Brøchner in his article wanted to try to show in part the inner continuity and unity in the entirety of his [sc. Kierkegaard’s] writings, and in part how closely his final public appearance was continuous with his previous activity, how definitely it was suggested in that previous activity, and with what necessary consistency it had to result from this in the given circumstances.35

Brøchner divided the authorship into two groups; the first group, which comprises the authorship up to and including the Concluding Unscientific Postscript from 1846, “strives toward what is Christian,” while the second, which comprises the rest of the authorship, “presents the thus achieved Christianity.” To the first group also belong the edifying discourses from 1843 and 1844, “which with a constant view to the category of religion ‘the individual’ approached more and more what is Christian-religious, without, however, wanting to reach it since they ended up in the humorous.”36 Brøchner’s division of the authorship shows that he did not distinguish between the pseudonymous authorship and that which Kierkegaard published in his own name. Brøchner’s brief account of the entirety of Kierkegaard’s authorship and the continuity in it is by far the most valuable and most insightful in the period prior to the monographs of Georg Brandes and Harald Høffding.37 The day after Brøchner’s article was published in Fædrelandet, he wrote to a friend that the editor of the paper had previously asked him to review Kierkegaard’s writings, but that he turned him down, “because I value the books and the author so

Brøchner, Om det jødiske Folks Tilstand, p. 5. The reference is to the “Interlude” in Philosophical Fragments, see SKS 4, 272–86 / PF, 72–86. 35 -r, “Om Søren Kierkegaard’s Virksomhed som religieus Forfatter,” Fædrelandet, vol. 16, no. 282, December 1, 1855, p. 1179, column 1. 36 Ibid., column 3. 37 Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877 (German translation: Sören Kierkegaard. Ein literarisches Charakterbild, Leipzig: Barth 1879; reprint: Hildesheim: Olms 1975), and Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1892 (German translation: Søren Kierkegaard als Philosoph, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896). 34

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highly and because I felt I could not measure up to the demands that I myself would bring to such a task.”38 But now he had to let himself be persuaded, and he continues: You can well imagine that Søren Kierkegaard’s death has been an event that has aroused people in a fashion he would not have liked very much. His death has made a painful but not a depressing impression on me. He has meant a great deal to me, both through his works and through the personal relationship I had with him. There is no one whose personality has had such an awakening and encouraging effect on me, and the friendly good will that he always demonstrated toward me often gave me courage when I was about to lose it. It is with joy that I remember him and the long series of years— almost twenty years—during which I knew him: how the gentle and loving side of his personality more and more gained the upper hand over the strongly ironic and polemical element that was in him by nature; and how his thought constantly became richer, more certain and clearer, so that often a word from him could have a calming and reconciling effect and could clear up a confusion that one could not manage on one’s own. I will certainly come to miss him, but when I think of how completely he fulfilled that which was his life’s task, how rich and full his life was, in all its brevity, and how much of him remains, I cannot think of his death with any depressing feelings. On the contrary, it seems to me to have been beautiful and fortunate.39

Briefly after the memorial article Brøchner appeared as a straightforward defender of the deceased. In a series of lampoons Kierkegaard was criticized for having harmed the cause of Christianity in Denmark with the conflict about the witness to the truth and with his attack on the Danish People’s Church.40 Under his usual signature “-r” Brøchner in 1856 reviewed the first two lampoons and raised here the question if both among the many, who without hesitation had accepted the existing order, and among those who “were only concerned for the mundane, there are any who by means of Dr. K. have been awakened to severe spiritual re-examinations, to concern also for matters of the soul.”41 Later in the year Brøchner, in a review of a short lampoon on the conflict about the witness to the truth,42 poked fun at some contemporary theologians, who accepted parts of Kierkegaard’s criticism of the existing order, but who for their own part did not fully draw the consequences of this criticism. “But,” he concludes the review, “when in a sense the old Greek was right who said, ‘the half is more than the whole,’ then in this case he is probably right who says, ‘the half is less than nothing.’ ”43

Kirmmse (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard, p. 249. Ibid. 40 A.D. Andresen, Dr. Søren Kierkegaards falske Paastande, vols. 1–3, Copenhagen: Lund 1855–56. 41 Hans Brøchner, “Dr. Søren Kierkegaards falske Paastande. Af Provst Andresen, Nr. I-II, Kbhvn. 1855–56. Lund,” Ugeskrift for den evangeliske Kirke i Danmark, vol. 7, 1856, p. 250. 42 J.C.M. Ørum, Sandhedsvidnestriden, Copenhagen: Eibe 1856. 43 Hans Brøchner, “Sandhedvidnestriden, fremstillet af J.C.M. Ørum, Cand. theol. Kjøbenhavn 1856. F.H. Eibes Forlag,” Fædrelandet, vol. 17, no. 298, December 20, 1856, p. 1239, column 2–p. 1240, column 1. The ancient Greek is Hesiod, see Works and Days, verse 40. 38 39

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In the year 1858–59 Brøchner gave a lecture series of in all 63 lectures on modern philosophy’s relation to Christianity and then attempts to formulate a Christian philosophy. Eight of the lectures from the spring of 1859 treat Kierkegaard. An extensive lecture manuscript to the entire series of lectures is preserved.44 The university’s catalogue of courses does not make clear the actual content of the lectures. It is noteworthy that already just over two years after Kierkegaard’s death, and nine years after Martensen, in his dogmatics with a view towards Kierkegaard, had spoken of those “who feel no inclination to consistent thought, but satisfy themselves with thinking in straw thoughts and aphorisms, fancies and allusions,”45 there was given a series of valuable academic lectures at the University of Copenhagen on Kierkegaard, in which the continuity in the authorship was emphasized.46 Against the background of the attention and the commotion that Kierkegaard’s attack on “Christendom” had awakened, and the opposition that he was met with from the powerful and influential Theological Faculty at the University of Copenhagen, Brøchner was aware that he had benefited from academic freedom. He thus says in his concluding lecture: What I wanted is reflection, honesty, clarity. I have struggled against illusions and confusion; I have striven for thought to separate what is consciously or deliberately mixed together, and in this mixture is distorted. In order to be able to do this, I have used the freedom of science, of which this university is in possession perhaps to a greater degree than any other university in Europe at this moment; I have allowed the thought to speak, and presented the attacks on the existing order with the same fullness and acuity as the defense. But since I have fully made use of this freedom, I have been aware of the obligation that it places me under.47

The manuscript can be found at the Royal Library in Copenhagen under the call number Add. 414i, 4o. 45 Hans Lassen Martensen: Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1849, p. III. 46 Habib C. Malik states without any reference to a source that Rasmus Nielsen in 1856 “held a series of twelve public lectures on Kierkegaard’s thought.” See Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, p. 129. Malik presumably has in mind the twelve popular lectures about Kierkegaard’s authorship, notes from which can be found at The Royal Library (Udtog af Professor Nielsens Forelæsninger over Kierkegaards forfatterskab, Ny kongelig Samling 1058, 8o). It is not stated in the notes when the lectures were given. Also Rasmus Nielsen in his lectures emphasized Kierkegaard’s own understanding of the authorship as it appears in Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed from 1851. Vilhelm Klein (1835–1913), who was a great admirer of Rasmus Nielsen, states that the latter every winter regularly gave “lectures for educated auditors.” See V. Klein and P.A. Rosenberg, Mindeskrift over Rasmus Nielsen udgivet paa Hundredaarsdagen efter hans Fødsel, Copenhagen: Schønberg 1909, p. 18. 47 Hans Brøchner, “Lectures on the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity since the Renaissance,” Royal Library in Copenhagen, Add. 414i, 4o, installment 78, p. 2. Future references to the mentioned lecture series will be given by installment and page number, 44

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The first line in the quotation recalls Kierkegaard’s statement “Very simply—I want honesty,” which could be read in Fædrelandet on March 31, 1855.48 Several times in the course of the lecture series, Brøchner emphasized the continuity in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a result of a conscious plan: “After having completed his studies at the university he [sc. Kierkegaard] immediately began his activity as an author, an activity conceived according to a comprehensive plan, with one sharply formulated thought in mind.”49 Shortly hereafter he explains this further: It has already been touched upon in the foregoing how one thought, one task carries the entirety of K[ierkegaard]’s work as an author. Through the entire series of his numerous works there runs a dialectically conceived and artistically executed plan, the individual parts of which the individual writings realize, and do so such that the final goal right from the beginning stood clearly before his eyes, and no individual work saw the light of day before the next one in the series was completed. The goal, towards which the entire activity of the author aimed, was what was Christian; also where the other life views are brought forward, where the scene was another sphere of existence, there is a hidden striving towards this goal, and for this reason the authorship is regarded as a totality, as religious from start to finish, and K[ierkegaard] is right when he says that to this authorship there corresponds as source someone, who qua author only wanted one thing. This one thing is thus the religious, and more determinately the Christian-religious, and this not as an object for theory but as a task for existence.50

Brøchner’s goal was to show that there was a strict continuity in the entirety of Kierkegaard’s activity as a religious author and therefore to show how unjustified the speculative dogmatic’s mocking dismissal of a “fragmentary, unsystematic thinking” was—unjustified to an even greater degree because it came from someone, who showed a complete lack of clarity and acuity of thought, an almost comic confusion;—and also, how many problems, which were set forth, how many new categories, which were brought to light, how many concepts, which are determined more sharply and more profoundly, how clearly the spheres of existence are ordered according to their inner relations, with how sharp a dialectic is used to defend the demands of existence, the undeniable demands of the ethical and the religious on the individual in existence.51

Brøchner’s lectures on Kierkegaard are thus a rejection of Martensen’s above-quoted characterization in Christian Dogmatics of the Kierkegaardian authorship. Prior to separated by a period. My additions in the quoted material are given in parentheses, and Brøchner’s underlinings are reproduced with the use of italics. 48 SKS 14, 179 / M, 46. 49 Brøchner, “Lectures on the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity since the Renaissance,” Royal Library in Copenhagen, 65.8. 50 Ibid., 66.1–66.2. Cf. SKS 13, 12–13 / PV, 6, from where the quotation comes. However, Kierkegaard speaks of “someone who qua author ‘has willed only one thing.’ ” 51 Brøchner, “Lectures on the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity since the Renaissance,” Royal Library in Copenhagen, 74.2–74.3. The quotation does not seem to come from Martensen, but is rather Brøchner’s summary of Martensen’s characterization of the authorship up to 1849.

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the lectures on Kierkegaard, Brøchner had over the course of five lectures destroyed speculative theology in the form of Martensen’s dogmatics.52 Although Brøchner thus—and with justice—regarded Kierkegaard as the antipode to Martensen and speculative theology, he nonetheless conceived him—somewhat surprisingly—as a speculative thinker; this is surprising, not least of all since he also speaks of Kierkegaard’s polemic against “speculation’s obscuring of existence.”53 About Kierkegaard’s philosophical studies he writes: “Hegel’s philosophy, then the dominant system, was made the object of a strenuous and passionate study, and from this he maintained, in spite of all deviations from it, the idealist conception, the strict dialectic, and the holding firm of speculation as the true philosophy.”54 Kierkegaard often used words like “speculative” and “speculation” in a strongly derogatory meaning, 55 which was not the case with Brøchner. These were among the age’s fashionable philosophical words, and both Kierkegaard and Brøchner conceived of them as generally known disciplinary termini, which did not demand any further determination. In the book about the relation between faith and knowledge he says of speculation that for it “the highest task of the human spirit is to place itself in the medium of eternity and live a pure life or eternity.”56 Since Kierkegaard regarded human beings as being disposed in the direction of the religious or eternally disposed, and their task is in passion to attempt to actualize their determination, his thought can be characterized as speculation and he himself as a speculative thinker. In opposition to the article about Kierkegaard from 1855, where the authorship was divided into two groups, Brøchner in the lectures divides it into three. The first group comprises The Concept of Irony and the pseudonymous writing up to and including the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In it is presented “in existence the various stages of life, which K[ierkegaard] sets prior to Christianity, and brings the latter forth in the form of an experiment….This group can be designated as propadeutic; their character is maieutic-dialectic.”57 The second group comprises the edifying discourses, which can be designated as religious communications, and the character of which is “to be edifying by means of the ideal as a claim.”58 Finally, there are the “Christian-polemical writings” consisting of The Sickness unto Death, Practice in Christianity, and the articles in Fædrelandet from 1854 and The Moment from 1855. This group is called the “polemical-reformatory group.”59 Just as later in the book about faith and knowledge, Brøchner presented in his lectures a criticism of what he also called Kierkegaard’s “theory,” namely, the view that the pseudonyms had presented in connection with the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, between religion and philosophy, or between the Christian and the human. However, he prefers here to speak of the difficulties or Ibid., 51.3–54.8. Ibid., 75.3. 54 Ibid., 65.6. 55 See, for example, SKS 7, 329–30 / CUP1, 361–2. 56 Brøchner, Problemet om Tro og Viden, p. 118. 57 Brøchner, “Lectures on the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity since the Renaissance,” Royal Library in Copenhagen, 66.4. 58 Ibid., 66.5. 59 Ibid. 52 53

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doubt, a doubt, “which should not break down, but only eluicdate…; I present this with caution with regard to a thinker, whom I admire, with humility with regard to a man, who has been dear to me like few others.”60 After this there follows the more extensive and somewhat differently disposed criticism, which was later presented in the book on faith and knowledge (see Section V below). It will suffice here to point out a fundamental assumption in Kierkegaard, which, according to Brøchner, made the criticism possible. Kierkegaard’s polemic against philosophy is based on a “philosophical presupposition,” namely, the conception of speculative philosophy as the highest form of philosophy, and of the Hegelian philosophy as speculation’s most consistent realization. The polemic is directed against speculation’s obscuring of existence…; but when the relation of thought to existence is determined, the point of departure is speculation’s conception of the eternal, the very determination of the human being as synthesis of the temporal and the eternal shines…through, and the conception of actuality becomes the idealist one; it is presupposed everywhere that what is sensed is deceptive, the world of sense is an illusion, the actuality of sense is seen everywhere as something secondary, an inexplicable addition to the eternal. From this presupposition it follows, when the determination of finitude is emphasized in opposition to speculation (and in addition speculation gives itself its justification), that eternity—which, however, must always be present in order to give continuousness—for the existing person determines himself as a future life, which always is only grasped in the form of uncertainty and abstraction, and therefore only in passion receives momentarily concretion, and the individual’s own ethical actuality (which is again conceived as something inward) remains as the sole actuality for the individual in addition to the paradoxical actuality of the object of faith. In these consequences lie the difficulties: that the eternal momentarily receives existence and becoming, without, however, being determined for thought by means of this becoming. This eternity becomes speculative philosophy’s abstract eternity, only such that it first receives the reality of being when becoming is eliminated. But by claiming that becoming should be eliminated, one makes becoming something passing, which should not be, that eternity as the actually true—for the being existing in the true existence of eternity.61

With a different philosophical point of departure, namely, Brøchner’s combination of idealism and Feuerbachian sensualism, the matter would have come out differently. Brøchner’s entire presentation of Kierkegaard’s “theory” and the emphasis on what he believes is Kierkegaard’s philosophical presupposition, shows two things, namely, first that he entirely ignores Kierkegaard’s request in “A First and Last Explanation” from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript about not being lumped together with the pseudonyms.62 On this point he is in agreement with the better part of later Kierkegaard research. But the presupposition which Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms had in common with Hegelianism—especially in the Danish version— is a premise in an argumentum ex concessis against Hegelianism, which implies that Ibid., 74.7. Ibid., 75.3–75.4. 62 SKS 7, 571 / CUP1, 627. 60 61

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the one doing the arguing—in casu Kierkegaard—is not claiming them in a way that commits him, and that therefore they cannot be ascribed to him. Second—which is related to the first point—Brøchner did not conceive the pseudonymous authorship, which for him constituted the “propadeutic” group of works, as polemical. If he had done so, then he could hardly have spoken of Kierkegaard’s “theory.” For Brøchner, as for the largest part of later Kierkegaardians of existentialist observance, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript is Kierkegaard’s main work, which contains what has been called Kierkegaard’s philosophy. But Kierkegaard was first and foremost an anti-philosopher, who used his opponents’ own weapons in order to fight against them. Kierkegaard himself wrote in “addendum” to On My Activity as an Author, that what Christendom needed was “a godly satire,” and that he especially with the help of the pseudonyms had made just such a satire.63 Brøchner did not have an eye for the paradoxical, which lay in the fact that Kierkegaard used the speculative dialectic’s sharp weapons—as it happens in the Philosophical Fragments and in The Concept of Anxiety—in connection with Christendom and personal existence, which, according to his own view, cannot be the object of speculation. In the academic year 1860–61 Brøchner, as newly named titular professor in philosophy, gave his first propadeutic lectures. Here he also speaks of the relation of philosophy to “the ethical, the aesthetic and the religious” in connection with an account of “the relation of philosophy to the spiritual life in general.” After having presented the Kierkegaardian conception of the relation between philosophy and the religious, he is said to have continued: We should now see what difficulties this view implies. Faith and thought thus exist alongside each other on the condition that the sphere of thought is limited and subordinated to that of faith. But this relation of subjectivity, which is faith’s, is like a relation of spirit, a relation of consciousness, but everything that is for consciousness must also come forth and be made clear for consciousness, and this happens through language, but language is an expression of thought, and so there must come a conflict between the thought determinations of faith and knowledge, which are to be united in the same consciousness; we posit namely the paradox, and it is expressed in the form of a statement of belief, and this statement of belief is posited as truth; but this truth, which is inaccessible for thought, is an undissolved point in the middle of consciousness, which disturbs the organism of my knowledge….The paradox’s expression of thought cannot be isolated, it must have an effect on the rest of consciousness, and thus the difference between truth and falsity disappears for us….The paradox is the miracle in the world of thought; but as a miracle in the world of nature it topples the entire basis of nature and all its laws such that the miracle in the world of thought topples the laws of thought.64

A similar objection appears in the lectures on Kierkegaard from the spring of 1859, and later in the book on the relation between faith and knowledge (see Section V SKS 13, 24–5 / PV, 17–18. See also Carl Henrik Koch, “Über Kierkegaard und das ‘Interessante,’ ” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 126–47. 64 The quotation comes from student notes, which are in the possession of the present author. It seems that they were written following Brøchner’s dictation, since a number of formulations from Brøchner’s works can be found here. 63

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below). What is new is that Brøchner here—possibly inspired by Hegel’s account of the role of language for knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit65—brings in language, which he does not do in the lectures or in his book on faith and knowledge. This also seems to be the first time that he used the expression: “The paradox is the miracle in the world of thought.” There is no doubt that Brøchner was among the first or perhaps was the first of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries to have a total and unified understanding of the entirety of the Kierkegaardian authorship. He was far from being in agreement with Kierkegaard, and, from his philosophical position, he had to stop with a series of difficulties that prevented him from following Kierkegaard any further. As he said in his lectures from 1858–59, he could not make the same movement into Christianity as Kierkegaard did: “[T]here is in K[ierkegaard]’s theory one point that bears the contradictions and the difficulties, at least the most essential ones, but in order to reach this point, a movement is demanded that I cannot make.”66 For this reason the critical analysis was, for Brøchner, not merely that of one academic against another but rather a matter of life and an existential necessity. V. In addition to an extensive criticism of H.L. Martensen’s and Rasmus Nielsen’s view of the relation between faith and knowledge, Brøchner’s The Problem of Faith and Knowledge also contains a criticism of what he calls Kierkegaard’s “theory” of the separation, in the interest of religion, between religion and philosophy.67 The theory Brøchner refers to is the conception of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, or between existence and knowledge, which the pseudonym Johannes Climacus had set forth in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. About Kierkegaard’s “suggestion for a solution” in connection with the problem of the relation between faith and knowledge, he writes by way of introduction that it will be shown that it “shakes the certainty of all knowledge and that [it] lets the ethical disappear in an abstract and irreal religious sphere.”68 Brøchner criticizes Kierkegaard’s “theory” on three points: (1) Kierkegaard’s conception of the concept of the eternal. This conception has two consequences, first (2a) for the determination of the paradox’s limitation of knowledge, and second (2b) for the determination of the ethical in relation to the religious and especially to Christianity.69 (1) While the Idea or the eternal in Hegel in a certain sense “lies behind” since the concrete actuality must be understood based on the Idea, which is what assures the continuity of existence, eternity, according to Kierkegaard lies “in front” by being See G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 2, pp. 81–92. 66 Brøchner, “Lectures on the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity since the Renaissance,” Royal Library in Copenhagen, 74.7. 67 See, for example, Brøchner, Problemet om Tro og Viden, p. 215. 68 Ibid., p. 6. 69 Ibid., pp. 216–24. 65

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the target which the Christian strives for. This eternal only receives being when the becoming of the existing person is over. The real should disappear before the eternal can appear, and in relation to this the real is, according to Kierkegaard, something distorting and deceptive. The existing person, who is indeed in a constant state of becoming, therefore cannot come into a relation with the eternal since it does not appear concretely for him and remains abstract and never appears with determinacy. The Kierkegaardian eternity is therefore, Brøchner believes, speculative philosophy’s abstract eternity. Religiosity, that is, the relation of the believer to the absolute, thus becomes “abstract and devoid of actuality.” (2a) According to Kierkegaard, the understanding should, so to speak, defend the paradox. In relation to Christendom the Christian believes “against the understanding and here uses the understanding—in order to see to it that he believes against the understanding.”70 But, Brøchner writes with a formulation taken from the propadeutic lectures from 1860–61, “The paradox is the miracle in the world of thought, and just as the miracle in the world of nature invalidates the concept of nature and of the law of nature, so also must the miracle in the world of thought topple the law of thought, and let the certainty of all knowledge dissolve into doubt.”71 The demand that is made, therefore, runs counter to the human being’s determination of being, which, according to Brøchner, is consciousness or thinking (which presupposes the unity of consciousness), and “this task for spirit: to cast out what belongs to a person’s essence, contains a self-contradiction and brings a irreconcilable split into consciousness.”72 If the paradox is accepted as the object of faith, then it becomes at the same time the object for thought, and thought’s acceptance of a self-contradiction implies that the criterion for consistent thought, namely, freedom from contradictions, is eliminated, and with this every form of certainty becomes illusory. (2b) From the doctrine that the human being should relate absolutely to the absolute teloV, it follows, Brøchner believes, that Christianity and ethics exclude each other: When Christianity’s demand to the human being, in agreement with the conception of the abstract relation of opposition between Christianity and the world is determined as a demand to die away, to hate one’s natural life, then this demand includes the impossibility of having an ethical content to exist together with Christianity. The content of the natural existence disappears as a nothing in the absolute opposition to the eternal truth, and with it disappears the condition for the ethical’s concretion, and that means, for its actuality. This consequence is drawn in Kierkegaard’s polemic against marriage (in The Moment), and what is suggested in the Concluding Postscript (p. 347) cannot lead to another result. There must be the same impossibility in letting the ethical keep its place despite this demand, like letting the understanding keep some significance despite the paradox.73 SKS 7, 516 / CUP1, 568. Brøchner, Problemet om Tro og Viden, p. 220. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., p. 223. The reference to The Moment is presumably to number 7, and specifically the section “The Wedding,” SKS 13, 299–303 / M, 245–8, in the article “Confirmation and the Wedding; Christian Comedy or Something Worse.” The reference to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript corresponds to SKS 7, 412 / CUP1, 453–4. 70 71

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The demand to relate absolutely to the absolute contains a renunciation of all relative goals, which determine existence’s many doings. But if this is the case, then due to the absolute character of the religious relation, there is no room for the ethical. The many references, especially in the lectures from 1858–59 to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and the numerous paraphrases of sections from this work are expressions of the fact that Brøchner conceived this book as the authorship’s main philosophical work and the author as a philosopher, who with the sharp dialectic of speculation, which he, according to Brøchner, accepted and brilliantly made use of, criticizes Hegel’s speculative philosophy. The difference between them—according to Brøchner—was the conception of the eternal. Hegel was not in doubt that the actual, with the often-quoted passage from the Philosophy of Right, was the rational, and that the human spirit managed to reach the stage in its development, where everything could be understood and explained from the perspective of eternity, which is not to say that the eternal can be obtained, whereas, according to Kierkegaard, the eternal is what creates continuity in human existence, but at the same time it is what is the object for the true human’s deepest longing, and which he momentarily grasps for without ever being able to obtain. Let me close with a quotation from the lectures from the spring of 1859, where Brøchner’s love of and devotion to the person Søren Kierkegaard is expressed in a moving way. After briefly portraying Kierkegaard’s literary activity, Brøchner continues: His activity gives such a picture of him. But those who have known him while he was alive, know a richer and fuller picture, and for them may I be permitted to recall the memory of his personality, to recall the clear wealth of his thought, his feelings’ rich inwardness, his will’s unbendable energy; —to recall him in the jest, which on his lips always transparently let seriousness shine forth; to recall him in seriousness when a tender word by him enlivened, a reconciling word calmed, a clarifying word advised; —to recall him in his youth when he brazen and polemical, with the never failing sharp weapons of humor and dialectic fought for the ideals of poetry against prose and mediocrity; to recall him when he as older, aiming at the highest goal in the service of the divine worked with a will of steel, which willed only one thing; to recall him finally in the final year’s serious struggle when his “wish is for death, his longing for the grave, and his desire that his wish and his longing might soon be fulfilled”; to recall how he in the suffering of the struggle maintained the tender affection for others, even for life’s smallest cases, maintained mildness, friendliness, even humor, maintained fairness of mind and clarity of thought; maintained above all the peace and quiet in faith, which did not let him down during the sufferings of the deathbed. Thus stands his picture for us, in beautiful agreement with the noble picture that those who knew him from his writings receive from them.74

More beautiful commemorative words for the dead have never been spoken. Translated by Jon Stewart Brøchner, “Lectures on the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity since the Renaissance,” Royal Library in Copenhagen, 66.7. This slightly modified quotation from Kierkegaard comes from an addendum dated April 11, 1855 to “This Must be Said, so Let it be Said,” SKS 13, 124 / M, 78. Brøchner has replaced “my” with “his.” 74

Bibliography I. Reference to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Brøchner’s Corpus Om det jødiske Folks Tilstand i den persiske Periode, Copenhagen: Bianco Luno 1845, pp. 4–8. “Om Søren Kierkegaards Virksomhed som religieus Forfatter,” Fædrelandet, vol. 16, no. 1. December 1855. “Sandhedsvidnestriden, fremstillet af J.C. M. Ørum, Cand theol. Kjøbenhavn 1856. F.H. Eibes Forlag,” Fædrelandet, vol. 17, December 20, 1856. “Dr. Søren Kierkegaards falske Paastande. Af Provst Andresen, Nr. I–II, Kbhvn. 1855–56. Lund,” Ugeskrift for den evangeliske Kirke i Danmark, vol. 7, 1856, pp. 249–51. Problemet om Tro og Viden. En historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1868, p. 3; p. 29; pp. 118–22; pp. 124–6; pp. 130–3; p. 212; pp. 215–24. Et Svar til Professor R. Nielsen, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1868, pp. 4–5. Om det Religiøse i dets Enhed med det Humane. Et positivt Supplement til ‘Problemet om Tro og Viden’, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1869, p. 24; p. 30; pp. 35–7; pp. 41–3. “Det Kristelige og det Humane som Modsætninger i vor Tids Bevidsthed I–III,” Nyt Dansk Maanedsskrift, vol. 2, 1871, pp. 289-99; pp. 433–56; pp. 492–510; pp. 433–8. “Brev til H.P. Barfod (November 1871),” in Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer 1844–1846, ed. by H.P. Barfod, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1872, pp. 329–30. “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard,” Det nittende Aarhundrede, vol. 5, 1876–77, pp. 337–74. Hans Brøchner og Christian K.F. Molbech. En Brevvexling (1845–1875), ed. by Harald Høffding, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1902, p. 153; p. 164; p. 172; pp. 173– 4; pp. 186–9; p. 211; p. 214. II. Sources of Brøchner’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard75 Heegaard, Sophus, “Troen som Princip med Udelukkelse af Viden: Søren Kierkegaard,” in his Indledning til den rationelle Ethik, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1866, pp. 376–84. Martensen, Hans Lassen, Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1849, p. III. 75 Brøchner’s main source of knowledge of Kierkegaard’s works was, of course, his extensive reading of the primary texts.

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— Om Tro og Viden. Et Leilighedsskrift, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1867, pp. 5–6; pp. 130–9. — Den christelige Etik, Den almindelig Del, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1871, pp. 275–300; pp. 383–90. Nielsen, Rasmus (ed.), S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1857. III. Secondary Literature on Brøchner’s Relation to Kierkegaard Høffding, Harald, Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1909, pp. 196–206. Kirmmse, Bruce H. (ed.), Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, collected, edited, and annotated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia R. Laursen, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, pp. 225–52. Koch, Carl Henrik, Den danske idealisme, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2004, pp. 497– 522. — “Hans Brøchners Forelæsning om Kierkegaard,” Fund og Forskning, vol. 37, 2008, pp. 223–42. Malik, Habib C., Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, passim. Rasmussen, S.V., Den unge Brøchner, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1966, passim. Rohde, H.P., “Trolddom,” in his Gaadefulde Stadier paa Kierkegaards Vej, Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger 1974, pp. 12–38.

Harald Høffding: The Respectful Critic Carl Henrik Koch

I. Høffding and Kierkegaard In his book about Søren Kierkegaard from 1892, the philosopher Harald Høffding (1843–1931) wrote that from his years as a boy, that is, as a 12-year-old, he remembered The Moment’s “small white booklets and the stir that they caused in the minds and discussions of the grown-ups,” but that he only later became acquainted himself with the “serious message that they contained.”1 When in the winter of 1915– 16 at the age of 73, in connection with writing his memoirs, he cast a glance back on his life and realized that “Kierkegaard’s problem”—and by this he meant, if one can judge from the context, the relation between knowing and personal appropriation, or between objectivity and subjectivity—“has pursued me from my youth, determined the direction of my life, again and again led me to an inward conception of many things, to a stricter testing of myself, to a disdain for what does not have personal truth.”2 What Kierkegaard wanted, namely, honesty, gave Høffding a direction. The demand for honesty led him in the years of his youth to Kierkegaard and to the understanding of Christianity that Kierkegaard advocated, and led him in the years of his manhood again away from Kierkegaard and from Christianity.

Harald Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1892, p. 147. (German translation: Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, Stuttgart: Frommann 1896, p. 156.) On Høffding, see Ola Fransson, Harald Høffding. Försoningens filosof, Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet 2001; Carl Henrik Koch, Dansk filosofi i positivismens tidsalder, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2004, pp. 31–87 and Carl-Göran Heidegren, Det moderna genombrottet i nordisk universitetsfilosofi 1860–1915, Göteborg: Daidalos 2004. 2 Harald Høffding, Erindringer, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1928, p. 50. A short autobiography in German is found in Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, vols. 1–7, ed. by Raymund Schmidt, Leipzig: Felix Meiner 1923–29, vol. 4, pp. 75–97. A short autobiography in English, which especially focuses on Høffding’s psychological writings, is found in Harald Høffding, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vols. 1–2, ed. by Carl Murchison, Worcester, Massachusetts: Clark University Press 1930–32, vol. 2, pp. 197–205. 1

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II. The Encounter with Kierkegaardian Views Høffding grew up in a relatively well-to-do Copenhagen merchant family. As a boy with a gift for learning, he easily skated through school and, after completing the entrance examination, was, in 1861, enrolled as a student of theology at the University of Copenhagen. Already in his last years at the school he had attended lectures at the university on literature and theology. Høffding’s early interest in theology was, during his school years, unproblematically united with an interest in Greek philosophy, literature, and history. In particular, the reading of Plato’s Symposium seems to have made a great impression on him. His studies of Greek continued into his years at the university, and he wrote later in his autobiography: This entire occupation came to have a great significance for me, since it allowed the thought to arise in me of a purely human way of understanding life, a belief in the possibility of an independent personal life based on a human foundation. But it was only very slowly that this thought and this belief grew to be strong in me.3

The early years of his youthful immediate unification of the human and the Christian, of Socrates and Christ, however, met a sudden end with the encounter with Kierkegaard’s claim that New Testament Christianity was in principle irreconcilable with bourgeois existence and with the age’s bourgeois culture. In his home, which did not bear any particular religious stamp, Høffding had encountered the form of Christianity which Kierkegaard had mockingly called “Christendom,” that is, a Christianity that was fully reconcilable with the traditional bourgeois way of life. Similarly, at the university he encountered the age’s theology of mediation (formidlingsteologi) which united the religious with the human. In the first year of his university studies, he also attended the lectures of the professors of philosophy, Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785–1872) and Rasmus Nielsen (1809– 84).4 Sibbern, who belonged to the Romantic school, was very old and struck the young Høffding as a comic figure, who had lived beyond his time. Only later did Høffding come to respect Sibbern and the great philosophical life’s work that he left behind. With an effusive eloquence, Rasmus Nielsen managed to unite such diverse things as Søren Kierkegaard’s criticism of the theology of the day, Hegelian dialectical thinking, and an interest in the natural sciences. Based on Kierkegaardian views, he had, at the end of the 1840s, criticized the contemporary Danish theology of mediation and the idea that there is a science of theology. In a book from 1850 he repeated again and again that “Christianity is higher than science, and faith in the gospels is different in kind from theology.”5 The latter claim he continued to argue for until his death, but the former he did not continue to maintain. At the end of the 1850s he changed his view. In a short philosophy textbook from 1857 he wrote that within the sphere of faith subjectivity—as was claimed by Kierkegaard—is the Høffding, Erindringer, p. 31. On Sibbern and Nielsen, see Carl Henrik Koch, Den danske idealisme, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2004, pp. 87–160 (Sibbern) and pp. 379–434 (Nielsen). 5 Rasmus Nielsen, Evangelietroen og Theologien, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1850, p. 1. 3 4

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truth, but within the sphere of science objectivity is the truth. But thus faith is denied any claim to have an influence on science, and vice versa science is denied any influence on faith. The spheres of faith and science are so different since they build on radically different kinds of principles. From this it follows that faith and knowledge could then, without contradiction, be united in one consciousness; their mutual conflict does not originate from a matter of principle. The conflict is psychological; it is human frailty, which has neither enough resignation to reconcile itself with the objectivity of science nor enough inwardness to maintain faith.6

Faith is a personal relation to the truth, while knowledge is impersonal. Rasmus Nielsen’s formula for the relation between faith and knowledge was accepted by Danish theology from around 1870, but thus theology had placed itself outside of the age’s general cultural debate and the discussions for and against Darwin’s evolutionary theory,7 which Rasmus Nielsen was among the first in Denmark to take notice of.8 In his first year as a student of theology, Høffding threw himself into exegesis and church history. In particular, the former with its training in the reading of texts was later of great use to him in his study of philosophical works, even if the German Bible commentaries that were used at the time left him cold. “And,” he wrote in his autobiography, when one considers that the words, which were the object of so much learning, aimed to place those who read them opposite the greatest question of life, the question of spiritual life or spiritual death, then one often feels indignant over the entire manner in which things are treated, especially when one had just read a book like Kierkegaard’s For SelfExamination. I have several times cast the commentaries on the floor—but later I went and picked them up. Indeed, I wanted to complete what I had begun.9

In For Self-Examination: Recommended to the Present Age from 1851, Kierkegaard had written, among other things: Now think of God’s Word. When you read God’s Word in a scholarly way—we do not disparage scholarship, no, far from it, but do bear this in mind: when you are reading God’s Word in a scholarly way, with a dictionary, etc., then you are not reading God’s Word….If you happen to be a scholar, then please do see to it that in all this learned reading (which is not reading God’s Word) you do not forget to read God’s Word. 10

6 Rasmus Nielsen, Philosophisk Propædeutik i Grundtræk, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1857, p. 77. 7 See Carl Henrik Koch, “Filosofi og Teologi 1880–1920,” in Lys over Landet. Dansk Naturvidenskabs Historie, vols. 1–4, ed. by Peter C. Kjærgaard, Helge Kragh, Henry Nielsen, and Kristian Hvidtfeldt Nielsen, Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag 2005–6, vol. 3, pp. 443– 61. 8 Rasmus Nielsen, Forelæsninger over “Philosophisk Propædeutik” fra Universitetsaaret 1860–61, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1862, see, for example, p. 246; p. 258. 9 Høffding, Erindringer, p. 41. 10 SKS 13, 57 / FSE, 28–9.

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It was words like these which must have struck the young theology student in the pit of his stomach, and which already in the second year of his studies (in 1862) cast him into a profound religious crisis. “There came now,” he writes in his autobiography a heavy and dark time in my inner life. I occupied myself with Kierkegaard’s writings, and after a difficult struggle I had to admit that he was right in his conception of Christianity. This no longer stood as the mild, consoling, way of truth, which in itself could take in all human ways of life—family life, art, science, social life—and lead them towards perfection. The idyll was destroyed. The ideal of the beyond came to stand in its entire unconditioned strictness. Only one thing was needed in the word’s literal sense, to enter into a relation to the great paradox. The miracle of human existence makes everything human look pale and only makes the demand that one give up everything in order to participate in the divine powers; this miracle had broken the context of nature and human life in one sole place in the world and in one sole point in time and let the light of eternity shine in the darkness….It was not the goal of Christianity to complete what human culture had begun, but to break off and to render all human undertakings meaningless, if they are not just impediments towards reaching the great goal.11

It was a heavy and dark year in his life, which isolated him from his family’s bourgeois existence: I locked myself in with my doubt and became unsocial and closed towards those closest to me. However much I cared for them, I was not a good family member. Life in my room and life in the sitting-room came to stand for me like two different worlds, and I managed only very badly to build a bridge between them.12

Initially the crisis did not lead Høffding to give up Christianity; but he made the admission which Kierkegaard, in his capacity of editor of Anti-Climacus’ Practice in Christianity from 1850 (but written in 1848), had demanded of the representatives of the Danish Church, and which is discussed or referred to in the prefaces to the three parts of which the book consists. Here he speaks of the demand of being a Christian, the demand, which was “forced up by the pseudonymous author to a supreme ideality,” and it is said that “there ought to be no scaling down of the requirement, nor suppression of it—instead of a personal admission and confession.”13 The church militant, ancient Christianity, is the truth, and the established Christendom is illusion.14 The admission must mean that the person who cannot live up to the demands made in the New Testament to someone who strives to walk in the footsteps of Christ, must admit that he is not a Christian in the same way as Kierkegaard does, for example, with the words in For Self-Examination: “[F]or I have continually said, ‘I do not have Faith’ ”; with this he admits that he was not a Christian but striving to be one.15 This admission resulted in Høffding giving up the idea of being a pastor. He continued his theological studies, and on June 19, 1865 he could walk down the Høffding, Erindringer, p. 44. Ibid., p. 46. 13 SKS 12, 15 / PC, [7]. 14 SKS 12, 214 / PC, 211. 15 SKS 13, 46 / FSE, 17. 11

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steps of the university as a theological candidate. But he had not found a solution for the question which the study of Kierkegaard had confronted him with, namely, the question of the possibility and conditions for the connection between, on the one side, the human intellectual life along with the humanist life-view, which he had found in the Greeks, and, on the other side, religious faith. Therefore, he threw himself into the study of philosophy because the answer to the question demanded “an investigation of what human knowledge is and can achieve, and in what relation it stands to personal life.”16 It was doubt (tvivlen) or perhaps rather despair (fortvivlelsen) that made Høffding into a philosopher. He was far from alone in wrestling with this problem. From the middle of the 1860s there raged a conflict on the Danish Parnassus about the relation between faith and knowledge, occasioned by Rasmus Nielsen’s formula about the irreconcilability between them. The conflict resulted in a large number of polemical works and newspaper articles and only ebbed away towards the end of the decade.17 In connection with this conflict Høffding published his first book a short piece in which he defended Rasmus Nielsen’s formula against the numerous attacks which had been directed against it, not least by the young hotspur Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who later won a name for himself across Europe as a littèrat and intellectual.18 But in the course of the fall of 1865 Høffding’s situation changed. He had met a young woman who would later become his wife; but, as he wrote in his memoirs, I could not get away from the strong statements in the New Testament concerning marriage and against marriage. And there stood now, called forth by the either/or which approached, a final struggle in my inward being. The seventh chapter in the first Letter to the Corinthians rose up in all its might, and Kierkegaard’s The Moment lay on my desk…I sought entirely personally to work it out whatever the consequences were and what I regarded as being most important. I stood at the most decisive turning point in my life. The natural human desire was victorious, and thus in actuality the foundation was laid for my entire later manner of dealing with life. Just as I had previously thrown the theological commentaries on to the floor, so now I threw down Kierkegaard’s The Moment. Again I also picked it up, but from now on my occupation with Kierkegaard aimed at finding the psychological and historical presuppositions for his appearance and at fetching a purely human strength for my life by drawing the conclusions of what it meant to claim that subjectivity is the truth.19

“Many a young man,” Høffding had previously written in a treatise on Kierkegaard, has in spite of his admiration for him [sc. Kierkegaard] cast his books on the floor and turned their back on him, when he realized the rights of life and its natural, internal

Høffding, Erindringer, p. 55. Koch, Den danske idealisme, pp. 435–61. 18 Høffding, Philosophie og Theologie. En historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: C.W. Stinck 1866. 19 Høffding, Erindringer, pp. 57–8. 16 17

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Georg Brandes was one of those who ran through a similar development as Høffding. In his book on Kierkegaard he wrote that with Kierkegaard’s attack on the victorious church, “Danish intellectual life is driven out to its extreme, from which a leap must take place, the leap down into the dark abyss of Catholicism or up to the high point, from where freedom waves.”21 This point was empiricism and positivism. Both Brandes and Høffding took this leap. In his book on Kierkegaard, Høffding claims that in the history of philosophy there are two types of thinkers.22 The one seeks unity, coherence, and continuity, while the other points out differences and discontinuity. “Continuous transition” and “degrees of difference” are the main concepts for the first type, whereas “abrupt transition” and “qualitative difference” for the other. Thus the mature Høffding had pointed out the difference between himself and Kierkegaard. Whereas “the leap” and “the individual” were some of Kierkegaard’s favorite concepts, notions such as “coherence,” “continuity,” “wholeness,” and “commonality” were key concepts in Høffding’s philosophy. For Høffding, the development of the personality was a continuous process subject to the psychological regularities for the life of consciousness, which the psychology of the age set out especially from introspection. Therefore, he had to reject Kierkegaard’s doctrine of the qualitative leap and especially the manner in which Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, described the transition from innocence to sin. Also, the doctrine of “the individual,” which Høffding conceived as ethical acosmism, was subject to criticism. The human being was, Høffding thought, a social individual and could not be regarded in isolation from his or her social context. In the passage quoted above from his Erindringer Høffding pointed out that his occupation with Kierkegaard had in part made him into a Kierkegaard researcher— and as such he became one of the founders of the scholarly study of Kierkegaard’s philosophical thinking in particular. Moreover, it indicated that Kierkegaard’s demand for honesty and faithfulness towards oneself and one’s personal conviction that had been obtained via intellectual work, that is, Kierkegaard’s principle of subjectivity, became decisive for his life. In addition, not only does Høffding’s conception of philosophy bears the stamp of his youthful encounter with Kierkegaard, but Kierkegaard’s principle of subjectivity is one of the sources of the principle, namely, the principle of personality, which lies at the foundation of the systematic philosophy that Høffding developed in his main works over several years. In the next section I will explore Høffding’s conception of the essence of philosophy and the principle that his philosophical thought is built upon and which he assigned especially to Harald Høffding, “Søren Kierkegaard. En Karakteristik,” Høffding, Mindre Arbejder, 2nd series, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1905, p. 191. 21 Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877, p. 271. 22 Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, pp. 79ff. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, pp. 83ff.) 20

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Kierkegaard. In a later section I will characterize Høffding as a Kierkegaard scholar and give an account of the main characteristics of his criticism of Kierkegaard’s philosophical thought. III. Influence and Inspiration from Kierkegaard After he graduated with a degree in theology in 1865, Høffding was employed for 17 years as a teacher at a Copenhagen school. As early as 1870 he received a doctoral degree for a treatise on the concept of the will in Greek philosophy.23 The treatise was in part written during a study trip to Paris in the winter of 1868–69. During his stay in Paris he attended a series of lectures by Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) on human understanding, which appeared in book form in 1870.24 Taine was influenced by the English empiricist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and the French positivist Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Høffding became familiar with positivism through Taine. “However, it took some time,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “before this direction took on a more decisive significance for me. I have always been slow to move. The thoughts had to mature quietly in my mind before I could work with them.”25 Through positivism Høffding found the humanist and naturalistic life-view which was later to become his own. In the first half of 1870 he published, first, a book on German philosophy after Hegel, and then a book on the more recent English philosophy.26 The former shows traces of the influence of Hermann Lotze (1817–81), and the latter from Mill and Comte. From the middle of 1870 his study of psychology was the focal point, and in 1882 Høffding’s first major work was published, his textbook on psychology,27 which later appeared in ten editions up until 1922 and was translated into French, German, and English, appearing in the latter two languages in several editions. This work made Høffding famous throughout Europe and was presumably a factor in his being named professor of philosophy in

Harald Høffding, Den antike Opfattelse af Menneskets Villie. Historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: C.W. Stinck 1870. 24 Hippolyte Taine, De l’Intelligence, vols. 1–2, Paris: Hachette 1870. 25 Høffding, Erindringer, p. 62. 26 Harald Høffding, Philosophien i Tydskland efter Hegel, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1872; Harald Høffding, Den engelske Philosophi i vor Tid, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1874. (German translation: Einleitung in die englische Philosophie unserer Zeit, Leipzig: Th. Thomas 1889.) 27 Harald Høffding, Psykologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaringen, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1882. (English translation of the German translation of the second Danish edition from 1885: Outlines of Psychology, London and New York: Macmillan 1891.) Although the main view is unchanged, Høffding revised the work in connection with the later editions of the Danish edition. Thus here reference is only made to the English translation if the reference is to the second Danish edition. On Høffding as psychologist, see J.L. Pind, “A Tale of Two Psychologies: The Høffding–Lehmann Controversy and the Establishment of Experimental Psychology at the University of Copenhagen,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 45, 2009, pp. 34–55. 23

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1883 as successor to his teacher Rasmus Nielsen. After this, there followed a stream of longer or shorter works until his death in 1931.28 A. Philosophy’s Existential Meaning As professor in philosophy Høffding sometimes gathered the few who studied philosophy as a major, and those non-majors who took courses in philosophy, in his home for philosophical discussions. We have an account from Frithiof Brandt (1892–1968), later a professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, who tells about such a meeting that took place on the occasion of Høffding’s 70th birthday in 1913.29 The topic here was people’s relation to philosophy, and after Høffding had concluded his account with the words: “Philosophy does not have much to thank me for—but I have much to thank philosophy for,”30 a young man began to speak, who explained that for him philosophy was a kind of sport. After these words there was silence, and Høffding asked another person present to present his view. This fellow explained that during his theology studies he had read Kierkegaard and had decided to draw the consequences of Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity. However, it had proven untenable over the long run, and the reading of Spinoza had led him to begin his life entirely from scratch and to break with Christianity. He had, like Høffding himself, come from faith through doubt to philosophy. After the young man had spoken, Høffding nodded and said, “Yes, indeed, it was this sort of thing that I wanted us to talk about.”31 He did not understand the person who had not experienced a religious crisis. For Høffding, philosophy was not merely a theoretical affair, but it was also a matter of life, and since philosophy’s theoretical interest was bound up with its existential interest, it could rescue the individual from doubt and despair by leading him forward to a humanistic, naturalistic and positivistic view of existence.32 Brandt concludes his account with the words: For Høffding philosophy was not a sport, but a question of life, something which replaced religion for him. With the entire seriousness of his being engaged in his thinking, honest in the smallest detail, he worked like a giant and created the gray building that is called Høffdingian philosophy. It is a temple for the everyday, for loyal industry, for moderation without asceticism, for self-assertion without overbearing inconsiderateness, for vigor without desperation, a temple for the healthy balance with a touch of melancholy and smiling resignation at that which one cannot achieve.33 An almost complete list of Høffding’s writings can be found in Harald Høffding in memoriam, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1932, pp. 47–76. However, there are many reprints that are not included, for instance, those of the English translation of Psykologi i Omrids. 29 Frithiof Brandt, “Notat om Harald Høffding,” Filosofiske Studier, vol. 2, 1979, pp. 169–71. 30 Ibid., p. 170. 31 Ibid., p. 171. 32 See Harald Høffding, Filosofiske Problemer, Copenhagen: Schultz 1902, pp. 1ff. (English translation: The Problems of Philosophy, New York and London: Macmillan 1905, pp. 2ff.) 33 Frithiof Brandt, “Notat om Harald Høffding,” Filosofiske Studier, vol. 2, 1979, p. 171. 28

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Philosophy was for Høffding an attempt to raise, treat and solve certain problems, for example, “What is a good life?” and “What certainty can be ascribed to human knowing?”; but philosophy also meant reflections on and answers to the challenges and tendencies in the spiritual life of the age, that is, the attempt to sum up and find meaning in existence. These two sides of philosophy, the theoretical and the existential stand, Høffding thought, in a constant reciprocal interaction, since a philosophical problem’s topicality can be an expression of a spiritual movement in the age, and the formulation of the problems and the general interest can by the same token create movements in spiritual life. In philosophy, as in all scholarly research, an intellectual and an existential interest are closely bound together. Of the two, Høffding thought, the existential interest is the primary one since the intellectual one, or the drive to a scholarly exploration of the world “is a special form of striving for consistency with oneself in the midst of all one’s manifold and changing experiences.”34 This drive for agreement with oneself is merely another expression for the individual’s striving for inward unity and thus continuity among ideas, feelings and endeavors, that is, a striving to strengthen and build up the personality. Behind Høffding’s articulation of philosophy’s existential significance one can catch a faint glimpse of Kierkegaard’s principle of subjectivity. B. The Principle of Subjectivity In the well-known Gilleleje journal entry from August 1, 1835 the young Kierkegaard had written that what was important for him was to find “a truth which is truth for me.”35 What use is it that he might know all the truths of the world if these truths did not have any deeper meaning for him personally or for his existence? A direct line runs from this youthful statement to the principle of subjectivity in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In Kierkegaard the principle of subjectivity (“subjectivity is the truth”) should be understood in a Christian context. Christianity teaches that the human being should be subjective, that his or her relation to Christ should be stamped by inwardness. It is the individual’s relation to Christ—and not his or her knowledge of Christ—that is decisive. Sin is the basic condition of the existing human being, that is, the human being is in untruth, but his or her passionate holding to the relation—the relation’s “how”—to Christ makes it that he or she is nonetheless in truth. This is the content of the principle. Therefore, the highest truth for the existing individual is defined as “An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness,”36 another expression for what, according to the Postscript, lies in the concept of “faith.” Obtaining the truth and thus faith is therefore an act of will. The human being is, according to Kierkegaard, disposed in the direction of the religious, and a human being becomes himself in his relation to the divine. Or as is said in The

Høffding, Filosofiske Problemer, p. 2. (The Problems of Philosophy, p. 3.) SKS 17, 24, AA:12 / KJN 1, 19. 36 SKS 7, 186 / CUP1, 203. 34 35

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Sickness unto Death: “In fact, the greater the conception of God, the more self there is; the more self, the greater the conception of God.”37 As is well known, Kierkegaard thought that the religious and the ethical-religious is the existing human being’s actual and essential disposition, and that the ethicalreligious actuality, which is the existing human being’s true actuality, in opposition to the empirical actuality, is dependent on the will. Høffding generalized the principle of subjectivity to contain all knowledge including that of the natural sciences, which Kierkegaard disdained.38 “The only certainty is the ethical-religious,” Kierkegaard wrote in 1846,39 whereas natural science is always an approximation.40 With a Hegelian expression, it is said that the discoveries of science lie “within the sphere of the bad infinity,” 41 that is, science never attains certainty, never reaches the end of the road. Høffding was in agreement with Kierkegaard that science never reaches the end of the road, but claims that this is also true for philosophy and ethics. Humanity’s constant search for truth can be visualized as a constant upward spiral movement. But in every search for the truth there is still the personal subjective work of obtaining knowledge, which is, according to Høffding, a condition for the formation of personality. This was the reason that Høffding called the Kierkegaardian principle of subjectivity “the principle of personality.” On occasion of the hundred-year anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth, Høffding gave a lecture about him at the University of Copenhagen.42 Here he mentioned that the principle of subjectivity for Kierkegaard himself was only relevant within the sphere of the religious and the ethical-religious. But, Høffding said, it is not the first time in the history of thinking that a principle with its consequences transcends the boundaries which its originator thought were insurmountable. Regarding Kierkegaard’s characterization of the natural sciences as approximation, Høffding remarks perhaps somewhat hastily that if Kierkegaard’s epistemological reflections on the natural sciences had been published abroad, “he would without doubt now be regarded as an interesting forerunner of the renewal of the critical and empirical philosophy, which characterizes the end of the 19th century.”43 As a historian of philosophy, Høffding had a tendency to highlight the ideas in a philosopher’s authorship which he himself found sympathetic. Høffding formulated his principle of personality in many ways. In the attempt to make his views comprehensible, he often spoke and wrote about the same thing,

SKS 11, 194 / SUD, 80. See, for example, SKS 20, 58–62, NB:70 / JP 2, 2807 and SKS 20, 63–7, NB:73 / JP 2, 2809. 39 SKS 20, 66, NB:73 / JP 2, 2809. 40 SKS 20, 68, NB:78 / JP 2, 2813. 41 SKS 20, 67, NB:76 / JP 2, 2811. 42 Harald Høffding, “Sören Kierkegaard 5 mai 1813 – 5 mai 1913,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 21, no. 6, 1913, pp. 719–32. 43 Høffding, “Sören Kierkegaard 5 mai 1813 – 5 mai 1913,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 21, no. 6, 1913, p. 725: “…il serait sans doute regardé à l’heure qu’il est comme un intéressant précurseur du renouveau de la philosophie critique et empirique qui caractérise la fin du XIXe siècle.” 37 38

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but he did not do so in the same way.44 This could have the unfortunate result that the auditor or reader, contrary to Høffding’s intention, could find it difficult to figure out what he meant. The most precise formulation of the principle of personality is found in Høffding’s memoirs. Here he writes that “the spiritual life’s formal characteristic lies in the unity, the concentration, with which the content of life is summed up, and that the measuring rod for the value of spiritual life lies in the relation between the richness of its content and the energy of its concentration.”45 In order to produce unity in his inner being, that is, to develop oneself to a true personality, the human being attempts to create a coherence and continuity in it, which at the beginning is experienced as incoherent and discontinuous; this is done in order to understand and explain what in the first instance seems incomprehensible and inexplicable, and thus to bring it into the sphere of rationality. Since science is precisely a constant attempt to understand existence in all of its aspects, Høffding has, in his epistemology, united his view of the scientific exploration of the world with his principle of personality. Personality, Høffding wrote in his masterpiece on epistemology, “produces in science—as in art—an objective reflection of itself.”46 This aspect of his philosophy of personality does not come from Kierkegaard but from Kant (1724–1804). According to Kant, consciousness or the “I” maintains its unity when the manifold of sense impressions is conceived as a synthesis which is a result of the activity of consciousness, such that there arises a consciousness of objects which is ordered successively in time and alongside one another in In his zeal to find a predecessor Høffding named, for example, in his short book Personlighetsprincipien i Filosofin, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1911, p. [5], the Swedish historian and philosopher Erik Gustav Geijer (1783–1847) as the one who had given the name to this principle. (E.G. Geijer, Samlade Skrifter, vols. 1–13, Stockholm: Nordstedt 1849–54, vol. 5, p. 132.) However, Geijer’s principle of personality is an “I-you” principle that says that there is not a personal “I” without a personal “you,” which does not follow from the Kierkegaardian principle of subjectivity, except if this “you” is the divinity. It is more correct when Høffding now and then points to Sibbern as a predecessor for his principle of personality since Sibbern, in the same year as Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript appeared, had expressed that even in an age in which philosophy, with respect to Christianity, preached objectivity, he went the way of subjectivity. “Only through the heart [sc. feelings],” Sibbern wrote, “does the truth realize itself in us and with us.” (F.C. Sibbern, Om den christelige Yttringsfrihed i kirkelig Henseende, Copenhagen: Schulz 1846, p. 23.) In addition to Kierkegaard and Geijer, Høffding also sometimes mentions Socrates, Leibniz, Kant, and Fichte as predecessors. 45 Høffding, Erindringer, p. 51. German autobiography (see note 2) p. 76. Høffding says in his Erindringer, that the principle lies at the foundation of Kierkegaard’s philosophical characterization of the individual stages or types in the doctrine of stages. In the German autobiography (see note 2) it is stated directly that Kierkegaard had asserted the principle in the form it has in Erindringer. The same thing is claimed in the article “Om min Forfattervirksomhed” from 1923 (Harald Høffding, Religiøse Tanketyper, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1927, pp. 17–40). 46 Harald Høffding, Den menneskelige Tanke, dens Former og dens Opgaver, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1910, p. 247. (German translation: Der menschliche Gedanke, Leipzig: Reisland 1911, p. 271.) 44

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space. The coherence and unity which consciousness experiences in the world of appearances is thus a product of consciousness’ unity-creating activity, which is in turn determined by its striving to maintain its own unity. But whereas Kant conceived his own transcendental philosophy as an account of the logical presuppositions for true knowledge, Høffding conceived of the synthesizing activity as a psychological process,47 the goal of which is to strengthen and build up the individual human being’s personality. “Synthesis,” Høffding wrote in his book on psychology, “is the fundamental form of all consciousness.”48 Understood as a psychological process, which is a striving for unity, synthesis is an act of the will, which constantly comes to expression in every human being. The development and consolidation of the personality was, for Høffding, a continuous process. IV. The Criticism of Kierkegaard A. Høffding as a Kierkegaard Scholar Throughout all of Høffding’s authorship it was natural for him in his systematic works to include and discuss Kierkegaard’s views. In spite of the fact that he had turned against Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity and later abandoned Christianity, the Kierkegaardian views of the pseudonymous authorship still had a topicality for him as he developed his systematic philosophy. He interpreted the Concluding Unscientific Postscript as a work of epistemology, the theory of stages as a psychological typology, and works such as The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death as psychological treatises. Although Høffding was not a psychologist, but explicitly rejected the view that psychology should be the fundamental science and philosophy only a subdiscipline under psychology,49 nonetheless the naturalizing and making-scientific of moral philosophy, philosophy of religion, and epistemology, which he, in agreement with English empiricism, attempted in his systematic works, meant that philosophy’s reflections on knowledge and evaluation of it must be founded in psychology. He made this same view of the character of philosophy the basis of his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. As has become a tradition in a large part of later Kierkegaard research, Høffding did not distinguish between Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, and also in agreement with the majority of Kierkegaard scholars, he conceived the pseudonymous authorship as a continuous whole and not as a series of pious satires,50 which, with the help of rhetorical tools, are supposed to lead a lost and reflective age forward to a simple Christianity. It was this continuous whole which Høffding and others with him called Kierkegaard’s philosophy.

Murchison, A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 198. Høffding, Psykologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaring, 2nd ed., Copenhagen: Philipsen 1885, p. 56. (Outlines of Psychology, p. 49.) 49 Høffding, Filosofiske Problemer, p. 6. (The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 12–13.) 50 SV1 XIII, 507 / PV, p. 17. 47 48

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B. Existence and Life Høffding’s criticism of Kierkegaard must be seen against the background of their fundamentally different conceptions of what Kierkegaard called “existence” and Høffding “life.” Whereas existence in Kierkegaard implies suffering in and with the fact that the existing person acknowledges his decision and firmly maintains faith in the paradox, and whereas Christianity only knows one value, namely, the god-man, which comes from outside into existence at a determinate point in time and in a determinate place, for Høffding, by contrast, life and the struggles it implies were a constant source of values. The naturalism which characterizes Høffding also determined his concept of value. Values are posited by human beings; what is valuable is for the individual something that has value for him, and that advances his welfare in the society he is a part of, and something that his own welfare depends on. Høffding’s humanist ethics was, with due consideration for the individual human being, a social ethic of utilitarian stamp. “[T]he life nerve of humanist ethics is…the inward connection between the individual and the race, and therefore also between the individual and the real world,” Høffding wrote in his first work on ethics.51 Repeatedly in his authorship, he criticized Kierkegaard’s ethical acosmism, that is, the fact that in Kierkegaard ethics was essentially individual ethics, which only concerned the individual and his relation to the divine.52 For Kierkegaard, Høffding wrote: No human relation…can have value in itself but only has value when it is consciously subordinated and reshaped from the point of view of eternity and infinity, which follows from the idea of God. From the opposition between the infinite demand and human finitude arises suffering, which cannot be harmonized.53

For Kierkegaard, value has a transcendent origin, whereas, for Høffding, its origin is immanent. The criticism of Kierkegaard’s ethics for acosmism, which Høffding leveled, is, he wrote in his book on Kierkegaard, the decisive charge against him. In his ethics Kierkegaard has torn the personality loose from the real, natural and social context in which its life can receive a positive content. For the truth can only live in the free subjectivity, struggling with actuality and learning from it—not in the subjectivity which, by means of formal,

51 Harald Høffding, Om Grundlaget for den humane Ethik, Copenhagen: Høst & Søn 1876, p. 102. (German translation: Die Grundlage der humane Ethik, Leipzig: E. Strauss 1880, p. 73.) 52 See, for example, Harald Høffding, Etik. En Fremstilling af de etiske Principer og deres Anvendelse paa de vigtigste Livsforhold, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1887, pp. 99ff. (German translation: Ethik. Eine Darstellung der ethischen Prinzipien und deren Anwendung auf besondere Lebensverhältnisse, Leipzig: Fues 1888, pp. 116ff.) 53 Harald Høffding, Den store Humor. En psykologisk Studie, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1916, pp. 104–5. (German translation: Humor als Lebensgefühl, Leipzig: Reisland, 2nd ed. 1930 [1918], p. 121.)

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Høffding’s objection to Kierkegaard’s view of New Testament Christianity and Christian ethics, as a doctrine which demanded renunciation and the imitation of Christ and thus suffering, was also turned against Kierkegaard’s emphasis, especially in The Moment, on the claim that New Testament Christianity no longer exists. In harmony with the tendency of his age to interpret the gospels escatologically, Høffding believed that ancient Christianity’s view of all human relations and tasks presupposed the idea of the impending return of Christ and the creation of the kingdom of God. And since this presupposition showed itself to be untrue, Christian ethics and Christianity in general had to change in character. As time has passed, conditions…have arisen, with respect to which the New Testament could not contain any real advice; an independent human life in the family, state, science and arts has developed, or more correctly the life which had already developed in these area now had to unfold itself in the Christianized world. But then there came a drive for other models and for an ethics, which could ascribe a positive significance to this life, and could regard life as a development and not as a time of trial until the impending end comes.55

In addition, Høffding writes that New Testament Christianity, as Kierkegaard portrayed it, “this doctrine about the cross and agony and terror and trembling before eternity etc.,”56 was in no way such a funeral march that Kierkegaard wanted to make it into but, on the contrary, a triumphal march, in which “Joy and enthusiasm about the immanent glory had by far the upper hand over the feeling of suffering. Original Christianity was not so consumptive, as it often seems to be in Kierkegaard’s presentation.”57 In every way Kierkegaard in his criticism of his contemporary age and in his attack on “Christendom” had shot over the mark. C. The Criticism of The Concept of Anxiety In his psychology Høffding distinguished between the formal self and the real self. The formal self is the continuity in the life of consciousness, which is due to consciousness’ active maintaining of its unity by consciously joining together in a synthesis and fusing together new phenomena of consciousness with those that are already familiar. This self is formal since it is a condition for all consciousness. Høffding says straightforwardly that the formal self, which is a formal unity, is the synthesis. The real self, by contrast, is the individual human being’s temperament

Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 69. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, p. 73.) 55 Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 153. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, pp. 162–3.) 56 Øieblikket, no. 5, SKS 13, 228–9 / M, 178. 57 Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 154. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, p. 165.) 54

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and character.58 The personality’s unity at a given point in time presupposes both the real self’s unity and the formal self’s unity. The unity of the personality over time presupposes only the unity of the formal self: Even if the central elements of consciousness are not the same through one’s entire life, but are different at the different stages of development, the formal unity can be maintained when the transition from the one standpoint to the next is continuous and motivated. A spiritual revolution does not destroy the unity of the self when it (like most revolutions) is only a result of a long, often hidden process. When we look back on our earlier life, we meet several different real egos, among which it can often be difficult to find unity and continuity. We are successful in this, the more memory is able to bring to light the motivating transitions. Only by means of a continuity of causes among our different conditions mutually could we then hold on to the conviction of the unity of our personality, while self-recognition within one and the same period of life can happen in an entirely immediate manner, without the help of inferences and constructions.59

Høffding’s doctrine of the formal self is, as is clear from the quotation, a psychological interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental ego. The unity of the personality over time is this, according to Høffding, conditioned by a continuity in the life of consciousness. That this continuity is possible presupposed, Høffding thought, the validity of the law of causality. He does not maintain this law dogmatically, but regards it as a heuristic or regulative principle and as an expression of the human being’s attempt to bring the apparently irrational into the sphere of rationality, and in this manner make what is incomprehensible understandable. Høffding was what one could call a methodological determinist. Høffding’s determinism means that he had to criticize Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic, that is, his doctrine of the leap, the sudden transition from one condition to another, qualitatively different condition. The best-known examples of this dialectic are the transition from one stage of existence to another and the treatment of original sin in The Concept of Anxiety, that is, the transition from innocence to sin. This transition happens, according to Kierkegaard, by means of a leap. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard develops, according to Høffding, his view of the relation between psychology and ethics. Psychology is concerned with the human being’s ideas, motivations, and intentions, that is, with the possibilities which exist before a choice is made, and ethics with the choice between good and evil. In The Concept of Anxiety the condition of innocence is described as a dreaming condition, that is, a condition in which the human being has not realized his determination as spirit, that is, as a religiously inclined being; the spirit is dreaming, and the opposition between soul and body is only a possibility, but a possibility that can cause anxiety. Anxiety is thus, Kierkegaard writes, “a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated Harald Høffding, Psykologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaring, 4th ed., Copenhagen: Det nordiske Forlag 1898, p. 156. 59 Ibid., pp. 156–7. 58

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nothing.”60 After this, anxiety is defined as “[F]reedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” 61 Freedom is always the possibility to choose, and the possibility that causes anxiety is the possibility to choose or to make the wrong choice. But since this latter possibility is not actuality, it is nothing. Kierkegaard compares anxiety with dizziness, which arises when the human being, figuratively speaking, looks down into the depth of nothingness. One becomes dizzy with freedom when one is confronted with the possibility of making the wrong choice and thus missing the possibility for mediating between soul and body as spirit. The anxiety is “the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.”62 Finitude is here the corporeal and the sexual. Freedom has made the wrong choice. In the moment that it chooses finitude, freedom has suffered shipwreck. Psychology can describe anxiety to this extent. “In that very moment,” Kierkegaard continues, “everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain.” 63 The sin has happened. With a qualitative leap innocence has been replaced by guilt. Psychology’s description of the possibilities that exist before the Fall cannot explain anything. When the decision between good and evil has taken place, ethics comes in and asks the question about the qualitative difference between good and evil. What preceded the Fall, psychology’s approximation to the sinking of freedom, is meaningless. “We have possibilities,” Høffding objects, “which are not possibilities of something, approaches which are not approaches to anything! The psychological understanding—and not merely that of theoretical psychology but also of practical knowledge of human nature—is then useless, indeed illusory.”64 The decision cannot be grounded in anything that precedes it. But here, Høffding thinks, Kierkegaard ends up in a contradiction. On the one hand, Kierkegaard speaks a lot about psychological experimenting and about a welltrained psychological observer copying every mood and every mental condition, but on the other hand, it is clear that the possibilities and approximations that psychology can come up with do not have any meaning. Kierkegaard on this point has cut the tie between possibility and actuality and has thus “offended the interest of both ethics and psychology.” For just as little as psychology can accept that the possibilities that it is able to demonstrate in no way could serve to ground the actual decision—even if it is freely admitted that a complete grounding is an ideal (and that due to the fact that not every possibility can be discovered)—just as little can ethics accept that the ethical evaluation should only concern the finished result, the sharp turn, and not also approaches, dispositions, SKS 4, 347 / CA, 41. SKS 4, 348 / CA, 42. 62 SKS 4, 365 / CA, 61. 63 SKS 4, 365–6 / CA, 61. 64 Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 76. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, p. 81.) 60 61

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and motivations. For the practical ethical observation it is a matter of getting hold of the possibilities in order to stop the pernicious actuality from growing, and in order to protect and nurture the good seeds.65

The criticism of Kierkegaard takes place here in general based on Høffding’s own conception of the continuity of consciousness. But he also criticizes Kierkegaard for the fact that his account of the Fall contains internal contradictions, for example, the condition which precedes the Fall is bound together with what comes after it. This happens when he states in The Concept of Anxiety that anxiety “maintains a subtle communication with its object” and that “life offers sufficient phenomena in which the individual in anxiety gazes almost desirously at guilt and yet fears it.”66 It is also clear, Høffding thinks, that although Kierkegaard claims that the leap, which no science has been able to or can explain, lies between two moments—between the moment when freedom sinks, and the moment when it rises up again and finds itself guilty—nonetheless he comes to make the first moment the decisive one: For the decision, indeed, actually lies in the moment when “the individual sinks in the impotence of anxiety,”67 We then have the causal chain: anxiety—dizziness—sinking— Fall, and where is the leap? The one who sinks does not leap; sinking is (even if sinking is to let oneself sink…) nothing other than a incipient fall, a fall, which would be able to be prevented—if one did not stand at an abyss.68

In reality Kierkegaard has not chosen between the leap and continuity but wanted to have both. Or as Høffding said, somewhat sloganizing: “Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety denied his slogan ‘either/or’ and wanted to try to carry out a ‘both/and.’ Indeed, in truth he wanted to have both an ‘either/or’ and a ‘both/and.’ ”69 D. Humor as a Life-View70 Høffding’s last critical encounter with Kierkegaard is an encounter with the narrow space between the ethical and the religious stage, into which Kierkegaard presses humor. This encounter is expressed in one of Høffding’s last great works, Den store Humor from 1916, which is not a work on aesthetics but rather is characterized

Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 77. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, p. 81.) 66 SKS 4, 405 / CA, 103. 67 SKS 4, 378 / CA, 74. Høffding does not quote verbatim. 68 Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 80. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, p. 85.) 69 Høffding, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, p. 77. (Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph, p. 81.) 70 Cf. Lars Peter Rømhild, “Die Humor-Theorie Harald Høffdings (1916). Ihre Auseinandersetzung mit Kierkegaard, die Kritik von Høffding durch seinen Freund und Schüler Valdemar Vedel,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik, vol. 22, no. 1, 1990, pp. 111–20. 65

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by the author as a contribution to psychology.71 It treats humor as a life-view, the great humor. This critical encounter was determined by the difference between Kierkegaard’s conception of existence and Høffding’s conception of life. Høffding wanted to show that the limits that Kierkegaard had placed on humor based on his own presuppositions were unjustified. A human being’s life-view, for Høffding, was not only an intellectual matter but a general mood or disposition towards the events and challenges that one meets in life, a mood which colors or emotionally shapes the way in which one experiences life and which affects one’s actions. A mood or sentiment of this kind is called by Høffding a “total emotion” (totalfølelse), whereas emotions such as anger about something or happiness about something or hope for something are characterized as individual emotions. The great humor is a total emotion. Where the small humor is the good-natured joke in concrete situations, the quiet amusement and the smile at oneself and others, the great humor is a disposition or attitude towards life as a whole. Høffding has taken his concept of the great humor from Romanticism and from Kierkegaard. The great name of Romantic aesthetics, Jean Paul (Richter, 1763–1825) had characterized humor as a denial of finitude by juxtaposing it to the idea, that is, existence as a whole, and thus seeing life’s ups and downs, its forms of good and evil, in a larger perspective.72 Similarly, Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript had said that the existing humorist, that is, the person who finds himself at humor’s stage of existence, has “an essential conception of the suffering in which he is, because he does not understand existing as one thing and fortune and misfortune as something that happens to the existing person, but he exists in such a way that suffering stands in relation to existing.”73 According to Høffding, the great humor regards existence both as something large and valuable and as something small and hostile to value, both as comic and as tragic. It regards life both as a source of what is valuable and as a cause of suffering and misfortune. The latter is met with a certain indulgence and melancholy resignation grounded in the knowledge that these are the conditions of existence; the former is met with quiet joy and gratitude. In the great humor the personality asserts itself over the negative sides of existence; this self-assertion builds on self-insight. The great humor is directed outward as self-assertion and inward as honest selfknowing, and it develops “through the experience of the conflicts of life, through the struggles of individual feelings, assisted by reflection and by the striving towards the goals, which are held on to with energy and faithfulness through the ages. And it has the possibility of keeping its receptivity open for whatever new experiences can bring.”74 The great humor was an ideal for Høffding.75 Just as Kierkegaard pointed Høffding, Den store Humor. En psykologisk Studie (German translation: Humor als Lebensgefühl). 72 Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, § 32, Werke, part 1, vols. 1–6, ed. by Norbert Miller, 4th ed., Munich: Carl Hanser 1980 [1959–63], vol. 5, pp. 125ff. 73 SKS 7, 407 / CUP1, 447. 74 Høffding, Den store Humor, p. 77. (Humor als Lebensgefühl, p. 87.) 75 Høffding, Den store Humor, p. 122. (Humor als Lebensgefühl, p. 142.) 71

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out that he did not himself have faith, so also Høffding emphasized that he himself was not a humorist. But Høffding did not necessarily regard the great humor as the highest stage of life. Both the great and energetic practical striving and the tragic suffering can be higher. In the life-mood or total emotion, the genesis of which Høffding describes here, the moment of the will is marked. The great humor is not only a melancholy resignation, but is also a will to see and to will life’s valuable sides to the extent that it is realistic that they can be achieved. It is not promoted by a naïve optimism, but rather by a moderate pessimism which prevents it as life-mood from being run down in any case as long as the source of values—that is, life—is not exhausted. If this happens, then the humorist cannot take the humoristic position but must admit that the tragic has won—and here Høffding is perhaps thinking of Kierkegaard. But Høffding was convinced that the source of values, life, would constantly generate something valuable, and that the placement that Kierkegaard had given to humor as a transitional stage to the religious stage was unjustified. Humor is not merely a transitional phase in the individual’s understanding of himself and his condition of existence, but is a life-view in which he can find peace and reconcile himself with the condition which life offers him. In a certain sense the great humor, as Høffding understood it, is life’s final victory over Kierkegaard. Translated by Jon Stewart

Bibliography I. References to or Uses of Kierkegaard in Høffding’s Corpus Philosophie og Theologie. En historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: Stinck 1866, pp. 19–25; pp. 31–3; p. 43. Den antike Opfattelse af Menneskets Villie. Historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: Stinck 1870, pp. 17–19; pp. 23–4; p. 159; p. 170. Philosophien i Tydskland efter Hegel, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1872, p. 75. Om Grundlaget for den humane Ethik, Copenhagen: Høst & Søn 1876, p. 102; p. 138. Psykologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaring, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1882, p. 184; pp. 331–2; p. 394. Etik. En Fremstilling af de etiske Principer og deres Anvendelse paa de vigtigste Livsforhold, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1887, p. 99. Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1892. Den nyere Filosofis Historie, vol. 1–2, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1894–95, vol. 2, pp. 261–4; p. 526. Kort Oversigt over den nyere Filosofis Historie, Copenhagen: Det nordiske Forlag 1898, p. 73. Religionsfilosofi, Copenhagen: Det nordiske Forlag 1901, p. 118; p. 166; p. 261; p. 335; p. 351; p. 357; p. 359; p. 361. “Filosofien og Livet,” in his Mindre Arbejder, 2nd series, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1905, pp. 1–20, see p. 1. “Forord og Efterskrift til min Religionsfilosofi,” in his Mindre Arbejder, 2nd series, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1905, pp. 47–57, see pp. 48–9. “Søren Kierkegaard. En Karakteristik,” in his Mindre Arbejder, 2nd series, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1905, pp. 181–91. Lehrbuch der Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, Leipzig: Reisland 1907, pp. 177–80. Danske Filosofer, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1909, pp. 147–74. Religion og Videnskab, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1910, p. 38; p. 49. Personlighetsprincipen i Filosofin, Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand 1911, p. 6; p. 39; p. 69. “Kierkegaard og Nietzsche,” in Mindre Arbejde, 2nd series, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1913, pp. 189–95. “Sören Kierkegaard 5 mai 1813 – 5 mai 1913,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 21, no. 6, 1913, pp. 719–32. Den store Humor. En psykologisk Studie, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1916.

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Ledende Tanker i det nittende Aarhundrede, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1920, pp. 137– 8; p. 140; p. 148. Erkendelsesteori og Livsopfattelse, Copenhagen: Høst & Søn 1925, pp. 49–52; pp. 59–60. “Pascal og Kierkegaard,” in his Religiøse Tanketyper, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1927, pp. 70–97. “Sibbern og Kierkegaard,” in his Religiøse Tanketyper, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1927, pp. 98–111. Religiøse Tanketyper, Copenhagen, Gyldendal 1927, p. 17; pp. 133–4. Erindringer, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1928, p. 41; p. 44; p. 50; pp. 57–8. Psykologi og Autobiografi, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1943, p. 11. II. Sources of Høffding’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Barfod, Hans Peter, “Udgiverens Forord,” in Barfod (ed.), Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer. 1833–1843, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1869, pp. V–XVII. — “Indledende Notiser,” in Barfod (ed.), Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer. 1833–1843, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1869, pp. XXVII–LV. Brandes, Georg, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. Brøchner, Hans, Problemet om Tro og Viden. En historisk-kritisk Afhandling, Copenhagen: Philipsen 1868. — “Erindringer om Søren Kierkegaard,” in Det nittende Aarhundrede, ed. by Georg Brandes and Edvard Brandes, 1877, vol. 5, pp. 337–74. Heegaard, Poul Sophus Vilhelm, Indledning til Den rationelle Ethik, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1866, pp. 376–84; pp. 418–38. Martensen, Hans Lassen, Den christelige Ethik. Den almindelige Deel, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1871, §§ 69–70; § 99. Nielsen, Rasmus, Paa Kierkegaardske “Stadier,” et Livsbillede, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1860. III. Secondary Literature on Høffding’s Relation to Kierkegaard Fransson, Ola, “Harald Høffding,” in Kierkegaard 1993—digtning, filosofi, teologi, ed. by Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Odense: University of Odense 1993, pp. 142–8. — Harald Høffding. Forsoningens filosof, Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet 2001, p. 28; pp. 250–4. Hansen, Valdemar, “Le principe de personnalité chez trois penseurs danois: Høffding, Kierkegaard, Poul Møller,” in Atti del XII Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia, vol. 12, Storia della filosofia moderna e contemporanea, Florence: Sansoni 1961, pp. 205–10. Hiroyuki Kitano, “Hajime Ohnishi and Harald Høffding’s ‘Kierkegaard,’ ” in Kierkegaard-Studiet (Kierkegaard-Study), vol. 17, 1987, pp. 15–28.

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Malik, Habib C., Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, pp. 319–32. Rømhild, Lars Peter, “Die Humor-Theorie Harald Høffdings (1916). Ihre Auseinandersetzung mit Kierkegaard, die Kritik von Høffding durch seinen Freund und Schüler Valdemar Vedel,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik, vol. 22, no. 1, 1990, pp. 111–20. Sorainen, Kalle, “Kierkegaard und Høffding,” in Symposion Kierkegaardianum, Orbis Litterarum, vol. 10, fasc. 1–2, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1955, pp. 245–51. Teisen, N., Til Overvejelse. I Anledning af Prof. Høffdings Bog om S. Kierkegaard, Odense: Milo 1893.

Peter Wessel Zapffe: Kierkegaard as a Forerunner of Pessimistic Existentialism Roe Fremstedal

I. General Introduction to Zapffe: The Norwegian Context Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) was a Norwegian philosopher, writer, environmentalist, mountaineer, literary critic, and humorist who was born in the arctic city of Tromsø. In the first part of the inter-war period (1918–25), Zapffe studied law at the University of Oslo and started pursuing mountaineering as a hobby. After having worked as a jurist in the late 1920s in Tromsø, Zapffe resumed his studies in 1929. He originally planned to take a magister degree (a degree that is between a Master’s and a Ph.D.) in literature, but his dissertation was changed into a doctoral dissertation in philosophy (Dr. philos. degree). The 1941 Ph.D. dissertation On the Tragic established Zapffe as one of the most original Norwegian philosophers of the twentieth century. Rather than following an established school like most other Norwegian philosophers, Zapffe constructed his own brand of pessimistic existentialism influenced by the biology of Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944), the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), as well as the literature of Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). After World War II, Zapffe was a freelancer, teaching an introductory course in philosophy at the University of Oslo. Although Zapffe worked at the Department of Philosophy, his reputation does not primarily stem from academic philosophy (with the possible exception of his Ph.D. dissertation). Zapffe’s publications in the post-war period cover a wide range of topics, including fiction, environmentalism, mountaineering, philosophy, dramaturgy, culture, religion, and politics. Zapffe’s bestselling book was Vett og Uvett, a humoristic masterpiece co-written with Einar K. Aas (1901–81).1 Zapffe’s collected works have been published in ten volumes by Pax publishers (1996–99), and a selection of his works has been translated and published in German.2 In 1978 he was awarded a lifetime government grant by the Norwegian parliament (Storting). Thanks to Sverre Sløgedal for having commented on an earlier version of this article. 1 Peter Wessel Zapffe and Einar K. Aas, Vett og uvett: stubber fra Troms og Nordland, Trondheim: Brun 1942. Reprinted many times, notably in 1999 as volume 2 of Zapffe’s Samlede verker, vols. 1–10, Oslo: Pax 1996–99. 2 Peter Wessel Zapffe, Ausgewählte Texte, Zürich: Thomann-Bolz-Verlag 1999.

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At the heart of Zapffe’s philosophy lies his theory of human nature. In chapter 4 of On the Tragic, Zapffe distinguishes between four so-called fronts of interests: biological interests, social interests, autotelic interests, and metaphysical interests. In particular, the so-called metaphysical front of interest is of vital importance to Zapffe’s theory. Zapffe depicts metaphysical interests as consisting of the need for the meaning of life and justice. Rather than referring to comparative justice, the latter means that the consequences of one’s acts should be in accordance with one’s efforts or contributions. Put in Kantian terms, virtue should lead to happiness, and unhappiness should only result from vice. The need for meaning, on the other hand, implies that we are bound to seek a meaning with existence as a whole. Existence should have some purpose outside itself; it is not sufficient that there is meaning within existence or that existence has an autotelic meaning (i.e., that it is its own purpose). Together, a world with meaning and justice make up what Zapffe calls a moral world order. Zapffe describes this world order as “a world order where everything has order, a plan, and meaning, [an order] where suffering—if it is necessary—is applied according to an economic principle so that the outcome is in accordance with needs. In short, an order where everything happens in a just manner according to each human’s judgment.”3 Zapffe goes on to argue that the earthly environment is an inadequate object for our interests since it is impossible to realize metaphysical interests in this world. Nevertheless, Zapffe insists that man should seek, or even demand, meaning and justice. This provides the background for what Zapffe himself describes as pessimism. II. Overview of the Use of Kierkegaard in Zapffe’s Corpus A. The Diary from 1930 The earliest known reference to Kierkegaard in Zapffe’s work occurs in his diary from Easter 1930: I am reading Kierkegaard. That is what we can do. We can extend our hands to a couple of kindred souls on the way. Then we will not die alone. Whoever dies in the circle of the family dies alone. But he who knows others, and who knows that he is known by others who also get to bear the colors of death from the cradle—he does not die alone. He is a brother in the only true freemasonry.—The freemasonry of seers, not of the prophets, the geniuses. But the simple and quiet souls who see. Who saw before they fell. I dare say I am seeing.4

This note comes from an early stage in Zapffe’s intellectual development, since it predates his first significant philosophical work, “The Last Messiah” (1933).5 In this 3 Peter Wessel Zapffe, Om det tragiske, Oslo: Gyldendal 1941 [same pagination as in Pax 1996], p. 67. 4 Zapffe’s diaries are quoted here from the selection in Jørgen Haave, Naken under kosmos, Oslo: Pax 1999, p. 136. All translations of Zapffe are mine. 5 Zapffe originally published “The Last Messiah” (1933) in Janus, a magazine published by the Norwegian anthroposophist Alf Larsen (1885–1967) and the Danish Kierkegaard

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period Zapffe criticized Christianity and held a pessimistic world-view, but he had yet to formulate a philosophical theory that grounded his views. Somewhat surprisingly, this passage gives a panegyric mentioning of Kierkegaard, hailing Kierkegaard as a kindred soul and possibly as a predecessor or an ally against Christian faith. Given the context of this passage, especially Zapffe’s pessimism as well as his views on Christianity, Zapffe’s use of Kierkegaard appears somewhat odd and uncritical. This passage comes from one of the rare notes where Zapffe appears to be open to Christian thinking (Zapffe suggests that it may lead to contentment, tranquility, and harmony even if it is a sham (humbug)).6 However, Zapffe’s understanding of Christian religiousness here does not appear to be Kierkegaardian in nature, because Zapffe depicts Christianity as something that can bring contentment and tranquility in this life. Rather than associating Kierkegaard with Christianity, Zapffe praises Kierkegaard immediately after having mentioned suicide and the problem of choosing between different possibilities. Zapffe says that although he in one sense has what he needs (caring parents, housing, etc.), “something is rotten.”7 He expresses a lack of motivation and contentment. Given this context, Zapffe’s use of Kierkegaard in this passage appears to refer to some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms rather than the writings penned under Kierkegaard’s own name. As we will see later on, Zapffe did not seem to distinguish between the two. Thus, it seems likely that rather than praising Kierkegaard, Zapffe is in fact praising one of the non-Christian pseudonyms whose writings take a gloomy view of life. Possible candidates include the nameless young man in Repetition,8 the aesthete A in Either/Or I (specifically scholar Johannes Hohlenberg (1881–1960). In 1939 an entire issue of the magazine dealt with Kierkegaard. Cf. Thor Arvid Dyrerud, “Norway: ‘You Have No Truth Onboard!’ Kierkegaard’s Influence in Norway,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome I, Northern and Western Europe, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 121–72, see p. 157. 6 Haave, Naken under kosmos, p. 137. 7 Ibid., p. 136. 8 In particular this passage anticipates the position Zapffe was to develop: My Silent Confidant: “I am at the end of my rope. I am nauseated by life; it is insipid—without salt and meaning. If I were hungrier than Pierrot, I would not choose to eat the explanation people offer. One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world—it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?” SKS 4, 68 / R, 200. Consider the following passage from Zapffe: “What kind of crafty devilry have I gotten into here? And what does it mean that I am capable of standing ‘outside’ and raising this kind of question? It means that ‘I’ am not identical to or one with my form of existence, that I can imagine several other forms as well as ‘better’ forms and that I can be a spectator who neutrally assesses the play of forces and forms in the environment as well as in the organism coincidentally left to me without taking into account my central propensities….Why do I have to put up with all of this? Have

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in “Diapsalmata” or “The Unhappiest One”),9 and Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling (more on that later). Although Zapffe shows a great interest in Kierkegaard in this note, it appears to be a result of first discovering Kierkegaard rather than thoroughly studying his authorship. Zapffe appears to lack an overview of the authorship since he seems to overlook the fact that Kierkegaard’s different books and pseudonyms express a great number of different views—a number of which probably do not resonate very well with Zapffe’s own views at the time. However, I believe this passage suggests that Zapffe has discovered something in Kierkegaard that he admired and that he may have had a keen interest in Kierkegaard early on in his intellectual development. B. The Use of Kierkegaard in On the Tragic (1941) When discussing seeking fulfillment in On the Tragic, Zapffe refers to the “Eulogy on Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.”10 Initially, it should be noted that Zapffe overlooks the pseudonymous nature of this work, ascribing it simply to Kierkegaard. Zapffe refers to Fear and Trembling when he says that the world has become cold and alien to him who seeks fulfillment by recollecting, and that he wants to wander with his dead until he himself becomes one of them, adding that the world will erase their memories. Given the context where Zapffe refers to the “Eulogy on Abraham,” I believe Zapffe is referring to the discussion of recollection found in the first pages of the “Eulogy,” in particular the following passage: If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything… if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond that knit humankind together, if one generation emerged after another like forest foliage, if one generation I brought about my own judgment without knowing it, or am I a victim to a hair-raising metaphysical injustice according to human standards—and what other standards do we have? The world is not construed after human principles, here we are tyrannized by a law which does not ask for our values and needs….I can experience my situation as man like a tourist or an explorer who has fallen off the train with all his costly equipment and finds himself at the hands of cannibals who judge him according to tenderness and fat percentage? Or analogous to a residence permit in a foreign country where I have no right of municipal domicile and have to borrow everything at the mercy of the state, a mercy that can be withdrawn without further notice? Where do I get this feeling from that tells me that the right forum for my being and my right destiny is different from what I have to put up with—what kind of journey was I on when I fell off the train and became born as a man? Which country is my true fatherland when I am but a stranger in the land of life?” Zapffe, Om det tragiske, pp. 116–17. 9 Cf. SKS 2, 214–21 / EO1, 220–8. Several of the aphorisms in the “Diapsalmata” anticipate Zapffe’s position. For instance, the aesthete A suggests that life (as a whole) lacks meaning (SKS 2, 40 / EO1, 31). Moreover, A depicts a person who feels like a stranger in life, a person who the world does not want to stand by (SKS 2, 31 / EO1, 23). Of course, this is exactly how Zapffe describes the human condition in “The Last Messiah” and On the Tragic (cf. the quotation above). 10 Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 104.

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succeeded another like the singing of birds in the forest, if a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it—how empty and devoid of consolidation would life be! But precisely for that reason it is not so.11

The continuation of this passage may also be relevant, in particular Johannes de silentio’s claim (when discussing recollection) that “he who struggled with God became the greatest of all.”12 Readers of Zapffe will readily recognize the struggle with God as one of the main themes of his writings. For instance, Zapffe deals with Job’s struggle with God in a detailed manner in On the Tragic.13 In On the Tragic, Zapffe expresses regret that he did not get the chance to deal with Kierkegaard as a theorist of tragedy.14 Presumably, this means that Zapffe was interested in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama” in Either/Or, Part 1, as well as the discussion of the tragic hero in Fear and Trembling. Zapffe also refers to Yrjö Hirn’s (1870–1952) comparison of Kierkegaard’s theory of boredom (as an incitement to activity) to the theory of JeanBaptiste Dubos (1670–1742), as well as Claude Adrien Helvetius’ (1715–71) theory of suffering.15 Actually, Hirn refers (almost in passing) to how Kierkegaard depicts boredom in the “Diapsalmata” in Either/Or, Part 1.16 In this case, Zapffe and Hirn attribute the views of aesthete A to Kierkegaard himself without qualification. More generally, Zapffe does not seem to distinguish between the different pseudonyms and Kierkegaard. SKS 4, 112 / FT, 15. SKS 4, 113 / FT, 16. 13 I have earlier argued that Zapffe’s interpretation of the Book of Job closely resembles the interpretation found in Repetition. For instance, the nameless young man in Repetition interprets the Book of Job as “the whole weighty defense plea on man’s behalf in the great case between God and man.” See SKS 4, 77 / R, 210. In his famous analysis of the Book of Job, Zapffe chooses exactly the same approach. See Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 487. Furthermore, the young man mentions the possibility that God is a tyrant and that “a person will admit that God is in the right, although he believes that he himself is.” See SKS 4, 75 / R, 207. Rather than this being depicted as a mere possibility, Zapffe depicts this (that is, that man has to pay lip service to the tyrant) as the grim reality that we find ourselves in. See Zapffe, Om det tragiske, pp. 487–8. For more details, see Roe Fremstedal “Eksistensfilosofi og pessimisme hos Peter Wessel Zapffe og Søren Kierkegaard,” Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, vol. 40, no. 2, 2005, pp. 81–98, see pp. 86–91. 14 Zapffe, Om det tragiske, pp. 558–9. 15 Ibid., p. 532 refers to Yrjö Hirn, Det Estiska Lifvet, Helsingfors: Söderström & Co. Förlagsaktiebolag 1913, pp. 199ff. 16 Hirn, Det Estiska Lifvet, p. 203. As mentioned earlier, several of the aphorisms in their “Diapsalmata” anticipate Zapffe’s position. In “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama” it is claimed that the first doubt by which pain begins is: why does this happen to me, could it not have been otherwise? SKS 2, 150 / EO1, 151. In On the Tragic it is claimed that the experience of tragedy as well as suffering begins with the sense of possibility that is experienced when the agent senses that things are not the way they have to be. See Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 338. 11

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One of the approaches Zapffe uses in order to discuss Christian religiousness in On the Tragic is to present a dialogue between a Christian and a non-believer. Zapffe states that the dialogue is designed to be representative of the discussions that have existed between enlightened laymen through the centuries.17 However, Zapffe goes on to attribute the following views to the religious person: “The decisive is that you must cut off all protection or safeguarding and throw yourself out into 70,000 fathoms of water.”18 And just before commencing the dialogue, Zapffe states that “faith presupposes a leap.”19 Although this statement occurs in an academic work, Zapffe does not refer to Kierkegaard. The reasons for this may be that Zapffe saw these expressions as typical of genuine Christian religiousness (rather than some idiosyncratic form of it). Also, Zapffe may have expected readers to be familiar with these Kierkegaardian terms. The Norwegian term Zapffe uses—sprang—is a slightly modernized version of Spring, the Danish term originally used in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Concept of Anxiety. It should be noted, however, that it was the secondary literature rather than Kierkegaard himself who made the term “leap” famous. Indeed, the expression the “leap of faith” comes from the secondary literature rather than Kierkegaard himself, and “70,000 fathoms of water,” which comes from Stages on Life’s Way (and is repeated in the Postscript) was also made famous by the secondary literature. Zapffe’s use of the leap and the 70,000 fathoms of water may indicate an indirect reception, or at least a reception mediated by secondary sources. Aside from Zapffe’s reference to Yrjö Hirn, Zapffe’s only reference to literature dealing with Kierkegaard in On the Tragic appears to be to The Dream of a Golden Age and the Belief in Progress by Paulus Svendsen (1904–89).20 Although this was a Ph.D. dissertation, it was known during the post-war era as perhaps the most prominent work to date in the history of ideas in Norway. Building on the books on Kierkegaard by Eduard Geismar (1871–1939) and Harald Høffding (1843–1931),21 Svendsen discusses Kierkegaard in the context of Golden Age Denmark.22 Svendsen Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 214. Ibid., p. 211. 19 Ibid., p. 204. 20 Ibid., p. 215. Paulus Svendsen, Gullalderdrøm og Utviklingstro, Oslo: Gyldendal 1940. 21 Svendsen, Gullalderdrøm og Utviklingstro, p. 359 refers to Eduard Geismar, Søren Kierkegaard. Hans Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed, vols. 1–6 in two volumes, Copenhagen: Gads forlag 1927–28, vol. 2 and vol. 3. On p. 363 Svendsen refers to Harald Høffding’s “book on Kierkegaard,” that is, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof (Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsen 1892). Svendsen does not state whether he used the first edition or the second edition (Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1919); however, it appears most likely that Svendsen used the second edition. I have not found references to Geismar in Zapffe. Zapffe refers fairly frequently to the work of Harald Høffding and Georg Brandes (1842–1927) and would probably be familiar with their books on Kierkegaard. However, I have not found references in Zapffe that show that he read these books. 22 Svendsen, deals with Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785–1872) (Gullalderdrøm og Utviklingstro, pp. 351ff.), Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860) (pp. 357ff.), Kierkegaard (pp. 359ff.), and Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–84) (pp. 367–75). The fact that Zapffe refers to 17 18

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comments explicitly on The Moment (no. 6), Stages on Life’s Way, Either/Or, and Fear and Trembling, and deals with the leap (from the aesthetic to the ethical stage), the single individual, the 70,000 fathoms of water, infinite resignation, the public, and the press.23 C. The Use of Kierkegaard in “Academic View on Life” (1977) In the second edition of the article “Academic View on Life” Zapffe contrasts conformism with “that single individual.”24 The fact that Zapffe uses quotation marks indicates that he refers to the concept of “that single individual.” Rather than using Kierkegaard’s Danish orthography (hiin Enkelte), Zapffe uses a slightly modernized Norwegian orthography (hin Enkelte). However, it is almost impossible to identify the source of his use of “that single individual.” It is quite possible that Zapffe’s source was secondary rather than The Point of View for My Work as an Author, the work where Kierkegaard probably makes the most use of the concept. In any case, it was certainly well known in the Norwegian academic context that the concept of “that single individual” came from Kierkegaard. III. General Interpretation Zapffe is usually taken to be an existentialist or an existential philosopher. Introductions to Zapffe and shorter articles on him often mention that his theory was influenced by Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. Although there are some comparative studies of Zapffe and other thinkers (for example, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer),25 there has been little Quellenforschung on Zapffe. I believe much of the reason why studies tend to favor a thematic and comparative approach rather the works of Martensen, Heiberg and Sibbern suggests that he was familiar with the Danish Golden Age context (see Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 68; p. 203; p. 471; p. 479). Zapffe also appears to be familiar with German romanticism and some of the German literary and philosophical contexts which were important for Kierkegaard. 23 Svendsen, Gullalderdrøm og Utviklingstro, p. 362; p. 363; p. 364; pp. 365–6; and pp. 366–7, respectively. 24 P.W. Zapffe, “Akademisk livssyn,” in Spøk og alvor, Oslo: Gyldendal 1977, pp. 50– 2, see p. 51. Reprinted as volume 8 of Samlede verker in Spøk og alvor, Oslo: Pax 1998, pp. 45–6, see p. 46. The first edition (1950) uses “that individual” (den ene) whereas the second edition (1977) uses “that single individual” (“hin Enkelte”). It is not clear why the second edition uses Kierkegaard’s concept while the first edition uses a less specific term. One possible explanation is that the first edition was published in an anthology that tried to minimize the use of difficult terms, old-fashioned language, and foreign languages, something which is indicated by the “small dictionary” the editors added to Zapffe’s article. In the second edition Zapffe made several small changes, including removing the dictionary. In any case, the use of “that single individual” in 1977 appears to be a conscious choice on Zapffe’s part. For the first edition, see Zapffe, “Akademisk livssyn,” in Studentene fra 1918: et jubileumsskrift, ed. by Inger Berset, Oslo: Bokkomitéen for studentene fra 1918, 1950, pp. 72*–4*, see p. 73*. 25 For a thematic approach to Zapffe and Kierkegaard, see Fremstedal, “Eksistensfilosofi og pessimisme hos Peter Wessel Zapffe og Søren Kierkegaard,” pp. 81–98.

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than a historical one is that it is often difficult to show whom Zapffe was influenced by. Zapffe himself rarely claimed to have been influenced by other thinkers, and he often does not provide references when borrowing concepts and ideas. Of course, much of the reason for this lies in the fact that the better part of Zapffe’s work consists of non-academic and literary texts. It should also be mentioned that very little of Zapffe’s diaries and Nachlaß have been published. However, the selections from the diaries published in the biography by Jørgen Haave (b. 1971) provide some interesting material. It is possible that better source material may surface later if more material from the Nachlaß becomes available. The present article provides the first attempt at a dedicated study of Kierkegaard’s influence on Zapffe. A. Interpretation of the Use of Kierkegaard in Zapffe’s Corpus Perhaps the most important reference to Kierkegaard in Zapffe is the reference to the “Eulogy on Abraham” in On the Tragic. Johannes de silentio starts the “Eulogy” by depicting human existence, suggesting that life would be nothing but despair without God and an eternal consciousness. Given the context of Zapffe’s reference the “Eulogy” as well as Zapffe’s theory more generally, I believe Zapffe can be said to be in essential agreement with de Johannes de silentio’s claim that life would be “empty and devoid of consolidation”26 without God (if God is taken in the traditional sense of being good and omnipotent). However, de silentio concludes by saying “But precisely for that reason it is not so”27 and goes on to invoke the name of God, thereby suggesting that man does have an eternal consciousness and that there does exist a sacred bond that knits mankind together. Zapffe, on the other hand, argues that belief in God is not warranted. So although Zapffe appears to agree with de silentio’s description of human existence, he clearly would dismiss the conclusion de silentio draws (as well as the Abrahamic faith found in the double movement of faith).28 Indeed, when developing his own philosophical position, Zapffe portrays the human condition in terms reminiscent of the passage from the “Eulogy,” thereby suggesting that the world is ruled by “a wild, fermenting power”29 rather than an omnipotent and good God. According to Zapffe, the grim realities of life do not themselves justify religious belief. Given Zapffe’s analysis in §§ 56–58 of On the Tragic,30 it seems clear that he would view the conclusion that de silentio draws (that is, “But precisely for that reason it is not so”) as an example of wishful thinking. Even if life is “empty and devoid of consolidation” without God as de silentio claims,31 Zapffe does not want to escape reality. In Zapffe’s view, it is exactly this intellectual honesty that sets him apart from typical Christian thinkers. While Kierkegaard attacked the State SKS 4, 112 / FT, 15. Ibid. 28 Regarding the double movement, see SKS 4, 129–45 / FT, 34–52. SKS 4, 167 / FT, 75–6. SKS 4, 189–90 / FT, 99–101. SKS 4, 197 / FT, 109. 29 SKS 4, 112 / FT, 15. Regarding Zapffe’s position on this point, see the discussion of his “Academic View of Life” later in this article. 30 See the discussion of Erfaringsbildet, ønskebildet, and arbeidsbildet in Zapffe, Om det tragiske, pp. 210–21. 31 SKS 4, 112 / FT, 15. 26 27

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Church in the name of intellectual honesty, Zapffe went on to attack religious faith in a good and omnipotent God more generally. The reference to the “Eulogy on Abraham” suggests that although Zapffe dismisses religious faith, he may accept the descriptions of faith and its alternatives (that is, despair, infinite resignation.32 etc.). More generally, Zapffe’s appropriation of Kierkegaard tends towards accepting the descriptions of Christian religiousness (for example, the paradox) and its alternatives (that is, despair) found in Kierkegaard’s authorship. In the case of Fear and Trembling, this means that Zapffe can agree that faith is absurd and paradoxical (and unethical in the case of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac). But instead of embracing religious faith, Zapffe dismisses it. Elsewhere, Zapffe depicts Christian faith as involving belief in something that is a contradiction (motsigelse can also mean incongruence) for human understanding. Although Zapffe does not absolutely preclude the possibility that this is not a contradiction for God, he insists that this is of no help to us.33 Zapffe would say that Christian faith is contradictory for the believer and unbeliever alike. Kierkegaard, however, can be taken to say that it is part of faith to believe that what appears paradoxical or even contradictory is really not a paradox or contradiction to God.34 But Zapffe would add that even if contradictions and paradoxes disappear for God, this is of no help to the believer who is still left with contradictions and paradoxes. Zapffe would probably agree with Kierkegaard’s claim that the Christian revelation is opaque both to the believer and the unbeliever.35 Although Kierkegaard is a Christian thinker or even a Christian theologian, his thinking lends itself toward being used by non-Christian thinkers such as Zapffe by stressing the paradoxical nature of Christian religiousness and how demanding it is to live as a Christian. Kierkegaard’s depiction of Christian faith as paradoxical and incredibly demanding has often been taken as providing good reasons for why one should not be a Christian. Indubitably, this is the effect that Kierkegaard has had on much of twentieth-century thought, especially existentialism. At this point, Zapffe’s reception of Kierkegaard appears to be typical of the more general trend in Europe. Furthermore, in the Norwegian context, Kierkegaard was cited by believers and unbelievers alike. Starting in the late nineteenth century, cultural radicalism I have argued earlier that Zapffe’s position comes very close to the knight of infinite resignation in Fear and Trembling; see Fremstedal, “Eksistensfilosofi og pessimisme hos Peter Wessel Zapffe og Søren Kierkegaard.” 33 Zapffe, “Guds vilje. Første samtale med en anti-teist,” Spektrum, no. 3, 1952, pp. 214–21, see pp. 217–18. Reprinted as “Guds vilje” in Hvordan jeg blev så flink. Essays. Rikets hemmelighet, Oslo: Pax 1999, pp. 45–51, see p. 48. 34 See the interpretation of Johannes de silentio, Johannes Climacus, and Kierkegaard in Poul Lübcke, “Kierkegaard’s Concept of Revelation,” in Theologie zwischen Pragmatismus und Existenzdenken, ed. by Gesche Linde et al., Marburg: N.G. Elwert 2006, pp. 405–14, see pp. 410–12. 35 Pap. IV C 1, p. 355, see p. 368 / JP 4, 3916, p. 56, see p. 67. In an approach that resembles Zapffe’s, Poul Lübcke has argued that if the revelation is opaque both to the believer and the unbeliever, Kierkegaard’s Christian thinking can hardly provide a solution since Kierkegaard continues to base his understanding of Christian concepts on pre-Christian experiences. Lübcke, “Kierkegaard’s Concept of Revelation,” pp. 411–12. 32

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(following Georg Brandes), Pietism, and the home mission (indremisjonen) were all influenced by Kierkegaard.36 Clearly, Zapffe’s approach to Kierkegaard has more in common with the cultural radicals than the Pietists and home mission. The dialogue between a Christian and a non-believer in On the Tragic indicates that Zapffe’s understanding of Christian religiousness is indebted to Kierkegaard (or at least to ideas generally taken to be Kierkegaardian). This is important since criticizing Christianity was central to Zapffe’s intellectual commitments throughout his life. Although Zapffe may have had a fairly good knowledge of the Scriptures, he does not appear to be very knowledgeable when it comes to theology. Since Zapffe rarely appears be influenced by Christian theologians, it would be all the more interesting if Zapffe’s view of Christianity was influenced by Kierkegaard. Zapffe uses the leap and the 70,000 fathoms of water in order to stress the uncertainty of faith and the fact that faith is not grounded empirically or rationally. The passage we have looked at from the “Academic View on Life” indicates that Zapffe may be influenced by Kierkegaard’s concept of “that single individual” and his critique of conformism. Rather than endorsing conformism, Zapffe says that he wants to “pay homage to ‘that single individual’ ” who “face[s] its cosmic conditions nakedly” and “recognizes the hopelessness and defeat”37 that is inherent in the human condition. Zapffe goes on to say that man demands existence to be meaningful, although meaning is not given in the world. In Zapffe, “that single individual” gets transformed from Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious person to a pessimist who dismisses religiousness, or at least dismisses faith in a good and omnipotent God. Zapffe uses “that single individual” to promote his own brand of existential philosophy, a brand according to which most people fail to live according to their true nature. In the direct continuation of the passage which “pay[s] homage to ‘that single individual’ ” Zapffe states: The religious mind is penetrated with the need for meaning, whereas the critical mind is penetrated by the veto of the environment. The demand of meaning is our pride and our curse, our hallmark and our destruction. We are strangers in the universe because we are a result of corrosive enmity towards the law of the universe: the interplay of soulless forces blind to values.38

This passage suggests that by using “that single individual” in order to criticize religiousness, Zapffe used Kierkegaard against Kierkegaard. Also, the “soulless forces” in this passage are reminiscent of the “wild, fermenting power” in Fear and Trembling that Zapffe refers to in On the Tragic, but Zapffe relies on a more scientistic and naturalistic world-view than Kierkegaard does.

See Dyrerud, “Norway: ‘You Have No Truth Onboard!’ Kierkegaard’s Influence in Norway,” pp. 132–42; pp. 164–5. 37 Zapffe, “Akademisk livssyn,” p. 51 (corresponds to p. 46 in the Samlede verker edition). 38 Zapffe, “Akademisk livssyn,” p. 52 (corresponds to p. 46 in the Samlede verker edition). 36

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B. Points of Overlap that May Indicate Influence At several points Zapffe’s thinking converges with Kierkegaard’s to such a degree that we are led to ask whether Zapffe was influenced by Kierkegaard even in cases where we cannot prove it. Although influence is very hard to establish in some cases (for example, Zapffe’s views on death and anxiety), I will try to give some brief examples that may indicate it. In the first part of this section I will focus on cases where Zapffe appears to reiterate some of Kierkegaard’s most controversial and infamous claims. In these cases influence may be more probable since there are relatively fewer alternative sources by which Zapffe may have been influenced. Zapffe appears to have been familiar with the last years of Kierkegaard’s authorship, especially some of Kierkegaard’s most controversial and infamous ideas. One extreme example from The Moment is Kierkegaard’s description of this world as a prison (Straffe-Anstalt—literally an asylum where one gets punished), a description Zapffe parallels in 1989 by describing this world as a prison camp (fangeleir).39 Also, very much as Kierkegaard does in this passage from The Moment,40 Zapffe places the responsibility for suffering on the parents who bring children into the world. Thus, Zapffe echoes the later Kierkegaard’s claims that it is immoral to have children.41 However, while Kierkegaard attempted to ground this view in New Testament Christianity, Zapffe defended it within the framework of his pessimistic theory of human existence. More generally, Kierkegaard increasingly tended towards believing that there is an inverse relation between virtue and happiness in this world, that is, that virtue leads to unhappiness. This tendency may be found as early as 1847,42 and it is somewhat clearer in Practice in Christianity and later on.43 This is an extreme view that Zapffe shared with Kierkegaard (although again Zapffe does not rely on New Testament Christianity). In “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe claimed that authenticity or greatness leads to destruction. In On the Tragic, he moderated this thesis (since he was not able to support it in a strong form), claiming instead that greatness disposes one to destruction or catastrophes.44 Put in Kantian terms, the stronger thesis is that

SKS 13, 306 / M, 251; Haave, Naken under kosmos, p. 35; note 27 p. 249. For a few examples of the later Kierkegaard condemning marriage and praising chastity and celibacy, see SKS 25, 363–4, NB29:101 / JP 3, 2617. SKS 25, 371–2, NB29:107 / JP 3, 2908. SKS 25, 379, NB29:118.a / JP 3, 2618. 41 P.W. Zapffe, “Den sidste Messias,” Janus, vol. 1, no. 9, 1933, pp. 645–56, see section V, p. 656. (Reprinted in P.W. Zapffe, Kulturelt nødverge, Oslo: Pax 1997, pp. 43–51, see p. 51.) Zapffe defends a somewhat weaker thesis in On the Tragic, preferring to decrease population by sticking to what is later known as the “one-child policy.” See Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 240. 42 See SKS 9, 260 / WL, 261. 43 See SKS 12, 158 / PC, 154. SKS 13, 306 / M, 251. SKS 25, 370ff., NB29:107 / JP 3, 2908. 44 For more details, see Roe Fremstedal, “Tragikk og pessimisme hos Nietzsche og Zapffe,” Parabel. Tidsskrift for filosofi og vitenskapsteori, vol. 4, 2001, pp. 25–45, see pp. 30–1. 39 40

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virtue necessarily leads to unhappiness, whereas the weaker thesis is that virtue tends to lead to unhappiness. Like Kierkegaard and later existentialist philosophers (for example, Heidegger and Sartre), Zapffe relies on some kind of a distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. However, rather than using the term “inauthentic,” Zapffe tends to favor the terms “repression”45 and “means of panic.” Zapffe takes these to be defense mechanisms that cover up the meaninglessness and injustice of human existence. The religious mind in the passage quoted above provides but one example of this. According to Zapffe, two of the main types of repression are distractions and seeking foundation in belief systems shared with others (for example, church, state, fate, or the people).46 Zapffe’s analysis of distractions is reminiscent of the analysis found in Either/Or, Part 1, in particular “The Rotation of Crops.” Zapffe’s criticism of accepting collective fundaments (for example, church and state) is reminiscent of several Kierkegaardian themes. First, accepting collective fundaments typically involves conformism rather than a critical appropriation. Rather than choosing oneself, or being “that single individual,” one tends to merely follow others. Secondly, the examples that Zapffe chooses, in particular the state and church, resemble Kierkegaard’s. From early on Zapffe was highly critical of the role the church played in the state (and the educational system). Zapffe eventually chose to focus his criticism on the Norwegian State Church in a way that resembled Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish State Church.47 Kierkegaard’s attack on the church was highly influential in Norway.48 Given Zapffe’s interest in Kierkegaard, I believe it is safe to assume that Zapffe was familiar with Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish Church. The following provides another possible point of contact: Zapffe argues that if the moral world order fails in only one case, then it is altogether invalid.49 We find a similar claim in Kierkegaard: If it ever happened to a human being in relation to God that the fault lay with God, there would be no task; if this ever happened to a single human being, there would be no task for the entire human race. It would not be only in this particular case that there was no task; no, if God just one single time had demonstrated that he was not love in the smallest or greatest, had left the sufferer without a task—then for all humankind there is no longer any task, then it is foolishness and futility and soul-deadening pernicious laboriousness to believe, a self-contradiction to work, and an agony to live…if God for Zapffe, “Den sidste Messias,” section III, p. 648. (Kulturelt nødverge, p. 45.) See Zapffe, “Den sidste Messias,” section III, pp. 649–53. (Kulturelt nødverge, pp. 46–9.) 47 P.W. Zapffe, “Kirkebrand og teologi,” Morgenbladet, August 8, 1975. (Reprinted in Kulturelt nødverge, pp. 145–52, see p. 151.) 48 See Dyrerud, “Norway: ‘You Have No Truth Onboard!’ Kierkegaard’s Influence in Norway,” pp. 132–42; Marius G. Mjaaland, “PÅ DE 70.000 FAVNE—Ole Hallesby møter Søren Kierkegaard,” Kirke og Kultur, vol. 107, 2002, pp. 207–21. It should be noted that it was only after the independence of Norway in 1814 that the Norwegian church was separated from the Danish State Church. 49 Zapffe, Om det tragiske, p. 411. 45 46

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one single moment has denied his love, then all tasks are dead and reduced to nothing, and hopelessness is the only thing there is.50

Although Zapffe appears to agree with Kierkegaard on this point, he goes beyond Kierkegaard by insisting that such cases do exist. Zapffe seems to hold that it is an empirical fact that the moral world order has failed at least in one case. I take Zapffe to mean that we know that individuals experience meaninglessness and injustice (in Zapffe’s terms, that greatness leads to destruction). Again, Zapffe appears to be using Kierkegaard’s description of religious belief and its alternatives but ends up dismissing religious belief.51 C. Conclusion For Zapffe, Kierkegaard appears to be a thinker who saw many of the problems with the Christian tradition without taking the final step and liberating himself from it. Although this approach to Kierkegaard is reminiscent of cultural radicalism, what is most characteristic of Zapffe’s approach is the use of Kierkegaardian ideas when developing his own type of existentialism. Although Zapffe may have seen the Kierkegaardianism of cultural radicals as an ally against Christianity, he did not merely use Kierkegaard as a means to further his own pre-established ends. Rather, Zapffe’s very understanding of Christian faith (and its alternatives) was to a large extent shaped by Kierkegaard. Zapffe’s reception of Kierkegaard is largely productive insofar as Zapffe successfully merges Kierkegaardianism with other impulses when formulating his own existentialist theory.

SKS 8, 373 / UD, 277. However, whereas Kierkegaard interprets human existence in terms of a task, Zapffe interprets it in terms of having interests, something which certainly involves different approaches to the human condition. See Fremstedal, “Eksistensfilosofi og pessimisme hos Peter Wessel Zapffe og Søren Kierkegaard,” pp. 81ff. 50 51

Bibliography I. References or Uses of Kierkegaard in Zapffe’s Corpus Om det tragiske, Oslo: Gyldendal 1941, p. 104; p. 204; p. 211; p. 532; pp. 558–9. “Akademisk livssyn,” in Spøk og alvor, Oslo: Gyldendal 1977, pp. 50–2, see p. 51. “Dagbok,” selections in Jørgen Haave, Naken under kosmos. Peter Wessel Zapffe— en biografi, Oslo: Pax 1999, see especially p. 136.

II. Sources of Zapffe’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard Brandes, Georg, Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1877. (Reprinted in Samlede Skrifter, vols. 1–18, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1899–1910, vol. 2, Danske Personligheder.) Hirn, Yrjö, Det Estiska Lifvet, Helsingfors: Söderström & Co. Förlagsaktiebolag 1913, p. 203. Høffding, Harald, Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1919. Næss, Arne, “Innledning” and “Løpende kommentar,” in Søren Kierkegaard, utvalg og innledning, ed. by Arne Næss, Oslo: Pax 1966, pp. 9–31; pp. 32–8. Svendsen, Paulus, Gullalderdrøm og Utviklingstro, Oslo: Gyldendal 1940, pp. 359– 67. III. Secondary Literature on Zapffe’s Relation to Kierkegaard Fremstedal, Roe, “Eksistensfilosofi og pessimisme hos Peter Wessel Zapffe og Søren Kierkegaard,” Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift, vol. 40, no. 2, 2005, pp. 81–98.

Index of Persons

Aas, Einar K. (1901–81), Norwegian author, 289. Abraham, 177, 226, 227, 296, 297. Adorno, Theodor W. (1903–1969), German philosopher, x, 3–48, 50, 53, 55, 57, 60, 61, 177, 180, 181, 187, 194. Antigone, 139. Arendt, Hannah (1906–75), GermanAmerican philosopher, 50, 166. Aristotle, 97, 123, 126, 128, 136, 138, 139, 147, 252. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), church father, 97. Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1850), French author, 49. Barth, Karl (1886–1968), Swiss Protestant theologian, 21, 61, 106, 107, 112, 113, 115, 117–19, 168. Barthes, Roland (1915–80), French philosopher, xi. Bataille, Georges (1897–1962), French writer, xi. Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre (1821–67), French poet, 49, 57–9. Bauer, Bruno (1809–82), German Protestant theologian, 246. Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), German philosopher, x, 4, 6, 11, 21, 22, 39, 49–65. Berg, Alban (1885–1935), Austrian composer, 4, 7, 8. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher, 106, 133. Bertram, Ernst (1884–1957), German scholar, 181.

Binswanger, Ludwig (1881–1966), Swiss psychiatrist, 99. Blanchot, Maurice (1907–2003), French philosopher, xi. Bloch, Ernst (1885–1977), German philosopher, x, 67–83. Blumenberg, Hans (1920–96), German philosopher, 166, 171. Böckh, August (1785–1867), German philologist, 88. Boesen, Emil (1812–81), 20. Brandes, Georg (1842–1927), Danish author and literary critic, 28, 179, 254, 271, 272, 298. Brandt, Frithiof (1892–1968), Danish philosopher, 274. Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956), German playwright, 50. Brentano, Franz (1838–1917), German philosopher, 147. Brøcher, Hans (1820–75), Danish philosopher, x, 245–65. Brunner, Emil (1889–1966), Swiss Protestant theologian, 106. Bultmann, Rudolf (1884–1976), German Protestant theologian, 106, 124, 173, 181. Burckhardt, Jacob (1818–97), Swiss historian of art and culture, 165, 172, 175, 176. Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), German-born American philosopher, 225, 226. Cavell, Stanley (b. 1926), American philosopher, xi, 235. Christ, 16, 30, 36, 134, 157, 176, 191, 268, 270.

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Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), French philosopher, 273. Cornelius, Hans (1863–1947), German philosopher, 4, 5. Dallago, Carl (1869–1949), Austrian author, 106, 108, 113. Darwin, Charles (1809–82), English natural scientist, 269. Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95), French philosopher, xi. Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), French philosopher, xi, 119, 147. Descartes, René (1596–1650), French philosopher, 173, 224. Diederich, Eugen (1867–1930), German publisher, 10, 52, 132. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911), German philosopher, x, 85–104, 123, 124, 129, 133, 173. Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821– 81), Russian author, 68, 113, 114, 115. Dubos, Baptiste (1670–1742), French theologian, 293. Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850–1909), German psychologist, 91. Ebner, Ferdinand (1882–1931), Austrian philosopher, x, 105–21. Ellul, Jacques (1912–94), French philosopher, xi. Engelmann, Paul (1891–1965), Austrian architect, 221. Fahrenbach, Helmut (b. 1928), German philosopher, 67, 71. Feuerbach, Ludwig (1804–72), German philosopher, 79, 106, 165, 246–52 passim. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), German philosopher, 39. Ficker, Ludwig von (1880–1967), German author and publisher, 114, 115, 217.

Frankfurt, Harry (b. 1929), American philosopher, 235. Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925), German mathematician, 148, 209, 215. Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), Austrian psychologist, 106. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1900–2002), German philosopher, x, 99, 123–45, 163, 166. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Italian scientist, 91. Geismar, Eduard (1871–1939), Danish theologian, 57, 58, 60, 294. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749–1832), German poet, author, scientist and diplomat, 26. Gogarten, Friedrich (1887–1967), German Protestant theologian, 106, 168. Gottsched, Hermann (1848–1916), German Protestant theologian, 174. Greve, Wilfred, 51. Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863), German philologist, 89. Grøn, Arne, 201, 202. Guardini, Romano (1885–1968), Catholic theologian, 11. Haas, Willy (1891–1973), German critic and publisher, 57, 58, 60. Haave, Jørgen, 296. Habermas, Jürgen (b. 1929), German philosopher, 138, 163. Hadot, Pierre (1922–2010), French philosopher, xi. Haeckel, Ernst (1834–1919), 111. Haecker, Theodor (1879–1945), German author and critic, 11, 28, 57, 58, 60, 106–13 passim, 117, 118, 173, 174, 179, 216. Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–88), German philosopher, 106. Hannay, Alastair, 201.

Index of Persons Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm (1770– 1831), German philosopher, 29, 30–2, 39, 67, 68, 70–4, 78–80, 87, 89, 94, 127, 130–9 passim, 157, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 170, 171, 176, 194, 248–51, 253, 254, 258, 259, 261, 263, 273, 276. Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1791–1860), Danish poet, playwright, critic and philosopher, 250. Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), German philosopher, xi, 9, 21, 23, 31, 34, 35, 39, 61, 74, 79, 87, 97, 98, 123, 127–9, 135, 136, 138, 139, 147, 164, 166, 168, 173, 176, 177, 181, 187, 188, 300. Helvetius, Claude Adrien (1715–71), French philosopher, 293. Heubaum, Alfred, 85, 87. Hirn, Yrjö (1870–1952), Finnish-Swedish historian of literature, 293, 294. Hirsch, Emanuel (1888–1972), German Protestant theologian, 24, 28. Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 5, 10, 50, 69, 165, 215. Høffding, Harald (1843–1931), Danish philosopher, x, 267–98, 86, 87, 254, 294. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1874–1929), German author, 50. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843), German poet, 173. Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973), GermanJewish philosopher, 4, 5, 8, 39, 50. Hostrup, Christian (1818–92), Danish author and pastor, 246. Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 12, 57. Hume, David (1711–76), Scottish philosopher, 73, 147, 209. Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), German philosopher, x, 147–62, 93, 123, 129, 130, 138, 164, 165, 181. Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), Norwegian playwright, 28, 289, 295

305

Janik, Allan, 107, 108, 111. Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969), German philosopher, 23, 24, 28, 74, 79, 87, 98, 123, 127–30, 139, 154, 168, 173, 179, 180. Jean Paul, i.e., Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), German author, 284. Jonas, Hans (1903–93), German-American philosopher, 165, 166. Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), Czech-Austrian novelist, 57, 58. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), German philosopher, 6, 71, 73, 74, 77, 88–91, 106, 123, 138, 147, 159, 277, 278, 281, 290. Karplus, Gretel (1902–93), German chemist, 4. Keller, Gottfried (1819–90), Swiss author, 52. Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55) The Concept of Irony (1841), 176, 258. Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est (ca. 1842–43), 53, 57, 176. Either/Or (1843), ix, 38, 52, 53, 56–8, 60, 61, 77, 78, 123, 129, 130, 133, 135, 139, 152, 177, 198, 212, 220, 221, 246, 291, 293, 295, 300. Repetition (1843), 168, 173, 176, 177, 212, 291. Fear and Trembling (1843), 173, 177, 212, 221, 226–8, 253, 292–8 passim. Philosophical Fragments (1844), 6, 130, 176, 212, 248, 253, 254, 260. The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 52, 53, 57, 60, 110, 130, 168, 175, 212, 260, 272, 278, 281, 282, 294. Stages on Life’s Way (1845), 53, 55, 57, 60, 246, 294, 295. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), ix, 15, 72, 80, 176, 212, 221, 231, 253, 254, 258–63, 275, 278, 294.

306

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy

A Literary Review of Two Ages (1846), 53, 109, 111, 112, 117, 118, 172, 175, 212, 216, 221, 228. The Book on Adler (ca. 1846–47), 177. Works of Love (1847), 24, 26, 27, 173, 178. Christian Discourses (1848), 173, 178. On My Activity as a Writer (ca. 1848), 260. The Point of View for My Work as an Author (ca. 1848), 38, 177, 178, 295. The Sickness unto Death (1849), 6, 12, 17, 33, 35, 110, 176, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199–202, 212, 220, 258, 275, 278. Practice in Christianity (1850), 173, 175, 212, 258, 299. On My Work as an Author (1851), 254. For Self-Examination (1851), 178, 269, 270. The Moment (1855), 86, 172, 175, 212, 258, 262, 267, 271, 280, 295, 299. Journals, Notebooks, Nachlaß, 174, 275. Kirmmse, Bruce H., 109. Körber, Lily (1897–1982), Austrian journalist, 7. Koyré, Alexandre (1892–1964), Russianborn French philosopher, 22, 165. Kracauer, Siegfried (1889–1966), GermanJewish writer, 6, 7, 8, 11, 21, 22. Krahl, Hans-Jürgen (1943–70), German student activist, 6. Kraus, Karl (1874–1936), Austrian author, 4, 57, 58, 106. Kuhn, Helmut, 19. Külpe, Oswald (1862–1915), German psychologist, 68. Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646–1716), German philosopher and mathematician, 147. Lequier, Jules (1814–62), French philosopher, 3.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95), French philosopher, xi. Lincoln, Peter, 108, 114. Lipps, Theodor (1851–1914), German philosopher, 68. Lotze, Hermann (1817–81), German philosopher, 89, 273. Löwenthal, Leo (1900–93), German-Jewish sociologist, 6. Löwith, Karl (1897–1973), German-Jewish philosopher, x, 20, 21, 39, 163–86. Lowrie, Walter (1868–1959), American translator, 181, 216. Lubac, Henri de (1896–1991), French philosopher, xi. Lukács, Georg (1885–1971), Hungarian philosopher, novelist and literary critic, 4, 7, 11, 68, 71, 170. Luther, Martin (1483–1546), German Protestant theologian, 97, 175. MacIntyre, Alasdair (b. 1929), British philosopher, xi. Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949), Belgian author, 85. Mahnke, Dietrich (1884–1939), German philosopher, 153. Malik, Habib C., 107, 112. Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), German author, 39. Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979), German philosopher, 165. Marini, Alfredo, 88, 91. Marion, Jean-Luc (b. 1946), French philosopher, xi. Martensen, Hans Lassen (1808–84), Danish theologian, 247, 249, 256–8, 261. Marx, Karl (1818–83), German philosopher and economist, 70, 71, 79, 91, 163, 165, 170, 171, 182, 194. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–61), French philosopher, 147. Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), English philosopher, 273.

Index of Persons Misch, Georg (1878–1965), German philosopher, 96. Mjaaland, Marius, 201, 202. Møller, Poul Martin (1794–1838), Danish poet and philosopher, 250. Müller, Max, 187. Murdoch, Iris (1919–99), British philosopher, xi. Nägele, Rainer, 51. Neurath, Otto (1882–1945), Austrian philosopher, 229. Newton, Isaac (1642–1727), English physicist, 91. Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892–1971), American theologian, 166. Nielsen, Rasmus (1809–84), Danish philosopher, 248–50, 261, 268, 271, 274. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), German philosopher, 52, 79, 85, 87, 88, 91, 133, 163, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 176, 179–82, 219, 289, 295. Nohl, Herman (1879–1960), German philosopher, 89. Nussbaum, Martha (b. 1945), American philosopher, 235, Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662), French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, 58. Paul, 171. Pickard Bell, Winthrop (1884–1965), Canadian academic, 153. Pindar, 187. Plato, 123, 136, 138, 139, 268. Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94), Austrian philosopher, 6. Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), French author, 49. Przywara, Erich (1889–1972), German Catholic theologian, 11. Ranke, Leopold von (1795–1886), German historian, 89.

307

Rickert, Heinrich (1863–1936), German philosopher, 68. Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005), French philosopher, xi, 147. Riedel, Manfred, 71. Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926), German poet, 216. Rohde, Erwin (1845–98), German philologist, 173. Rorty, Richard (1931–2007), American philosopher, xi. Rosenzweig, Franz (1886–1929), GermanJewish philosopher and theologian, 107. Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970), British philosopher, 209, 210, 215, 216. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), French philosopher, xi, 34, 39, 147. Savigny, Friedrich Karl von (1779–1861), German jurist, 89. Schaeder, Hans Heinrich (1896–1957), German orientalist, 10. Scheler, Max (1874–1928), German philosopher, 106. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854), German philosopher, 68, 70, 71, 77, 79, 171. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. (1768– 1834), German Protestant theologian, 88, 89, 97, 124, 126, 172. Schlick, Moritz (1882–1936), German philosopher, 223, 225. Schmitt, Carl (1888–1985), German jurist and philosopher, 165. Scholem, Gershom (1897–1982), Germanborn Israeli philosopher, 11, 50, 53. Schönberg, Arnold (1874–1951), Austrian composer, 4. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), German philosopher, 79, 215, 219, 289, 295. Schrempf, Christoph (1860–1944), German Protestant theologian, 28, 86, 127. Schulz, Heiko, 107.

308

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy

Schweppenhäuser, Hermann (b. 1928), German philosopher, 39. Shestov, Lev (1866–1938), UkrainianFrench philosopher, 152, 153. Sibbern, Frederik Christian (1785–1872), Danish philosopher, 248, 250, 268. Simmel, Georg (1858–1918), German scholar, 68. Socrates, ix, 137–9, 227, 234, 268. Spinoza, Baruch (1632–77), Dutch philosopher, 248, 274. Stein, Edith (1891–1942), German philosopher, 165. Stein, Ludwig (1859–1930), Hungarianborn German philosopher, 85. Sternberger, Dolf, 19. Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74), German Protestant theologian, 246, 247, 250. Svendsen, Paulus (1904–89), Norwegian historian of literature, 294. Swenson, David F. (1876–1940), American translator, 181. Tagore, Rabindranath (1861–1941), Indian author and philosopher, 226. Taine, Hippolyte (1828–1893), French philosopher, 273. Taylor, Charles (b. 1931), Canadian philosopher, xi. Theunissen, Michael (b. 1932), German philosopher, x, 51, 106, 187–207. Thust, Martin (1892–1969), 153, 181. Tillich, Paul (1886–1965), GermanAmerican Protestant theologian, 4, 5, 8, 17, 18, 166. Tolstoy, Lev (1828–1910), Russian author, 85, 219. Trakl, Georg (1887–1914), Austrian poet, 216.

Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf (1802–72), German philosopher and philologist, 88. Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923), German Protestant theologian, 99. Troost, Karl, 19. Uexküll, Jakob Johann (1864–1944), Estonian biologist, 289. Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), French poet, 166. Vattimo, Gianni (b. 1936), Italian philosopher, 138. Vedel, Peter (1823–1911), Danish jurist, 247. Vetter, August, 22. Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744), Italian political philosopher, 166. Wahl, Jean (1888–1974), French philosopher, 9, 22–4, 31, 39, 40, 181. Waismann, Friedrich (1896–1959), Austrian mathematician, 227. Wartenburg, Count Paul Yorck von (1835–1897), German writer and philosopher, 86. Weber, Max (1864–1920), German sociologist, 68, 164. Weininger, Otto (1880–1903), Austrian philosopher, 106. Windelband, Wilhelm (1848–1915), German philosopher, 91, 92. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher, x, 209–41. Wyneken, Gustav (1875–1964), German educational theorist, 50. Zapffe, Peter Wessel (1899–1990), Norwegian philosopher, x, 289–302.

Index of Subjects

Absolute, the, 40. abstraction, 34, 128, 158. absurd, 14, 152, 171, 297. acosmism, 272, 279. actuality, 152, 227, 259, 262. aesthetics, the aesthetic, 21, 56, 59, 60, 70. alienation, 13, 164, 167, 171. ambiguity, 28, 35. analytic philosophy, xi, 209, 210, 214, 223, 224, 234, 235. anguish, see “anxiety.” anthropology, xi, 14, 15, 31, 35, 39, 188, 194. anti-Semitism, 35, 36. anxiety, 31, 39, 96, 110, 182, 222, 281–3, 299. appropriation, 22, 32, 39, 41, 81, 111, 113–15, 275, 300. approximation, 276. atheism, 95. authenticity, 28, 33, 299, 300. authority, 109, 111, 168, 177, 178, 182. autonomy, 29, 119.

Catholicism, 4, 272. chatter, 54. choice, 111, 132, 136, 281, 282. Christendom, 28, 37, 172, 175, 256, 260, 262, 268, 270, 280. Christianity, x, 16, 27, 28, 30, 36, 37, 95, 114, 115, 117, 118, 157–60, 167, 168, 172, 176, 180, 232, 246, 247, 250, 254–6, 258, 261, 262, 267, 268, 270, 274, 275, 278, 279, 291, 298, 301. Christology, 16, 40. cogito, 116. communication, 78, 89, 126, 168, 172, 181, 258, 283. indirect, 168, 172, 189, 214, 231, 232, 234. community, 172. conformism, 298, 300. conscience, 23, 30, 132. contemporaneity, 14, 132, 134, 192. creation, 61, 153, 280. critical theory, x.

bad infinity, 276. baptism, 247. Berlin, 6, 25, 68, 85, 89, 109, 131, 187, 215. Bible, 225, 269, 271, 280, 299. Job, 293. Luke, 191. Mark, 191. Matthew, 191. Bolshevism, 119. boredom, 55, 177, 182, 293.

death, 31, 96, 110, 111, 128, 189, 190, 217, 218, 263, 269, 290, 299. decision (see also “choice”), 31, 33, 34, 39, 55, 114, 117, 119, 131, 133, 165, 170, 177, 195, 196, 198, 282, 283. decisionism, 114. deconstruction, xi. defiance, 195, 197–9, 201. demonic, the, 23, 38, 174. Der Brenner, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 179, 216, 217, 228. desire, 17, 70, 76, 112, 171, 202, 263, 271.

capitalism, 163. care, 56, 59.

310

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy

despair, 17, 31, 39, 60, 111, 113, 115, 118, 167, 168, 182, 193–203 passim, 215, 220, 225, 271, 292, 296, 297. dialectical theology, 10, 28, 61, 168, 182. dialogical philosophy, x, 107, 140, 198, 199, 230, 259, 262, 270, 271, 274. dizziness, 282, 283. double movement, 190, 191, 296. doubt, 195, 198, 262, 271. duty, 219, 248, 252, 274. earnestness, 38, 172. either/or, 130, 136, 283. emotions, 76. eternity, 160, 168, 191, 262. ethics, the ethical, xi, 40, 52, 56, 89, 91, 105, 110, 126, 130, 132, 138, 139, 147, 189, 210, 212–15, 218–23, 226–8, 230, 231, 234, 235, 252, 253, 257, 259–63 passim, 272, 276, 279–83 passim, 295. evil, 26, 54, 126, 218–20, 281, 282, 284. existence, ix, 9, 15, 17, 22, 30-5, 39, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62, 70-81 passim, 87, 97, 99, 105, 110, 111, 113–17, 119, 125, 128, 129, 131–5 passim, 140, 150, 151, 157–9, 166–9, 172, 174, 178– 80, 188, 189, 192, 201, 222, 226, 227, 229, 234, 250-2, 254, 257–63, 268, 270, 274, 275, 277, 279, 281, 284, 285, 290, 296, 298–300. existentialism, existential philosophy, x, 10, 18, 23, 24, 28, 32–4, 39, 55, 61, 79, 88, 105, 123, 133, 136, 138, 150, 167, 182, 234, 289, 297, 301. facticity, 98, 129, 135, 138, 140. faith, x, 37, 61, 95, 96, 106, 131, 132, 150, 156–9, 167, 168, 171, 189, 191, 192, 195, 198, 200, 201, 215, 217, 226–32 passim, 248, 249, 252, 258–63 passim, 268–71 passim, 274, 275, 279, 284, 285, 291, 294, 296–8, 301. Fall, the, 282, 283.

fascism, 167. feminism, xi. finitude, 94–6, 131, 135, 139, 152, 167, 168, 252, 259, 279, 282, 284. freedom, 117, 128, 138, 154, 192, 194, 203, 253, 256, 262, 272, 282, 283. God, 15–17, 28, 30, 40, 96, 107, 108, 112, 116–18, 137, 155, 157–9, 168, 170, 191–8, 200-3, 217, 218, 232, 233, 247, 253, 269, 276, 280, 293, 296–8, 300. God-man, 30, 279. grace, 16, 157, 158, 171. guilt, 128, 199, 212, 252, 282, 283. Hegelianism, 170, 250, 251, 259. hermeneutics, x, xi, 92, 99, 123–45. heroism, 58. historicity, historicism, 137, 138, 149, 150. history, 14, 18, 25, 28, 49, 50, 70, 74, 78, 85, 91, 96, 99, 123, 132, 134, 149, 150, 152, 159, 166, 167, 173, 173, 179, 218, 248, 251, 253, 254, 268. Hochland Circle, 10. hope, 5, 15, 17, 74, 75, 192, 198, 203, 284. humor, 254, 263, 283–5. idealism, 13–15, 18, 21, 31, 35, 57, 59, 60, 99, 109, 112, 127, 136–8, 147, 250, 259. German, 6, 28, 39, 70, 127–30, 250. speculative, 131, 132, 139. identity, personal, xi. imitation, 37, 280. immanence, 253. immediacy, 29, 73, 76, 134, 155. inauthenticity, 33, 300. inclosing reserve, 172. indirect communication, see “communication.” individual, the, see “single individual.” individualism, individuality, 24, 92, 111, 117, 127, 179, 231. infinity, 157, 252.

Index of Subjects innocence, 272, 281, 282. intentionality, 150, 151, 157. interesting, the, 72. inwardness, 13–15, 19, 21, 25–7, 29, 32, 33, 39, 40, 53, 55, 60, 67, 72, 78, 80, 110, 118, 160, 228, 263, 269, 275. irrationalism, irrationality, 24, 133, 148–50, 154, 155, 159, 171. irony, 213, 231. isolation, 8, 272. jest, 263. Jews, 36. joy, 219, 255, 280, 284. Judaism, 50, 253. Kantianism, 123, 133, 137. kingdom of God, 191, 192. knight of faith, 61. language, x, 10, 53, 54, 69, 78, 124, 126, 127, 129, 136, 137, 168, 209, 213, 219, 220, 222–5, 227, 232, 233, 234, 260, 261, 273. leap, 31, 59, 95, 117, 118, 167, 168, 171, 177, 272, 281–3, 294, 295, 298. leveling, 109, 111, 116, 118, 169, 228, 229. logic, 148. logos, 35, 129, 136. love, 25–7, 40, 152, 251, 300. Christian, 26, 27, 40. marriage, 262, 271. martyr, martyrdom, 36, 58, 172. Marxism, x, 50, 67, 68, 74, 78, 80. materialism, 57, 116, 171. meaning, meaningfulness, 95, 96, 115, 136, 151, 188–90, 201, 203, 211, 217–23 passim, 230, 275, 290, 298. mediation, 29, 33, 73, 119, 129–32, 135, 136, 170, 268. melancholy, 52, 56, 58–61, 110, 177, 274, 284, 285. midwife, 231. moment, the, 191, 282, 283, 285.

311

morality, 52. myth, mythology, 18, 19, 27, 30, 40. naturalism, 149, 152, 156–60. Nazism, 35, 36, 40. negativity, negation, 14, 17, 25, 26, 28, 32, 117, 118, 191, 193–6, 202. neo-Kantianism, 127, 128, 133. nihilism, 117, 118, 163, 167, 168, 170, 171, 176, 188, 189, 198, 201. nothingness, nothing, 139, 190, 282. ontology, 9, 31, 34, 35, 39, 77. Other, the, 127, 136, 137, 202. paradox, 17, 30, 36, 59, 61, 78, 159, 167, 168, 171, 227, 228, 253, 259–62, 270, 272, 279, 297. passion, 55, 58, 59, 72, 73, 77, 117, 152, 251, 258, 259, 275, 292. phenomenology, x, xi, 129, 147–60 passim, 167, 182, 195, 202. philosophy of religion, xi. Pietism, 298. politics, 107, 110, 113, 119, 166, 174, 289. positivism, x, 88, 108, 272, 273. possibility, 75, 77, 81, 189, 200, 233, 271, 281, 282. postmodernism, xi. post-structuralism, xi. press, the, 174, 295. Protestantism, 175. pseudonymity, pseudonyms, ix, x, 24, 52, 56, 59, 60, 173, 175, 178, 180, 200, 226, 231, 251, 254, 258–61, 270, 278, 291–3. psychoanalysis, 20. psychology, 18, 20, 52, 68, 91, 93, 98, 99, 115, 116, 148–51, 159, 193, 202, 272, 273, 278, 280-2, 284. rationalism, rationality, reason, 12, 26, 30, 39, 40, 76, 88–90, 109, 116, 126, 128, 132, 136, 148–52, 157–9, 170, 192, 202, 203, 250, 277, 281.

312

Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy

reality, 189. rebellion, 196, 197. recognition, 6, 77, 110, 111, 281. reconciliation, 16, 61, 131, 177, 252. redemption, 119, 193, 200. religiousness A and B, 253. renunciation, 105, 107, 219, 263, 280. repetition, 37, 130, 167, 169, 176. resignation, 115, 155, 269, 274, 284, 285, 295, 297. resoluteness, 31. responsibility, 80, 109, 119, 155, 228, 299. revelation, 28, 30, 98, 297. revolt, see “rebellion.” Romanticism, 127, 198, 284. sacrifice, 12, 16, 17, 23, 30, 40, 118, 297. salvation, 79, 80, 200, 203. secularism, secularization, 117, 158, 166. seduction, 179. semiotics, xi. seriousness, 25, 189, 214, 263, 274. sickness unto death, 113, 118, 171. silence, 227, 229, 234. sin, 54, 154, 155, 171, 198, 199, 272, 275, 281, 282. original, 281. single individual, the, 28–30, 39, 40, 73, 81, 118, 155, 169, 172, 173, 178, 180, 254, 272, 295, 298, 300. skepticism, 109. Socratic method, 231, 232. solitude, 56, 77, 78, 216. speculative philosophy, ix, 35, 87, 129, 176, 259, 262, 263. spirit, 12–17 passim, 21, 27, 36, 72, 94, 114, 130, 152, 157, 194, 251, 252, 258, 263, 281, 282. stages, 190, 258, 278. structuralism, xi.

subjective thinking, subjective thinker, 73. subjectivism, 31, 32, 36, 39, 87, 149, 159, 171. subjectivity, 14, 16, 27–9, 32, 35, 54, 55, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78, 87, 116, 119, 136, 137, 147–60 passim, 253, 258, 260, 261, 267, 268, 271, 272, 275, 276, 279. suffering, 36, 55, 56, 58, 59, 199–201, 263, 279, 280, 285, 290, 293, 299. suicide, 50, 291. supernaturalism, 159. suspension, see “teleological suspension.” synthesis, 278. system, systematic philosophy, 9, 17, 67, 70-2, 74, 80, 87, 94–6, 98, 110, 116, 124, 130, 133, 135, 138, 147, 156, 159, 211, 227, 250, 258, 272, 278. teleological suspension, 253. temporality (see also “time”), 131, 134, 140, 167, 189–91. terror, 169, 280. time, 149, 152, 167, 168, 188–93 passim, 200, 250, 251, 270, 279, 281. totalitarianism, 40. transcendence, 15–17, 21, 27, 30, 32, 96, 252. trust, 192, 200, 201. uncertainty, 21, 213, 259, 275, 298. unhappy consciousness, 29. University of Berlin, 85, 88. University of Vienna, 223. utilitarianism, 108. values, 94, 151, 158, 224, 279, 285, 298. Weltanschauung, 94, 95.