philosophy. His peculiar authorship comprises a baffling array of
different narrative points of view and disciplinary subject matter,
including aesthetic novels, works of psychology and Christian
dogmatics, satirical prefaces, philosophical "scraps" and
"postscripts," literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian
polemics, and retrospective self-interpretations. His arsenal of
rhetoric includes irony, satire, parody, humor, polemic and a
dialectical method of "indirect communication" – all designed to
deepen the reader's subjective passionate engagement with ultimate
existential issues. Like his role models Socrates and Christ,
Kierkegaard takes how one lives one's life to be the prime criterion
of being in the truth. Kierkegaard's closest literary and
philosophical models are Plato, J.G. Hamann, G.E. Lessing, and his
teacher of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen Poul Martin
Møller, although Goethe, the German Romantics, Hegel, Kant and the
logic of Adolf Trendelenburg are also important influences. His prime
theological influence is Martin Luther, although his reactions to his
Danish contemporaries N.F.S. Grundtvig and H.L. Martensen are also
crucial. In addition to being dubbed "the father of existentialism,"
Kierkegaard is best known as a trenchant critic of Hegel and
Hegelianism and for his invention or elaboration of a host of
philosophical, psychological, literary and theological categories,
including: anxiety, despair, melancholy, repetition, inwardness,
irony, existential stages, inherited sin, teleological suspension of
the ethical, Christian paradox, the absurd, reduplication,
universal/exception, sacrifice, love as a duty, seduction, the
demonic, and indirect communication.
1. Life (1813-55)
a. Father and Son: Inherited Melancholy
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on May 5th 1813 in Copenhagen. He was
the seventh and last child of wealthy hosier, Michael Pedersen
Kierkegaard and Ane Sørensdatter Lund, a former household servant and
distant cousin of Michael Kierkegaard. This was Michael Kierkegaard's
second marriage, which came within a year of his first wife's death
and four months into Ane Lund's first pregnancy. Michael Kierkegaard
was a deeply melancholic man, sternly religious and carried a heavy
burden of guilt, which he imposed on his children. Søren Kierkegaard
often lamented that he had never had a childhood of carefree
spontaneity, but that he had been "born old." As a starving shepherd
boy on the Jutland heath Michael had cursed God. His surname derived
from the fact that his family was indentured to the parish priest, who
provided a piece of the church (Kirke) farm (Gaard) for the family's
use. The name Kirkegaard (in older spelling Kierkegaard) more commonly
means 'churchyard' or 'cemetery.' A sense of doom and death seemed to
hover over Michael Kierkegaard for most of his 82 years. Although his
material fortunes soon turned around dramatically, he was convinced
that he had brought a curse on his family and that all his children
were doomed to die by the age attained by Jesus Christ (33). Of
Michael's seven children, only Peter Christian and Søren Aabye
survived beyond this age.
At age 12 Michael Kierkegaard was summoned to Copenhagen to work for
his uncle as a journeyman in the cloth trade. Michael turned out to be
an astute businessman and by the age of 24 had his own flourishing
business. He subsequently inherited his uncle's fortune, and augmented
his wealth by some felicitous investments during the state bankruptcy
of 1813 (the year, as Søren later put it, in which so many bad notes
were put into circulation). Michael retired young and devoted himself
to the study of theology, philosophy and literature. He bequeathed to
his surviving sons Peter and Søren not only material wealth, but also
supremely sharp intellect, a fathomless sense of guilt, and a
relentless burden of melancholy. Although his father was wealthy,
Søren was brought up rather stringently. He stood out at school
because of his plain, unfashionable apparel and spindly stature. He
learned to avoid teasing only by honing a caustic wit and a canny
appreciation of other people's psychological weaknesses. He was sent
to one of Copenhagen's best schools, The School of Civic Virtue
[Borgerdydskolen], to receive a classical education. More than twice
as much time was devoted to Latin in this school than to any other
subject. Søren distinguished himself academically at school,
especially in Latin and history, though according to his classmates he
struggled with Danish composition. This became a real problem later,
when he tried desperately to break into the Danish literary scene as a
writer. His early publications were characterized by complex Germanic
constructions and excessive use of Latin phrases. But eventually he
became a master of his mother tongue, one of the two great stylists of
Danish in his time, together with Hans Christian Andersen.
Kierkegaard's father is a constant presence in his authorship. He
appears in stories of sacrifice, of inherited melancholy and guilt, as
the archetypal patriarch, and even in explicit dedications at the
beginning of several edifying discourses. Kierkegaard's mother, on the
other hand, never gets a mention in any of the writings – not even in
his journal on the day of her death. His mother-tongue, though, is
omnipresent. If we conjoin this fact with the remark in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript (1846) that "… an omnipresent person should be
recognizable precisely by being invisible," we could speculate that
the mother is even more present than the father, pervading all but the
foreign language insertions in the texts. But whether or not there is
any substance in this speculation, the invisibility of the mother and
the treatment of women in general are indicative of Kierkegaard's
uneasy relationship with the opposite sex.
b. Regina Olsen: The Sacrifice of Love
Søren drifted into the study of theology at the University of
Copenhagen, but soon broadened his study to include philosophy and
literature. He started rather desultorily, and enjoyed a relatively
dissolute time, even aspiring to cut the figure of a dandy. He ran up
debts, which his father reluctantly paid, but eventually knuckled down
to finish his degree when his father died in 1838. It seemed he was
destined for a life as a pastor in the Danish People's Church. In
1840, just before he enrolled at the Pastoral Seminary, he became
engaged to Regina Olsen. This engagement was to form the basis of a
great literary love story, propagated by Kierkegaard through his
published writings and his journals. It also provided an occasion for
Kierkegaard to define himself further as an outsider. For several
years (at least since 1835) Kierkegaard had been dabbling with the
idea of becoming a writer. The wealth he had inherited from his father
enabled him to support himself comfortably without the need to work
for a living. But it was not really enough to support a wife, let
alone a wife and children. Furthermore, Kierkegaard harbored an
undisclosed secret, something dark and personal, which he thought it
his duty to confide to a wife, but which he dared not. Whether it was
some sexual indiscretion, an inherited sexual disease, his innate
melancholy, an egotistical mania to become a writer, or something
else, we can only speculate. But when it came to the crunch, it seemed
sufficient to make him break off the engagement rather than to reveal
it to Regina. Thereafter, Kierkegaard frequently used marriage as a
trope for "the universal" – especially for the universal demands made
by social mores. Correlatively, becoming an "exception" was both a
task and constantly in need of justification. The tortuous dialectic
of universal and exception, worked out in terms of the sacrifices of
love, subsequently informs much of Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and
Trembling, Prefaces, and Stages on Life's Way. A frequent foil for the
trope of marriage as the universal is the figure of a young man
"poeticized" by a broken engagement, who thereby becomes "an
exception." Only when the young man is "poeticized" in the direction
of the religious, however, is there any question of his being a
"justified exception." Kierkegaard's ultimate justification for
breaking off his own engagement was his dedication to a life of
writing as a religious poet, under the direction of divine Governance.
As a measure of the importance the relationship to Regina had for his
life, Kierkegaard adapted a line from Virgil's Aeneid II,3 as "a motto
for part of his life's suffering": Infandum me jubes Regina renovare
dolorem ("Queen [Regina], the sorrow you bid me revive is
unspeakable").
c. The Master of Irony and the Seductions of Writing
During the period of his engagement Kierkegaard was also busy writing
his Master's dissertation in philosophy, On the Concept of Irony: with
constant reference to Socrates (1841). This was later automatically
converted to a doctorate (1854). Kierkegaard had petitioned the king
to write his dissertation in Danish – only the third such request to
be granted. Usually academic dissertations had to be written and
defended in Latin. Kierkegaard was allowed to write his dissertation
in Danish, but had to condense it into a series of theses in Latin, to
be defended publicly in Latin, before the degree would be awarded.
Almost immediately after his dissertation defense, Kierkegaard broke
off his engagement to Regina. He then undertook the first of four
journeys to Berlin – his only trips abroad apart from a brief trip to
Sweden. During this first trip to Berlin Kierkegaard completed most of
the first volume of Either/Or (much of the second volume already
having been completed).
Throughout the second half of the 1830s Kierkegaard had aspired to
become part of the pre-eminent literary set in Copenhagen. This
centered on Professor J.L. Heiberg, playwright, philosopher,
aesthetician, journal publisher, and doyen of Copenhagen's literati.
Heiberg had been credited with introducing Hegel's philosophy to
Denmark, though in fact there had already been lectures on Hegel by
the Norwegian philosopher Henrik Steffens among others. Nevertheless,
the fact that Heiberg gave Hegel's work his imprimatur accelerated its
acceptance into mainstream Danish intellectual life. By the end of the
1830s Hegelianism dominated Copenhagen's philosophy, theology and
aesthetics. Of course this engendered some resistance, including that
from Kierkegaard's professors of philosophy F.C. Sibbern and Poul
Martin Møller. One of Hegelianism's most illustrious local exponents
was Kierkegaard's archrival H.L. Martensen (professor of theology at
Copenhagen University, later Bishop Primate of the Danish People's
Church). Martensen, just five years senior to Kierkegaard, was firmly
entrenched in the Heiberg literary set, and anticipated at least one
of Kierkegaard's pet literary projects – an analysis of the figure of
Faust. In his journals, as part of his practice at becoming a writer,
Kierkegaard had been fascinated with three great literary figures from
the Middle Ages, who he thought embodied the full range of modern
aesthetic types. These figures were Don Juan, Faust, and the Wandering
Jew. They embodied sensuality, doubt and despair respectively.
Martensen's publication on Faust pre-empted Kierkegaard's budding
literary project, though the latter eventually found expression in the
first volume of Either/Or (1843). Meanwhile, Kierkegaard continued to
seek Heiberg's seal of approval. His first major breakthrough was an
address to the University of Copenhagen's Student Association on the
issue of freedom of the press. This was a satirical conservative
riposte to a previous address in favor of more liberal press laws, and
was the first broadside by Kierkegaard in a long career of lambasting
the popular press, especially insofar as it supported political
agitation for democracy. In this instance, however, it seemed
motivated more by a desire to showcase his wit and erudition than by
any deeper engagement with the political issues. The freedom of the
press had been severely undermined by King Frederik VI's ordinance of
1799, and was threatened with full censorship by his press legislation
of 1834. The Society for the Proper Use of Press Freedom was formed in
1835 to combat this development. Kierkegaard followed up his speech
with an article in Heiberg's paper, The Copenhagen Flying Post (1836).
The article, published pseudonymously, was so clever and polished that
some people mistook it for the work of Heiberg himself. This amounted
to his calling card for invitation to the Heiberg literary salon.
Kierkegaard followed this with further pseudonymous articles on the
same topic. But his first monograph was a 70-page review of Hans
Christian Andersen's novel, Only a Fiddler. This too was a strategic
move to break into the inner sanctum of Heiberg's circle. Andersen was
emerging as a major talent in Danish letters, having published poetry,
plays and two novels, which had almost immediately been translated
into German. Only a Fiddler was on a topic dear to Kierkegaard's heart
– genius. Andersen's prime claim was that genius needs nurturing, and
can succumb to circumstance and disappear without trace. Kierkegaard,
in his book-length review From the Papers of One Still Living (1838),
disagreed stridently, maintaining that the spark of genius could never
be extinguished, but only augmented by adversity. Furthermore, he
developed a theory of the novel in which he asserted that to be worth
its salt, a novel had to be informed by a "life-view" and a
"life-development." He criticized Andersen's novel for its dependence
on contingent features from Andersen's own life, rather than being
transfigured by a mature philosophy of life with clarity of purpose.
He contrasted Andersen's novel unfavorably in this respect with the
novel by Heiberg's mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, A Story of Everyday
Life. Kierkegaard was to return to Gyllembourg as a novelist in his
review of her Two Ages in A Literary Review (1846). He was also to
write a review of the work of Heiberg's wife Louise, Denmark's leading
actress, in The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848).
d. The "Authorship": From Melancholy to Humor
Neither the articles in Heiberg's papers, nor the monograph on
Andersen as novelist had gained Kierkegaard secure membership of
Heiberg's circle – though he was an occasional visitor there. With the
breaking of his engagement to Regina, the completion of a major
academic book (The Concept of Irony), his decision to devote himself
to writing, and the trip to Berlin both to audit Schelling's lectures
(along with Karl Marx, Jacob Burckhardt and other luminaries) and to
concentrate on his new literary project (Either/Or), Kierkegaard was
about to embark on what he later, retrospectively, called his
"authorship." This was eventually to comprise all the "aesthetic"
pseudonymous works from Victor Eremita's Either/Or to Johannes
Climacus's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Edifying Discourses
under Kierkegaard's own name (up to 1846), and Two Ages: The Age of
Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review (by S. Kierkegaard).
In short, these were the works published between Kierkegaard's first
and final visits to Berlin.
Either/Or burst upon the Copenhagen reading public with great force.
It was immediately understood to be a major literary event. It was
also regarded as scandalous by some, since its first volume portrayed
the cynical, bored aestheticism of the modern flâneur, culminating in
"The Seducer's Diary." Many, including Heiberg, took this to be a
thinly disguised account of Kierkegaard's own treatment of Regina
Olsen. Most of the reviews, including Heiberg's, concentrated on the
scurrilous content of the first volume of the book. But other reviews
read the two-volume work as a whole, and discovered the edifying and
ethical framework in which the aesthetic point of view was to be
assessed. Nevertheless, Heiberg's review deeply offended Kierkegaard,
and marked the point at which his relationship to Heiberg changed from
aspiring associate to embittered critic. Hereafter in the "authorship"
Heiberg became the target of unrelenting satire. He and Martensen were
the main representatives of Danish Hegelianism, which is attacked at
various points in the "authorship" – particularly in Prefaces (1844)
and in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It is worth noting that
Hegel himself comes in for much less criticism, and much more positive
endorsement, in Kierkegaard's work than is commonly assumed. It is the
Christian Hegelianism of Danish intellectuals that is the main target
of his critiques. The "authorship" comprises two parallel series of
texts. On the one hand are the pseudonymous works, which purportedly
follow a dialectical trajectory of existential "stages" from the
aesthetic, through the ethical, to the religious, and ultimately to
the paradoxical religious stage of Christian faith. On the other hand
are the Edifying Discourses, which are published under Kierkegaard's
own name, which resemble sermons on biblical texts, and which are
addressed to a readership already presumed to be Christian. The
pseudonymous authorship starts with an existential type modeled on the
German Romantic aesthete – the ironic, urbane flâneur whose main
concern is to avoid boredom and to maintain a cerebral spectator's
interest in life and its sensuous pleasures. Ironically, this aesthete
is beset with melancholy. His greatest happiness is his unhappiness,
as the section of Either/Or entitled "The Unhappiest One" concludes.
Although boredom is stated to be the negative motivation for the
aesthete's actions, at a deeper level we can discern that it is escape
from melancholy and despair that are the real motivators. As part of
the dialectical framework of the "authorship," Kierkegaard says there
are also intermediate states between the discrete existential stages.
These he calls "confinia" or border areas. Between the aesthetic and
ethical stages lies the confinium of irony. Between the ethical and
religious stages lies the confinium of humor. Humor is defined as
"irony to a higher power" – so it does not wear its meaning on its
sleeve. It is also to be understood as an inclusive, magnanimous state
of affirming "both/and" (both the aesthetic and the ethical, both the
tragic and the comic) rather than the ethically exclusive "either/or."
The author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus is
a self-professed "humorist" in this sense. Although he purports to
give the reader the truth about Christianity, he also "revokes" all he
has said in that book. The religious humorist purports to go beyond
the aesthetic and the ethical by choosing the religious exclusively,
yet by virtue of the absurd, gets the aesthetic and the ethical back
again within the religious. In terms of his own psychological economy,
Kierkegaard seems to have been struggling to lose his melancholy and
have it at the same time. It seems to have served him as an essential
motor of aesthetic productivity, but was also a constant source of
suffering from which he sought escape. For a long time Kierkegaard
reconciled himself to his life of aesthetic self-indulgence as an
author with the idea that it was all for a limited time. Once his
"authorship' was complete, he would retire from writing and become a
country pastor ministering to the souls of simple folk. Authorship was
both a demonic temptation and a means of self-justification as an
exception to the universal demands of society's ethics. But just as he
was on the point of completing the "authorship," Kierkegaard managed
to provoke an attack on himself by the press, which demanded further
work as an author in response.
e. The "Second Authorship": Self-Sacrifice, Love, Despair, and the God-Man
Kierkegaard provoked an attack on himself by the journal The Corsair.
The journal, edited by the talented Jewish author Meïr Goldschmidt,
specialized in ruthless satirical attacks on contemporary Danish
authors. Yet, perhaps because of the esteem in which Goldschmidt held
him, Kierkegaard had been spared. Kierkegaard found this favorable
treatment offensive (partly out of vanity, ostensibly because of his
ongoing critique of the press's influence on public opinion). So he
publicly challenged The Corsair to do its worst. It did. It launched a
series of attacks on Kierkegaard, more personal than literary, and
focused on his odd appearance and his relationship with Regina. In
some wicked caricatures it portrayed him with one trouser leg shorter
than the other, with a sway back, and riding on a woman's (Regina's)
back with stick in hand. These caricatures made a laughing stock of
Kierkegaard in Copenhagen, to the extent that he was mocked in the
street and had to give up his habit of walking around the inner city
to talk with all and sundry.
But it galvanized him to begin a "second authorship." This time the
edifying discourses under his own name were supplemented with works by
the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Anti-Climacus represents an idealized
Christian point of view – one that Kierkegaard professed is higher
than he had been able to achieve in his own life. The only other
pseudonyms to appear in this "second authorship" were Inter et Inter,
author of The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress, and
"H.H." author of "Two Ethical-Religious Essays." In addition the
"second authorship" comprises: Works of Love (1847), The Sickness Unto
Death (1849), Practice in Christianity (1850), as well as various
edifying discourses, including Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits
(1847), The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849), Three
Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849), Two Discourses at the
Communion on Fridays (1851), and For Self-Examination (1851). He also
published a retrospective self-interpretation of his writings to date,
On My Work as an Author (under his own name – 1851). In addition
Kierkegaard wrote various works at this time which he decided not to
publish. The most significant of these are: The Book on Adler and The
Point of View for My Work as an Author. The former gives a detailed
analysis of the "phenomenon" of Adolph Adler, a pastor in the Danish
People's Church who claimed to have had a divine revelation. He was
deemed mad by the church authorities and pensioned off. Adler had been
a leading Hegelian in the 1840s, but on Kierkegaard's analysis ends up
being "a Satire on Hegelian Philosophy and the Present Age."
Kierkegaard makes an immanent critique of Adler's writings to
demonstrate their confusion and the absence of revelation. Kierkegaard
published only the addendum to The Book on Adler as "The Difference
between a Genius and an Apostle" in "Two Ethical Religious Essays."
The Point of View for My Work as an Author sets out Kierkegaard's
(retrospective) interpretation of his authorship. It is subtitled: "A
Direct Communication, Report to History." It explains in direct terms
the dialectic of indirect communication, but Kierkegaard was uncertain
whether its directness at that time was dialectically correct for the
authorship and refrained from publishing it. The "second authorship"
reintroduces various concepts from the "aesthetic authorship," but
"transfigured" by the light of Christian faith. One of the most
significant of these is "despair," which is a transfigured version of
"anxiety." Both concepts are illuminated by reference to the notion of
sin, and both are constitutive of the dialectic of selfhood. Only by
acknowledging our ultimate dependence on God's grace is it possible to
overcome despair, and to become a self (paradoxically by becoming as
"nothing" before God). Another concept transfigured in the "second
authorship" is "love." In the "aesthetic authorship" "love" is
understood in pagan terms, primarily as eros – or desire. Desire is
preferential, based on a lack (we only desire what we don't have,
according to Plato's Symposium), and is ultimately selfish. Christian
love is understood as agape. It is self-sacrificing, directed to the
neighbor (without personal preference), is conceived as a spiritual
duty rather than a psychological feeling, and comes as a gift from God
rather than from the attraction between human beings. Its only perfect
model is in the person of Jesus Christ, the God-man. We can see in the
journey from eros in the "aesthetic authorship" to agape in the
"second authorship" a personal attempt by Kierkegaard to sublimate his
selfish desire for Regina into a self-sacrificing universal duty to
love the neighbor. On his own terms this is impossible for a human
being to achieve alone. It is only possible if love as agape is
received as a gift by the grace of God.
f. The Attack on the Danish People's Church
The "authorship" and "second authorship" had been governed by
Kierkegaard's elaborate method of "indirect communication." This
method, inspired by Socrates and Christ, is designed to elicit
self-examination from the reader in order to start the process of
existential transfiguration that is entailed by Christian faith. It is
designed to make it harder for the reader to appropriate the text
objectively and dispassionately. Instead, the text is folded back on
itself, layered with riddles and paradoxes, and designed to be a
mirror in which the way the reader judges the text amounts to a
self-judgment on the reader. The different works in the "authorships"
are related to one another dialectically, so that a reader has to
traverse a complicated journey to arrive at the threshold of Christian
faith. The method of indirect communication requires meticulous
attention to each word, and to the dialectical trajectory of the whole
oeuvre. At times, the subtlety of the method nearly drove Kierkegaard
to distraction, and he had to rely on the intervention of "Governance"
[Styrelse], to let him know whether it was appropriate to publish the
works he had written. On the Point of View for My Work as an Author: A
Report to History, and The Book on Adler, failed to get Governance's
stamp of approval for publication.
But ultimately Kierkegaard began to think that this elaborate method
of indirect communication, and his obsession with linguistic detail
were temptations to the demonic. Besides, time was running out and
some direct, decisive intervention in Danish church politics was
necessary. This was precipitated by the death of the Bishop Primate of
the Danish People's Church, J.P. Mynster (1854). Mynster had been the
family pastor in Michael Kierkegaard's day, and Søren Kierkegaard had
always had a filial respect for him. But when the new Bishop Primate
elect, H.L. Martensen, announced that Mynster had been "a witness to
the truth" Kierkegaard could not restrain himself. He launched a
stinging attack on the established church in a series of articles in
the newspaper Fædrelandet [The Fatherland], and by means of a
broadsheet called The Instant [or more literally "The Glint of an
Eye"](1855) and in a series of other short, sharp pieces including
This Must Be Said, So Let It Be Said (1855), and What Christ Judges of
Official Christianity (1855). On September 28th 1855 Kierkegaard
collapsed in the street. A few days later he was admitted to
Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, where he died on November 11th.
2. The "Aesthetic Authorship"
a. On the Concept of Irony and Either/Or
Although Kierkegaard explicitly leaves On the Concept of Irony out of
his "authorship," it functions as an important preface to that body of
work. According to the theory of existential stages contained in the
authorship, irony functions as a "confinium" [border area] between the
aesthetic and the ethical. But it also functions as a point of entry
to the aesthetic. As Kierkegaard argues in On the Concept of Irony,
irony is a midwife at the birth of individual subjectivity. It is a
distancing device, which folds immediate experience back on itself to
create a space of self-reflection. In Socrates it is incarnated as
"infinite negativity" – a force that undermines all received opinion
to leave Socrates' interlocutors bewildered – and responsible for
their own thoughts and values. That is, Socratic irony forces his
interlocutors to reflect on themselves, to distance themselves
critically from their immediate beliefs and values.
Although the aesthetic can consist in immediate immersion in sensuous
experience, as in the case of Don Juan, Kierkegaard's most developed
portrait is of the reflective aesthete in Either/Or volume 1. Faust is
the first example of a reflective aesthete. He is lost in reflective
ennui and craves a return to immediate experience. This is the basis
of his attraction to Margarete, who embodies innocent immediacy. At
its most extreme, the aesthete is unhappily and utterly self-alienated
by means of temporal dislocation. "The Unhappiest One" – an echo of
Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" – hopes for that which can only be
remembered, and remembers that which can only be hoped. He or she
lives only in the modality of possibility and never in the modality of
actuality, and therefore fails to be self-present. Yet, by means of
reflective self-knowledge, the prudent rotation of moods and the
arbitrary focus of interest, this "unhappiness" can be transformed
into the greatest happiness for the aesthete. The "infinitizing"
element of possibility becomes the realm of freedom, where even the
most banal events can be "poeticized" by aesthetic sensibility.
Actuality is transformed into nothing more than an occasion for
generating reflective possibilities, rather than being an obstacle or
a task. Johannes the seducer need see only a dainty ankle descending
from a carriage to reconstruct the whole woman – just as Cuvier
reconstructs the whole dinosaur from a single bone. The
reconstruction, in the case of Johannes however, is not for the sake
of knowing what's real, but is for the sake of his own aesthetic
titillation. If the actual doesn't fit Johannes' reflective desires,
he manipulates it and himself until he generates a story that
satisfies him. His seduction of Cordelia is not aimed at mere sexual
consummation, but more at narrative consummation – she is to be used
as an occasion, and manipulated in whatever ways Johannes deems
necessary, to become the character in the story of seduction he has
predetermined. But this detachment from the actual, by self-centered
immersion in reflective possibility, is exactly what On the Concept of
Irony had accused the German Romantics of achieving with their use of
irony. The first volume of Either/Or just gives us a more developed
version, artistically construed from the point of view of German
Romantic irony. On the Concept of Irony had already argued for the
necessity to go beyond immersion in irony, or mere possibility – to
become a "master of irony," so that irony could be used strategically
for ethical and religious ends. The title Either/Or presents us with a
choice between the aesthetic and the ethical. The first volume is
written from the point of view of the reflective aesthete, who has run
astray in possibility. Although its main theme is love, this is
conceived selfishly as erotic desire. The papers that comprise volume
1 are written ad se ipsum [to himself]. The aesthete's brilliant
pyrotechnics are demonically self-enclosed, ironically cutting him off
from genuine communication. The second volume, on the other hand, is
written by a judge, who advocates transparency and openness in
communication. It is written in the form of letters, as a direct
communication to the aesthetic author of the first volume. The letters
implore him to realize the limitations of his demonic self-enclosure,
and to embrace his ethical duties to others. Whereas the paradigm of
love in volume 1 is seduction, the paradigm of love in volume 2 is
marriage. Marriage is a trope for the universal claims of civic duty.
It requires an open, intimate, transparent, honest relation to an
other. Yet the first section of volume 2 argues for the aesthetic
validity of marriage. Judge Wilhelm wants to persuade the aesthete
that ethical love is compatible with aesthetic love – that love in
marriage does not exclude sensual enjoyment and love of beauty as
such, but only the selfishness of lust for "the flesh." The latter is
a category excluded by Christianity. It pertains to the body and
psyche, to the exclusion of spirit, which is the definitive Christian
category. Yet the claims of the judge ring hollow. Either/Or is
presented as a whole book, edited by Victor Eremita (the victorious
hermit). It presents us with a radical, exclusive choice between the
aesthetic and the ethical, yet the judge tries to show their
compatibility in marriage. The final word of the book belongs neither
to the aesthete, the judge, nor even to the pseudonymous editor, but
to an anonymous parson. His sermon, "The Edification Which Lies In The
Fact That In Relation To God We Are Always In The Wrong," alerts the
reader to the impossibility of escaping sin through ethics. The
assumption shared by both the aesthete and the ethicist is that love
can provide a means for ascent to the divine. Whereas erotic desire
provides a means for the aesthete to ascend to a state of reflective
possibility unconstrained by actuality, in which he becomes his own
creator-god, the judge conceives ethical love to be a dialectical
advance on aesthetic selfishness – in the direction of God. The whole
pseudonymous authorship, from Either/Or to Concluding Unscientific
Postscriptcan be read as a parody of the notion of a scala paradisi by
means of which humans can ascend to the divine. The original model for
this ladder to paradise is Plato's account of love [eros] in the
Symposium. But the model is appropriated by many subsequent writers,
including Augustine and Johannes Climacus, a sixth century monk from
Mt. Sinai, who wrote a book called Scala Paradisi. Kierkegaard borrows
this name for his pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments and
Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But it is in order to parody the
notion that humans can ascend to the divine under their own power.
Each of the pseudonymous books in the "authorship" makes a gesture of
movement from human to divine, whether by means of the aesthetic
sublime, ethical virtue, the religious leap of faith, or philosophical
dialectics. But in each case the apparent movement is "revoked" in
some way. Ultimately Kierkegaard endorses the Lutheran view that human
beings are radically dependent on God to descend to us. Human beings
have no inherent capacity for transcending their own immanence, but
are completely reliant on God's grace to connect with alterity.
b. Fear and Trembling and Repetition
The next two books in the pseudonymous authorship, Fear and Trembling
and Repetition, are supposed to represent a higher stage on the
dialectical ladder – the religious. They are supposed to have moved
beyond the aesthetic and the ethical. Fear and Trembling explicitly
problematizes the ethical, while Repetition problematizes the notion
of movement. Fear and Trembling reconstructs the story of Abraham and
Isaac from the Old Testament. It tries to understand psychologically,
ethically and religiously what Abraham was doing in obeying an
apparent command from God to sacrifice his son. It apparently
concludes that Abraham is "a knight of faith" who is religiously
justified in his "teleological suspension of the ethical." The ethic
in question here is the civic virtue championed by Judge Wilhelm in
Either/Or – corresponding to Hegel's Sittlichkeit [customary
morality]. The end for which this ethic is suspended is the
unconditional command of God. But such obedience raises difficult
epistemological questions – how do we distinguish the voice of God
from, say, a delusional hallucination? The answer, which induces fear
and trembling, is that we can only do so by faith. Abraham can say
nothing to justify his actions – to do so would return him to the
realm of human immanence and the sphere of ethics. The difference
between Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and Abraham
is that Agamemnon could justify his action in terms of customary
morality. The sacrifice, however painful, was demanded for the sake of
the success of the Greek military mission against Troy. Such
sacrifices, for purposes greater than the individuals involved, were
intelligible to the society of the time. Abraham's sacrifice would
have served no such purpose. It was unjustifiable in terms of
prevailing morality, and was indistinguishable from murder. The
ineffability of Abraham's action is underscored by the pseudonym
Kierkegaard chose as author of Fear and Trembling, namely, Johannes de
silentio. But while Fear and Trembling is supposed to have moved
beyond the aesthetic and the ethical, its subtitle is "a dialectical
lyric." Although its subject matter is ineffable and its author
silent, it effuses aesthetically on its theme. It ends with an
"Epilogue" that asserts that, as far as love and faith go, we cannot
build on what the previous generation has achieved. We have to begin
from the beginning. We can never "go further."
Repetition begins with a discussion of the analysis of motion by the
Eleatic philosophers. It goes on to distinguish two forms of movement
with respect to knowledge of eternal truth: recollection and
repetition. Recollection is understood on the model of Plato's
anamnesis – a recovery of a truth already present in the individual,
which has been repressed or forgotten. This is a movement backwards,
since it is retrieving knowledge from the past. It can never discover
eternal truth with which it was previously unacquainted. In contrast,
repetition is defined as "recollection forwards." It is supposed to be
the definitive movement of Christian faith. The pseudonym Constantin
Constantius congratulates the Danish language on the word
"Gjentagelse" [repetition], which more literally means "taking again."
The emphasis in the Danish, then, is on the action involved in the
repetition of faith rather than on the intellection involved in
recollection. Christian faith is not a matter of intellectual
reflection, but of living a certain sort of life, namely, imitating
[repeating] the life of Christ. Despite this verbal analysis of the
difference between recollection and repetition, the characters in
Repetition fail to achieve religious repetition. The pseudonymous
author fails in his attempt to repeat a journey to Berlin, and the
"young man" who has been "poeticized" by love seems to move in the
direction of the religious, but ultimately gets no further than
religious poetry. He becomes obsessed with Job, the biblical paradigm
of repetition. He substitutes the book of Job for the beloved he has
rejected, even taking it to bed with him. But in the end the "young
man" turns out to be no more than a fiction invented by Constantius as
a psychological experiment. He falls back into the realm of
aesthetics, of mere possibility, a figment for the psyche rather than
the spirit.
c. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Prefaces
In June 1844 Kierkegaard published three pseudonymous books:
Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Prefaces.
Philosophical Fragments, the first book by the pseudonym Johannes
Climacus, tackles the question of how there can be an historical point
of departure for an eternal truth. This picks up from Constantius'
discussion of the difference between repetition and recollection. But
Johannes uses the perspective and vocabulary of philosophy, rather
than Constantius' aesthetic irony. He introduces the paradox of the
Christian incarnation as the stumbling block for any attempts by
reason to ascend logically to the divine. The idea that the eternal,
infinite, transcendent God could simultaneously be incarnated as a
finite human being, in time, to die on the cross is an offense to
reason. It is even too absurd an idea for humans to have invented,
according to Climacus, so the idea itself must have a transcendent
origin. In order for humans to encounter transcendent, eternal truth
other than through recollection, the condition for reception of that
truth must also have come from outside. If we have Christian faith, it
is Christ as teacher who is the condition for receiving this truth –
and he is conceived, precisely, as an incursion of the transcendent
deity into the realm of human immanence. There can be no ascent to
this truth by reason and logic, contra Hegel, who tries to demonstrate
that "universal philosophical science" ultimately reveals "the
Absolute."
The emphasis Climacus places on the paradox of the Christian
incarnation, together with his assertion that this causes offense to
reason, have prompted many to the view that Kierkegaard is an
"irrationalist" about Christian faith. Some take this to mean that his
view of faith is contrary to reason, or transcendent of reason – in
either case, exclusive of reason. Others have sought to find means of
reconciling Climacus' claims with some more extended notion of reason.
It is important in considering these issues to distinguish
Kierkegaard's position from that of his pseudonym, and to take into
account the point of view from which this consideration is made.
Kierkegaard's main aim in having Climacus make these claims is to
undermine the idea that philosophical reason can be used as a scala
paradisi. His principle target is Hegelianism, but he is also trying
to distinguish pagan (especially Platonic) epistemology from Christian
epistemology. We must also bear in mind that under the influence of
Christian faith, all experience is transfigured ("everything is new in
Christ"). This includes the experience of reason, as well as ethics
and aesthetics. Ethics, for example, might be teleologically suspended
in faith, but is recouped within Christian faith – though it comes to
have another meaning. It is no longer merely customary morality, but
is the morality sanctioned by Christian love, which is deontological,
centered on spirit rather than sympathy, self-sacrificing, and is
mediated by God (the "third" in every love relation). Similarly
aesthetics is transfigured under Christian faith, from self-serving
reflections confined to the realm of possibility, to the beauty
inherent in altruistic self-effacing acts of love. Reason itself comes
to have another meaning under Christian faith, so that it no longer
takes offense at the paradox, but recognizes its necessity given the
exigencies of relating the transcendent to the immanent without
reduction. Reason is recontextualized within existence, rather than
being elevated to absorb the whole of existence. Prefaces: Light
Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require reinforces the
polemic against Hegel's speculative ladder of reason. Although much of
its content is devoted to satirical broadsides at J.L. Heiberg, H.L.
Martensen, and the popular press in Copenhagen, its starting point is
the paradox of philosophical prefaces articulated in the preface to
Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel's assumption is that a
philosophical work should be a sort of Bildungsroman – a narrative by
means of which the reader's consciousness is dialectically developed
in the course of reading. If we assume the reader is to learn
something from the process of reading the book, then he or she will
not be in a position to understand the conclusions of the book until
they have worked their way through the content. By the time they reach
the end they will be conditioned by what they have read to understand
the conclusion. But a preface presents the conclusions to the book at
the outset. It is really an anticipatory postface rather than a
preface. The reader will really only be able to understand it after
having read the book. It is meant for orientation of the reader on
embarking on the voyage of self-development represented by the book.
But if it is a direct bridge into the book, the subject matter itself,
then it is really part of the book rather than a preface. If, on the
other hand, it stands radically outside the book, then it can't be a
bridge into the book and is redundant. This gap between preface and
book parallels the gap Hegel draws between "particular philosophical
sciences" (such as aesthetics, and history of philosophy) and
"universal philosophical science" (logic). The former must be used as
a contingent starting point, commensurate with the limited knowledge
of the reader, as a point of induction into logic. The particular can
retrospectively be subsumed within the universal, but cannot be
expanded to become the universal. It has been claimed, in accordance
with this position, that if the reader understands the preface to
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, he or she understands the whole of
Hegel's philosophy. But the condition for understanding the preface is
already to understand the whole of Hegel's philosophy. The
pseudonymous author of Prefaces, Nicholas Notabene, is a pedant whose
wife has forbidden him to be an author. He takes an author to be a
writer of books, and with cunning sophistry decides to write nothing
but prefaces "which are not the prefaces to any books." Notabene's
prefaces are analogues of human immanence – no amount of expansion
will make them bridges to the transcendent. All human immanence is a
"preface" to the divine. Only once the divine has come to us (in the
incarnation or through direct revelation) can we retrospectively
understand the status of our prefatory lives as mere prefaces. For
Kierkegaard there is only one book – the bible. We are never "authors"
of books, but only readers of "the old familiar text handed down from
the fathers." On the same day as he published Prefaces Kierkegaard
also published On the Concept of Anxiety by Vigilius Haufniensis
[Watchman of the Harbor - namely, Copenhagen]. Its subtitle is "A
Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of
Hereditary Sin." It is supposed to be a serious counterweight to the
"light reading" of Prefaces. But it forms part of the same polemic
against immanent human efforts to reach the divine. From the points of
view of psychology and theological dogmatics it elaborates the theme
of the sermon appended to Either/Or – that against God we are always
in the wrong. Sin is inescapable. Sin ultimately consists in being
outside of God. Only Jesus Christ, the God-man, is not in sin. Sin
consciousness comes into being as part of human psychological
development. It is absent from the innocent immediacy of childhood. It
awakens with sexual desire – when we want to possess another. Desire
is here understood as a lack that we want to fill. Possession, or
incorporation of the other, is thought to be the way to fulfill the
desire. In erotic love it feels as though part of ourselves is outside
of us, and needs to be reintegrated (as in Aristophanes' explanation
of love in Plato's Symposium). This is the beginning of
self-alienation and the loss of innocent immediacy. Self-alienation is
a necessary stage on the way to becoming a self. A self is a synthesis
of finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, body and soul, held
together by spirit. Only with the diremption of these aspects of the
self, through self-alienation, does spirit arise. But spirit can only
achieve the synthesis of self if it acknowledges its absolute
dependence in this task on God ("the power that posits it"). Long
before it gets to this stage, the person feels anxiety in the face of
self-alienation. Anxiety is an ambivalent state, "a sympathetic
antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy." It is the intimation of the
delights of freedom, but also of the dread responsibility that is a
consequence of freedom. Like vertigo, it is the simultaneous
fascination and fear of the abyss – a hypnotic possibility of falling
that induces the dizziness to actually fall. The main arena for the
exercise of freedom is in becoming a self. But this requires
alienation from one's immediate sensate being, taking ethical
responsibility for one's relations to other people, and
acknowledgement of one's ultimate dependence on God. Each of these
entails risk – and hence anxiety. One of the risks involved is the
possibility of falling prey to the demonic. A key definition of this
notion is "self-enclosed reserve" [Indesluttethed] – a state in which
the individual fails to relate to an other as other, but returns into
him or herself in narcissism or solipsism. Kierkegaard feared that his
convoluted, indirect writing could be his own form of the demonic, and
ultimately opted for more direct forms of communication.
d. Stages on Life's Way and Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Like many of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, Stages on Life's Way
repeats elements from earlier pseudonymous works. In particular, it
repeats the device of nesting narrators within narrators, it repeats
characters from Either/Or and Repetition, and it "repeats" "The
Seducer's Diary" in "Quidam's Diary." The latter was originally
conceived at the same time as "The Diary of the Seducer" but was to
differ by having the seducer undermined by his own depression once he
had won the girl. Stages also repeats the idea built up over the
sequence of pseudonymous works that human existence can be conceived
as falling into distinct "stages" or "spheres," which are related in a
dialectical progression. Stages repeats the same stages that have
already been traversed in the preceding works, apparently without
making any progress.
It is another example of the false ladder to paradise, exemplified by
Plato's ladder of eros. The first major section of Stages, "In Vino
Veritas," borrows its title from Plato's Symposium and is modeled
explicitly on that work, both structurally and thematically. It
consists in a group of men at a banquet, each discoursing in turn on
the nature of (erotic) love. This section of the book is followed by
"Some Reflections on Marriage" by Judge Wilhelm, to give an ethical
perspective on love. This is followed by "Quidam's Diary," which is
supposed to follow a trajectory from erotic love to religious
consciousness. But Quidam's diary is framed by the words of Frater
Taciturnus (a distorted repetition of Johannes de silentio), in which
he tells us that Quidam's diary was retrieved from the bottom of a
lake. It was enclosed in a box with the key locked inside – a symbol
of the demonic. Later Frater Taciturnus tells the reader explicitly
that Quidam is demonic "in the direction of the religious."
Furthermore, like the "young man" from Repetition, Quidam is only a
fiction invented by Frater Taciturnus to illustrate a point. As we
read through Stages it looks as though we are progressing from the
aesthetic, through the ethical to the religious. But Frater Taciturnus
pulls the ladder out from under our feet in his "Letter to the
Reader." He even suggests that there might not be any reader, in which
case he is content to talk to himself – i.e. return demonically into
himself, rather than relate himself earnestly to an actual other.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript repeats these movements of Stages.
It proclaims itself to be only a postscript to the Philosophical
Fragments, which any attentive reader of that book could have written,
and contains an extensive review of the pseudonymous authorship to
date. The self-proclaimed humorist, Johannes Climacus takes up the
problematic of Philosophical Fragments of whether there can be an
historical point of departure for eternal truth. He seems to conclude
that since it is impossible to demonstrate the objective truth of
Christianity's claims, the most the individual can do is to
concentrate on the how of appropriation of those claims. This issues
in the extensive discussion of inwardness and subjectivity, which is
usually taken as the basis for the accusation that Kierkegaard is an
"irrationalist." Climacus, but not Kierkegaard, proclaims that "truth
is subjectivity" (as well as "subjectivity is untruth"). Climacus also
makes a distinction between two types of religiousness: "Religiousness
A" and "Religiousness B." The former is the pagan conception of
religion and is characterized by intelligibility, immanence, and
recognition of continuity between temporality and eternity.
Religiousness B is dubbed "paradoxical religiousness" and is supposed
to represent the essence of Christianity. It posits a radical divide
between immanence and transcendence, a discontinuity between
temporality and eternity, yet also claims that the eternal came into
existence in time. This is a paradox and can only be believed "by
virtue of the absurd." The distinction between "Religiousness A" and
"Religiousness B" is another expression of the distinction between
recollection and repetition, or between eros and agape, or between
immanence and transcendence. It is supposed to mark the gulf between
Christianity and all other forms of faith. The paradox of the
Christian incarnation is presented as an offense to reason, which can
only be overcome by a leap of faith. But even a leap is under the
control of the individual. It might take more courage and induce more
anxiety than the steady step-by-step ascension of a ladder. One is out
over 70000 fathoms. But Climacus is a humorist. Humor is characterized
as a means of "revoking" existence. Although Climacus writes about
Christian faith, he doesn't live it. He represents in the modality of
possibility what can only be experienced in the modality of actuality.
At the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus explicitly
revokes everything he has said – though he is careful to add that to
say something and revoke it is not the same as never having said it at
all. That is, at the end of the pseudonymous scala paradisi, the
pseudonymous author proclaims that what he has said is misleading –
because it presents a continuity between immanent human categories of
thought and the divine in the form of analogy. But there is no analogy
to the divine. It is sui generis. It is "the book" to human life as
"preface."
3. The Edifying Discourses
a. Sermons, Deliberations, and Edifying Discourses
Simultaneously with the publication of the aesthetic pseudonymous
works, Kierkegaard published a series of works he called "Edifying
Discourses" [Opbyggelige Taler]. These were written under his own name
and most of them were dedicated "To the Late Michael Pedersen
Kierkegaard, Formerly a Clothing Merchant Here in the City, My
Father." Although they typically take a New Testament theme as their
point of departure, Kierkegaard explicitly denies that they are
sermons. This is because he had not been ordained, and so wrote
"without authority." They are also addressed to "that single
individual" and not to a congregation.
Kierkegaard distinguishes his "edifying discourses" as a genre from
other works he calls "deliberations" [Overveielser]. Edifying
discourses "build up" whereas deliberations are a "weighing up."
Edifying discourses presuppose Christian faith and terminology as
given and understood, and build on that. They are meant to augment the
faith and love of the Christian reader. Deliberations, while they may
ostensibly deal with the same subject matter, imply that the reader
stands outside the matter being weighed. But this is in a particular
sense. In weighing something on a scale, we measure two weights
against one another. In deliberating, the reader weighs the temporal
significance of the subject matter against its eternal significance.
The deliberation, as a type of writing, weighs into the reader's
balance of temporal and eternal with polemical force. It is meant to
turn the normal, worldly view topsy-turvy. Works of Love is subtitled
"Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses." It has the
polemical, topsy-turvy nature of deliberation, but contains within it
the form of the discourse. Furthermore, one of the explicit themes of
these discourses is edification. But because of the framework of
deliberation, the discourses about edification are not necessarily for
edification. They don't presuppose an understanding of the Christian
categories, but are meant to lead the reader to an understanding –
through deliberation. The earlier pseudonymous book, The Concept of
Anxiety is subtitled "A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation
on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin." Like Works of Love it is a
serious weighing up of various Christian concepts, in a manner
designed to provoke readers to rethink the relation between the
temporal and eternal in their lives. Kierkegaard uses yet other
related genres besides deliberations and edifying discourses. The
pseudonym Anti-Climacus uses the subtitles "A Christian Psychological
Exposition [Udvikling] for Edification and Awakening" (The Sickness
Unto Death) and "For Awakening and Making Inward" (Practice in
Christianity). These are written from an idealized Christian point of
view, so not only presuppose an understanding of the Christian
categories, but seek to raise the level of awareness to the highest
level of Christian faith.
b. Direct and Indirect Communication
Kierkegaard struggled to find appropriate means of communication that
would address the inward nature of Christian faith. He thought his
contemporaries had too much (objective) knowledge, which needed
stripping away, before they could achieve awareness of individual
inwardness. Everything was made too easy for people, with the press
providing ready-made opinions, popular culture providing ready-made
values, and speculative philosophy providing promissory notes in place
of real achievements. Kierkegaard's task as a communicator was,
initially, to make things more difficult. In order to do this, he
devised a method of indirect communication. This was designed to
confront the reader with paradox, contradiction, and difficulty by
means of refraction of the narrative point of view through pseudonyms,
prefaces, postscripts, interludes, preliminary expectorations,
repetitions, irony, revocation and other devices that obscure the
author's intention. These devices are meant to undermine the authority
of the author, so any "truths" contained in the text cannot merely be
learned by rote or appropriated "objectively." Instead, the text is
meant to supply a polished surface in which the reader comes to see
him or herself. The manner in which the reader appropriates the text,
understands it, and judges it will disclose more about the reader than
about the text.
Part of the method of indirect communication was to juxtapose two
series of texts: the pseudonymous texts and the "edifying discourses."
The latter were published under Kierkegaard's own name, and were
co-extensive with the pseudonymous authorship. They are evidence that
he was a religious author from the outset. The indirect method of the
pseudonymous works is often convoluted, obscure, and a combination of
personal confession and obfuscation (of those confessions). The whole
of the pseudonymous authorship from Either/Or to Concluding
Unscientific Postscript can be read as a parody of Hegel's
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – an enormously baroque
conceit that threatens to become demonic in its obscurity and
labyrinthine complexity. This complexity is balanced by the relatively
simple thematic variations on biblical texts to be found in the
edifying discourses. The latter were direct communications – but
addressed only to Christians who could understand them. The indirect
works, on the other hand, were designed to seduce or deceive into the
truth those who stand outside it – such as the Danish Hegelians and
their followers. By parodying Hegel's Encyclopedia, Kierkegaard was
undermining the whole system on which the Danish Hegelians placed so
much faith. He supplemented his parody of Hegel with more specific
jibes at particular Danish Hegelians throughout the "authorship."
Kierkegaard continued to write edifying discourses in conjunction with
the "second authorship," to accompany the works of the pseudonym
Anti-Climacus. After the "second authorship" he wrote Christian
discourses that were more polemical and strident than the edifying
discourses. They were equally "direct" – being published under his own
name, but addressed different emotions and values.
c. That Single Individual, My Reader
Kierkegaard's edifying discourses are addressed to "that single
individual, my reader." When he first used this address he meant it to
apply to Regina Olsen. But he came to see that it had a wider
application. He had polemicized from his earliest writings against the
press, and against cultural and political tendencies to "level"
individuals into homogeneous masses. His term of loathing for the
depersonalized, de-individualized instrument of leveling was "the
crowd." It corresponds to Nietzsche's notion of "the herd" and to
Heidegger's notion of "das Man." One subset of "the crowd" that
especially attracted Kierkegaard's ire was "the reading public." This
was the anonymous mass, consumer of the secondhand literary opinion of
"reviewers." Most reviewers, in Kierkegaard's opinion, were hasty,
ill-informed panderers to public opinion, so that reviewers and public
fed off each other in a vicious circle. Reviews were even written
without the reviewer having read the book, then circulated through
gossip by "the reading public" as final judgment on the book. The
anonymous circulation of public gossip is the antithesis of serious
engagement with truth on a personal level.
Christianity addresses the single individual. Its truths, according to
Kierkegaard, must be appropriated inwardly, seriously and with
infinite passion. Just as we cannot die another's death, we cannot
live another's faith. Existing inwardly in passion as an individual is
a prerequisite for Christian faith. Having Christian faith is a
prerequisite for understanding the edifying discourses. So the
edifying discourses are addressed to each single individual. The
pseudonymous works in the aesthetic authorship often have letters
addressed to the reader too. But, as in the case of the letters of
Constantine Constantius and Frater Taciturnus, they turn out to be
soliloquies addressed to themselves more than direct, open
communications to a reader posited as genuinely other.
4. THE "SECOND AUTHORSHIP"
a. Works of Love
Works of Love was written under Kierkegaard's own name. Its subtitle
places it within the genre of "Christian deliberations" – i.e.
polemical weighings-up of Christian notions. It does not presuppose an
existential understanding of Christian love, as it would were it an
"edifying discourse," but challenges the reader to open him or herself
to the specifically Christian understanding of love. For a reader who
understands love principally in terms of eros, the Christian notion of
love as agape is counterintuitive. Whereas eros is a preferential
feeling of desire, agape is a spiritual duty to serve the neighbor
(without discrimination in terms of preference). Whereas eros is
ultimately selfish, aimed at satisfying the lover's desire, agape is
selfless, requiring self-sacrifice. Whereas eros is often built on the
visual objectification of the beloved, agape requires the individual
to become "transparent" and "as nothing" before God. Whereas eros is
typically a relation between two people, agape always involves God as
the "third" in the relation.
Works of Love concentrates not so much on the understanding of love as
such, but on the understanding of works of love. Love will be known as
the fruit of these works of love. Since God is love, it can only be
known through the existential commitment of Christian faith. This
faith is only lived in the attempt to imitate the life of Christ.
Christ's life was itself God's principal work of love for human
beings. It is only through this work of love that we can know God as
love. The only true work of love is helping someone else achieve
autonomy through Christian love. But if that person sees that he or
she was dependent on some other human being to achieve autonomy, that
autonomy will be undone. The human author of a work of love must
disappear in the act of love, so that only the love is perceived and
only God is recognized as its author. This presents Kierkegaard with a
difficult task in writing Works of Love. If it helps its readers
achieve autonomy through an understanding of Christian love, and the
readers recognize Kierkegaard to be the author, it will fail to be a
work of love. Kierkegaard has to disappear as author in order for the
book to function as a work of love. He resorts to the device of the
dash [Tankestreg] to achieve his disappearance. He explicitly talks
about this use of the dash during the course of Works of Love, and
ends the penultimate section of the book with a dash (unfortunately
omitted from the English translation). The conclusion that follows the
dash is a presentation of the words of the Apostle John. As an
Apostle, John presents the word of God. The word of God is a record of
the life of Christ, which is God's work of love. So God's word is the
work of love. Kierkegaard, by means of the dash, erases his ego as an
author to allow the word of God to shine through – thereby preserving
Works of Love as a work of love.
b. Anti-Climacus
Anti-Climacus is the pseudonymous author of two of Kierkegaard's
mature works: The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and Practice in
Christianity (1850). As his name indicates, Anti-Climacus represents
the antithesis of Johannes Climacus. As we have seen, Climacus derives
his name from the monk who wrote Scala Paradisi, thereby embracing the
idea that it is possible for human beings to ascend to heaven under
their own power. The "aesthetic" authorship, culminating in Concluding
Unscientific Postscript, explores a number of possible modes of
scaling heaven – by means of erotic love, the Babel tower of aesthetic
poetry, ethical works, or speculative reason. All are found wanting.
Having established the absolute nature of transcendence through
repeated parodies of these vain attempts in the aesthetic authorship,
Kierkegaard proceeds to show through Anti-Climacus how various
aesthetic concepts are transfigured from an ideal Christian point of
view.
The central notions explored in The Sickness Unto Death are "despair"
and "the self." In this respect it is a Christian repetition of the
central themes of The Concept of Anxiety, with "despair" supplanting
"anxiety." Both explore the task of becoming a self from the points of
view of psychology and Christian faith. Both invoke sin as the
greatest obstacle to becoming a self. Yet paradoxically, becoming
conscious of sin is a prerequisite for faith and selfhood.
Anti-Climacus distinguishes between "human being" and "self." The
human being is a synthesis, of infinite and finite, temporal and
eternal, freedom and necessity, body and soul. The self, on the other
hand, is the process of relating these elements of synthesis to one
another. The self is the task of maintaining the proper equilibrium of
the synthesis. But this task is beyond the capacity of a mere human
being alone. Willing to be a self is itself a form of despair. Not
willing to be a self is also a form of despair. Being unaware of the
possibility of being a self is also a form of despair. The only
antidote to despair is Christian faith. Faith provides the missing
element in the synthesis, namely, an acknowledgement of God as the
necessary underpinning of the self-relation. But to become aware of
God, one first has to become aware of one's absolute difference from
God. This is the function of sin-consciousness. Sin-consciousness
presupposes God-consciousness. The ultimate form of despair is
despairing over one's sin, and thereby failing to accept God's
forgiveness. Only through the movement of faith can God's grace be
received and accepted, thereby acknowledging God's absolute alterity
as well as our absolute dependence on God to be selves. Practice in
Christianity complements The Sickness Unto Death thematically. It
deals with the appropriate Christian response to divine grace, and
with healing through penitence. But it also repeats some of the themes
of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In
particular it revisits the themes of offense and the historical point
of departure for eternal truth. The latter is explored under the
rubric of becoming contemporary with the absolute. Christian faith is
the only means for the immanent, temporal human being to have contact
with the transcendent, eternal truth, since that faith consists in
believing that Christ was the incarnation of God. That faith consists
not merely in intellectual belief, but in willingness to imitate the
life of Christ to the utmost of one's powers. Anti-Climacus catalogues
various ways in which we might take offense at someone claiming to be
the "God-man." In the process he discusses the necessity for God, as
transcendent, to use a method of indirect communication. The God-man
needs to be "incognito" – to arrive in the unrecognizable form of a
servant. He needs to suffer, to be spurned, to avoid any possible
direct revelation of His exalted status. Only by means of indirect
communication, rather than by direct revelation, will the individual
come to relate to the God-man through faith. The possibility of faith
is the obverse of the possibility of offense. Offense is underscored
by means of the Almighty's lowly incognito and indirect method of
communication.
c. The Attack on the Church
Kierkegaard came to think that perhaps indirect communication should
be the exclusive provenance of the God-man. He came increasingly to
regard his own indirection, and his love affair with language, to be
demonic temptations. When the Bishop Primate of the Danish People's
Church, his father's old pastor J.P. Mynster, died in January 1854,
Kierkegaard felt free to attack the established church more directly
and stridently. He had suppressed some critical and potentially
offensive writings while Mynster was still alive. But he was
precipitated into a full frontal attack when the new Bishop Primate,
H.L. Martensen, Kierkegaard's old rival, publicly described the late
Mynster as "a witness to the truth." Kierkegaard had respected Mynster
as a pastor and a man, but found his administration of the church
wanting. Mynster had steered the church into closer relations with the
state, and had shored up the values of "Christendom" rather than
"Christianity." The former was a phenomenon of cultural history; the
latter was the vehicle of passionate, inward individual faith. Given
the leveling tendencies of "the present age," Christendom as a
cultural phenomenon was on a collision course with Christian faith. It
threatened to replace "the single individual" with "the crowd" (under
the guise of "the congregation"), struggle with mediation, revolution
with reflection, and works of love with the welfare state. Worst, it
threatened to usurp eternal truth with temporal gossip. Therefore, to
call its chief spokesman a "witness to the truth" provoked an extreme
reaction from Kierkegaard.
His discourses changed from gentle edifications to strident calls to
arms. He moved from a position of "armed neutrality" with respect to
church politics, to one of decisive intervention in "the instant."
"The Instant" [Øieblikket - literally 'the glint of an eye'] was
Kierkegaard's final frenetic publication. The Concept of Anxiety had
identified "the instant" as the point of intersection of time and
eternity. It is the moment of decision, the moment of transfiguring
vision, the moment of contemporaneity with Christ. It was also the
moment to let go of indirect communication and to speak directly. "The
Instant" was the name of a broadsheet Kierkegaard published to
continue his attack on the state church. He published ten issues
between its inception in May 1855 and the last in September 1855, when
he collapsed and was admitted to hospital. But to speak directly,
having spoken for so long indirectly, is not the same as the
"objective" direct communication he originally resisted. It was not a
direct communication about eternal truth, but a timely intervention in
contemporary politics. It was a verbal act, rather than a measured
contribution to literature. Another important part of the "second
authorship" consists in the self-reflections Kierkegaard wrote on his
own work as an author. In 1851 he published On My Work as an Author,
but had also written several other works that were only published
posthumously. These include The Point of View for my Work as an
Author: A Report to History (1859), Armed Neutrality, or My Position
as a Christian Author in Christendom (1880), and "Three Notes
Concerning my Activity as an Author" (1859). He also withheld from
publication The Book on Adler, an extended study of Adolph Adler, a
prominent Hegelian and pastor in the Danish People's Church. Adler
claimed to have received divine revelation, but Kierkegaard's analysis
of his writings tries to demonstrate Adler's confusion. Adler becomes,
in Kierkegaard's words, "a Satire on Hegelian Philosophy and the
Present Age." Kierkegaard also used Adler's case to distinguish
between "a genius" and "an apostle." Another work, also published
posthumously, was "The Ethical and Ethico-religious Dialectic of
Communication" (1877). Kierkegaard agonized over whether to publish
these direct communications about his own strategies of communication
and how he saw his activity as an author. Of particular concern was
how these direct writings would affect the complex dialectic of direct
and indirect communications he had set up in his "authorships."
Ultimately he relied on the guidance of "Governance" [Styrelse] to
decide whether or not to publish – much as Socrates had relied on the
warnings of his daimonion about whether to engage people in
philosophical cross-examination. Retrospectively, Kierkegaard regarded
his activity as an author to have been under the direction of
Governance. He had not had a clear view at the outset about the
structure of his authorships, but had come to see that what he had
been directed to write was what was required for a religious poet in
the present age. He was a writer who overflowed with ideas – far too
many to write down. Therefore Governance had to sit him down like a
schoolboy, and make him write as though he were writing "a work
assignment." In much the same way as he disappeared under the dash in
works of love, Kierkegaard "disappears" in these accounts of his own
activity as a writer under the sign of "Governance."
5. Bibliography
Kierkegaard's Writings
Danish
Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaaard, ed. Niels
Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1953-4.
Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr & E. Torsting,
second edition Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968-78.
Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, ed. A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg &
H.D. Lange, second edition, Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1920-36.
Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N.J. Cappelørn, et.al., Copenhagen: Gad, 1997-.
English Kierkegaard's Writings volumes 1-XXVI, ed. & trans. H.V. Hong,
et.al. Princeton University Press: 1978-2000. Commentary
Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen, Hermann Deuser, et.al. (eds), Kierkegaard
Studies Yearbook 1996-, Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996-
Ferreira, M. Jamie, Love's Grateful Striving: A Commentary on
Kierkegaard's Works of Love, Oxford University Press, 2001
Garff, Joakim, SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard: en biografi, Copenhagen: Gad, 2000
Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2001
Hannay, Alastair & Gordon Marino (eds), The Cambridge Companion to
Kierkegaard, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Kirmmse, Bruce, Encounters With Kierkegaard, Princeton University Press, 1996
Kirmmse, Bruce, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990
Mackey, Louis, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee:
Florida State University Press, 1986
Malantschuk, Gregor, Kierkegaard's Thought, ed. & trans. H.V. Hong &
E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1971
Pattison, George, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1992
Perkins, Robert L (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, Macon:
Mercer University Press (this is a series of anthologies of essays,
with each volume designed to accompany the volumes comprising
Kierkegaard's Writings, op.cit.)
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