The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard 9780199601301, 0199601305

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
References to Kierkegaard’s Works
Abbreviations of Titles of Kierkegaard’s Works
Introduction
PART I: CONTEXTS AND SOURCES
1. The Textual Inheritance
2. Kierkegaard and the End of the Danish Golden Age
3. Kierkegaard and Copenhagen
4. Kierkegaard and German Idealism
5. Kierkegaard and Romanticism
6. Kierkegaard and the Church
7. Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy
8. Kierkegaard and the Bible
9. Kierkegaard and the History of Theology
PART II: SOME MAJOR TOPICS IN THE AUTHORSHIP
10. Pseudonyms and ‘style’
11. Ethics
12. Selfhood and ‘Spirit’
13. Formation and the Critique of Culture
14. Time and History
15. Kierkegaard’s Theology
16. Society, Politics, and Modernity
17. Love
18. Irony
19. Death
PART III: KIEREGAARD AFTER KIERKEGAARD
20. Translating Kierkegaard
21. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
22. Kierkegaard and Heidegger
23. Kierkegaard and Phenomenology
24. Kierkegaard and Postmodernism
25. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Wittgensteinian Tradition
26. Kierkegaard and Moral Philosophy: Some Recent Themes
27. Kierkegaard as Theologian: A History of Countervailing Interpretations
28. Kierkegaard and Modern European Literature
29. Kierkegaard and English Language Literature
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
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W
Y
Z

Citation preview

t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

K I ER K EGA A R D

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the oxford handbook of

KIERKEGAARD

Edited by

JOHN L IPPITT and

GEORGE PATTISON

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2013 Extract from “The Sea and the Mirror”, copyright 1944 and renewed 1972 by W. H. Auden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF W. H. AUDEN by W. H. Auden. Used in USA by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission. Used in the English language in all other territories worldwide by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Extract from “Kierkegaard and the Novel”, from THE SINGER ON THE SHORE: ESSAYS 1991–2004 by Gabriel Josipovici (Carcarnet, 2006). Used by permission of Carcarnet Press Limited. Extract from “Kierkegaard”, by Iain Crichton Smith, from NEW COLLECTED POEMS by Iain Crichton Smith, edited by Matthew McGuire (Carcarnet, 2011). Used by permission of Carcarnet Press Limited. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–960130–1 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Tom Perridge and Lizzie Robottom for the initiative that led to this collection. At an early stage, Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn provided invaluable advice on the volume and we are also grateful for provision of page proofs for SKS volumes that had not appeared at the time of submitting the manuscript. On a personal level, John Lippitt would like to thank Sylvie Magerstädt, not only for editorial assistance on this project, but for her love, support, and ability to raise his spirits. He would also like to thank Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret at the University of Copenhagen for a residential fellowship during July 2011, at which time some of the editorial work on this book was done, and the University of Hertfordshire for a research grant that made this visit possible. George Pattison would like to thank Hilary for more than usual support during the time this volume has been in preparation.

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of Contributors References to Kierkegaard’s Works Abbreviations of Titles of Kierkegaard’s Works

Introduction

v xi xvii xix 1

George Pattison and John Lippitt

PA RT I CON T E X TS A N D SOU RCE S 1. The Textual Inheritance

11

Steen Tullberg

2. Kierkegaard and the End of the Danish Golden Age

28

Bruce H. Kirmmse

3. Kierkegaard and Copenhagen

44

George Pattison

4. Kierkegaard and German Idealism

62

Lore Hühn and Philipp Schwab

5. Kierkegaard and Romanticism

94

William McDonald

6. Kierkegaard and the Church

112

Anders Holm

7. Kierkegaard and Greek Philosophy

129

Rick Anthony Furtak

8. Kierkegaard and the Bible

150

Paul Martens

9. Kierkegaard and the History of Theology David R. Law

166

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contents

PA RT I I SOM E M AJOR TOPIC S I N T H E AU T HOR SH I P 10. Pseudonyms and ‘style’

191

Edward F. Mooney

11. Ethics

211

C. Stephen Evans and Robert C. Roberts

12. Selfhood and ‘Spirit’

230

John J. Davenport

13. Formation and the Critique of Culture

252

Joakim Garff

14. Time and History

273

Arne Grøn

15. Kierkegaard’s Theology

292

Sylvia Walsh

16. Society, Politics, and Modernity

309

Merold Westphal

17. Love

328

M. Jamie Ferreira

18. Irony

344

K. Brian Söderquist

19. Death

365

Patrick Stokes

PA RT I I I K I E R K EGA A R D A F T E R K I E R K EGA A R D 20. Translating Kierkegaard

385

Alastair Hannay

21. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Markus Kleinert

402

contents

22. Kierkegaard and Heidegger

ix

421

Clare Carlisle

23. Kierkegaard and Phenomenology

440

Claudia Welz

24. Kierkegaard and Postmodernism

464

Steven Shakespeare

25. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Wittgensteinian Tradition

484

Anthony Rudd

26. Kierkegaard and Moral Philosophy: Some Recent Themes

504

John Lippitt

27. Kierkegaard as Theologian: A History of Countervailing Interpretations

528

Lee C. Barrett

28. Kierkegaard and Modern European Literature

550

Leonardo F. Lisi

29. Kierkegaard and English Language Literature

570

Hugh S. Pyper

Index

591

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List of Contributors

Lee C. Barrett is the Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He has authored several articles concerning Kierkegaard’s relation to the Lutheran theological heritage, many of which have appeared in the International Kierkegaard Commentary Series and in Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Lee has published an introduction to Kierkegaard’s thought entitled Pillars of Modern Theology: Kierkegaard (Abingdon Press, 2010) and is finishing a book on Kierkegaard’s relation to Augustine. He serves on the advisory board of the Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources series and on the editorial board of The Kierkegaard Yearbook. He is a former president of the Søren Kierkegaard Society of the USA. Clare Carlisle is Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London. She is the author of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (State University of New York Press, 2005) and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (Continuum, 2010). Her English translation of Félix Ravaisson’s De l’habitude was published in 2008, and her next book will be On Habit (Routledge, 2013). John J. Davenport is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He is the author of Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard (Routledge, 2012); Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, and Happiness (Fordham, 2007), as well as several essays on Kierkegaard and ethics, character, free will, and eschatological faith. He coedited Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Open Court, 2001) with Anthony Rudd. C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University. He formerly held positions at Calvin College, St Olaf College (where he directed the Hong Kierkegaard Library), and Wheaton College. He is the author of many books, including Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford University Press, 2004), Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Divine Authority and the Foundations of Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2013). M. Jamie Ferreira is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2009), Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Transforming Vision: Will and Imagination in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford University Press, 1991), as well as numerous articles on religious epistemology and modern religious thought.

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Rick Anthony Furtak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College. In addition to his interests in ancient and existential philosophy, he also works on the moral psychology of emotions and on the relations between philosophy and literature. He is the author of Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) and the editor of Kierkegaard’s ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has published one book of poetry in translation as well: Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’: A New English Version, with a Philosophical Introduction (University of Scranton Press, 2007). His current projects include works on American philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the rationality of emotion. Joakim Garff is Associate Research Professor at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen and a co-editor of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. He is author of SAK (2000), an award winning biography of Kierkegaard, translated into English as Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2005). From 1992 to 1999 he was Chair of the Danish Kierkegaard Society, and is currently working on Kierkegaard and the concept of culture. Arne Grøn is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Copenhagen. He is a co-founder of, and professor at, the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Subjectivity Research. He is a Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Alastair Hannay is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He has published three books on Kierkegaard, one in the ‘Arguments of the Philosophers’ series (Routledge 1982, reprinted 1999), a biography (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and selected essays (Routledge, 2003). Together with Gordon D. Marino, he is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He has published several Kierkegaard translations and is engaged in the ongoing Princeton critical edition of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Anders Holm is Research Lecturer in the department of Church History in the Theology Faculty of Copenhagen University, specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His doctorate Two Contemporaries dealt with the relationship between Kierkegard and N. F. S. Grundtvig (To Samtidige, Anis 2009). Lore Hühn is Professor of Philosophy specializing in Ethics and German Idealism at the University of Freiburg. She is a member of the directorial committees of the Interdisciplinary Center of Ethics (Freiburg) founded October 2005 and of the Schopenhauer Society. Since 2008 she has been president of the International Schelling Society and from 2009 a member of the editorial board of the HistoricoCritical Edition of Schelling’s Writings at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich; she is also a member of the advisory board to the ‘Nietzsche-Kommentar’ of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

list of contributors

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Bruce H. Kirmmse is Professor Emeritus at Connecticut College and has also been a Reader at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of two books and numerous essays dealing with Kierkegaard and other subjects pertaining to Danish and European intellectual history. He has also done many translations of works by and about Kierkegaard and is General Editor of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (Princeton University Press, 2007–). Markus Kleinert is Assistant Professor at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt. He is copy-editor and co-editor of the new German Kierkegaard edition (Deutsche Søren Kierkegaard Edition). He is currently engaged in research on ‘transfiguration’ in art, religion, and philosophy. Selected publications include Sich verzehrender Skeptizismus. Läuterungen bei Hegel und Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard Studies. Monograph Series, vol. 12) (de Gruyter, 2005); and the edited Kunst und Religion. Ein kontroverses Verhältnis (Chorus, 2010). David R. Law is Professor of Christian Thought and Philosophical Theology at the University of Manchester. Among his publications are two books on Kierkegaard, namely Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford University Press, 1993) and Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has also published articles on Kierkegaard in the International Kierkegaard Commentary and in Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. John Lippitt is Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire. His publications include Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Palgrave, 2000); the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (Routledge, 2003); and Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-love (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Other interests include the virtues; the philosophy of love and friendship; the relationship between philosophy and theology; and the relevance of philosophy to psychotherapy. Leonardo F. Lisi is Assistant Professor in the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (Fordham, 2012), as well as numerous articles on Kierkegaard and European modernism. An executive editor of the comparative literature issue of MLN, Lisi is also a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. William McDonald is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of New England, Australia. He is translator of Kierkegaard’s Prefaces (University Press of Florida State, 1989), co-editor of Kierkegaard’s Concepts with Jon Stewart and Steven Emmanuel (Ashgate, 2013), and author of numerous articles on Kierkegaard, including the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Paul Martens held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame and currently teaches Christian Ethics at Baylor University. He is the author of The Heterodox

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list of contributors

Yoder (Cascade, 2012), A (Very) Critical Introduction to Kierkegaard (Eerdmans, 2013), Reading Kierkegaard II: A Guide to Works of Love (Cascade, 2013), and numerous articles on Kierkegaard’s theology and ethics. Edward F. Mooney is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Syracuse University. His writings include On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy and Time (Ashgate, 2007), Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell (Continuum, 2009), Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology (Routledge, 1996), and Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (SUNY, 1991), as well as numerous articles. George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral. His recent books include God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is also co-editor with Nicholas Adams and Graham Ward of The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought. Hugh S. Pyper is Professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield, with a particular interest in the interaction between the biblical tradition and literary and critical theory. His recent book The Joy of Kierkegaard (Equinox Press) focuses on the role of biblical exegesis in the development of Kierkegaard’s thought. Robert C. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Baylor University. He writes on topics in ethics and moral psychology and is influenced by the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. Recent books include Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and (with Jay Wood) Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2007). He is currently finishing Emotions and Values, which will be published by Cambridge. He has published a dozen or so essays on Kierkegaard, and a book on Philosophical Fragments: Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (Mercer, 1986). Anthony Rudd is Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford University Press, 1993); Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Open Court, 2003); and Self, Value and Narrative: a Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as numerous articles. He co-edited Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Open Court, 2001) with John Davenport. Philipp Schwab is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg. Since 2009, he has been Scientific Coordinator of a project on editing Schelling’s Erlangen Lectures (funded by the Thyssen Stiftung). He has also been a visiting researcher at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen (2008), and at the Schelling Comission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich (2010).

list of contributors

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Steven Shakespeare is Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and co-facilitates the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. His published work includes Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (Ashgate, 2001); Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (SPCK, 2007); Derrida and Theology (T & T Clark, 2009); and (co-edited with Claire Molloy and Charlie Blake) Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (Continuum, 2012). K. Brian Söderquist is Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Theology, and Co-general Editor of the new translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, published by Princeton University Press. Söderquist received his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen in 2005, has a Master’s degree from Yale University, and a Bachelor’s degree from Utah State University. He has published a book and numerous articles on Kierkegaard and German Romanticism and Idealism. His other interests include French existentialism and aesthetics. Patrick Stokes is Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia and a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. He has previously held research positions at Hertfordshire, the University of Copenhagen, and St Olaf College. He is the author of Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision (Palgrave, 2010) and Editor (with Adam Buben) of Kierkegaard and Death (Indiana University Press, 2011). Steen Tullberg is a member of staff at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen. He is Head of the Philological Department and a member of the editorial board of the new edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. He has written articles on the Danish and German reception of Kierkegaard including the book Søren Kierkegaard i Danmark (C. A. Reitzel, 2006). Claudia Welz is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen and Research Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research. She has studied Theology and Philosophy in Tübingen, Jerusalem, Munich, and Heidelberg, and obtained her Ph.D. and venia legendi from the University of Zurich. Her doctoral dissertation Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (2008) was awarded the 2009 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. Her habilitation thesis is entitled Vertrauen und Versuchung (Mohr Siebeck, 2010). Sylvia Walsh is Scholar in Residence at Stetson University and the author of three books on Kierkegaard, Living Poetically (Penn State University Press, 1994), Living Christianly (Penn State, 2005), and Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly (Oxford University Press, 2009), as well as the translator of Fear and Trembling (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (Indiana University Press, 2011). She is also Co-chair of the Kierkegaard, Religion and Culture Group in the American Academy of Religion. Merold Westphal is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fordham University; Adjunct Professor at Australian Catholic University; and Guest Professor at

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Wuhan University, China. He is the author of two books on Hegel and two on Kierkegaard, he also works on continental philosophy of religion in the contexts of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, ideology critique, and deconstruction. Recent books include Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Fordham University Press, 1998), Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (Fordham, 2001), Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Indiana University Press, 2004), Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Indiana, 2008), and Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Baker Academic, 2009).

R eferences to Kierkegaard’s Works

References to Kierkegaard’s published works are to the latest Danish edition of his works, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Copenhagen: Gad, 1997–), abbreviated to SKS and followed by volume number, and to the translations in the series Kierkegaard’s Writings, edited by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–2009) referred to by a title-based acronym. Thus (SKS11: 157/SUD: 42) refers to The Sickness unto Death (English trans.), p. 42=SKS, volume 11, p. 157. A full list of the acronyms used is given below. Where other translations are used, full references are given in the relevant article. References to Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals, notebooks, and other works are also to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. In this case, however, references to the English translation are to Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, ed. Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007–), abbreviated to KJN. These are then followed by the entry numbers used by Kierkegaard himself and adopted by both SKS and KJN, rather than page numbers (only very few entries are more than one or two pages long). As only the first six volumes of KJN have appeared at the time of this Handbook going to press, references may also be given to the selection of Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–78), abbreviated to JP. Following well-established custom, these latter references are given by volume number and entry (rather than page) number. Where authors have cited this translation, references may be given in addition to the SKS/KJN references. Thus SKS18/KJN2: EE:62 [JP 2: 1319] refers to SKS, volume 18 and KJN, volume 2, entry number EE:62, equivalent to JP, volume 2, entry number 1319. The abbreviation SKSK refers to the Kommentar or Commentary volumes accompanying each volume of SKS. As SKS does not include all the material published in the older Danish edition of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks, some few references are to these—Papirer, ed. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and R. Torsting (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–48), abbreviated to Pap.

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Abbreviations of Titles of Kierkegaard’s Works

All works are translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong unless otherwise indicated and all are published by Princeton University Press. BA

The Book on Adler (1995).

CA

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (1980).

CD

Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1997).

CI

The Concept of Irony together with Notes on Schelling’s Berlin Lectures (1989).

COR

The Corsair Affair (1982).

CUP1 and CUP2

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (2 volumes, 1992).

EO1 and EO2

Either/Or (2 volumes, 1987).

EPW

Early Polemical Writings, trans. Julia Watkin (1990).

EUD

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (1990).

FSE/JFY

For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! (1990).

FT/R

Fear and Trembling and Repetition (1983).

LD

Letters and Documents, trans. Hendrik Rosenmeier (1978).

M

The Moment and Late Writings (2009).

P

Prefaces and Writing Sampler, trans. Todd W. Nichol (1998).

PC

Practice in Christianity (1991).

PF

Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus (1985).

PV

The Point of View for My Work as an Author, The Single Individual, On My Work as an Author and Armed Neutrality (1998).

R

Repetition. See Fear and Trembling.

SLW

Stages on Life’s Way (1988).

SUD

The Sickness unto Death (1980).

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abbreviations of titles of kierkegaard’s works

TA

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review (1978).

TDIO

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1993).

M

‘The Moment’ and Late Writings (1998).

UDVS

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1993).

WA

Without Authority (1997).

WL

Works of Love (1995).

I N TRODUCTION g eorge pattison and j ohn l ippitt Søren Aabye Kierkegaard’s relatively short life—5th May 1813 to 11th November 1855— was largely devoted to what he called his ‘authorship’. This began as two series of books, one published under a range of different pseudonyms and dealing with a variety of literary, philosophical, and religious questions, the other published under his own name and made up of devotional writings of a kind he referred to as ‘upbuilding’ or ‘edifying’ works. These two series, published between 1843 and 1846, were followed by a further sequence of writings of a primarily religious nature, several of which he at one point considered publishing in a volume entitled The Works of Fulfilment. Finally, in the last year of his life he wrote a series of furious newspaper articles and pamphlets attacking the idea of an established Church, with particular reference to his own Danish Lutheran Church. Throughout most of his life, he also penned a large number of journal articles and notebooks, including several full-length manuscripts, which he left unpublished at his death but with the expectation that they would be published posthumously. The subject of this Handbook is therefore this ‘authorship’—its context, content, and ‘effective history’ (this last referring to the idea developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer that every cultural text is to be understood not only in terms of its context and inner rationale but also its continuing impact on all who are subsequently—and not necessarily consciously—affected by it). Who was Søren Kierkegaard? We shall return to our rationale for the particular selection of topics that are to be addressed in the main part of the Handbook, but it is impossible to leave Kierkegaard the man entirely out of the picture, not least because the reception of his thought has often been inseparable from judgements as to the kind of man he was. For example, many contemporaries regarded the final attack on the Church, in which he deployed hyperbolic sarcasm and sometimes bitter personal comments, as manifesting either insanity or, at best, a warped personality. This, of course, helped those on the receiving end of his criticisms to avoid taking them seriously, but the idea that there is something morbidly unhealthy about Kierkegaard has stuck—witness the episode in Carl Dreyer’s classic film Ordet [The Word], in which the madness of the theological student Johannes is attributed to his having read too much Kierkegaard (see

2

george pattison and john lippitt

Ziolkowski 2011: 293–309). But even with regard to the extreme writings of the last year, others have seen Kierkegaard’s stance as a kind of martyrdom and his early death as the sacrifice that sealed the meaning of his life.1 Such a range of responses suggests that while it is impossible to keep Kierkegaard the man entirely out of the picture, it is almost equally impossible to get him into the picture in any focused, consistent, or unambiguous way, and that the reasons for this are more complex than the elusiveness of any historical personality. Nevertheless, such has been—and continues to be—the role of Kierkegaard’s personality (or readers’ perceptions of his personality) in interpreting his work that we can scarcely do otherwise than open this Handbook with a brief survey of the life and some of the interpretative issues connected with it. Kierkegaard’s life was not eventful in the way that many nineteenth-century lives were eventful. He did not man the barricades or go to war; he did not venture into the unexplored hinterlands of Africa, Asia, or the Americas; nor did he pioneer any new technologies or develop new industries. Indeed, his pseudonym Johannes Climacus (if he may be allowed to speak for Kierkegaard in this case) gently mocks his own inability to contribute to anything that his age regarded as suggesting ‘greatness’. In lieu of such events, his biographers have therefore tended to focus on four main areas, two of which are of an essentially private nature. These are: the circumstances of his childhood, with particular emphasis on his relationship with his father; the breaking off of his engagement to Regine Olsen; the literary spat with the satirical journal The Corsair; and, finally, the attack on the established Church. This has nevertheless been enough to generate a mountain of secondary literature, not least because the period that saw the first major reception of Kierkegaard’s work, i.e. the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was dominated by the view that the meaning of literary work was to be found in the life and mind of the author. (This was, of course, the period that saw the birth of psychoanalysis and related movements.) Kierkegaard’s own insistence on the primacy of ‘subjectivity’ in relation to religion and personal existence itself contributed to this tendency, whether or not that was what he intended. If we believe, with Wordsworth, that the child is father to the man, it is easy to see why Kierkegaard’s own childhood would be scrutinized for its possible contribution to interpreting the complex thought-world of the adult writer. But precisely with regard to Kierkegaard’s childhood we immediately run up against the reasons why it is perhaps ultimately impossible to get any definitive focus on the ‘secret’ of his personality. For although both published and unpublished works seem to offer provocative hints as to the dark familial secrets that might have generated an authorship that circled around themes such as anxiety, melancholy, guilt, despair, and suffering, these same hints are consistently ambiguous—even, at times, mutually contradictory—and of uncertain literary status. How much is indirect

1 Thus Walter Lowrie, writing that ‘he was never more sane, and the attack upon the Established Church was the logical and necessary outcome of all his thinking’ (Lowrie 1942: 242). It is telling that Lowrie concludes his Short Life with an extract from the journals in which Kierkegaard speaks of the testimony of those who are sacrificed in order to underwrite the belief that God is truly love—even in extremis.

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confession? How much is deliberate mystification? How much is pure literary invention? Did his father really believe that his family was under a curse as a cold and hungry child he himself had once cursed God? Or was it a more recent transgression of a sexual nature, possibly involving the father’s second wife (Søren’s mother) with whom he possibly slept prior to their marriage (Garff 2005: 131–8)? Or was the sexual transgression Søren’s own, perhaps a botched visit to a brothel à la Nietzsche, resulting either in syphilis or the possibility that he had fathered a child (SKS6: 257–68/SLW: 276–88; cf. Heiberg 1912, Hohlenberg 1940: 89–90)? Was he latently homosexual (Friedman 1949: 43–4)? Or was the issue basically to do with his physical deformity (Haecker 1948)—the hunched back of which The Corsair’s cartoonist made much? Was he simply epileptic—in that time a legal barrier to marriage (Hansen 1994; Garff 2005: 457–60)? All these and other hypotheses have been ventured, some have been explored in detail, but none has acquired a consensus. And even were such consensus to be achieved, the question would still remain as to how far particular aspects of his work or its overall tendency would then be explained. Even if we limit ourselves to Kierkegaard’s adult life as documented in the journals and in others’ memoirs (Kirmmse 1996) it seems hard to escape ambiguity and uncertainty. Was he a pampered and narcissistic poet, irritably remarking the absence or shortcomings of his servants and oblivious to the wretchedness of the inhabitants of the hostel for the poor directly opposite his flat (Garff 2005: 535–40)? Or was he the friend of the common man, mindful of his peasant origins and speaking up for those excluded from the elite literary and ecclesiastical circles (Bukdahl 2001)? Or are there elements of both? Are the many pages of complaints at his treatment by The Corsair evidence of hyper-sensitivity and neurotic self-obsession? Or are they only too comprehensible in the light of our more recent knowledge of the effects of media excesses? And was this man who became an important source for many modern Jewish thinkers himself an anti-Semite (Tudvad 2010)? Was his final battle a witness to Christian truth, or was he half way to a post-Christian humanism (Brandes 1877)? In all these cases—unlike speculation about his childhood—the evidence is all in the public sphere, but how to read it remains supremely debatable, as some of the responses to Joakim Garff ’s monumental biography of 2000 (English trans. 2005) reveal. Perhaps, then, the point is that it is precisely the Protean, mercurial, and multi-voiced nature of Kierkegaard the man that makes him so dangerously fascinating to his now many generations of interpreters. For the truth is that, poor in outward events as it was, Kierkegaard’s life is among the most fascinating of the nineteenth century and it is fascinating because he was, so to speak, both Newman and Nietzsche, both Baudelaire and Ibsen, both a decadent and edifying writer, the ‘melancholy Dane’ and a master of spiritual comfort and guidance. The question of Kierkegaard the man, then, inevitably turns us back to the question of Kierkegaard the author and to the authorship itself, its content and its impact. We have chosen to divide this handbook into three main parts: ‘Contexts and Sources’, ‘Some Major Topics in the Authorship’, and ‘Kierkegaard after Kierkegaard’. Part I begins with what is perhaps the most elementary aspect of our relation to Kierkegaard: the texts in which we read his words, how they were written, and how they

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have been transmitted to us through a sequence of publications. Going on from here we look at aspects of Kierkegaard’s physical and cultural environment—the city where he lived, and the writers and thinkers who shaped his intellectual landscape. Although these include many figures whom he knew and interacted with on a personal level—and, not least, the Church community to which he belonged and with which he developed a complex and conflicted relationship—they also involve sources stretching back to classical antiquity and to the Bible, as well as the history of theology in which he was trained academically and to which he would himself make such an important contribution. In addressing such themes as ‘Romanticism’ and ‘German Idealism’ here, we are also trying to step back from narrow conceptions that would reduce his complex and productive appropriation of these movements to a simple opposition to one or other representative figure—as has most notably happened in the case of his relation (or, as Jon Stewart felicitously put it, ‘relations’) to Hegel (Stewart 2003). In Part II we turn to ‘Some Major Topics in the Authorship’. Many readers will here note the omission of articles specifically entitled ‘anxiety’, ‘the leap of faith’, ‘the paradox’, ‘the absurd’, ‘despair’, and other familiar terms commonly associated with Kierkegaard. This is not because we have wilfully ignored them. Rather, we believe that while a focus on what might be called ‘key terms’ could be appropriate to a Kierkegaard Dictionary or Encyclopedia, the purposes of this Handbook are better served by seeing these ideas in their larger context. Indeed, it could be argued that it is precisely a focus on such terms, torn out of their context, which has been responsible for some of the worst misreadings of Kierkegaard over the last century and a half, such as the often repeated charge that Kierkegaard was an ‘irrationalist’, propounding a version of faith that is radically opposed to reason and proud of it. (Alastair Mackinnon, for example, has shown that the term ‘leap of faith’ only enters Kierkegaard’s vocabulary in English translation (Mackinnon 1993).) Thus, anxiety and despair are discussed, for instance, in the chapter on selfhood and spirit; ‘the paradox’ and ‘the absurd’ in the chapter on Kierkegaard’s theology; and ‘faith’ in numerous contributions. Overall, we have tried in Part II to combine a focus on topics the experienced reader of Kierkegaard might expect to see in such a collection (such as the importance of pseudonymity and aspects of Kierkegaard’s ethics and theology; together with his views on selfhood, love, and irony) with perhaps less obvious—but, we consider, highly important—themes (Kierkegaard’s view of time and history; of Bildung (or culture); death; and aspects of his social and political critique of modernity). Part III, ‘Kierkegaard after Kierkegaard’, is concerned with aspects of the way Kierkegaard’s thought has been received in various philosophical, theological, and literary traditions, as well as containing an article on the challenges faced in translating Kierkegaard into English. The relationships between Kierkegaard’s thought and that of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and phenomenologists such as Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, are explored, as is his complex and ambivalent relation to ‘postmodernism’. The influence of his thought on Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinian tradition is also considered, followed by a chapter sketching the links between Kierkegaard and numerous anglophone moral philosophers, with particular emphasis on Alasdair MacIntyre and narrative-based

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views of practical identity. Finally, following a survey of Kierkegaard’s influence on numerous key figures in theology since his death, the volume concludes with two chapters on his impact on literature, both in English and other European languages. Wide-ranging though these articles are, there is more that could be said about the extent of the impact of Kierkegaard’s thought, as we can see if we step back and consider some of the aspects of Kierkegaard reception that we have been unable to take up in detail. It has often been said that Kierkegaard did not enter the English-speaking world until the 1930s because of his having written in Danish. Yet his contemporary and rival, Hans Lassen Martensen, was not only translated into English in his lifetime but hailed in T. & T. Clark’s publicity material as possibly Lutheranism’s greatest theologian of the nineteenth century. For Britain and the United States, it was not the lack of knowledge of Danish that inhibited Kierkegaard’s early reception but the absence of an appropriate horizon within which to receive his ideas. This horizon would be provided in the interwar years by Karl Barth’s dialectical theology and Heidegger’s philosophy of existence (Pattison 2009). Heidegger would also be a pivotal point of reference in the French reception of Kierkegaard and, indirectly (through the exiled Russian writer Lev Shestov), Kierkegaard’s reception in Russia. Yet Barth and Heidegger were themselves inheritors of an earlier phase of Kierkegaard’s reception, which reached its high point in the AustroHungarian Empire in the years preceding the First World War. Here Kierkegaard appears as one of many representatives of a new literary and spiritual consciousness, sharing intellectual and cultural space with Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Indian philosophy (see, e.g. Kassner 1911). As the apostle of the individual, he spoke to a complex multicultural society in which the bonds linking individual, social, and religious identity were being tested to breaking point. From Lukacs to Kafka, Buber to Haecker, and Wittgenstein to Kraus, Kierkegaard could thus become spokesperson for the struggle for identity and self-commitment in an age when things were only too palpably falling apart. This context would also be important for the impact of Kierkegaard on twentiethcentury Jewish philosophy. Despite a relatively limited reception in Israel itself (see Golomb 1998), there is evidence for Kierkegaard having been among the key points of intellectual reference for a number of major Jewish thinkers and writers. Buber and Kafka have already been named (Lukacs, Wittgenstein, and Kraus, though Jewish by origin were not, to borrow a phrase from Levinas (see below), thinkers of Judaism). Kierkegaard’s influence on Buber was far more significant than the somewhat negative article ‘The Question to the Single One’ (Buber 1947 [1936]) might suggest (see Šajda 2011), although his development of a philosophy of dialogue might be seen precisely as turning away from Kierkegaard-the-exponent-of-individualism who was welcomed (and perhaps even invented) in the early Austro-Hungarian reception of his work. If Kierkegaard entered into Buber’s thought-world in the period prior to the First World War, Shestov reported that, on his journey to invite Husserl to lecture at the Sorbonne in 1928, Kierkegaard was a major topic of conversation among Buber and others he visited in Frankfurt (see Pattison 2011). Shestov himself was, of course, of Jewish origins and never formally converted to Christianity, although he was not a practising member of a synagogue and, as Levinas put it in a review of Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard, he was

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not essentially a thinker of Judaism. Levinas, too, like Buber, seems to have wanted consciously to distance himself from Kierkegaard, although, as many commentators have pointed out (especially with regard to Works of Love), the Kierkegaardian resonances of many of his key ideas are more apparent than he might have wished (see, e.g. Ferreira 2001; Simmons and Wood 2008; Welz 2008; Westphal 2008). Franz Rosenzweig, a colleague of Buber’s in the translation of the Scriptures and a major influence on Levinas himself makes strong and overt Kierkegaardian gestures in the first part of The Star of Redemption, although not subsequently (Rosenzweig 1985 [1919]; see also Welz 2011). Reasons why Kierkegaard might have appealed especially to a number of early to midtwentieth-century Jewish figures are perhaps not hard to find. In his own way, he articulated a crisis of identity involving a threefold tension between religion, society, and family that also marked their experience. In a book-length study Abraham Joshua Heschel compared Kierkegaard to the charismatic but extraordinary Hasidic Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotz (Heschel 1973). Attention has also often been drawn to his distinctive way of reading the Bible that some commentators see as closer to Jewish exegetical traditions than to the standard Christian methods of his own Lutheran tradition (although see Gellmann 2003 on key differences in the account of the Akedah or binding of Isaac). Even if the secular and, in philosophy largely ‘analytic’, culture of Israel today means that Kierkegaard is only a marginal presence, there are significant Israeli voices in contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship (e.g. Jerome Gellmann, previously cited; see also Krishek 2009). More recently, the question of Kierkegaard’s relation to Judaism has been provocatively sharpened by strong and meticulously documented accusations of antiSemitism (Tudvad 2010—although whether the documentation entirely supports all of Tudvad’s claims is open to question). Other times and places have no less significantly shaped how Kierkegaard has been received. Japan’s unique relation to the West meant that, as later with Heidegger, Kierkegaard was early on received in Japan and read in the perspective of modernizing and westernizing developments in Buddhist thought (see Giles 2008). Elsewhere, the unique status of George Lukács in Hungary’s intellectual life meant that his own early Kierkegaardianism provided a point of reference for accessing Kierkegaard in a communist bloc environment in which he was officially regarded as a degenerate proponent of bourgeois ideology (Nagy 1998, 2009). Other contexts of persecution have also sharpened Kierkegaard’s witness to the truth of the individual in the face of persecution by the majority (Jahanbegloo 2009). Existentialism and postmodernity have both been shaped by Kierkegaard himself and provided contexts in which different aspects of his thought come to the fore, often controversially—as several of the contributions to this volume testify. However, as these comments already indicate, this collection is far from being exhaustive—as Jon Stewart’s series of collections on the reception of Kierkegaard’s work more than amply illustrates, Japan is only one significant non-Western European/North American context of reception among others (see Stewart 2009). Indeed, whether it is with regard to Kierkegaard’s historical and contextual background, the content of his work or its reception in and impact on subsequent movements and individuals in philosophy, theology, and other areas of culture, we are fully aware that even a work as

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substantial as this can only reflect a small part of an extraordinary and, in many ways unique and unclassifiable, author and authorship. To take just one final example, there is a fascinating story to be told—much of it yet to be written2—about the various ways in which Kierkegaardian themes have influenced numerous major figures in psychiatry, psychotherapy, and counselling, among them Carl Rogers, Rollo May, R. D. Laing, and Irvin Yalom (see e.g. Laing 1960; Rogers 1961; May 1977; Yalom 1980). The year 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth and it is also significant as marking the completion of the latest Danish edition of his works, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings). This latter is especially important as it comes with an exceptionally thorough apparatus that answers many of the questions that have floated around the margins of secondary literature on Kierkegaard, clearly identifying many of the sources that he used or exploited in developing his own ideas and removing the basis for some of the more lurid biographical myths. There will, of course, always be further historical and philological questions to answer, but the achievement of SKS is to free readers of Kierkegaard really to engage with the meaning of his work, the questions it raises (or fails to raise), and its significance for our own thinking— and to do so in ways that do not distort or overlook what he actually wrote. This Handbook has been able to take full advantage of this most recent Kierkegaard scholarship, and we hope that this will therefore contribute to making the present work not only a good cross section of the current state of play of Kierkegaard studies in the Englishspeaking world, but will also provide an enduring resource for students and scholars for a long time to come.

References Brandes, George (1877). Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Buber, Martin (1974). Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Collins). Bukdahl, Jørgen (2001). Søren Kierkegaard and the Common Man, trans. B. H. Kirmmse (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans). Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving. A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Friedmann, Rudolph (1949). Kierkegaard: The Analysis of the Psychological Personality (London: Peter Nevill). Garff, Joakim (2005). Søren Kierkegaard. A Biography, trans. B. H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Gellmann, Jerome I. (2003). Abraham! Abraham! Kierkegaard and the Hasidim on the Binding of Isaac (Farnham: Ashgate). Golomb, Jacob (1998). ‘Kierkegaard in Zion’, in Kierkegaardiana vol. 19 (Copenhagen: Reitzel), 130–7. Haecker, Theodor (1948). Kierkegaard the Cripple, trans. A. Dru (London: Harvill).

2

Though see some of the essays in Stewart 2011.

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Heiberg, Peter Andreas (1912). Kierkegaard Studier I: En Episode I Søren Kierkegaards Ungdomsliv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Heschel, Abraham Joshua (1973). A Passion for Truth (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Hohlenberg, Johannes (1940). Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: H. Hagerup). Jahanbegloo, Ramin (2009). ‘Iran: Kierkegaard’s Reception in Iran’, in Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome III: The Near East, Asia, Australia, and the Americas (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) (Farnham: Ashgate), 97–102. Kassner, Rudolf (1911). Motive (Berlin: S. Fischer). Kirmmse, Bruce H. (ed and trans.) (1996). Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Krishek, Sharon (2009). Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Lowrie, Walter (1942). A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Mackinnon, Alastair (1993). ‘Kierkegaard and “The Leap of Faith” ’, in Kierkegaardiana 16 (Copenhagen: Reitzel), 107–25. May, Rollo (1977). The Meaning of Anxiety, rev. edn. (New York: W. W. Norton). Pattison, George (2011). ‘Lev Shestov: Kierkegaard in the Ox of Phalaris’, in J. Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) (Farnham: Ashgate), 355–74. Rogers, Carl R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (London: Constable). Rosenzweig, Franz (1985 [1919]). The Star of Redemption, trans. W. W. Hallo (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press). Šajda, Peter (2011). ‘Martin Buber’: “No-One Can so Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself ” ’, in J. Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) (Farnham: Ashgate)), 33–62. Simmons, J. Aaron and Wood, David (2008). Kierkegaard and Levinas. Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Stewart, Jon (2003). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (ed.) (2009). Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Tome III: The Near East, Asia, Australia, and the Americas (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) (Farnham: Ashgate). ——– (ed.) (2011). Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) (Farnham: Ashgate). Tudvad, Peter (2010). Stadier på Antisemitismens Vej. Søren Kierkegaard og Jøderne (Copenhagen: Rosinante). Welz, Claudia (2011). ‘Franz Rosenzweig: A Kindred Spirit in Alignment with Kierkegaard’, in J. Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources) (Farnham: Ashgate), 299–322. ——– (2008). Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Westphal, Merold (2008). Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Yalom, Irvin D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books). Ziolkowski, Eric J. (2011). The Literary Kierkegaard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).

pa rt i

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chapter 1

The Textua l I n her ita nce S teen T ullberg

I. A Brief History of the Posthumous Papers When Søren Kierkegaard died on 11 November 1855, a vast amount of literary remains were found at his last address in Copenhagen, Klædeboderne 5–6 (presently Skindergade 38/Dyrkøb 5). The members of the board of the official administration of the estate who inspected the apartment three days later and again on 19 November (the day after the funeral), reported that apart from some papers lying loosely around the apartment, the deceased’s writing desk and a chest of drawers were completely packed with manuscripts. Kierkegaard’s nephew, Henrik Lund (1825–89), who was present in the apartment on both occasions, subsequently undertook the tedious task of registering his uncle’s papers, a job he worked on from late November or beginning of December until 17 January 1856. He made two catalogues, one with an overview of where the papers were located in the two pieces of furniture (‘The Order of the Papers’) and another numbering and to some extent designating the content of the numerous manuscripts, consisting of Kierkegaard’s journals, notebooks, booklets, letters, sheets, scraps, and slips of paper (‘List of the Papers’). After abandoning the idea of himself being the literary executor of Kierkegaard’s estate, Lund thought that the publication of the materials could be done by Kierkegaard’s lifelong friend Emil Boesen (1812–81), but Boesen declined. Following this, a little more than a year went by during which the papers were kept in various sacks, bags, and boxes in the home of Henrik Lund’s paternal family, where he had left them after leaving the country for a job as a doctor on the island of St John in the Danish West Indies. After some correspondence, at the end of May 1857 the papers ended up in the northern town of Aalborg, in the residence of Kierkegaard’s brother, Bishop Peter Christian Kierkegaard (Jensen 2006: 261–6).

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The two Kierkegaard brothers had had a troublesome relationship. This is mirrored in an incident that occurred the day after the funeral at the aforementioned second official inspection of Kierkegaard’s apartment. We have an account of the incident from Kierkegaard’s long-time secretary, Israel Levin (1810–83), who dramatically describes how profoundly P. C. Kierkegaard was moved when he read a letter found among his brother’s papers addressed specifically to him. The content of this letter allegedly caused Peter Christian to sit down, staring and trying to collect himself (Kirmmse 1996: 212). According to Levin no one knew the reason for this agitation but his account is not entirely trustworthy, since the official report from the inspection makes it clear that Levin was not present in the apartment on that day. The letter in question in fact consisted of two letters containing Kierkegaard’s last will and testament, in which he not only left everything to his former fiancée Regine Schlegel (née Olsen) but also formally dedicated his entire authorship to her. In the aftermath of this discovery, a correspondence took place between P. C. Kierkegaard and Regine, who now presided on the island of St Croix with her husband, Frederik Schlegel, then governor of the Danish West Indies (after 1917 the US Virgin Islands). Regine, through her husband, replied that she had no interest in being Kierkegaard’s sole heir, and that she was only interested in receiving items that were of personal concern to her. At that point she had already received a packet from Henrik Lund with material taken from the posthumous papers, including her own letters to Kierkegaard, which she said that she later burned, and the notebook entitled ‘My Relationship to “her” ’. After an intermezzo involving Kierkegaard’s niece, Henriette Lund, this notebook was published immediately after Regine’s death in 1904 under the title Kierkegaardian Papers: The Engagement by Raphael Meyer, an assistant at the University of Copenhagen Library (Cappelørn et al. 2003: 71–5; cf. SKS19KJN3: Not1s:1–15). In spite of his reluctance to have anything to do with his brother’s literary remains, P. C. Kierkegaard did publish an important work found in manuscript form among the posthumous papers, namely The Point of View of My Work as an Author, in 1859. After considerable hesitation he allied himself with the jurist and editor H. P. Barfod (1834–92), who in February 1865 moved into the bishop’s residence and immediately set about the work of re-registering Kierkegaard’s papers. In comparison to Henrik Lund’s catalogue, the result of Barfod’s work was a far more extensive and detailed register, ‘List of the Papers Found at the Death of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard’, in which he incorporated Lund’s catalogue; thus the first 382 of the total 472 numbers are identical to Lund’s. While working on his own catalogue Barfod made several discoveries, including the entry relating to the legend about Kierkegaard’s father having cursed God when he was a small boy, but also a little octavo page, which contained Kierkegaard’s intention with respect to his literary Nachlass. From this it is clear that Kierkegaard had designated Rasmus Nielsen (1809–84) to be in charge of the publication of his manuscripts, journals, etc. Even if Barfod and P. C. Kierkegaard had the right not to regard this as Kierkegaard’s final literary will, it doubtless provoked a minor crisis in the editorial work—and ten years later a minor crisis in the relation between P. C. Kierkegaard and Rasmus Nielsen, when the latter was made aware of the discovery of the page in ques-

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tion. Nielsen had, however, already contributed to Kierkegaard research with his publication of Kierkegaard’s newspaper articles in 1857 (Bladartikler). On completing his work, Barfod had the catalogue bound and ceremoniously handed it over to P. C. Kierkegaard on the tenth anniversary of Søren’s death, 11 November 1865. His catalogue later became an invaluable source for the editors of the different Danish editions of Kierkegaard’s papers, among them of course the very first, Barfod’s own, Af Søren Kierkegaard’s efterladte Papirer (1869–81). In 1875, the papers were handed over to the University Library by P. C. Kierkegaard during a stay in Copenhagen where he attended the funeral of his brother-in-law, Henrik Lund’s father, J. C. Lund. He did, however, first remove his brother’s testamentary papers and also retained the manuscript of Judge for Yourselves!, which he then published in 1876. In time, the papers ended up in the Royal Danish Library and for a brief time during the Second World War were evacuated to Esrum Monastery in northern Zealand. Today they are among the most carefully guarded materials in the library and Kierkegaard’s papers are unusually well preserved, both with respect to how much has been kept for posterity and also with respect to the quality of the manuscripts. The Kierkegaard archive occupies some fourteen metres of shelf space in the library, though it is not quite as large as, for instance, that of Georg Brandes or Karen Blixen (Cappelørn et al. 2003: 78).

II. The Major Danish Editions The Edition: Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer (1869–81) In the autumn of 1867, Barfod gained permission from P. C. Kierkegaard to work on the publication of Kierkegaard’s papers, and on 13 December 1869, the first volume of what would ultimately be eight volumes (the first being a double volume) of Af Søren Kierkegaards efterladte Papirer [From the Posthumous Papers of Søren Kierkegaard] appeared. Barfod, however, only published the first four volumes himself. After the publication, in the spring of 1877, of the journals from 1847, a volume that had been underway for several years presumably owing to Barfod’s fatigue, the young German secondary-school teacher, H. Gottsched (1848–1916), was brought on board. In 1879–81 he edited the last five volumes with Barfod serving as his assistant. Gottsched thus appears to have been a considerably more effective editor than Barfod, but one must keep in mind that the complexity of Kierkegaard’s early material is considerably greater than the material that Gottsched handled. Moreover, there is the fact that Gottsched did not carry out, in anywhere near the same quantity as Barfod, the time-consuming work of writing elucidatory notes. Furthermore, the two last volumes only included around 50 per cent of the journal entries written by Kierkegaard in his last years in contrast to the 80–90 per cent typical of the earlier volumes.

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Barfod has been viewed as a problematic editor by later generations, primarily due to his heavy-handed treatment of the original material. Moreover, at the time he was considered indiscreet by some people both for publishing Kierkegaard’s allegedly private papers, but even more so because people discussed in them were still alive. Barfod’s slapdash editorial practice was later noted by the editors of the Efterladte Papirer’s heir, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (1909–48) (more on this later), and the allegation of indiscretion proved to be a temporary phenomenon and died out relatively quickly, making possible a recognition of the value of the material that Barfod had presented (Cappelørn et al. 2003: 53ff. and 67ff.; Kabell 1948: 128ff.). In the foreword to the first volume, Barfod gives an account of the general point of view that formed the basis for the selection and ordering of the entries. The idea of the edition is to create ‘a collection of material, an archive, ordered as much as possible, of loose, often not even mutually continuous, supplementary materials for a future portrayal of the story of Søren Kierkegaard.’ To this end Barfod found it natural to organize the material ‘according to the chronology’ (EP, vol. 1: XI). This organization of the material, its fundamental determination as a biographical source and the accompanying chronological principle of organization meant, for example, that the presentation of the journal JJ and the first of the thirty-six NB journals took on a fragmentary and discontinuous character, and that the letters, loose pages, and unpublished polemical articles were interspersed with the other materials in a chronological series. In order further to give the edition its dramatic character as a biographical source, starting with the third volume, Barfod began to group material under headings such as ‘The Polemic with Heiberg’ and ‘The Corsair and Goldschmidt’. The desire to arrange the material in chronological order gave Barfod a problem, as many of Kierkegaard’s entries are not dated. This same problem would appear again for the editors of Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), but Barfod ‘solved’ it by keeping first of all to the entries of a personal nature, which he thought relatively easy to date, and then to entries that can be situated in what Barfod believed to be the context of Kierkegaard’s thought at the time and allusions made to contemporary events. However, he omits a great deal of material connected to Kierkegaard’s studies and drafts and outlines for planned works (material that in the Papirer is placed in the groups B and C). As noted, in his edition Barfod included explanatory notes that were intended to defend against charges of indiscretion, a kind of counterweight to Kierkegaard’s polemics or unflattering discussions of people who were still living. In the case of M. A. Goldschmidt, this concerned references to and quotations from passages in the periodicals The Corsair and North and South, so that Kierkegaard’s harsh criticism of Goldschmidt did not remain entirely isolated and uncommented upon. The sympathetic and reader-friendly feature of Barfod’s edition is emphasized further by the useful memoirs of Kierkegaard’s companions and friends from school and the time of his youth, which Barfod collected and included in his introductory ‘Notes’ to the first volume. In time, the initiative of collecting testimonies about Kierkegaard spawned various contributions, which constitute important psychological material and a corrective and

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supplement to Kierkegaard’s own autobiographical statements. One of the most important of the documents is Hans Brøchner’s ‘Recollections of Søren Kierkegaard’, written in late 1871 and early 1872 and published after the death of the author in Edvard and Georg Brandes’ journal, Det nittende Aarhundrede [The Nineteenth Century], in March of 1877, by Brøchner’s student Harald Høffding (Kirmmse 1996: 225–52).

The Edition: Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker (1901–6 and 1920–36) From 1901 to 1906 Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928), a professor of classical philology, together with his fellow philologist, Anders Bjørn Drachmann (1860–1935), and the Egyptologist and chief librarian at the Royal Library, Hans Ostenfeld Lange (1863–1943), published the first edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works, Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker (SV1). This was printed in fourteen volumes in a modern Latin font. The division of labour among the three gave H. O. Lange responsibility for the edifying part of the authorship, while Heiberg edited the aesthetic/literary works, and Drachmann the philosophical ones. The edition did not include any foreword in the strict sense, but A. B. Drachmann described the editorial principles in an article in 1911 and presented examples in order ‘to show that the work which was done with the new edition of Kierkegaard is not without fruit for the ordinary reader, who is only concerned with having a comprehensible text without stains and distortions’ (Drachmann 1911: 174). Not surprisingly, given their background and training, the editors made use of the methodology of classical philology, which means that the point of departure assumes that one is usually not in possession of the original manuscript but instead a long series of surviving variant texts placed alongside one another and from which one then attempts to reconstruct the original from which they stem. One thus builds on the surviving variant texts and not genetic variants of the original text (outlines, drafts, and the fair copy), which, in Kierkegaard’s case, means that the editors not only made use of Kierkegaard’s own first editions but also his second editions. This letzter Hand principle—that is, to publish the text which appeared to be the final version Kierkegaard intended—is, however, supplemented by the sporadic use of Kierkegaard’s manuscripts, from which the editors have taken expressions and formulations and placed them into the text of their edition. In the more scholarly second edition (SV2), which was published by the same editors in the years 1920–36, the philological principles were changed to a certain degree. Here the edition moved more and more in the direction of the erster Hand principle, which means that the editors were far more amenable to correcting the first editions based on readings from the manuscripts, a procedure based on a (neo-Romantic hermeneutical) idea about what must have been Kierkegaard’s original intention. In both cases (SV1 and SV2) a text was created, which was in complete accordance with the text-philological

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tradition of the time, but which from the perspective of modern text-philological principles creates a synthetic and contaminated text, a situation that was only remedied with the new historical-critical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Compared to SV1, which was conceived as a popular edition or folkeudgave, SV2 is not essentially improved when it comes to commentaries and explanatory notes, even if in the postscript to the last volume of SV1 the editors write that the ‘explanatory notes beneath the text are only a first foundation of a real commentary; to approach even some degree of completeness in this regard must be the task of the future.’ (SV1, vol. XIV: 377). Instead, SV2 was accompanied by an index of persons and an index of subjects by A. Ibsen and a terminological dictionary by J. Himmelstrup (vol. XV). A typographical curiosity is the fact that the editors of the SV2 edition chose to imitate the original first editions’ Gothic font, which perhaps can be regarded as an expression of the new national-historical consciousness in the wake of the First World War (the revival of Scandinavianism takes place during this same period). The editions of the Samlede Værker doubtless improved the access to Kierkegaard’s writings, but the historical impact of these editions was not as great as that of the large new edition of the posthumous papers (Papirer), which will be treated immediately below. The primary reason for the limited impact of these editions of Kierkegaard’s collected works is that during this period many of his writings were published as individual works, rendering complete editions superfluous.

The Edition: Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (1909–48 and 1968–78) Søren Kierkegaards Papirer [The Papers of Søren Kierkegaard] edited by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr, and (from 1926) Einar Torsting, appeared in the years 1909–48 in twenty volumes and was reprinted in 1968–70 by Niels Thulstrup in a photomechanical reproduction with two supplement volumes. Moreover, Thulstrup’s improved edition also included (in 1975–8) a three-volume Index created by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. The monumental edition (referred to in the following simply as the Papirer) is a rare thing in a Danish context and represents a unique philological effort, which right from the beginning commanded respect even beyond the country’s borders. The edition was welcomed from the publication of the first volume in 1909 as a worthy and much-needed successor to its predecessor, Barfod and Gottsched’s Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer. The idea for the edition was that of the younger brother of the aforementioned J. L. Heiberg, physician and archivist at Rigsarkivet (National Archive) P. A. Heiberg (1864– 1926), who had already written a series of dense psychological studies of Kierkegaard. Together with his colleague, professor of philosophy Victor Kuhr (1882–1948), he reported in the preface (dated September 1909) of the first volume, that all of the decisions of principle concerning questions about the edition’s plan, character, and external

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form, along with the treatment of the text, had been made in consultation with the three editors of Samlede Værker. The Papirer was therefore, right from the beginning, projected as a natural and carefully thought-through continuation of the first edition of Kierkegaard’s published works with awareness of the necessity of a corresponding complete corpus of non-published Kierkegaard material. The intention of the edition was first to produce ‘a series of volumes with the literary manuscripts, with the exception of letters, in so far as these are not included in S. K.’s journals, then letters from, to and about S. K., and finally documents and materials.’ (Pap. I: VII). The preface goes on to describe the material, which was made the foundation of the edition, with the University Library’s collection of Søren Kierkegaard’s papers as the primary source. It then describes the two catalogues of the material, which were made by Henrik Lund in 1855–6 and by H. P. Barfod in 1865, and mentions the material’s partially defective condition due to Barfod’s cutting, pasting, writing on the manuscripts, crossing-out, and corrections he had made with an eye to sending the manuscripts themselves directly to the typesetters, using them as the basis for his edition of the Efterladte Papirer; and finally it describes the ordering of the material. As was the case with Barfod’s edition, an overarching chronological principle governs the organization of the material. But in addition to this, a systematic principle supplementing the strict chronological ordering of the entries with a thematic ordering is applied. The editors base this on ‘the very nature of the material’ and divide the entries into three main groups according to their content: ‘one group with the character of diary entries (including everything from exclamations torn out of context and notes to a continuous travel diary)—one group related to the development of the authorship in one form or another (including everything from short treatises and newspaper articles to large works)—one group related to Kierkegaard’s studies and readings (including everything from short aphoristic entries to entire notebooks and verbose excerpts)’ (Pap. I: X). These groups are then dubbed A, B, and C, and within the group C a further division is introduced with respect to content: ‘Theologica, Philosophica and Æsthetica’. With this division of material according to theme and with the abandoning of a strict chronological principle, the editors were nevertheless confronted with the inevitable problem of placing Kierkegaard’s undated entries. They chose here to try to place the undated entries among the dated entries based on internal and external criteria, and it is especially this forced chronology, that is the focus of the few critical statements made about the edition in the reception at the time. The Papirer was received, as mentioned, in a predominantly positive manner at the time. A lot of the accusations made against Barfod in his time had fallen away in more than one sense. The critical points were mainly of an indirect nature, for instance in the case of Valdemar Ammundsen’s book on Kierkegaard’s youth from 1912, which to some degree demonstrated the shortcomings of the first three published volumes of the Papirer, since Ammundsen avails himself of material that is only listed but not fully reproduced in the edition (Ammundsen 1912: 86ff.). This primarily concerns material from the first volume’s section C (Kierkegaard’s study notes, etc.), and one can imagine that afterwards the editors cast a side glance at Ammundsen’s book since, in contrast to

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the first three volumes, from the fourth volume onwards everything in this group is reproduced in extenso. The first thorough evaluation of the Papirer was, however, long in coming and can with some justice be said to be Henning Fenger’s Kierkegaard: The Myths and Their Origins from 1976 (English translation, 1980). One might suspect that this is because editions that stretch over decades can only be seen in overview and used critically and deeply when they exist as a completed whole. Over time, the Papirer has received a reputation for being difficult to work with because of the unclear organization of the enormous mass of material and the problematic chronology of the undated material. The Papirer seems, moreover, to presuppose that one has read the entire edition in order to find one’s way around the text, and in this context the importance of the Index can hardly be overestimated in facilitating the use of the edition. The primary actor in the Papirer’s further publication history is Niels Thulstrup (1924–88), who was the primus motor in the creation of the Danish Søren Kierkegaard Society, founded on 4 May 1948. As a student of theology he had, in an article in the Berlingske Aftenavis on 10 February 1948, made some concrete reflections about what task a ‘Kierkegaard Community’ might have. Here he mentions the need for a bibliographical overview of the large body of Kierkegaard literature, which had already been published by that time, along with the fact that for the new edition of the papers ‘it would be highly desirable if there could be a well-organized index volume’ (Garff et al. 1998: 197). The twentieth and final volume of the Papirer was published in the early autumn of 1948, but two main tasks remained outstanding, relating to the omission of Kierkegaard’s correspondence and the problem of orienting oneself in the enormous mass of text. Thulstrup’s Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard [Letters and Documents Concerning Søren Kierkegaard] appeared in 1953, containing 21 different documents from Kierkegaard’s baptism certificate to his will, 312 letters and notes to and from Kierkegaard along with a preliminary series of dedications from Kierkegaard’s hand, but the index volume was not forthcoming. It was conceived as an analogue to the more than 500-page person and subject index that A. Ibsen had made for the second edition of the Samlede Værker, but in the first instance it received only a skimpy forerunner in the form of a 90-page photocopied index of names in A4-format, compiled by the Finnish Kierkegaard scholar Kalle Sorainen, which was offered on a subscription basis to members of the Society in its newsletter for the autumn of 1952. Niels Thulstrup’s work on the index resulted in a trial index that appeared at the same time as the publication of the ninth volume of the periodical Kierkegaardiana in 1959, and contained some ‘Instruction al Remarks’, where it is explained that he and his wife, Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, had compiled slips of paper for a person and subject index to Søren Kierkegaards Papirer consisting of 70,000 references. This provisional index would make do for some time, and the project was not mentioned again until 1968—the year that witnessed the photomechanical reproduction of the Papirer under the joint administration of the Søren Kierkegaard Society and the Danish Society for Language and Literature. In the preface to the ‘Second enlarged edition’ one could read: ‘The printed volumes are followed by supplement volumes, which contain corrections and additions

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to the texts along with heretofore unpublished entries (from section C) from Søren Kierkegaard’s hand. The final supplement volumes contain a person and subject index for the entire edition, created by M. Mikulová Thulstrup and the editor [sc. Niels Thulstrup]’ (Pap., vol. 1 1968: XXIII). In 1968–9, the photomechanical reproduction of the twenty original volumes appeared, with one volume being published per month, and in 1969–70 the two supplementary volumes, containing mainly excerpts and lecture and book notes, which the first edition of the Papirer had omitted. The second edition of Søren Kierkegaards Papirer was, however, only completed when Niels Jørgen Cappelørn—who had worked on the material of the ‘Mistakes and Corrections’ in the supplement volume XIII, and to whom the demanding work of going through the Thulstrups’ collection of small slips of paper had been entrusted—had conceived the project anew, reworking and expanding the person and subject index to around 140,000 references in the Index which was published in 1975–8. At the beginning of the 1960s, Thulstrup and the author Villy Sørensen were asked by the publishing house Gyldendal if they would take it upon themselves to publish a third edition of the Samlede Værker, a request which was motivated by the 150th anniversary in 1963 of Kierkegaard’s birth. Their conditions were, however, unsatisfactory (since the publishing house wanted to publish one volume per month), and the project was instead taken over by the author, Peter P. Rohde (1902–78), who despite serious time pressure managed to keep to the production plan, though this was not without consequences with respect to quality. The edition (1962–4) was—in line with its predecessor—conceived as a popular edition or ‘folkeudgave.’ (SV3 1: 7). It was based on the text of the second edition and was accompanied by a reprint of Himmelstrup’s terminological index and an expanded apparatus of notes; it subsequently became, without comparison, the most widely used edition in Denmark, since it was cheap and also appeared as a paperback.

The Edition: Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (1997–) A book that in many ways stands alone in Kierkegaard research and on several points anticipates the new edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), is the literary scholar Henning Fenger’s Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins from 1976 (English trans. 1980). Henning Fenger (1921–85) undertook a wide-ranging criticism of Kierkegaard research’s uncritical relation to source material, which had been presented thus far, and he presented a sharp criticism of the Papirer edition and its editors. His style is polemical and ironic, and the words of praise are for the most part limited to admiring the hard work and the monumentality of the edition. But even the editorial work’s ‘Sisyphean task’ has, according to Fenger, the dubious quality of having been performed by scholars with a decided theological, philosophical, and philological background, and he misses especially the historians who could competently oversee a responsible edition of the papers from Kierkegaard’s youth. What is worse is that the entire edition’s original

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intention of being a Søren Kierkegaard ‘diplomatarium’ (as was stated in the foreword to the first volume from 1909), was not only not fulfilled, but also intrinsically overambitious and inevitably confusing. Among other things, Fenger criticizes the unclear talk of ‘literary’ Kierkegaard manuscripts and ‘letters from Kierkegaard’, which constitute a special problem, because the editors have not reflected on the possibility that these letters might be fictional. He concludes: ‘the edition of Heiberg and Kuhr, its plan and division into parts, is unclear and imprecise from the very start’ (Fenger 1980: 48). Fenger virtually comes to defend H. P. Barfod’s heavy-handed treatment of the original manuscripts, which made the Papirer dependent upon the Efterladte Papirer, Barfod’s catalogue, and his transcription of the original manuscripts as source for the edition. In this context Fenger finds Heiberg’s and Kuhr’s rough treatment of Barfod and his age’s editorial norms condescending. Concerning the Papirer’s editorial principles, with its putting aside the strict chronological organization of the material while favouring instead a thematic-systematic principle by dividing the material into groups A, B, and C, and within the C group a further division into Theologica, Philosophica and Æsthetica, ‘the editors have succeeded in creating a perfect and absolute chaos, concerning which—without malice—one can use Kierkegaard’s own words: “discursive discussions and incomprehensible commentaries concerning the category of higher lunacy” ’ (Fenger 1980: 50). While H. P. Barfod at least laid his cards on the table and admitted his own helplessness and lack of consistency with regard to Kierkegaard’s actual discontinuous and problematic entries, the editors of the Papirer allowed a respect for the interdependency or the accidental connection among the entries to outweigh a respect for the chronological sequence, which in Fenger’s eyes was misleading. It is hopeless to force the complexity in Kierkegaard’s entries, especially in the papers from his youth, into an order of this kind. Therefore, with respect to these entries, according to Fenger, it would have been more honest, ‘if one had chosen either to publish the twelve books, or folders, from before the time of the journals—the twelve items described by Barfod, with the addition of the random papers—or to have opted for the following principle: dated entries in one section, undated ones in another’ (Fenger 1980: 50). Fenger’s main criticism of the Papirer culminates in a quotation of the words of the editors about their practice of placing the undated entries together with the dated ones, ‘The most important passage in Heiberg and Kuhr’s long preface’, which is reproduced unaltered in the second edition. With an introductory remark concerning the editors’ bureaucratic style of writing and P. A. Heiberg’s arrangement of the undated entries so that they fit with his theory of Kierkegaard’s religious development, Fenger goes on to say: Translated into everyday language, this means that they stuck in the numerous undated slips where they believed they could aptly be used to support the concept of Kierkegaard they already had! It is astonishing, putting it mildly, that in the Papirer’s second edition (a photographic reproduction, of course) no attention was paid to the editors’ own express opinion concerning the chronology’s altogether doubtful value. It is high time that a team of experts be given the task of identifying, that is, dating and placing, the papers of the young Kierkegaard. In Annelise Garde, Denmark possesses a skillful graphologist, and the Royal Library has at its disposal

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both experts and technical equipment to aid in the identification of paper, watermarks, types of ink, and so forth. Of course, we shall never attain absolute accuracy in determining when Kierkegaard wrote what, but we can certainly not afford the reputation of putting up with the results of Heiberg and Kuhr. (Fenger 1980: 51)

Not even the Papirer’s descriptions of the manuscripts, which are found at the back of each volume and which before Fenger were not criticized for anything more than being superfluous, escape his criticism. By comparing the original manuscripts—in this case the many small pieces of paper which constitute the journal FF—with the editors’ information about them, Fenger complains that it is only with great difficulty that the reader can deduce that two entries, which are not printed one after another, are actually found on the front and back side of the same piece of paper. He rounds off his criticism of the philological side of the edition by requesting that the editors of Søren Kierkegaard’s papers be pedantic. Pedantry is not only a virtue but a must. Moreover, he suggests that a scholarly edition should present photographic reproductions of the many different loose papers on verso pages and descriptions and commentaries of those papers on the recto pages: ‘We must be able to afford it, after all. We have only one Kierkegaard’ (Fenger 1980: 53). In the new scholarly edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter [Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings] the editors have taken into account much of Fenger’s criticism of the Papirer— although there have not been sufficient financial resources to publish a photographic reproduction of every one of Kierkegaard’s numerous small scraps of paper. In an article from 1994, Joakim Garff sketches the perspectives for a new electronic edition and, on the same occasion, runs through older and newer editions of Kierkegaard’s writings, including Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Garff agrees with Fenger’s problematization of the Papirer’s organization of the material and points especially to two critical points concerning the Papirer editors’ lack of sense for the graphic signals of the manuscripts, among others, the numerous and often very important marginal additions, as well as the organization of the B section, which is supposed to make possible insight into the genesis of Kierkegaard’s works, but which, according to Garff, is carried out in such a backwards manner that the material more or less loses its value (Garff 1994: 332f.). As an institutional expression of the profound new interest in Kierkegaard in the 1980s and 1990s the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre was founded in Copenhagen in 1994. The Centre was established with a grant from the Danish National Research Foundation (on the initiative of Niels Jørgen Cappelørn) with two main objectives: (1) to promote Kierkegaard research nationally and internationally from literary, theological, and philosophical perspectives, and (2) to create a complete new edition of everything that has survived from Søren Kierkegaard’s hand. The first volume of the new historicalcritical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), saw the light in 1997 and will when completed comprise fifty-five volumes, twenty-eight of them consisting of Kierkegaard’s own text and twenty-seven consisting of extensive explanatory notes. The edition is scheduled for completion in 2013. SKS divides the entirety of Kierkegaard’s output into four categories: (1) works published by Kierkegaard during his lifetime (vols. 1–14); (2) works that lay ready—or substantially ready—for publication at the time of his death, but which he did not

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publish in his lifetime (vols. 15 and 16, e.g. The Book on Adler and The Point of View of My Work as an Author); (3) journals, notebooks, excerpts, and loose papers, collectively entitled ‘journals and notebooks’ (vols. 17–27); and (4) letters and biographical documents (vol. 28). The edition thus for the first time brings together what has until now been published separately: the collected works, the posthumous papers and writings and the letters and documents. Furthermore, the edition has from the very beginning been projected as a hybrid between a book version (SKS-B) and an electronic version (SKS-E), the latter being the book version presented in an electronic format and (in time) supplemented with what the Papirer edition brought in the B section, i.e. Kierkegaard’s drafts, outlines, rough copies, comments written in the books he owned, etc. (cf. Garff 1994). The organization of the material rests on an archival principle, which means that each document (e.g. a journal, a notebook, or a loose piece of paper) is represented in its original appearance, i.e. as near as possible to the form in which Kierkegaard left it (and not, for instance, split up for chronological reasons). This implies a careful reconstruction of the original from the information given in Barfod’s (and to some extent Lund’s) catalogue, but it also introduces an important new graphical feature in the presentation of the ‘journal and notebooks’, namely a two-column format, which is employed in order to reflect the polydimensionality of the original material. The K-volumes of the new edition consist of ‘Explanatory Notes’ for each text and a ‘Critical Account’ of the same. The main purpose of the explanatory notes in SKS is to make the reader contemporary with Kierkegaard’s text—not to make the text contemporary with the reader, a job the reader must undertake on her own. The explanatory notes are meant to honour three demands: first, they should provide brief, relevant comments on the specific issue; second, they should stick to the immediate context of the issue at hand and not divert the attention of the reader away from the text itself; and, third, they should provide the reader with the information necessary to continue with the reading. Generally speaking, the explanatory notes emphasize the factual dimension of the text and do not indulge in interpretations (SKS K1: 50). The critical accounts of Kierkegaard’s texts consist of descriptions of the manuscripts in terms of the physical characteristics, provenance, and the available dating and other chronological information. Furthermore, as a novelty compared to previous editions, they offer a close look at the genesis of each of Kierkegaard’s published works, thus providing important information on the nature of his working process, which also involves his relations with various secretaries, printers, and publishers.

III. Aspects of Kierkegaard’s Working Process We know for certain that three people worked as secretaries for Kierkegaard during the genesis of some of his major works. In the case of his great breakthrough as a writer, Either/Or (1843), he was assisted with the fair copy by Peter Vilhelm Christensen

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(1819–63), and with the proofreading by his friend, the newspaper editor Jens Finsteen Giødwad (1811–91). The third secretary whom we know for certain is the already mentioned Israel Levin–by far the most frequently used assistant. It is possible that a fourth person served as secretary: Carl Ludvig Simonsen (1817–1907), who emigrated to Norway in the beginning of the 1840s, and claimed to his new fellow-countrymen that he had written the fair copy for both On the Concept of Irony and parts of Either/Or. Although Simonsen might very well have known Kierkegaard, since he was the brother-in-law of Grundtvig’s associate J. C. Lindberg with whom P. C. Kierkegaard had close relations, it is unlikely that his claim is true. His handwriting is nowhere to be found in Kierkegaard’s manuscripts and Kierkegaard never mentions Simonsen in his journals (SKS K1: 129). He does mention the other three. In a journal entry probably written in August 1843 Kierkegaard airs his suspicion that P. V. Christensen is plagiarizing some of his own thoughts in various articles. The entry reads: There is something odd about my little secretary Mr. Christensen. I bet he’s the one who in various ways is scribbling in the newspapers and in little pamphlets; because not infrequently I encounter an echo of my ideas, not as I tend to write them, but as I let them fall casually in conversation. And I, who treated him with such kindness, paid him so well, conversed with him for hours at a time—for which I paid him so as not to mortify and humiliate him because his lack of money made it necessary for him to work as a copyist. I made him an initiate into the whole business, threw a veil of mystification over it all, and in every way made the time as pleasant as possible for him.—But that little article in Portefeuille—it was a few days before Either/Or came out—was surely by him. It really wasn’t very nice of him. After all, he could have confided in me and told me that he had a desire to become an author. But his writings do not have a clean conscience. He himself probably notices that I have changed a bit, even though I am still just as polite and kind to him. On the other hand I have weaned him off his inquisitive snooping around my room. He must be kept at arm’s length; I hate all plagiarists. (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:144)

P. V. Christensen probably did notice that Kierkegaard had ‘changed a bit’, and he later wrote a couple of critical articles against Kierkegaard in connection with the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript in 1846 (cf. SKS K20: 152f.). When it comes to Giødwad, the relation was of a much more positive and long lasting nature. In addition to the proofreading of Either/Or, Kierkegaard used Giødwad when making arrangements with the printer Bianco Luno and the publisher C. A. Reitzel concerning the publishing of the pseudonymous writings from 1843–5 and again in 1849, where Kierkegaard sent the fair copy of Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays (1849) to Giødwad in order for him to deliver the manuscript to the printer Louis Klein (the only printer of Kierkegaard’s works other than Bianco Luno). Giødwad assisted in the proofreading of this work as well. That he was Kierkegaard’s personal friend is clear from several journal entries, for instance in an entry from May 1850, where Kierkegaard mentions that he has talked with Giødwad every single evening for the last three or four years (SKS23: NB18:44). There is, however, also evidence that Kierkegaard denounced Giødwad on his deathbed. In the written testimony of the hospital conversations between Kierkegaard and Emil Boesen, Boesen writes that Kierkegaard refused to

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receive visits from Giødwad and allegedly said of him: ‘He did favors for me in private and disavowed me publicly. I don’t like that.’ (Kirmmse 1996: 125). Israel Levin functioned as Kierkegaard’s secretary in the years 1845–51 and helped proofread major works such as Stages On Life’s Way (1845), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Works of Love (1847), Christian Discourses (1848), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), and Practice in Christianity (1850) as well as most of the smaller books from this period. Levin has given an account of his collaboration with Kierkegaard, in which he specifically refers to a chapter in Stages On Life’s Way: [Kierkegaard’s] elaborate depiction of situations and the pointedness of his phrasing, which one finds everywhere in his notes, meant that many portions of his books were produced at the cost of an enormous amount of work. What with all the corrections, and yet more corrections, we almost never finished ‘The Discourse of the Ladies’ Tailor.’ I became extremely useful to him, just by helping him to get beyond the most significant of the items upon which he foundered. At times I spent up to eight hours a day with him. Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks. (Kirmmse 1996: 208)

It was also while working on Stages on Life’s Way that Kierkegaard received a letter from Levin inviting him to give a sample of his handwriting for publication, an invitation that Levin sent to a number of well-known Danish personalities. Kierkegaard refused, writing: ‘My good Levin,|It cannot be done. I am too old to copy in an exercise book for my own sake, and even though my handwriting might come to be considered a model to be imitated by the reading youth, it does not appeal to me to write a draft for the sake of the draft. That kind of draft could easily become daft.|Yours respectfully,|S. Kierkegaard.’ (B&A1: 144/LD: 183). This refusal gives an impression of the somewhat strained relation between Kierkegaard and Levin but also provides an insight into Kierkegaard’s meticulous working process. Levin and Kierkegaard seem to have had a steady routine in their collaboration. From the manuscripts, and especially from the proofs of several of Kierkegaard’s works, it appears that the editing of a work typically proceeded with Kierkegaard reading the proof first for obvious errors, then with Levin making a thorough check of the proof against the printer’s copy and making orthographic adjustments. Finally, Kierkegaard edited the whole thing again with regard to content, often making sizeable changes along the way. That was certainly the case in On My Work as an Author from 1851 (Tullberg 2010: 252). The last point mentioned in the description of the proofreading process is probably the most apparent trait in Kierkegaard’s work process. He seems to have been simply unable to leave a text alone. A work was never really completely finished, it was in quite a modern sense always a work-in-progress. One almost has the impression that the compositor and printer at times had to pull the manuscript out of Kierkegaard’s hands in order to be able to finish the job of producing his books. As his authorship progresses and the complexity of his endeavour itself became a problem, Kierkegaard became extremely conscious of the timing of his publications and of how a current book would fit into the overall architecture of his entire authorship. A good example is, again, On My Work as an Author, which is a small book, almost a pamphlet, of about twenty pages, but has an

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enormous amount of manuscript material surrounding it, because of Kierkegaard’s constant reworkings and reconsiderations of its ideal timing and the context in which it should be published. In this respect his authorship itself can be called a work-in-progress. In fact, we know that during the typesetting and printing of his books Kierkegaard sometimes showed up in person at the printing house, for instance in the case of The Sickness Unto Death. The manuscript for this book was sent to Bianco Luno’s printing house at the end of June 1849, and Kierkegaard later described the circumstances surrounding the printing phase as dramatic: the arrangements with the printer had already been made when he received news of the death of Terkild Olsen (1784–1849), the father of his former fiancée Regine. This occurred on the night between 25 and 26 June and the event shocked Kierkegaard. Furthermore, his relationship with the publisher C. A. Reitzel was going through a crisis. The nature of this is unclear but it seems as if Reitzel at this point was having serious doubts about publishing Kierkegaard. The death of Regine’s father and the trouble with Reitzel made Kierkegaard reconsider his pseudonymous strategy right to the very end of the printing, and for various and very subtle reasons he was inclined to publish The Sickness unto Death under his own name (and not pseudonymously under the name of Anti-Climacus) together with the writings that would later become Practice in Christianity (SKS K11: 156–67). The relationship to C. A. Reitzel (1789–1853) must have taken a positive turn in the immediate aftermath of these events, since the books following The Sickness unto Death were all published by Reitzel and after his death by his heirs, who undertook the publication of Kierkegaard’s attack on official Christianity in the nine numbers of the periodical The Moment in 1855. Apart from Reitzel, the only other publishers of Kierkegaard were P. G. Philipsen (1812–77), who handled the dissertation On the Concept of Irony from 1841 and the upbuilding discourses from 1843–4, and the publishing house Gyldendal, who handled Two Minor Ethical-Religious Essays from 1849. Another example of Kierkegaard’s ongoing elaboration of texts can be seen in his journals. Here he frequently copies unused passages from rough drafts or fair copy of a work, probably having found them unfit for the current manuscript but good enough to be preserved in his journal. And even here, when copying a discarded passage, he changes the wording of the text, sometimes almost to the point of it becoming a different text altogether. The journals have also functioned as a kind of stockpile or a quarry for Kierkegaard’s creative process, a place where he could throw ideas about and later pick them up and bring them into the context of his current work. After publishing Either/Or, when he began to consider himself an author in a more conscious sense than before, he clearly used the journals very deliberately as a workshop for his authorship; the journals of his youth, on the other hand, are much more chaotic and fragmented in their contents. In this connection it is interesting that many of the journal entries have a very clear oral quality to them, suggesting that Kierkegaard must have articulated a lot of his thoughts verbally before writing them down. The verbal formulation could very well have taken place during Kierkegaard’s daily strolls through Copenhagen, where he had an extraordinary ear for the things being said on the street by everyday folk such as servant girls, coachmen, stablemen, beggars, and drunkards. And in fact, in his journal, Kierkegaard gives explicit evidence of the importance of his walks in the streets of the city:

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steen tullberg If, after a walk, which is when I meditate and gather ideas, I turned to go back home, overwhelmed with ideas, every word ready to be written down, and in a certain sense so weak that I could scarcely walk (ah, the person who has dealt with ideas will know about this), if then, along the way some poor person addressed me, and if in my excitement over my ideas I had not had time to talk with him, then when I reached home it would be as if everything had disappeared, and I would sink into the most frightful spiritual trial at the thought that what I had done to that person, God could do to me. If, on the other hand, I took the time to talk with the poor person and listen to him, this never happened to me, and everything would be ready when I arrived home. (SKS21/KJN5: NB7:41)

Kierkegaard’s eagerness to preserve unused passages during the genesis of a work has a counterpart in another phenomenon, which influenced his manuscripts in a somewhat backward manner. In more than one instance he copies into his rough draft passages that were added in the fair copy, thus bringing the rough draft up to date with the final version of the manuscript. He probably did so for fear of the fair copy being lost or destroyed at the printing house. This practice of updating the draft text can be seen, for example, in the drafts of Two Discourses for the Communion on Fridays, where Kierkegaard edited the draft himself (SKS K12: 351). But in the case of On My Work as an Author, which was published on the same day as the discourses, 6 August 1851, we have a strange case of Henrik Lund’s handwriting appearing in Kierkegaard’s draft in more than one place. It is possible that Kierkegaard has asked Lund—or rather, perhaps gave him permission—to update the text of the draft so it agreed with the final wording in the printer’s copy, where the same passages were added in the margin by Kierkegaard himself. The draft in question also bears witness to Kierkegaard’s work on a possible dedication to Regine Schlegel, a plan that was later abandoned. Its title page reads ‘On My Work as an Author|By|S. Kierkegaard.|Copenhagen, 1850’ with the remark ‘Format as in Philosophical Fragments, but smaller type and set more closely;|525 copies; 30 copies on vellum.’ A dedication intended for Regine then appears, written in a foreign, Gothic hand that can be identified as Lund’s, with the words, ‘To One Unnamed|whose name will one day be named|is dedicated|(these pages)’. Since this dedication is not found in the printer’s copy, it is not possible to explain its presence by Kierkegaard having asked Lund to update the draft in agreement with the printer’s copy. Whether Kierkegaard had, for other reasons, directed Lund to add the dedication to the draft cannot be determined, but there is evidence suggesting that Kierkegaard and Lund had socialized to some extent around this time. In a short letter, which Niels Thulstrup dates to around 1851–2, Kierkegaard writes to Lund: ‘Dear Henrich,|Can you meet me this evening at the usual time and place? If not, then please call on me tomorrow morning between 11–12 a.m.|Your Uncle|S. K.’ (B&A1: 298/LD: 378).

References Works by Kierkegaard Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer (EP), H. P. Barfod and H. Gottsched (eds.) (1869–81), vols. 1–9 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel).

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Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard (B&A), N. Thulstrup (ed.) (1953–4), vols. 1–2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter (Bl.art), Rasmus Nielsen (ed.) (1857) (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker (SV1), A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange (eds.) (1901–06), vols. 1–14 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker (SV2), A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange (eds.) (1931). Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker (SV3), Peter P. Rohde (ed.) (1962–4), vols. 1–19, 3rd edn (Copenhagen: Gyldendal).

Other Works Ammundsen, Valdemar (1912). Søren Kierkegaards Ungdom. Hans Slægt og hans religiøse Udvikling (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen). Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen, Joakim Garff, and Johnny Kondrup (2003). Written Images. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals, Notebooks, Booklets, Sheets, Scraps, and Slips of Paper. (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Drachmann, A. B. (1911). ‘Textkritik, anvendt paa S. Kierkegaards Skrifter’, in Udvalgte Afhandlinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Fenger, Henning (1980). Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins, trans. George C. Schoolfield (Danish 1976) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Garff, Joakim (1994). ‘Fra bog til bits’, Bogens Verden 6: 332f. ——– Tonny Aagaard Olesen, and Pia Søltoft (eds.) (1998). Studier i Stadier. Søren Kierkegaard Selskabets 50-års Jubilæum (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Jensen, F. G. (2006). ‘Two Letters Discovered. From J. C. Lund to P. C. Kierkegaard and from Regine Schlegel to Henrik Lund’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2006 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 261–70. Kabell, Aage (1948). Kierkegaardstudiet i Norden (Copenhagen: Hagerup). Kirmmse, Bruce H. (1996). Encounters with Kierkegaard. A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Tullberg, Steen (2010). ‘On the Genesis of On My Work as an Author’, in N. J. Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2010 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 237–52.

Suggested Reading Cappelørn et al. (2003). Fenger (1980). Henriksen, Aage (1951). Methods and Results of Kierkegaard Studies in Scandinavia. A Historical and Critical Survey, publication of the Kierkegaard Society, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard). KJN, vol. 1: pp. vii–xxv. SKS K1: 7–61. Tullberg, Steen (2003). ‘Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (1909–48 and 1968–78). Between Recension and Reception’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2003 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 234–76.

chapter 2

K ier k ega a r d a n d the En d of the Da n ish G olden Age B ruce H . K irmmse

There are perhaps only five historical figures from Danish intellectual life whose names are widely known outside Denmark: the writers Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karen Blixen, and the physicists Hans Christian Ørsted and Niels Bohr. Three of these—Andersen, Kierkegaard, and Ørsted—were active during the Danish Golden Age. What was this Golden Age?

I. Denmark, 1800–50 The term ‘Golden Age’ designates a cultural phenomenon, namely a remarkable outpouring of artistic, scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological productivity within the compass of a rather brief period of time, c. 1800–50, and largely within the confines of a single city, Copenhagen. In 1800, the population of Denmark proper (excluding Norway, extra-European possessions, and the predominantly German-speaking territories) was about one million. Approximately 75–85 per cent of this population was rural, with roughly 70 per cent directly engaged in agriculture. Denmark’s only large city was its capital, Copenhagen, with a population of 100,000. It is a curious fact that the great burst of cultural activity that marked Denmark’s Golden Age took place against a background of military defeat, economic depression, and state bankruptcy. The early 19th century was not kind to Copenhagen. In the wake of Denmark’s defeat by Sweden in the latter part of the 17th century, the form of government had changed to an absolute monarchy supported by the wealthy haute bourgeois merchant patriciate of the capital city. During the many petty wars that marked Europe

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in the 18th century, Denmark wisely remained neutral, and Copenhagen’s commercial houses earned great fortunes by carrying goods to and from Europe’s various belligerent powers. The city was dominated by a sophisticated, cosmopolitan upper-middle class, whose gracious palazzi can still be seen today, despite the effects of several major fires. With the coming of the incessant and large-scale warfare precipitated by the French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent rise of Napoleon, these good times could not continue, because Denmark was not powerful enough to continue to uphold—and profit from—its neutrality. In 1807, fearing that the Danish fleet would fall into French hands, the British demanded that neutral Denmark turn over its fleet, and when the Danes refused to do so, the British bombarded Copenhagen, burned much of it, and sailed off with the captured Danish fleet after destroying what they could not take with them. Denmark now, understandably but foolishly, abandoned its neutrality and took Napoleon’s side in the wars that ensued. Despite allied pleas and offers of concessions, Denmark remained with the French until the very end, Napoleon’s only ally after the disastrous Moscow campaign. As Napoleon’s fortunes fell, the Danish economy and state finances, already suffering badly, went into a precipitous decline, and in 1813 the government was forced to declare bankruptcy. At the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15, the victorious allies punished Danish intransigence by depriving Denmark of Norway, which was awarded to Sweden, and by compromising Danish sovereignty over Schleswig and Holstein by making the duchies members of the newly formed German Confederation—an arrangement that would lead to two wars and Denmark’s ultimate loss of both duchies later in the 19th century. Copenhagen’s commercial prosperity had come to a sudden end, and it would be a long time before the situation improved significantly. These are scarcely the circumstances in which one would expect to find an extraordinary blossoming of cultural creativity. In the countryside the situation was very different from that of the city. Rural Denmark had not benefited much from the urban boom of the 18th century, but starting with the peasant reforms that began in 1787, the countryside had been witness to steady and genuine economic advance and improvements in the social status of the rural population. These rural reforms, which were not seriously interrupted by the urban economic disasters of the early 19th century, brought the peasants legal freedom, and many had the opportunity to purchase, on favourable terms, the land they farmed. By the 1820s and 1830s a large and increasingly prosperous class of independent agricultural landowners had become established. The success of the countryside as compared to Copenhagen is striking and is borne out by whatever statistics one chooses: the rural economy was growing rapidly while Copenhagen stagnated; between 1800 and 1840 the rural population grew by 40 per cent while the population of Copenhagen grew by only 20 per cent; in the latter 1830s the life expectancy for a man in Copenhagen was 35, while in the countryside it was 50. Denmark’s rural majority had come of age, and it would demand that its voice be heard. The tension between the vigorous, progressive countryside and fragile, aristocratic Copenhagen was an important background feature of the Golden Age.

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The early 19th century also saw the rise of political liberalism and nationalism among the middle classes of much of western Europe, Denmark (and Germany) included. The old polyglot states and empires of early modern Europe had unfortunately linked the notion of the multinational state to an ideology of rigid conservatism, and in the 19th century, when the Enlightenment idea of representative government filtered down to the middle classes, it became entwined with the romantic belief in the single-nationality state. This idea took hold with peculiar vehemence in Germany, which of course was not one state but part of a political and ethnic hodgepodge. And it also took hold in Denmark. Unfortunately, German and Danish nationalists had conflicting notions concerning in particular what should become of the mixed German-Danish duchy of Schleswig (Danish: Slesvig), and this conflict bedevilled Danish politics during the 1830s, the 1840s, and after. Denmark was a complex, brittle, multinational, absolute monarchy, and the government rightly feared that any attempt to sort matters out along national lines would lead to collapse. In the end this was precisely what happened, and the success of the Danish ‘revolution’ of March 1848 was more a product of stubborn and incendiary middle-class urban nationalists (in both Germany and Denmark) than of any principled attempt to introduce representative government for its own sake. Yet of all the countries in Europe affected by the turmoil of 1848, Denmark was the only one to make decisively democratic changes that would never be rescinded. For Denmark, the most important and long-lasting consequence of the turmoil of 1848 was the constitution of 1849, by which the sclerotic absolute monarchy was transformed, literally overnight, into a democratic, constitutional state with what was then one of the broadest suffrage laws in the world, enfranchising the vast majority of the adult male population. In practice this meant that political power had shifted from a handful of wealthy families and high civil servants in Copenhagen to the many propertied agriculturalists (misleadingly still known by their former and somewhat denigrating appellation, ‘peasants’) who were the backbone of an increasingly prosperous and vocal rural population. The era of rule by the conservative urban elite was over, and the short-lived generation of liberal nationalists who had supplanted them would not survive the destruction of their dreams by Denmark’s crushing defeat in the German war of 1864. The changes of the first half of the 19th century laid the foundation for the middle-class democracy that characterizes Denmark today, and the real inheritor of the aristocratic Golden Age was the democratic majority. The Golden Age formed the doorway of modern Denmark, a doorway with two sides: on one side, a pre-modern, hierarchical, elitist absolute monarchy; on the other side, a modern society with representative government, mass communication, and integration into the world market economy. War, depression, bankruptcy, a declining urban patriciate, rural reform, nationalism, democratic revolution: no one of these things, but all of them explain the Danish Golden Age, which came into being in this complex field of tensions. The literary facet of the Golden Age is perhaps best examined in terms of its development through three generations.

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II. The First Generation of the Danish Golden Age: OehlenschlÄger, Mynster, and Grundtvig The first generation, c. 1802–25, was marked by the simultaneous debut, in 1802, of the philosopher Henrik Steffens (1773–1845) and his friend, the poet Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850). Steffens, a Norwegian, had studied science and philosophy in Germany and had fallen under the spell of the German Romantics and the philosopher Schelling. He arrived in Copenhagen in the summer of 1802 and immediately exercised a powerful influence upon Oehlenschläger. In the hope of advancing his candidacy for a philosophy post at the University of Copenhagen, Steffens held a very well-attended series of lectures in the autumn of 1802. A great many of those who would become Golden Age notables were present at these lectures, among them Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), now famous for his discovery of electromagnetism. In his Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger [Introductory Lectures on Philosophy] Steffens presupposed in his listeners ‘the internal need to know the real essence of things, to solve the riddle of existence’ (Steffens 1996: 11). Steffens promised his audience, ‘I will open a more significant view of life and existence than that to which we are led by ordinary experience, by daily life that is limited by finite needs’ (Steffens 1996: 12), and he held out the hope of attaining ‘the internal view that composes each individual part into a whole, positing the absolute whole, the One, as the Real’ (Steffens 1996: 11). We need to open ourselves to ‘poetry’, Steffens asserted, and ‘poetry is that which finds the stamp of the Eternal even in finite things’ (Steffens 1996: 139–40). And who is most capable of receiving this revelation? The genius. Genius differs from mere talent, which is always one-sided, in that it is the most immediate revelation of the Eternal, even in the finite, and therefore, despite the fact that it is the most individual, it is also the most universal. [. . .] It is the Divine within us, it is that which is one with everything, the image of Divinity, our real essence, which emerges in indistinct intimations, which expresses itself in every scientific endeavor, which reveals itself in every talent, and which reveals itself in its fullest glory in the splendid Genius. (Steffens 1996: 146–8)

University officials found Steffens’s views too radical, and he was not offered the position in philosophy. Steffens departed for Germany, but he had already succeeded in kindling the flame of Romanticism in Adam Oehlenschläger whose most famous poem ‘Guldhornene’ [The Golden Horns] (published in Digte [Poems], 1802) and whose ingenious drama Aladdin (published in Poetiske Skrifter [Poetical Writings], 1805) are celebrations of precisely the cult of genius and immediacy that had been Steffens’ gospel:

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bruce h. kirmmse ‘Guldhornene’ [The Golden Horns] They search and look In ancient books, In barrows high With prying eyes, Upon swords and shields In wall-girt fields, On rune-covered stones In mouldy bones [. . .] For the rare few Who understand our gift, Who are not bound by earthly chains, But whose souls lift themselves To the pinnacle of eternity; Who perceive the High In Nature’s eye; Who worshipfully tremble Before rays of the Deity, In the sun, in violets, In the least things and the greatest; Who burningly thirst After the life of Life; Who—O, great Spirit Of times gone by!— Who see thy divine brilliance Upon the sides of sacred things— For them our command sounds again! (Oehlenschläger 1961: 30–2)

In 1803, at almost the same moment that Oehlenschläger was composing his poetry, his friend Jakob Peter Mynster (1775–1854), one of the most profound young theologians of the age, was experiencing what he described as the ‘breakthrough’ that led him away from the rationalistic Christianity of the 18th century and into the subjective religiosity of the new age: At that instant my entire being focused upon this knowledge, and commitment fused together with this knowledge. Then a peace such as I had never known dawned, or rather descended, into my soul, “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.” [. . .] [There is] an expressible Good [. . .] not of flesh and blood [. . .] but which belongs to a higher order of things that always comes near to man. [. . .] I had to feel myself utterly and painfully abandoned in the world in order to find what is highest and most blessed of all. And nothing can compare with the delight, the internal jubilation, with which I said to myself ‘I have a God and a Saviour!’ (Mynster 1884: 155–7)

Together, Mynster and Oehlenschläger represented the Romantic-subjectivist version of the synthesis of culture and religion which had characterized pre-modern society and

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which continued, in this new guise, to characterize the Danish Golden Age. As time passed, Oehlenschläger became a normal and even conservative fixture of the cultural firmament. In 1810, despite his lack of an earned degree, Oehlenschläger was made extraordinary professor at the University of Copenhagen, and later he even came to serve as the university’s rector. But another sort of voice also emerged during this first generation of the Danish Golden Age. Oehlenschläger’s pantheism and Mynster’s aristocratic personalism were challenged by the protean—indeed, erratic—figure, N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783– 1872), who increasingly used his remarkable poetic powers both to promote what he called ‘old-fashioned’ religion and to celebrate the rise in the peasantry of a Danish national and democratic consciousness. Poet and pastor, politician and prophet, theologian and philologist, historian and popular educator, Grundtvig broke all boundaries, and his career almost defies description. One feature ought to be mentioned here, however: his religious conception of the Danish national destiny. Grundtvig had a remarkable ability to view as parallel the chronicle of his own tormented but hopeful soul and the fate of the Danish nation. As early as his great mystery play Paaske-Lilien [The Easter Lily, 1817—the Danish term for daffodil], Grundtvig held out the hope of national salvation, even in the midst of defeat and humiliation: ‘Winter storms and hail and rain|Blow and dash upon the earth,|But I [i.e. the “Easter lily”] stand as a sign|Of a blossom-time in the North’ (Grundtvig 1941: 313). As Grundtvig pointed out in his lengthy poem Nyaars-Morgen [New Year’s Morn, 1824], his hope was ‘an unreasonable hope’ (Grundtvig 1941: 366), a hope for ‘a blessed New Year’s morn in mid-summer’ (Grundtvig 1941: 372). It was a hope for a spiritual and national rebirth that ‘will be realized [if we] depend upon the Lord and keep our eye continually on the great goal that He surely wills: the revival of the spirit of Scandinavia unto Christian deeds in a manner befitting the times!!’ (Grundtvig 1941: 373). Therefore, ‘despite all visible signs, the dead of Denmark are only slumbering and will now suddenly arise’ (Grundtvig 1941: 374). And as it turned out, Grundtvig’s path of revival led through democracy and constitutional government: ‘Yes, you sons of the giant race!|Let us understand our advantages properly!|We are each made according to our last,|And freedom is what serves us best’ (Grundtvig 1942: 366). Despite the fact that he was anything but a peasant in his origins, and despite his own roots in Romanticism—like Steffens, Grundtvig was affected early on by the philosophy of Schelling—Grundtvig remained the great cultural democrat of his age and the bugbear of the Copenhagen elite, to which, however, he was very well connected, as will be seen later in this essay. Grundtvig’s religious and political-cultural notions idealized the peasants, and many of them returned the favour by embracing his version of Christianity and, after the adoption of the 1849 constitution, by electing him to the parliament, where he served for many years.

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III. The Second Generation of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg and Martensen Then came a second generation of Golden Age figures, who had rather different voices. By the 1820s and 1830s, much of the younger generation had come to find the naïve and unsystematic immediacy of the first generation of Danish Romanticism unsatisfying. Thus Oehlenschläger, Mynster, and company were found wanting by the cooler and more sophisticated intellectual and artistic sensibilities of Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791– 1860). Heiberg was no stranger to Copenhagen intellectual and cultural circles. He was the son of Peter Andreas Heiberg (1758–1841), a leading Enlightenment writer, and the beautiful and remarkably gifted young Thomasine Buntzen (1773–1856). The couple wed in 1790, and their son Johan Ludvig was born the following year. P. A. Heiberg’s close friend and colleague was Knud Lyne Rahbek (1760–1830), a leading critic and the dean of the Danish literary scene, who with his influential wife Karen Margrethe (‘Kamma’) Rahbek, (1775–1829), hosted the city’s most influential salon from the late 1700s into the first decades of the 1800s. Danish politics in the 1790s was dominated by the after-effects of the French Revolution, and by 1799–1800 matters finally came to the point that the liberal P. A. Heiberg clashed with the Danish government and was compelled to go into exile in Paris, from which he did not return. Neither his wife Thomasine nor his son Johan Ludvig accompanied him to France, and a bitter divorce and custody battle ensued. Heiberg’s wife was granted a divorce, and Heiberg did not gain custody of their son. Shortly thereafter, Thomasine Buntzen Heiberg married Carl Frederik Gyllembourg (1767–1815), a wealthy Swedish baron (who, ironically, had been exiled from Sweden to Denmark because of his sympathies for the French Revolution and his involvement in the 1792 assassination attempt on the king of Sweden). Although he grew up among the well-to-do and the literary elite, young Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s childhood was rather turbulent, as he was at the centre of his parents’ marital complications, and for a time he was placed with various surrogate families, including two years living with the Rahbeks. Johan Ludvig Heiberg was a brilliant and precocious student and had already left his mark on the literary scene—in particular, the theatre— before a sojourn in Germany in the 1820s subjected him to the influence of Hegel, whose speculative philosophy had a profound effect on Heiberg’s thinking for the rest of his life. Heiberg acquired from Hegel a lofty sense of possessing an overview through which all phenomena and historical developments could be explained, and when he returned to Denmark it was to proclaim this latest gospel of German idealism in a manner that calls to mind the similar proselytizing zeal of Steffens a generation earlier. In his programmatic piece, Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuvaerende Tid [On the Significance of Philosophy to the Present Age, 1833], Heiberg adopted a strikingly superior attitude with respect to Christianity, declaring that ‘one can rightly say that the

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Christian religion was a work not of Christ, but of the human race; it is precisely because of this that the Son was sent forth, not by himself, but by the Father—for what is a work of the human race is a work of God’ (Heiberg 1861a: 390). Furthermore, Heiberg noted, ‘It is of [. . .] no use to conceal or gloss over the truth: we must confess to ourselves that in our time religion is primarily a matter for the uncultivated, whereas for the cultivated world it belongs to the past, to a previous stage’ (Heiberg 1861a: 396). In 1831, Heiberg had married Johanne Luise Pätges (1812–90), twenty-one years his junior and the much sought after belle of the Danish stage. Johan Ludvig and Johanne Luise Heiberg would soon make their home into the leading literary salon of the latter half of Danish Golden Age, frequented by writers and intellectuals of many stripes—by everyone who was anyone, even the socially awkward Andersen and a strange dissident named Søren Kierkegaard—and presided over by Heiberg, his wife, and his aging mother Thomasine Gyllembourg, who, as everyone knew, had herself created an entire genre of modern Danish fiction under the transparent pseudonym of ‘The Author of A Story of Everyday Life’. The Heiberg home certainly constituted Copenhagen’s literary Parnassus during the latter half of the Golden Age, but times were changing. The educated upper-middle classes were soon more interested in the fight for representative government and national identity than in speculative idealism. Heiberg’s exalted intellectualism did not gain the popularity he had hoped it might, and the middle classes simply refused to become his pupils. With the advent of the 1840s, Hegel was becoming passé, and the Golden Age was losing its audience, its public. Heiberg pronounced his curse upon the Copenhagen middle class: ‘You sit lazily upon the temple benches.|You neither hear nor think.|For you, the Spirit is nothing but a stink.|[. . .]|[You] have lost respect for beauty|And have no faith in ideas,|And respect art as much as if it were a bean.|[. . .] Soon you will stand in the nations’ ring|As grey in art as in other things’ (Heiberg 1862: 177–88). Frustrated by the public’s changing attitude, Heiberg lamented that what is needed is ‘a genius, who really understands the movements of his times’ (Heiberg 1861b: 266). The Denmark of 1842, however, was not as receptive to the idea of genius as it had been in 1802, and Heiberg became increasingly embittered at the approach of modern mass society and democratic government. (It was left to his widow, Johanne Luise Heiberg, who became the director of the Royal Theatre after the death of her husband in 1860, to open that venerable institution for the first time to Henrik Ibsen, whose work went beyond the limits of Golden Age sensibilities.) Johan Ludvig Heiberg had a friend and, for a time, a prominent Hegelian ally in the theologian Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–84). As a young man, Martensen studied in Germany in the mid-1830s and, not unlike Heiberg, plunged enthusiastically into Hegel’s philosophy and found himself caught up ‘in a magical net’ (Martensen 1882: 95). In the summer of 1836, Martensen left Germany, and on his way back to Copenhagen he visited the Heiberg couple in Paris. The three got on famously and a lifelong friendship was forged. Martensen was nearly a generation younger than Johan Ludvig Heiberg, but they had a shared interest in Hegelian philosophy. By 1838, having finished his licentiate

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degree at the University of Copenhagen the previous year, Martensen was appointed lecturer at the university. Martensen’s dissertation for the licentiate dealt with the autonomy of human self-consciousness. His work was viewed as a theological expression of the latest ‘speculative’ (i.e. Hegelian) trend, and the lectures he gave at the university on ‘speculative dogmatics’ in the late 1840s were immensely popular. Nonetheless, if Martensen intended to keep open the possibility of a career in the Danish Church—and even, perhaps, to advance to the highest levels within the university—he would have to make it clear that he was by no means so entranced with Hegel as was his friend Heiberg. In the course of the 1830s it had become clear that Heiberg’s views on Christianity were quite unorthodox (see above), which summoned forth a rejoinder from Bishop Mynster, after which a scholarly debate ensued, with Martensen taking Heiberg’s side. In the 1840s, however, the popularity of Hegel’s philosophy waned generally, while the Hegelian Left (e.g. Bruno Bauer, D. F. Strauss, and Ludwig Feuerbach) made many fearful of where all this would lead, thus vindicating the initial hesitation of those who had viewed Hegel as a pantheist. Martensen’s views moderated, and he made less and less use of Hegelian or speculative language. In 1849, when Martensen published a book version of the lectures that had originally been called ‘speculative dogmatics’, the volume bore the title Den christelige Dogmatik [Christian Dogmatics]. Martensen cut a brilliant career path in the 1840s, not without being helped by the patronage of Bishop Mynster, who in addition to being the most influential person in the Church also wielded significant influence at the university. In 1840, Martensen was promoted from lecturer to extraordinary professor of theology at the university; in 1841, after being nominated by Bishop Mynster, Martensen was made a member of the Royal Scientific Society; in 1845, again at the instance of Bishop Mynster, Martensen was appointed Court Preacher; in 1847 he was made a knight of the Dannebrog; in 1850, he was appointed ordinary professor at the university; and on Mynster’s death in 1854, Martensen succeeded his protector as bishop of Zealand and primate of the Danish Church.

IV. Intermezzo: A Tightly Knit Society of ‘Coteries’ Denmark was a small and very close-knit country. By the close of the Golden Age at the middle of the 19th century, the population had reached c. 1,350,000, but—at least until the adoption of the 1849 constitution, which enfranchised the rural and unlettered people who made up the majority of the Danish population—only a few thousand families ‘mattered’, that is, had the education and the wealth to play a significant part in the nation’s cultural and political life. Democracy was a problem that the Golden Age elite would be compelled to confront subsequently, and although it proved possible to stave

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off the full consequences of the events of 1848 and 1849 for several decades, there is no question that mid-century marked the end of the Golden Age. During the period with which we are concerned, it is hard to overstate the degree to which the literary and cultural world was dominated by cliques or, as Kierkegaard would mockingly come to call them, ‘coteries’. It is impossible here to provide a full account of the inbred and clubby nature of the Danish Golden Age, but a few specifics which follow below can give an overview of the situation. In 1802, when he published his groundbreaking Digte, launching the Danish Romantic movement later known as the Golden Age, the great poet Adam Oehlenschläger was engaged to be married to Christiane Heger (1782–1841), who was the younger sister of Kamma Rahbek. This engagement was not without its advantages, inasmuch as Kamma Rahbek was the wife of K. L. Rahbek, the reigning literary trendsetter of the day. Rahbek was definitely the defender of the neo-classicist ‘old school’, some of whose members would be sure to have serious objections to the subjectivity and the break with formal conventions that characterized the new poetry, including Oehlenschläger’s, that was written in the new Romantic style. Having Rahbeks in the family was a definite advantage for the daring young Oehlenschläger. The Rahbek connection proved especially useful a few years later, in 1805, when Oehlenschläger published his Poetiske Skrifter, a volume that included, in addition to the previously mentioned drama Aladdin, a lengthy narrative poem, Jesu Christi gientagne Liv i den aarlige Natur [The Life of Jesus Christ, Repeated in the Annual Cycle of Nature]. This poem was quite overtly a Romantic-pantheistic attempt to assimilate something resembling Christianity to the new Romantic gospel of nature. People close to Oehlenschläger, notably the Rahbeks, were justifiably concerned that the ‘JesusNature’ poem (as it came to be called) might draw fire from Christian circles, which considered themselves ‘orthodox’, notably Bishop N. E. Balle, primate of the Danish Church, and charges of unorthodoxy might do considerable damage to the young poet at this stage of his career. The Rahbeks were close to Jakob Peter Mynster, the promising young cleric with a reputation for personal profundity but unimpeachable orthodoxy. Mynster and Kamma Rahbek were lifelong friends who carried on an extensive correspondence that remains very readable and informative to this day. The Rahbeks brought considerable pressure to bear upon Mynster in order to induce him to write a laudatory review of Oehlenschläger’s new book, and especially of the ‘Jesus-Nature’ poem it contained. After considerable delays and hesitations, Mynster finally swallowed whatever qualms he may have had and—in a review that treated the ‘Jesus-Nature’ poem while ignoring the other (and better) poems in the book—he vouched for the poem’s orthodoxy, thereby shielding Oehlenschläger and his dubious poem from what might well have been very damaging controversy. Thus, the network of familial connections and friendships in which Oehlenschläger was enmeshed once again proved quite beneficial to him. He had already profited from the circumstance that he was engaged to Kamma Rahbek’s sister Christine, and here he reaped substantial benefits from the close connection between Kamma and the charismatic young Mynster.

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Nor does the list of Oehlenschläger’s fortunate connections end here, for in 1802, the same year Oehlenschläger’s Digte were published, his sister Sophie (1782–1818) had married Anders Sandøe Ørsted (1778–1860), the younger brother of the brilliant physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851). A. S. Ørsted was a promising young jurist and philosopher who was destined to become for many years the leading spokesman for the royal government, serving several terms as prime minister in the 1840s and 1850s. As a respected academic, A. S. Ørsted also served as rector of the University of Copenhagen and as president of the Royal Scientific Society. Similar networks served other major Golden Age figures. Mynster had had the misfortune of losing his father when he was only two years old. Soon thereafter his mother married Frederik Ludvig Bang, a professor and one of Denmark’s leading medical experts, but she herself died two years later, leaving Mynster with his stepfather F. L. Bang, the only parent he ever truly knew. Here again, the close-knit nature of the upper levels of Danish society can be seen: Mynster’s stepfather Bang was Grundtvig’s mother’s brother (though admittedly this does not seem to have done anything to foster friendly relations between Mynster and Grundtvig as adults). When Mynster chose a wife, the choice fell on Maria Frederica Franzisca (‘Fanny’) Münter (1796–1871), the daughter of Friederich Münter (1761–1830), bishop of Zealand and primate of the Danish Church, a position to which Mynster himself was appointed in 1834. Even more remarkably, not only was Grundtvig’s maternal uncle Mynster’s stepfather, his maternal aunt was the mother of the philosopher Henrik Steffens, who had famously brought the flame of Romantic philosophy to Denmark in 1802. As will be seen, the Kierkegaard family were relative newcomers to the Copenhagen bourgeoisie and were more or less outsiders in comparison with most of the figures mentioned here. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard’s elder brother, the theologian Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805–88), married twice into the Grundtvigian camp. His first wife, Elise Marie Boisen (1806–37), was daughter of P. O. Boisen, bishop of Lolland, and her brother was married to a daughter of Grundtvig. This first wife of P. C. Kierkegaard died less than a year after their marriage, however, and when he married for the second (and final) time, he chose Henriette Glahn (1809–81), a niece of Grundtvig. Despite being a supporter of the continually troublesome Grundtvigian faction in the Danish Church, P. C. Kierkegaard was also known for his great learning and was regarded as a moderate by more conservative Church factions, e.g. Mynster and Martensen. In 1856, shortly after his brother, Søren died in the midst of his furious ‘attack on Christendom’, P. C. Kierkegaard was made bishop of Aalborg at the prompting of H. L. Martensen, who in 1854 had succeeded Mynster as primate of the Danish Church. P. C. Kierkegaard later served for a time as cabinet minister of the department that administered educational and Church affairs. While not by any means exhaustive, the sketch provided above gives an idea of the webs of connection and affiliation that knit together a number of leading Danish Golden Age figures.

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V. The Third Generation of the Danish Golden Age: H. C. Andersen and SØren Kierkegaard Finally, then, we come to Hans Christian Andersen and to Søren Kierkegaard, the subject of the present volume. These two major figures are more well known than most Golden Age figures and have been discussed in detail in entire libraries of criticism, both Danish and foreign: Each in his own way represents the third generation of the Golden Age (after c.1840), when the old cultural synthesis was undergoing dissolution. Since both Andersen and Kierkegaard have been so widely treated elsewhere in the literature, and inasmuch as the rest of the present volume is devoted entirely to Kierkegaard, here it will suffice to sketch each of the two briefly, triangulating them in relation to the Golden Age that their work transcended. Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) was the Golden Age’s favourite naif, its pet country boy. He actually was generally regarded as a real genius, and the Golden Age clasped this genius to its bosom. Andersen served as guarantor of Denmark’s innocence and its good heart. He could become annoying when his childlike traits—his insufferable vanity, his cultivated eccentricities, and his embarrassing infatuations with unattainable women—gained the upper hand, but he was tolerated, almost unfailingly tolerated, even by the most sophisticated. To many genteel observers, Andersen’s social clumsiness merely attested to the fact he truly was a natural genius, sprung from the heart of the common folk. Andersen was an early and regular member of Heiberg’s circle of acquaintances—where he was appreciated, if also covertly mocked—but he really belonged to no clique, and after his initial breakthrough he found a ready welcome in so many homes that he almost never had to dine alone. Andersen came to stand for true, natural, ‘old-fashioned’ virtue, but he did not oppose an orderly transition to the new world of railroads, telegraphs, and modern science, provided that the homely pieties were respected. And Andersen’s very presence and popularity seemed to guarantee that they would be respected. Hans Christian Andersen was eccentric, but lovable; he was safe. It was no wonder that his long and productive career would cast an afterglow that lingered well beyond the end of Golden Age. And it is no surprise that the largest boulevard in Copenhagen, right at the centre of town and adjacent to the city hall, has long been named after Andersen. Like Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) represented in his very person the tension between country and city. In Kierkegaard’s case it was in particular a tension between rural religious intensity and urbane sophistication—he had plenty of both. Kierkegaard was the son of a shepherd boy from the Jutland heath who had come to Copenhagen as a penniless fourteen-year-old and had retired at forty as a wealthy rentier, thereafter impregnating and then marrying his illiterate serving maid (who was also his cousin and also from Jutland). Together they had seven children, including two

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daughters who married very well, one son who became a bishop and cabinet minister, and another son, Søren, who became one of the most famous philosophers and theologians of all time. The Kierkegaard family was torn between the Herrnhut (or ‘Moravian’) pietism of west Jutland, which Søren’s father had brought with him to the city, and the gentrified and elegant Christianity of Jakob Peter Mynster—‘my father’s priest’, as Kierkegaard called him—who subsequently became the head of the Danish Church. Søren Kierkegaard readily acknowledged that Mynster’s Christianity was beautiful, but he came to doubt that it was in fact Christianity. Kierkegaard’s career is perhaps most instructively viewed as beginning with a line in a journal entry from 1835: ‘It is a question of understanding my own destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die’ (SKS17/KJN1: AA:12). And of course his career came to a spectacular end some twenty years later with his attack on the Established Church, when he wrote that ‘the truth [about Bishop Mynster] is that he was worldly wise, but weak, pleasure-mad, and great only as an orator’ (SKS14: 126/M: 8). In his final pyrotechnic assault, Kierkegaard made his appeal quite literally over the heads of the cultured elite of Copenhagen’s Golden Age: You common man! The Christianity of the New Testament is infinitely high, though not high in such a way as to address itself to the differences between people with respect to talent and the like. No, it is for all. [. . .] You common man! I have not cut off my life from yours. You know that I have lived in the streets, am known by everyone, am possessed of no class egoism. So, if I belong to anyone, I must belong to you, you common man. [. . .] But one thing I implore you to do for the sake of God in Heaven and by all that is holy: Flee the pastors, flee from these disgusting creatures’. (SKS13: 410/M: 346)

Thus, Kierkegaard began by searching for the ‘idea’ for which he was ‘willing to live and die’ and ended by attacking Mynster and the Established Church with an appeal over the heads of the Golden Age elite to ‘the common man’. Between these two termini came Kierkegaard’s ‘education’, his disillusionment with the ‘coteries’ who constituted the Danish Golden Age. This radical disenchantment is the subject of a journal entry Kierkegaard wrote in the summer of 1848, after the revolution that spelled the end of the Golden Age and changed Denmark forever. Better than any other text, this journal entry (not previously published in English translation) serves to situate Kierkegaard in the context of the Danish Golden Age. Written in 1848, midway in his writing career, this entry shows Kierkegaard looking both backwards, to the days when he had aspired for acceptance by the Heiberg/Mynster ‘coterie’, to his disappointment when he was, as he believed, abandoned by the elite and left to fend for himself during the barbarous attacks by M. A. Goldschmidt’s satirical journal Corsaren [The Corsair], and forwards to the final cataclysmic break with the Golden Age and everything that was ‘established’, including the Danish Church. Carefully read, this centrally situated entry reveals both Kierkegaard’s youthful hopes and his final disenchantment with the elite coteries of the Golden Age, and it merits citation in full:

the end of the golden age It is really insane, but also helpful in showing how confused the world is and how something that is true must always be the victim. Melancholic as I was—and understanding, as I did, the Christian doctrine of human equality—I have lived year after year in such a way that all the distinguished people (as I well knew) at first took exception to it, then found it to be treason against them (because I ought to have adhered to their synagogue), and finally became accustomed to it. That was how I lived, willing to speak and associate with every person on the street, utterly careless of the little bit of respect that was mine. And then what? Then I was attacked. By whom? By the distinguished? Alas, no. That would at least make some sense. No, I am attacked by—yes, this is what people must be in order to produce this confusion—crazy tribunes of the people, who fight for equality. And I am attacked for haughtiness and for being distinguished! Greater insanity than this is hard to find. As things now are in the world, haughtiness and being distinguished consist solely in avoiding the mass of the people, in never being seen on the street, etc. And so I am attacked for being distinguished. I wonder what Papa Socrates would say! Now the distinguished people have nothing against this, for of course people see that they are not the distinguished: of course, they do not walk in the street, they are never seen. See, this is what comes of being judged by boys. Goldschmidt never grasped the point of life at all. He imagines that he is fighting for equality—and then I am attacked for being distinguished! Quantæ tenebræ! [What confusion, what darkness]. Alas, this is the difference between blind passions and honest zeal. I have seen very well where all the coteries (especially that of the distinguished people) lay; and while I have always gladly and enthusiastically expressed proper veneration for the excellence they contained, I have taken careful aim at the untruth in the coterie, at the illusion, etc. My tactic has always been to sow discord in the coteries. And now, in retrospect, I see once again how Governance has helped me. The great coterie is Mynster, Heiberg, Martensen, and company. For Mynster was a part of it, even if he never condescended to participate openly. This coterie then intended to destroy me by means of negative resistance. Then there was the fortunate circumstance that I venerated Mynster so absolutely. This was an annoyance to them, and in fact the coterie was unable to get the rumor mill running. Then time passed and Heiberg became less and less active. Furthermore, he saw that he had been wrong, that I had absolutely no intention of becoming an aesthetician. Perhaps he even had a bit of a feeling of having wronged me (for originally I had had the idea of attacking him in order to break up the aesthetic coterie). The coterie is weak. Then I took his mother [i.e. Thomasine Gyllembourg; see Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review of Two Ages] and celebrated her. And that was annoying, inasmuch as the coterie has its stronghold in social life. And now his wife [i.e. Johanne Luise Heiberg; see Kierkegaard’s The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress]—and for safety’s sake a little squib at Martensen [see Kierkegaard’s negative allusion to the ‘court preacher’ in The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress], so that the coterie not be all too pleased about it. And yet Governance has obviously helped me in this, for my reverence for Mynster was something I was granted, something I was to display. The single individual is what I am fighting for, and it is true that the kingdom of Denmark has been and is the most hostile soil for this, for here coterie is everything.

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bruce h. kirmmse But wherever there is a coterie I take care to single out one person whom I venerate or draw toward myself, simply in order to weaken the coterie. The most amusing case has been that of Grundtvig. He has been attacked, among other reasons, on account of his party—and so I have succeeded in maintaining a sort of high-spirited relationship with him, which very much embitters the party. Even if I were to give up all my ideas and my actual view of Christianity or the cause to which I essentially belong, merely ridding Denmark of all coteries, if it were possible, would be a great gain for the country. The country is small enough after all. But it would be an unending task to catalogue all these complexities. It is true that I was born for intrigue, and it is certain that there is a power that participates in this game and that has helped me in a very curious way, for even where I have not always been clearly conscious of it while I was doing it, but where I either follow the instinct of my immediacy or assign things to God, it proves so opportune in retrospect. Also in connection with the coterie of P. L. Møller and Goldschmidt, it was my calculation to lump them together; and indeed it is not impossible that this was to some extent successful. (SKS21/KJN5: NB6: 55).

With Kierkegaard we have definitively taken leave of the Golden Age coteries of the elite and have entered the modern world, with all its perils and opportunities. Until very recently no street or other physical feature of Copenhagen bore Kierkegaard’s name, but finally, several years ago, a small, stony windswept area adjacent to the new wing of the Royal Library was named ‘Søren Kierkegaard Place’.

References Grundtvig, N. F. S. (1941). Værker i Udvalg [Selected Writings], vol. 7, Georg Christensen and Hal Koch (eds.) (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). ——– (1942). Værker i Udvalg [Selected Writings], vol. 4, Georg Christensen and Hal Koch (eds.) (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1861a). Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid reprinted in Prosaiske Skrifter [Prose Writings], vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). ——– (1861b). Folk og Publicum [People and Public, originally published 1842] reprinted in Prosaiske Skrifter [Prose Writings], vol. 6 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). ——– (1862). ‘Skuespilhuset’ [The Playhouse], from Danmark, et malerisk Atlas (Denmark: A Picturesque Atlas), originally published 1840] reprinted in Poetiske Skrifter [Poetical Writings], vol. 8. (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Martensen, H. L. (1882). Af mit Levnet [From My Life], vol. 1. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Mynster, Jakob Peter (1884). Meddelelser om mit Levnet [Communications Concerning My Life]. 2nd edn (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Oehlenschläger, Adam (1961). ‘Guldhornene’ reprinted in its original 1802 version in F. J. Billeskov Jansen (ed.), Den danske Lyrik, 1800–1870 [Danish Lyric Poetry: 1870–1870], vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Steffens, Henrich (1996). Indledning til philosophiske Forelæsninger [Introductory Lectures on Philosophy]. Johnny Kondrup (ed.) (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab/ C. A. Reitzel).

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Suggested Reading Bukdahl, Jørgen (2001). Søren Kierkegaard and the Common Man. (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William R. Eerdmans Publishing Company). Hannay, Alastair (2001). Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kirmmse, Bruce H. (1990). Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). ——– (1996). Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard, Religion, and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2008). Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérteur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press). Thompson, Curtis L. (2008). Following the Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press).

chapter 3

K ier k ega a r d a n d Copen h agen G eorge Pattison

I. Introduction Although much less commented on than Romanticism or Hegelianism, the city of Copenhagen is no less important a part of the background to Kierkegaard’s authorship than any intellectual and cultural movement. In fact, like these, it is also an active presence within the world conjured forth by his writings. The aim of this chapter is therefore to look at some of the wide range of meanings embedded in the daily life of the city in which Kierkegaard lived, moved, and wrote. In fact, Kierkegaard lived almost his entire life within a one kilometre radius of Copenhagen’s Vor Frue Kirke (Church of Our Lady). This was the church to which his family belonged, which he attended and in which he sometimes spoke at the Friday communion service, and where his own funeral service would be held. It was only a couple of blocks away from the family home in Nytorv (New Market), where he grew up and all but one of his subsequent apartments were located in the streets around this church’s landmark tower. This is where he lived and where he died. But this is not merely to state a fact, since the city—this city, Copenhagen—is not just the backdrop to Kierkegaard’s life but constitutes a tangible presence in his writings. Its streets, churches, parks, entertainments, and—not least—burial grounds are integral to the very fabric of his work. Nor is its influence limited to what we might think of as the more literary aspects of that work: the city— this city, Copenhagen—provided Kierkegaard with a living imaginary by which to articulate both his critique of modernity and his struggle to redefine the task of Christian discipleship. More than the backdrop and more even than the stage, Copenhagen would itself become a part of the drama of Kierkegaard’s authorship and that authorship itself therefore, is not explained fully if we fail to give sufficient heed to it. One might draw analogies with Dostoevsky and St Petersburg, Dickens and London, Baudelaire and Paris (the last of which we shall return to later). The thrust of such comparisons is to say still more: that Kierkegaard, in his way (his unique, singular way), is also among the great

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nineteenth-century writers of the city, writing up the ‘old familiar text of individual existence-relationships’ (SKS12, 281/WA: 165) as a narrative of modern urbanity. That, in the end, Kierkegaard saw his way as leading beyond the city or, more precisely, to a terrible judgement on it, does not diminish its importance in his work, any more than Jesus’s warning that Jerusalem had missed the hour of its visitation makes his relation to Jerusalem insignificant.1 On the contrary. As Kierkegaard put it in Practice in Christianity, the Christian challenge was now to practise Christianity ‘here in Copenhagen, in Amager Square, in the everyday hustle and bustle of weekday life’ (SKS12: 72/PC: 59). This was certainly where he himself liked to be. Andrew Hamilton, a British visitor to Copenhagen in 1847 wrote of Kierkegaard that ‘no one knows more people than he. The fact is he walks about the town all day, and generally in some person’s company; only in the evening does he write and read . . . I saw him almost daily in the streets . . .’ (Hamilton 1852, vol. 2: 269–70).

II. A Changing City So what was this city that so permeated Kierkegaard’s life and work? I have mentioned Paris and Baudelaire, but Copenhagen was scarcely a cosmopolitan metropolis like Paris. Kierkegaard himself repeatedly referred to it disdainfully as a mere ‘market town’. Summoned to an audience with King Christian VIII in March 1847, Kierkegaard informed the king that ‘It is miserable . . . to be a genius in a market town’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB9:41). Kierkegaard himself seems not to have noticed the implicit affront to the royal host implied in this remark. Copenhagen was officially described as a royal residential city and one might think that an absolute monarch would not take well to having his capital described as a ‘market town’. But if Kierkegaard was unaware of his own criticism, the king too held his counsel. In any case, Kierkegaard was not the first to pass such a judgement. At an early stage in his career he had been much influenced by the man of letters, theatre director, and Hegelian philosopher, J. L. Heiberg, who, in 1828, had published a series of articles under the pseudonym ‘Urbanus’ that are sometimes referred to collectively as ‘A Contribution to an Aesthetic Morality’.2 In these articles Heiberg laments the squalid domestic circumstances of life in the Danish capital. Everywhere and in every aspect of life he sees a lack of manners. The noise in coffee houses makes it impossible for a man to read a newspaper, while young men think nothing of letting women step off the pavement into the street if they, the young men, have right of way (Heiberg 1954: 21). Domestically, he complains, buildings are of poor quality, apartments are badly laid out, without even a separate dining room; the milky, stodgy food is such as would not be served in England or France, and, since people aren’t prepared to pay for decent 1

This saying is referenced several times in Kierkegaard’s writings. See SKS3: 321ff./EO2: 341ff.; SKS5: 159–205/EUD: 159–203. 2 For Heiberg, see also the chapter by Kirmmse in this volume.

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staff, meals are served by the mother of the house along with her elder daughters, an arrangement that, exacerbated by the presence of young children at the table, leads to a state of complete chaos. It is no wonder, he avers, that men so frequently go out to eat and live what he calls ‘vagabond’ lives, for which they compensate by the provision of outings and theatre visits that they can often scarcely afford (Heiberg 1954: 46–50). The whole thing adds up to a vicious circle and creates an atmosphere that ‘gives Copenhagen the appearance of being a little market town’ and makes Danes ‘the subject of laughter among foreigners’ (Heiberg 1954: 18). Typical of this backwardness is the way in which Danish women turn make-up and clothes into an endless topic of conversation, whereas in England and France they spend more but with much less to-do about it (Heiberg 1954: 43–4). In one of his vaudevilles, The Danes in Paris, a Parisian innkeeper is shocked to hear from one of the characters that he has been to Denmark, informing him that ‘The people there are wild, they eat raw meat and even small children. They’re like polar bears.’ And, she adds, that they can’t even talk properly—‘at least, not so as we can understand them. They have sounds and tones with which they are able to make themselves comprehensible to each other, but it is not a proper language’ (Heiberg 1862). Heiberg himself does not go that far, but he is convinced Copenhagen has much to learn from Paris—a lesson that he himself determined to put into practice by reorientating Danish theatre away from a Germanic repertoire and towards French models, as well as by actively promoting better treatment of and education for women (in 1852 he would publish and write an Introduction for Clara Raphael, recognized as among the first feminist novels in Scandinavia). All of this gives force to Adorno’s assertion that there is no significant ground for comparison between Kierkegaard and the world of the Parisian flâneur: ‘Aestheticism is no “attitude” that can be adopted at will’, he writes. ‘Just as it has its time, so too it has its place: the big cities in the early period of their development. There, like the artificial street-lighting, the form of a crepuscular despair begins to take shape: strange, dangerous, self-ruling, garishly rendering eternal the life that is slipping away.’ And, he adds, ‘Kierkegaard’s work never attained this stage’ since he lacked ‘every evident experience in the social landscape in which the flâneur and dandy were able to move’, so that all he could achieve was a mere ‘parody’ of the dandy’s world (Adorno 1974: 20–1). But is this right? Clearly, Copenhagen was not Paris, but the history and topology of modern cultural experience and attitudes is too complex to be divided up as neatly as Adorno tries to do here. As we have already seen in the case of Heiberg (who, in fact, lived much of his young life in Paris, as a result of his father’s political exile [See Kirmmse in this volume]), Paris was not unknown in Copenhagen and there would be a sequence of cultural events and movements that attempted to remake Copenhagen in the image of Paris. Whether or not Kierkegaard ever knew what it was to be a Parisian flâneur, he certainly used the term of himself, as when (in The Point of View), he described how he spent his days giving the world the impression that he was nothing but a flâneur when, in reality, he was already ‘in the monastery’ (SKS16/PV: 35). For those not locked into the Marxist view that cultural movements are mere epiphenomena of macrosocial economic realities, the city or a certain experience and image of

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the city belongs as much to the sphere of imagination—and therefore of memory, hope, and fantasy—as to the mechanisms of the production and distribution of goods. That Kierkegaard’s city was something more than the ensemble of bricks and mortar, or trades and businesses logged by statisticians, is nicely indicated in an unpublished draft of a never-completed work, Writing Sampler: My pleasures especially divide themselves up by variation. Here are two of the main variations. I regard the whole of Copenhagen as a great party. But on one day I regard myself as the host who goes and talks to all the many invitees, my dear guests; on the next day I imagine that it is some great man who is giving the party and I am a guest. In addition to these variations I am differently dressed, greet people differently, etc. Those who know me have certainly remarked more than once that I can be fairly changeable in the way I am, but they haven’t an inkling that this is the reason. If a splendid coach drives past on the day when I am imagining myself to be the host, then I greet it in a friendly manner and imagine that it is I who have lent them the fine coach. (Pap. VI B 225/P/WS: 139)

And, he continues, ‘I also practice variety in another way: by regarding Copenhagen now as a big city, now as a small town’ (Pap. VI B 225/P/WS: 139). ‘Copenhagen’, then—like the whole phenomenon of the nineteenth-century city—is not a fixed quantity in Kierkegaard’s experience: it is an idea, a dream, a moving pattern of human relationships that can be figured and re-figured in infinitely variable ways. In this, however, Kierkegaard typifies the new experience of urbanity that was emerging across Europe in his time and which would be determinative also for the world of the flâneur of the 1860s. Where the camera obscura of previous centuries had awed an admiring public with what was, in the end, a stable and constant image of the world, the new visual technologies of the nineteenth century transformed this image into a moving and multidimensional series of phenomena. Peep shows, dioramas, cosmoramas, ‘dissolving views’, magic lanterns, the stereoscope, the daguerreotype, photography and, ultimately, the moving picture both inaugurated and reflected a new reality, to which such transformations of public space as the arcades, zoos, and theme parks (such as Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens) also bore witness. In this new urban space the ‘I’, it has been said, becomes an ‘eye’, a being whose existence is absorbed into the dialectics of seeing and being seen. Such a one is what Jonathan Crary has called ‘a new kind of observer’, a word that immediately transports us to the world of the Kierkegaardian aesthete, labelled ‘Mr Observer’ by his critic, Assessor Vilhelm, but also a designation freely embraced by the pseudonyms Constantin Constantius (Repetition) and Vigilius Haufniensis (The Concept of Anxiety). It is no coincidence that, in just this age, wearing spectacles or a monocle became a distinctive style accessory among young men about town and were clearly part of Kierkegaard’s self-image when, in 1835, he describes himself (or a thinly fictionalized alter ego) as being sized up by the locals of northern Sjælland as ‘a man dressed in modern clothes, wearing spectacles, and smoking a cigar’ and therefore likely to have enlightened and sceptical views as to the healing powers of St Helen’s grave, a local attraction and place of pilgrimage (SKS17/KJN1: AA: 1).

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For one with sufficient imagination, Paris was not necessary. All that was needed was the idea of Paris that found its fullest expression in that mythical entity that Paris would become in its self-image as ‘capital of the nineteenth century’. It is this idea that we see depicted in the world of the Kierkegaardian aesthete and, above all, the Kierkegaardian Seducer. In a passage from near the beginning of his ‘Diary’, Johannes the Seducer reveals some of the basic principles of his visual philosophy and how his gaze not merely observes but creates its world. He illustrates this extraordinary power by describing how, in order to observe a young woman descending from her carriage, he stands under a street light so as to make himself invisible to her, since, as he puts it, ‘one is only ever invisible to the extent that one is seen, but one is only ever seen to the extent that one sees . . .’ (SKS2: 291/EO1: 314). What does this mean? Before we can answer that question, note what happens next: he walks past her and lets his ‘side-glance’ fall on her. ‘One doesn’t forget my side-glance so easily,’ he boasts (SKS2: 293/EO1: 316). Here, then, are two ways of seeing and being seen. When one is seen as simply there, as a mere personage, one of the crowd, one is not really seen at all and the person who ‘sees’ one doesn’t actually see one. But when the person who is equipped with a side-glance like that of Johannes lets his gaze fall upon another, that other cannot but see him and see him in the way and in the manner that the seer has chosen. Johannes is not merely an ‘I’ who is all ‘eye’: his ‘eye’, we may say, itself creates his ‘I’. But it is also as an ‘eye’ that he creates or recreates the other. See how, having let his side-glance fall on the defenceless young woman, he follows her into a shop and watches in a mirror as she makes her purchase. She is not the object of his interest except as image, as what he sees, a pure reflection of and for his eye. As he himself says, she is ‘a picture formed in recollection even in the moment when she is present’. This is the essence of what it means for Johannes that woman exists only as being for another and that ‘other’ for whom she exists is himself. Hegel spoke of an ‘unhappy consciousness’ and one is scarcely able to describe Johannes’s world view as expressing a happy consciousness. In fact, Kierkegaard presents it as the epitome of what it is to live aesthetically and, as such, an expression for the deepest inner disharmony. But what the Seducer practises in virtuoso style is, as Kierkegaard many times states, revelatory of the deepest tendency of the age, that is, to live in aesthetic rather than in ethical or religious categories. Where the supreme egotist, such as the Seducer, leads, the masses soon follow. In the age of the city spectacle we soon learn to be flâneurs en masse and even en famille. For Kierkegaard, it is precisely the essential voyeurism of modern society that is the key to its fundamental weakness. The typical product of the age of reflection is a person who can only look and who is becoming incapable of acting. But where and how did Kierkegaard see such a culture (as opposed to the individual practice) of spectatorship taking shape in the backward ‘market town’ of Copenhagen? The city, I have said, is not a fixed quantity, but a complex of processes that live in a state of interactive transformation.3 This was certainly true of Copenhagen in Kierkegaard’s lifetime, during which time it increased its population from 100,000 to 130,000. More importantly, this was a period in which it began to emerge economically, 3

For this and the following paragraph, see also Kirmmse in this volume.

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culturally, and politically from the ruination brought upon it by the Napoleonic Wars. Yet in a Europe of new political orders, it continued to be governed by an absolutist monarch, albeit a monarch (Frederick VI) more benign than the Russian czars. Copenhagen itself was still a walled city, hemmed in by defensive fortifications, the uselessness of which had been revealed by the British bombardment. Something of the atmosphere of the times was epitomized in the practice of locking the city gates each night and handing the keys personally over to the monarch. Frederick’s paternalism found concise expression in his much-quoted dictum ‘We alone know’. Yet the first third of the nineteenth century was also the time that would become known as Denmark’s Golden Age, an extraordinary efflorescence of, especially, science, art, and literature. J. L. Heiberg’s cultural crusade against Danish backwardness has already been mentioned and, as critic, dramatist, and later theatre director, he exerted himself to raise the tone of Danish society and give it a genuinely Parisian stamp. To this end he not only contributed a series of his own vaudevilles or light musical comedies, but translated a considerable number of comedies by Scribe, whose income, according to one estimate, equalled that of all the other dramatists then working in France. One of these translations, The First Love, would be the subject of an extended critique by Kierkegaard’s aesthete in the pages of Either/Or 1. His success was acclaimed by the Swedish novelist Frederikke Bremer, who visited Copenhagen in 1847 and whose travelogue Life in the North offers a useful portrait of the city at that time. She writes: ‘Not solely for pleasure’ is the superscript on Copenhagen’s temple of Thalia. And whoever has seen the tragedies of Oehlenschläger, the comedies of Holberg, Hertz, Overskou and has seen them acted by Nielsen and his wife, Rosenkilde and his daughter, Phister, the young Wiehe, and the charming Madame Heiberg, the pearl of the Danish stage—talents that are rare in any land; whoever has seen Bournonville’s ballets, perfect works of their art—such a one must acknowledge that the moral spirit of the North has here given the magic of the stage an ennobling power, that the theatre is ‘not solely for pleasure’. We do not merely enjoy ourselves, we become better while we are enjoying ourselves, and the mind is elevated to a noble longing for higher, more noble dramas than those of everyday life, to intimations of the dignity of humanity, both in the greatest sufferings as in the greatest delights. (Bremer 1849: 18–9)

This, it might be added, is precisely the theatre known to Kierkegaard, whose works contain extensive eulogies of several of the actors listed by Bremer, most notably Mme. Heiberg, to whom he dedicated his remarkable essay The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress.

III. Tivoli, Østergade, and the Market Town A rather different attempt to bring something of Paris to Copenhagen was the opening of Tivoli gardens by one Lt. Georg Carstensen, who had made his reputation as an impresario with a series of firework displays and Vauxhall evenings held in the gardens

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of the Rosenborg Palace. Tivoli opened in summer 1843, some months after the publication of Kierkegaard’s first major work, Either/Or. It not only reflected the returning prosperity of Danish society, but also contributed to it, stimulating economic activity in a variety of areas and pioneering a new form of venture capitalism. One testimony to its impact is to be found in the novel Two Ages by Thomasine Gyllembourg, Heiberg’s mother and a novelist whom Kierkegaard greatly admired—indeed, he devoted a small book to analysing the literary and cultural significance of this novel. In it, one of the characters, Charles Lusard, returns to Copenhagen in the summer of 1844 after a long absence: ‘The popular life that had newly awoken and that manifested itself on the avenues and streets, the swarm of people which he encountered as he was entering the city itself, streaming out of its western gate, the resonating music and shining lights of Tivoli’s illuminated alleyways and gondolas that greeted him, put him in the gayest of moods and filled his heart with joyful expectation’ (Gyllembourg 1851: 130). Tivoli would, in its own way, bring something of a genuinely metropolitan and ‘Parisian’ lifestyle to this northern Athens. Had Charles Lusard gone in through the gates, he could have enjoyed the harlequin theatre, the oriental bazaars, the steam roundabout, panoramas, a daguerreotype studio, a diorama with ‘dissolving images’, and waxworks, and then gone on to eat in a large saloon fit to hold some thousand people, with a good orchestra, where company gathered when the evening advanced, and listened to the music, sipping their ice and bishop. Windows ran all round, except behind the orchestra, extending from bottom to top, and in a manner typifying the crystal palace. The saloon was well lit up, and the moonbeams played in upon the lamps with a mighty purified radiance, illuminating at the same time the crowds outside and the trees and statues. (Hamilton 1852: 185–6)

The evening would then, as now, be rounded off with a display of fireworks, an art in which Carstensen had already made a name for himself. With 372,237 visitors in the 1844 season, Tivoli thus brought something of what the urbanologist Martin Zerlang calls the nineteenth-century’s ‘city spectacular’ to Copenhagen (Zerlang 1995). However, the picture also had a darker side. Charles Lusard’s initial enthusiasm for the new life manifest in Tivoli is soon qualified by events. Among his Copenhagen relatives, Lusard observes that the mother of the family allows the maid to take the children out to Tivoli until late in the evening, while she coquettishly entertains a group of unsuitable and foppish young men. Tivoli, for all its pretensions, becomes the occasion of the dissolution of domestic and moral order. Although Kierkegaard does not mention Tivoli in this context, it is perhaps in keeping with Mme Gyllembourg’s implied judgement that his review of her book ends with what is his most sustained attack on the modern world under such rubrics as chatter, formlessness, superficiality, flirtation, prudential self-interest and, in the word that, for him, summed it all up, ‘levelling’, the flattening out of significant distinctions and differences in the uniformity of the crowd. In fact, there was no love lost between Heiberg and Carstensen, the former regarding the latter as totally lacking the ability to make objective judgements as to taste and as pandering to whatever was perceived as modern and contemporary. Even if both

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men can be seen as promoters of Parisian style, Heiberg saw this more in terms of raising the tone of Danish culture and manners, whilst Carstensen (according to Heiberg) was no more than a crowd pleaser. In 1842, the year prior to the opening of Tivoli, Heiberg had dismissed Carstensen’s fashionable journal Figaro—which he referred to mockingly as Pierrot—by calling it ‘the representative of stupidity’ and declaring that ‘whatever that fool thinks is all the same to me’. Carstensen demanded an apology, but an angry (on one side) and contemptuous (on the other) correspondence and exchange of articles yielded nothing. In 1842, at least, Kierkegaard seems to have sided with Heiberg, when, in an article in The Fatherland, he commented sarcastically on Carstensen’s apparently notorious hairstyle and on the supposed popular superiority of the impresario. Yet he also notes in his journal that at the time when Carstensen was editor of Figaro he actually approached Kierkegaard with an offer of substantial payment for an article against Heiberg. This may say more about Carstensen’s lack of judgement than Kierkegaard’s actual sympathies, but it is clear that by 1843 or at the latest 1844, Kierkegaard’s rejection of Heiberg’s Hegelianism and a general disenchantment with the latter’s critical practice had led him to see both of them in a rather similar light. ‘ . . . “Liebhabere” of Tivoli’, Johannes Climacus remarked in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ‘care so little for eternity’ (SKS7: 261/CUP1: 286). Tivoli is premissed on the pleasure of distraction and variation, and its roller coaster is seized on as an image of the merely mechanical systematic progression of Hegel’s system. As this implies, the cultural divide between Carstensen and Heiberg is rendered merely superficial, and Kierkegaard speculates in his journal as to ‘Whether Hr Prof. [Heiberg], in combination with Carstensen, might not be able to arrange a celestial phenomenon in Tivoli’ (Pap. IV B 124), alluding to Heiberg’s interest in astronomy and Carstensen’s installation of an observatory in Tivoli. Both elitist and populist versions of urban modernity thus serve the cause of levelling. In Kierkegaard’s religious perspective, therefore, the carefully cultivated differences of style between Tivoli and the Theatre Royal are, in the end, merely trivial. Both subordinate the individuality of the single, subjective, responsible human being to abstract and collective categories, in the one case the abstractions of Hegelianism’s belief in ‘humanity’ and ‘history’, in the other Tivoli’s cultivation of ‘the crowd’. Cultural phenomena such as the Theatre Royal and Tivoli could feed Kierkegaard’s imagining of the world of the flâneur and dandy, yet, as we have seen, he seemed to conclude that Copenhagen was unable, in the end, to drag itself out of the rut of being a mere market town. Something of the tussle between the new cosmopolitan style and the old market town ways is discernible in several contemporary commentators remarks on Østergade, generally regarded as Copenhagen’s most fashionable street and home (as we shall hear) to its would-be flâneurs—and where the Seducer sets one of his voyeuristic night-time adventures. Frederikke Bremer was impressed by the women’s ‘taste and elegance’, by the display of silk shawls and mantillas, white hats decked with flowers or feathers, lace, parasols, umbrellas, gloves, stockings, and shoes that she saw displayed among the crowds on Østergade, yet she concluded her account of Østergade as follows:

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george pattison In truth, I shall honestly declare before all of Copenhagen that I hate Østergade and all the people who walk there (NB only as long as they are walking there), and I regard Østergade as a kind of hell and walking along it as a kind of purgatory, which one has to suffer for one’s sins’ sake. Østergade puts me in an utterly misanthropic mood, and I wouldn’t mind seeing Østergade struck off the list of Copenhagen streets or else divided amongst others: I never want to see Østergade again, I am now quitting Østergade—certainly for ever. (Bremer 1849: 17)

Andrew Hamilton, a British visitor to Copenhagen in 1847 is similarly unimpressed: From its narrowness, Østergade is bad enough at certain times of the day, for there is no more than room for two carriages to pass on the causeway, and as for the pavement, what with the many steps that lead from it to the shops and always jut out some feet to oppose your progress, and the stair that go down to the cellars, forming every now and then a gulf that must either be jumped over or gone round, and the canvas shades that overhang the shop windows, coming low enough to let you knock your head or hat upon them, there is little scope left from freedom of motion. And in rain, when everybody carries an umbrella, the evil is naturally increased. But this is the street where everyone walks one time of the day or other, where all the ‘shopping’ is done, for it contains the best shops in town, where youths go to saunter and smoke, ladies to gossip, and nurserymaids to carry infants or trundle them in chairs, and where the entire traffic of the kingdom passes through in going from the west side of the metropolis to the east. Were Östergade only twice its present width, the throng would not seem considerable, and the street would look twice as handsome; and after all, it is not the regular promenade of the place, only at hours when people fancy themselves on business. A ‘Dagdriver’ (day-loiterer) is in Denmark much what a lounger is in England; and Östergade is the place where par excellence they exercise their calling. To hang about Östergade all day is to be a lounger. Hence, Andersen . . . represented the ghost of a deceased Dagdriver as being compelled to saunter up and down Östergade all night, by way of punishment for having done so by day while alive. (Hamilton 1852, 1: 19–20).

Perhaps it is such a ‘deceased ghost’ we see in the Seducer (who, with his fellow aesthetes, is likened in Stages on Life’s Way to a ghost that has been unable to return to its nocturnal dwelling). In any case, it is clear that, despite the mixed efforts of Heiberg and Carstensen, Copenhagen still had far to go to fulfil the dream of its becoming a Paris of the North. The market town still made its presence felt in even the most fashionable streets. For Kierkegaard himself, it was the market town atmosphere of Copenhagen that increasingly defined his relation to the city in the late 1840s. Just what Kierkegaard meant by referring to it as a ‘market town’ can be gleaned by looking back to his journal for the summer of 1840, when, as a 27-year-old student, he made a pilgrimage to Sæding, the village on the west coast of Jutland where his father had been born and, before that, the family had lived for many generations—indeed it was from the farmland attached to the church in that village that their name, Kierkegaard, had been taken. The route from Copenhagen to Sæding went by sea from Sjælland to Aarhus, the main town of Jutland, where Kierkegaard arrived on Sunday 19th July 1840. The comparison with Copenhagen

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was striking: whereas 291 ships were registered in Copenhagen, Aarhus had only 42, and against the capital’s 120,000 inhabitants, Aarhus could muster only 7,000. For a rich young man who liked theatre, music, and literature this was not destined to be an enjoyable stopover. As Peter Tudvad, the chronicler of Kierkegaard’s journey to Jutland has observed, he is likely to have been greeted on arrival by the stench of a cargo of over 3,000 sealskins, newly arrived in port, nor were matters helped by heavy summer rainfall (Tudvad 2006). In an apparently misdated journal entry, Kierkegaard wrote, ‘Life in these market towns is just as wretched, ridiculous, and abgeschmakt as the gait assumed in walking the streets. It is useless to try to appear dignified (for to walk and meditate is absolutely impossible; the meditation itself would turn out to be nothing but dashes)— and then one must then think of oneself as the object of all this peculiar market town curiosity . . .’ (SKS19/KJN3: Not6:2). It is especially this last phrase that links the experience of the student pilgrim with that of the established writer Kierkegaard had become seven years later. For, by 1847, Kierkegaard was not merely known as the writer of a series of pseudonymous books about philosophy, literature, and religion or the author of some much appreciated devotional writings, he had also become the object of a fierce satirical attack by The Corsair which went on for several months in 1846. It is not necessary to go into the details of this attack here,4 but one result was that Kierkegaard lost the ease with which he had previously walked the streets of Copenhagen, since he had now become the object of a malicious curiosity. His supposedly short trousers were a particularly enticing focus for sniggers and ribaldry among the more uncouth of his fellow citizens, and the fact that no one from higher literary circles had intervened to curtail the character assassination perpetrated by The Corsair persuaded him that this ‘rabble-barbarism’ was characteristic for Copenhagen and Denmark as a whole. The sheer quantity of journal entries in which he laments this situation is almost overwhelming, but the same themes are constantly repeated: that his misfortune as a writer is to have been born in a country as small, petty, and coarse as Denmark. Distantly echoing Heiberg’s comments about Danish women’s obsession with make-up, Kierkegaard complains that where newspapers abroad discuss political affairs, in Denmark they are reduced to discussing what a person wears. Denmark is being demoralized and destroyed and he is wasted on Denmark or, more seriously, sacrificed to the crowd—albeit, as he puts it on one occasion, his is a ‘martyrdom of laughter’. What had been a merely passing unpleasantness in Aarhus was in the way of becoming an unrelieved via crucis. A phrase that becomes increasingly common in the writings of the late 1840s to describe the collective reality of the city is ‘the human swarm’ and Kierkegaard’s question is increasingly, where can he go to escape it? His response points to three places where the grip of urban life is loosened and possibilities of transcendence made topographically present, namely, in church, in the countryside, and in the graveyard, signalling, respectively, the transcendence offered by religion, nature, and death.

4

See COR for the main relevant materials.

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IV. Other Places Copenhagen’s churches undoubtedly played an important part in Kierkegaard’s life. It has been mentioned that the Kierkegaard family were attached to the Church of Our Lady. However, for much of Kierkegaard’s childhood, this lay in ruins, its spire having provided the British with a target for their incendiary attack on the city centre. Its congregation worshipped in the nearby Church of the Trinity (the loft of which also served as the University Library in Kierkegaard’s student years) until 1829, when the new building was dedicated. The Kierkegaards were also closely associated with the Moravian Meeting-House, five minutes’ walk from their house in the opposite direction from Our Lady’s. As a student, Kierkegaard would also preach in another city-centre church, Holmen’s Church. But it was the Church of Our Lady that was the main focus of his worshipping life. The Kierkegaards had joined the exiled congregation of Our Lady in 1820, and one reason was probably the charismatic personality of its chaplain, Jakob Peter Mynster. Although chiefly remembered in the mirror of Kierkegaard’s portrait of him as the supreme compromiser, the man who soft-pedalled the demands of New Testament Christianity in return for worldly honours and rewards, Mynster—as Kierkegaard also testified (see, e.g. SKS19/KJN3: NB3:16)—made an extraordinary impression on his contemporaries. Hamilton, who dedicated his memoirs of Denmark to Mynster, described him as exemplifying ‘the pure loveliness of a human soul fashioned into Christ’s divine pattern—a fair and fitting example of the renewed man in whose heart the image of Christ was formed, the fruit being holiness—love to God and man’ (Hamilton 1852, 2: 187–8). And, for all his later criticisms of Mynster, Kierkegaard always acknowledged his indebtedness to Mynster’s preaching and devotional writings, lamenting only that the man himself didn’t live up to what he preached. Interestingly, Mynster’s view of church-going was framed precisely in terms of its providing a refuge from the world and from ‘the human swarm’, as in this passage from a sermon preached in 1812, exhorting the congregation to give financial support to the rebuilding of Our Lady: You go into your own chamber, but it is so solitary, your restlessness, your nagging thoughts awake there, your wounds are opened and bleed, but there is no doctor to be found; you rush out into the human swarm, but who cares for you there? Who knows your need? Who speaks the word you need to hear? You seek out your friend, but perhaps find him thinking about his own affairs, wrapped up in his own joys and sorrows, or wearying you with useless talk or wounding you with reproaches. Then God’s House offers you its peaceful refuge, and the joyful and troubled go in; go in yourself, that your heart may be warmed in gathering together with your brothers, yet without being disturbed by the hubbub of the world. (Mynster 1854: 92)

This is not entirely alien to what Kierkegaard too sought in church—a refuge from the human swarm and a place to be alone with God and his conscience. But there is also

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precisely the difference. For Mynster, one goes to church to seek refuge from the crowd— in the warmth of Christian fellowship. For Kierkegaard, one goes to be alone, seeking forgiveness at the feet of the Lord, whose presence was so powerfully imaged in Thorvaldsen’s statue of the Redeemer. This was probably connected with the particular appeal that the Friday communion service—as opposed to Sunday morning worship— had for him. As Kierkegaard himself said, speaking at this service on 17th August 1847: When the person going to Church on a holy day meets a passer-by, he naturally assumes that this passer-by is probably also going to Church, for, on a holy day (even though it is far from always being the case) the passer-by is someone who is on their way to Church. But the person who is driven by an inner need to come here today—would anyone who met him passing by assume that he was going to Church? Does that make his visit to God’s House less significant? It seems to me that this privacy must, if possible, make it still more inward. In full view of all, yet hidden: [that is how] the individual went to Church today, hidden, or on a hidden path, for no one knew what path he trod but God, no passer-by thought you were going to God’s House, and you yourself did not say it, for you said [to yourself that] you were going to the altar, as if that were something more inward and more significant . . . No, it was as if the passer-by didn’t exist: with downcast eyes, secretively, it was as if you fled here. (SKS10: 288/CD: 269)

On many occasions it is clear that the Church of Our Lady served Kierkegaard himself in just this way, and the intensity of his experience of God’s love at the foot of the altar is recorded in the many discourses he wrote for this occasion (even though only a few of them were actually spoken in church). Church was, for Kierkegaard, somewhere where he could, almost literally, hide himself from the human swarm and precisely from the increasingly tormenting experience of being reduced to the object of the malicious gaze of the crowd. Thus, he takes up the biblical motif of being ‘hidden’ in God: Those who are hidden in God by means of unconditional obedience are unconditionally safe. From their safe hiding-place they can see the devil, but the devil cannot see them. ‘From their safe hiding-place’—for as sharp-sighted as the devil may be in relation to ambiguity, he is in the same degree blind when looking at simplicity: he becomes blind or it strikes him blind. But it is not without a shudder that those who are unconditionally obedient watch him. This glittering gaze looks as if it could penetrate the earth, the sea, and the heart’s deepest secrets, and indeed it can, and yet, despite this gaze, he is blind. But he who spreads out temptation’s net is blind in relation to those who are hidden in God by means of unconditional obedience and there is no temptation for them, for ‘God tempts no one’. (SKS11: 37/ WA: 33)

Here, it seems, was a refuge from the unrelenting spectacle of the city-cum-market town that had become the stage of Kierkegaard’s daily existence. Yet even this would, in the end, fail him. As his writings on the Church grow increasingly hostile in the years leading up to the final pamphleteering ‘attack on Christendom’ and in those last pamphlets themselves, one constant thread is that the Church itself has become a spectacle among others, a mere theatre or amusement park. There is no dividing line between Church

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and society and the church is a mere decorative embellishment to the thoroughly worldly pleasures of family and social life. Even the New Testament has become nothing more than a tourist guidebook, listing the dramatic historical events that once took place where there are now only railways and cafés (SKS13: 165/M: 123). The more clearly Kierkegaard sees—or believes he sees—this, the less (even in the ‘secret’ gatherings on Fridays) the church can give him the refuge he needs. But where else, without entirely abandoning the church (or, at least, the altar), might he turn? One answer that had been on offer since the first stirrings of Romanticism had been ‘nature’. If we weary of the city and of the world being ‘too much with us’, why not take off to the solitude of the country and wander ‘lonely, as a cloud’? This was an option well known to Kierkegaard. In a sense his authorship opened with just such a journey, if we count the ‘Gilleleie Journal’ of 1835 as the first substantial piece of writing in which he succeeded in portraying a particular spiritual situation. Here it is the arguably clichéd situation of a young man (he was 22 when he wrote it) going on long walks along cliff tops and through woodlands, meditating on a succession of bereavements and pondering his future. The changing moods and vistas of the landscape, now melancholy, now awe-inspiring, now soothing, provide a constant accompaniment to his inner journey. In the so-called ‘Faustian Letters’ a year later, the setting has become resolutely urban, but the country has not been forgotten. At several points in the pseudonymous authorship there is a clearly deliberate interplay between city and country. Either/Or is mostly set in Copenhagen itself, where the Seducer roams along Østergade or strolls in the Royal Parks and the Assessor has his family home and office. This is the stage on which ‘the aesthetic’ and ‘the religious’ are set to fight it out. Yet, at the end, via an enclosure sent from the Assessor to the aesthete, it is, in a sense, the country that has the last word. For the ‘Ultimatum’ that the Assessor sends is a sermon preached by a friend who has long been a pastor on the lonely and melancholy Jutland Heath and, it is suggested, the empty sublimity of the Jutland landscape is a physical reminder that, as the title of the sermon has it, ‘over against God we are always in the wrong’. Nor is it perhaps coincidental that the sermon contains the previously mentioned allusion to Christ’s word over Jerusalem that its external peace cannot conceal the fact that it has missed the hour of its visitation. Similarly, Repetition takes up the dialectic of city and country at several points, even though the main movement of the novella is between Copenhagen and Berlin. Constantin Constantius, the pseudonymous author, describes how, from time to time, he takes himself out to the country in order to spy upon a young woman he has come across—not, he assures us, lustfully, but to take pleasure from the picture of innocence and purity she offers. It is a strange confession, certainly, but in terms of the world of the pseudonyms, it links the immediacy of femininity and nature together as offering a consoling countermovement to the complexity and rationality of the city. More decisive for the development of Kierkegaard’s later thought, however, is the motif of the lilies and the birds that he takes from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6) and to which he dedicates a considerable number of discourses—the central section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (three discourses), the first part of Christian

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Discourses (seven discourses), and the separately published ‘godly discourses’ The Lily of the Field and the Bird Under Heaven (1849). This last throws a significant retrospective light on the use of the dialectic of city and nature in the pseudonymous writings, since it was published at the same time as the second edition of Either/Or and contains several allusions to the earlier work. As Either/Or was constructed as a critique of a merely poetic existence, so the first of these godly discourses contrasts the poetic attitude to nature and to the lilies and the birds with that of the Christian. The poet experiences nature as a beautiful and enchanting image of a freedom he longs for but which cannot be realized in the reality of the modern world. In a sense, the discourse condenses the argument of Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire as ‘a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism’, namely, that such a poet is fated to be impotent and marginal in relation to the concrete realities of society. If he has any political sympathies at all, it is with the terrorist, incapable of transforming society, and able only intermittently to disrupt it. That too, is Kierkegaard’s ‘poet’—but the Christian is commanded to become ‘like’ the lilies and the birds. This is to be taken seriously—it is a commandment of Christ—although Kierkegaard doesn’t forget that we can never be lilies or birds, since we can never unburden ourselves of our human capacities for reflection and responsibility. Nature nevertheless provides us with an image and even an experience of what it is for God’s will to be attended to in silent reverence, to be unconditionally obeyed, and of the joy that is experienced in the fulfilling of God’s will. Importantly, this last is interpreted not in terms of submission to an external heteronomous power, but of becoming and being who we are in immediate self-presence. For joy is to be present to oneself. But to be present to oneself in truth, that is this ‘today’: it is this—to be today, in truth to be today. And to the same degree that it is true that you are today, and in the same degree that you are entirely present to yourself in being today, in that same degree will misfortune’s ‘next day’ not exist for you. Joy is the present time, where the entire stress lies on the present time. That is why God is blessed, for in all eternity He says, ‘Today’—He who is eternally and infinitely present to Himself in being today. And that is why the lily and the bird are joy, because silently and obediently they are entirely present to themselves in being today. (SKS11: 43/WA: 39)

‘Out there’ with the lilies and the birds the tyranny of the ‘Satanic’ gaze is stripped of its power, since there is no possibility of what Kierkegaard calls ‘comparison’, i.e. the mimeticism that runs riot in the city spectacle and corrupts individuals into being mere elements in the mob. In an earlier discourse, Kierkegaard sets out the fundamental distinction between the logic of comparison that is encountered in contemporary civilization and the great simplicity of what the lilies and the birds are constantly ready to teach us. ‘Shouldn’t the invitation to learn from the lilies be welcome to everyone who can benefit from what it reminds us of?’, he asks. Ah, but in the everyday worldly life dominated by comparison those great, uplifting, simple, elementary thoughts are more and more, perhaps even completely, forgotten. People compare themselves with one another and each generation compares

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george pattison itself with the other so that comparison piles up in a great mass over our heads. As artifice and industry increase, each generation contains more and more who slavishly work their whole lives through deep down in the low, subterranean regions of comparison. Indeed, like miners who never see daylight, the unfortunates are thus never able to see the light—those uplifting, simple, elementary thoughts about how glorious it is to be human. And meanwhile, up on comparison’s high places, vanity smilingly plays his false game and deceives even the fortunate, so that they get no impression of those sublime, simple, elementary thoughts . . . However, amongst the lilies the anxious have been set apart and are far removed from all that human—or, perhaps, more accurately, inhuman—comparison between one person and another. And not even the one who turned his back on the greatest city in the world has left behind such a variegated mass, such a confused, monstrous multitude as the one who turned his back on these inhuman comparisons in order to humanly compare his clothing with the lily’s. (SKS8: 286–7/UDVS: 189)

Getting rid of ‘comparison’ is, simply, the key to becoming truly human and distinguishing humanity from animality, a distinction that Kierkegaard sees as threatened by modern mass society: The individual animal is not set apart, is not unconditionally an individual. The individual animal is an individual only in a numerical sense and belongs to what the most renowned of pagan thinkers called the attribute of animality: the mass. In this way, those who despairingly turn away from those elementary thoughts in order to plunge into the mass-element of comparison make themselves into mere numerical individuals, regarding themselves as if they were animals, whether they emerge from the comparison at the top or at the bottom of the pile. (SKS8: 287/UDVS: 190)

A similar idea informs Kierkegaard’s comments on the increasing tendency to analyse and interpret human life by means of statistics—and, again, this is a tendency he associates especially with Paris. In this vein, the pseudonym Frater Taciturnus takes the leftHegelian writer Ludwig Börne to task for arguing that the statistical approach to sickness and crime that is possible in a big city such as Paris contributes to forming a philanthropic disposition. Why does it do this? Because it helps us to see that our individual actions are subject to statistical laws and that, as a result, we are not to condemn the individual, since we learn, as Paris is learning, that ‘the weaknesses of men are the weaknesses of mankind’. We must submit to laws of cause and effect and not try to impose a moral order where there is only natural causation. A suicide is not to be treated as a moral issue but simply a statistical inevitability. Frater Taciturnus does not agree, and sees nothing comforting in regarding suicide or prostitution as merely statisticallydetermined phenomena. If this is how it is in Paris, he exclaims, then ‘Poor Paris!’ Copenhagen, by way of contrast, is large enough to be able to become larger and small enough not to put a market price on individuals. One may suddenly become known to thousands in Paris, but in Copenhagen you are known for who you are (he is writing before the Corsair affair) (SKS6: 448/SLW: 487). As a twist on Börne’s statistical approach, Kierkegaard comments in his journal that whereas country folk take more interest in a man than a cow, in big cities it is the other way round, ‘because in the country

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there are two or three cows or more per person, whereas in the big cities there are a thousand people per cow’, (Pap. VIII 2 B 87) a situation he regards as typifying the decline in the value placed on the individual by modern urban life. ‘Out there’, then, one can relearn something of what it is to be an individual, a person, a human being, and not a mere statistic, number, or animal—and, paradoxically, one can learn it from considering the lilies and the birds. Yet, despite his increasing penchant for taking extensive coach tours out to the North Sjælland countryside, Kierkegaard remained in the city. As he himself put it in one of the discourses on the lilies and the birds, nature provides a godly diversion or distraction and to experience that diversion can be greatly healing and restorative, but one must, after all (as we have seen) practice Christianity ‘here in Copenhagen, in Amager Square, in the everyday hustle and bustle of weekday life’. The experience of going ‘out there’ provides a critical distance, but it is not to be enjoyed or indulged as an end in itself and when we have learned what we have to learn from the lilies and the birds, we return to the challenge of life with our fellow human beings, even if—as Kierkegaard believed—this must be a life not only of love but also of sacrifice. In addition to its churches and its surrounding countryside, there was one more reminder within the city of the limits to city life: the graveyard. Whether we count Kierkegaard’s last years and death as a sacrifice or not, he was certainly buried, after a service in the Church of Our Lady, in the Assistens Churchyard—alongside many of the great and good of his contemporaries. This churchyard had been established some distance beyond the city walls in 1760, when burials within city churches were recognized as constituting a major health hazard. Originally used only by the lower orders, by the early nineteenth century the churchyard itself was becoming absorbed into the city spectacle, occupying ‘a high rank’ ‘among the pretty promenades in which Copenhagen is so rich’, as one journal put it (Politievennen 1840: 781). Rather more elegantly, another contemporary writer, Claudius Rosenhoff, author of an early guidebook to Copenhagen, called it ‘a kind of Pantheon’, in which one is not only able to enjoy ‘uplifting feelings’ but ‘has the further opportunity of observing the alterations which art, taste, time and custom bring with them in the course of a century’ (Rosenhoff 1857: 198). A contemporary Swedish poet, C. A. Nicander, even calls it ‘a paradisal city of graves . . . a lavish life in the city of death’ (Pattison 1999: 94). By Kierkegaard’s time, Assistens Churchyard had become something of a leisure resort for Copenhageners, where men were to be seen smoking their pipes and walking their dogs, families picnicking, and vandals entertained themselves with desecrating the monuments. Although these things had all been forbidden by a series of official by-laws, clearly advertised at the entrance gate, no one seemed to take much notice. Kierkegaard himself seems actually to have approved of the use of the graveyard as a recreational area, since he comments in the discourse ‘At a Graveside’ that if a poor person or a servant uses their few free hours to go out and remember their departed loved ones, then they should not be forbidden from using this little time also as an occasion for recreation’ (SKS5: 447/TDIO: 77). For those who could not, as he could, afford a private coach to transport them to the woods and lakes, this was one way to get ‘out there’ and experience a flavour of something other than the daily grind.

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Kierkegaard himself was a regular visitor to the churchyard, where the Kierkegaard family grave was located. So too was his pseudonym Johannes Climacus, especially, as he tells us, in the early evening, when most visitors had gone home and when the atmosphere became ‘enigmatic’, being neither day nor night but some liminal state between the two. On one occasion he becomes witness to a dramatic scene, in which an old man is visiting a grave together with his grandson. The grave is that of the old man’s son, the boy’s father. The grandfather is not only lamenting the son’s death, but, more particularly, the fact that he died whilst alienated from his faith. Such a grief, as Climacus describes it, comes from depths too profound for words—‘like the River Niger in Africa,’ he comments, ‘no one knows its origin, no one knows its mouth, only its course is known’ (SKS7: 216/CUP1: 237). The comportment of the old man provides Climacus with an instance of genuine religious seriousness and of the kind of subjective passion that is appropriate in relation to Christianity and that, as such, is also an instructive counterpoint to the speculative attempt to ‘explain’ the paradox of faith. Some pages earlier in the Postscript itself, as also in the discourse ‘At a Graveside’, he has insisted that death is not a mystery to be explained and that, indeed, we cannot imagine, understand, or explain death at all. What death confronts us with is the unceasing questionableness of our lives: ‘the inexplicability is not a request to solve enigmas, an invitation to be ingenious, but is death’s earnest warning to the living: I need no explanation; but bear in mind, you yourself, that with this decision all is over and that this decision can at any moment be at hand; see, it is very advisable for you to bear this in mind’ (SKS5: 468/TDIO: 101). The churchyard, then, is a liminal space that is in but not of the city, and, by inviting us to meditate on our mortality, a reminder—even if we go there with our sandwiches and dogs—of questions that the busy life of the city cannot answer. It is the tangible presence of a nothingness that unsettles the supposed fullness and purposefulness of our urban existence. At the end of his protracted self-tormenting journal, Quidam, the major protagonist of the second half of Stages on Life’s Way, sees in the image of a mourner inscribed on a funerary monument and lamenting ‘He departed hence into the beyond’ a symbol of his own spiritual predicament, looking out into an empty and void existence (SKS6: 362/SLW: 390). Is this, then, where the city ends and where the spell of the spectacle is finally broken? It is certainly where Kierkegaard’s life in Copenhagen ended. But, as the words inscribed according to his instructions on his own tomb bear witness, he did not regard this as ‘The End’. Not that he was ready to speculate on any ‘afterlife’ or speak of such a possibility as a ‘consolation’. Rather it was a reminder to take life seriously, really seriously, and, in doing so, learn to live victoriously. But just what does or might that mean to loafers and shoppers on Østergade, to theatregoers and churchgoers and families having a day out at Tivoli? Kierkegaard nowhere tells us that such activities are intrinsically forbidden and, in the Postscript, he even uses a man pondering on the legitimacy of taking a pleasure trip out to the Deer Park as an example of religious suffering—an example he spends fifty pages exploring, before telling us that such an indulgence is indeed compatible with a religious understanding of life. Nor, conspicuously, does he offer any proposals for social revolution. Perhaps it is intrinsic to the spirit of Kierkegaardian

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seriousness that he cannot tell us how we are to be as residents of the modern urban world, but what he does tell us—and exemplifies in his own literary practice—is that this is where we must live out our response to death’s decisive question and, if we are Christian, where we must practice our discipleship. This may seem rather little, but it sets an important limit to the many attempts made in modern religious life to make religion a distinctive culture, marked out from the modern secular world by its archaic architecture, its exotic costuming, or its esoteric rituals. All we need do is seek to be human in, with, and under the cultural conditions of our own time, which, for us as for Kierkegaard, means doing so in the culture of modern urbanity, in, with, and against the flow, ‘here in Copenhagen, in Amager Square, in the everyday hustle and bustle of weekday life’.

References Adorno, T. W. (1974). Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Bremer, F. (1849). Liv i Norden (Copenhagen: F. H. Eibe). Gyllembourg, T. (1851). To Tidsaldre in J. L. Heiberg (ed.), Skrifter (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Hamilton, Andrew (1852). Sixteen Months in The Danish Isles, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley). Heiberg, J. L. (1862). Poetiske Skrifter, vol. 7 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). ——– (1954). Bidrag til en æsthetisk Moral (Copenhagen: Arne Frost-Hansen). Mynster, J. L. (1854). Kirkelige Leiligheds-Taler, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Pattison, G. (1999). ‘Poor Paris!’ Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City (Berlin: de Gruyter). Politievennen (1840). 13. Rosenhoff, C. (1857). København (Copenhagen: Rittendorf and Aagaard). ——– (2006). Kierkegaards Jyllandsrejse (Copenhagen: Politiken). Zerlang, M. (1995). The City Spectacular of the Nineteenth Century (Copenhagen: Center for Urbanitet og Aestetik).

Suggested Reading Bremer (1849). Crary, J. (1990). ‘Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Hamilton (1852). Pattison (1999). Thulstrup, N. (1986). The Copenhagen of Kierkegaard (Biblioteca Kierkegaardiana 11). (Copenhagen: C. A/ Reitzel). Tuvad, Peter (2004). Kierkegaards København (Copenhagen: Politiken). ——– (2006). Zerlang (1995). Zerlang, M. (2002). Bylivets Kunst. København som Metropol og Miniature (Hellerup: Spring).

chapter 4

K ier k ega a r d a n d Ger m a n Idea lism L ore H ühn and P hilipp S chwab 1

I. Productive Appropriation and Critical Distance: Kierkegaard’s Relations to German Idealism There is no doubt that, philosophically, German Idealism constitutes the background and point of departure for Kierkegaard’s thinking. Essential concepts, ideas, and moves in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre are indebted to impulses from Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and are, in the first instance, to be understood by reference back to classical German philosophy. To take just a few of the most prominent examples: the way in which the Kierkegaardian dialectic develops through a series of oppositions and contradictions would be unthinkable without Hegel; the motif of the incommensurability between existence and the concept points to Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’; and the figure of choosing the self in its absolute ‘meaning’ is clearly inspired by Fichte. If such connections are acknowledged, an exposition of Kierkegaard’s relation to German Idealism will need to develop Kierkegaard’s own attitude to his ‘predecessors’ both in general terms and in detail, and to identify the precise respects in which he can be linked to the idealist tradition. However, the peculiar character of Kierkegaard’s reception of German Idealism places three basic problems in the way of such a procedure. Firstly, Kierkegaard’s relation to idealism is deeply ambivalent and involves a twofold tension between productive appropriation and critical distance. In general terms, this

1 Parts I and II are written by Philipp Schwab; Part III is written by Lore Hühn. The chapter was translated by George Pattison.

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ambivalence can be focused in the following ways. On the one hand, against the idealist tradition, Kierkegaard takes up the cause of the concretely existing individual and the ‘forgetting’, as it were, of this individual is the central critical point he maintains against idealist speculation as a whole, whatever variations in detail. It is precisely this Kierkegaardian criticism of German Idealism, especially of Hegel, that exerted such a significant influence on twentieth-century philosophy, as, for example, on Jaspers, Heidegger, and, especially, Adorno (cf. Hühn and Schwab 2011). But, on the other hand, Kierkegaard’s own analysis of concrete existence draws on the conceptual resources of German Idealism, and does so to a striking degree. Furthermore, his polemics against idealism are themselves inspired by a debate within idealist thought, namely, Schelling’s late debate with Hegel. In particular, Kierkegaard’s criticisms concerning the distortion of the actuality of existence by logic can be traced back to Schelling’s late thought. So too can his criticism of the treatment of ‘beginning’ and ‘movement’ in Hegel’s Logic. This ambivalence manifests itself in the fact that Kierkegaard hardly ever takes up an idea from German Idealism in a direct way. Instead, the concepts and patterns of thought that characterize the idealist tradition appear in an altered form and are contextualized by Kierkegaard’s own philosophical interest, that is, in the analysis of the concretely existing individual. This can be made clear by reference to the examples already listed. Hegel’s speculative idea of the dialectical self-mediation of Absolute Spirit is transformed by Kierkegaard into a paradoxical dialectic of existence that never finds its point of rest in a final result or a positive mediation. Similarly, Schelling’s projected positive ‘philosophy of revelation’ is changed by Kierkegaard into an analysis of the facticity of an ethical existence that is always singular. Nor does Kierkegaard think of self-choice along the same lines as a Fichtean transcendental act that would structure the ground of subjectivity and self-consciousness in general; instead, it concerns the constitution and conversion of the concretely existing personality. Yet, conversely, Kierkegaard’s polemic against idealism is not to be read as a purely immanent critique within a shared horizon that might allow for a relative justification of aspects of his predecessors’ work. Instead, it ex negativo points us towards Kierkegaard’s own intellectual agenda and can be understood only in relation to this. It is precisely by means of his critical reaction against idealism that Kierkegaard outlines the shape of his own philosophy. This ambivalence regarding systematic principles is, secondly, echoed in the distinctive form in which Kierkegaard refers to German Idealism in his published and unpublished works. Apart from the Master’s thesis On the Concept of Irony there are scarcely any places in his writing where he discusses Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel explicitly, thoroughly, or with detailed references to particular texts. In the pseudonymous works especially, Kierkegaard mostly refrains from discussing classical German philosophy for its own sake and only addresses idealist positions in the context of his own thoughtprojects. And even when he does this, it is often with the aim of sharpening and clarifying his own approach by differentiating it from that of idealism. Moreover, explicit references to Fichte and Schelling are extremely rare in Kierkegaard’s work as a whole, although this does not allow us to draw any immediate conclusions as to their significance for his thought.

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In fact, it is precisely where we encounter what, at first glance, looks like an extensive and explicit discussion of German Idealism, that is, in his debate with Hegel, that the third problem in defining Kierkegaard’s relation to German Idealism becomes manifest. Recent research has been able to show that the well-known polemic against Hegel that has almost exclusively defined the question of Kierkegaard’s relation to idealism over many decades is at numerous points reacting to contemporary Danish Hegelianism of the 1830s and 1840s and needs to be seen in relation to this, especially to J. L. Heiberg and H. L. Martensen (see Stewart 2003). Nevertheless, this ‘mediation’ by no means implies that Kierkegaard’s debate with Hegel can be reduced in its entirety to the contemporary Danish context. What it does do is to make the task of specifying at which points Kierkegaard does in fact have genuinely Hegelian propositions in view all the more difficult. In addition, Kierkegaard’s discussion often treats not only Hegel but also Fichte and Schelling on the basis of secondary sources, such as Rosenkranz’s 1843 work on Schelling. Taken as a whole, recent research offers a far more differentiated picture of Kierkegaard’s complex and multiple relations to German Idealism. Alongside work on contemporary contexts, we may especially note a greater interest in identifying and investigating in detail Kierkegaard’s attitude both to Schelling and also to Fichte.2 In addition, and over and above the debate about Danish Hegelianism, current research has developed a nuanced interpretation of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. In contrast to the so-called ‘standard view’ that regards these two thinkers as utterly different in kind, this has also shown a pervasive affirmative moment.3 Although the influence of idealist thought on the general shape of Kierkegaard’s thought is of undoubted significance, demonstrating the concrete historical points of contact makes the task of profiling his distinctive reception of it a difficult one. This is also the case when Kierkegaard relates not just to one of the idealist thinkers but to internal debates among them, such as Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity or Schelling’s critique of Hegel’s absolute system. Here too, Kierkegaard does not simply reproduce his predecessors’ discussions but appropriates their mutual positioning in a productive transformation—often without naming the original protagonists. We must therefore especially emphasize that a study of Kierkegaard’s relation to idealism will not be able to demonstrate any single attitude to Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. Seen in terms of his work as a whole, Kierkegaard’s engagement with idealism is changeable and manylevelled and must therefore be related to the concrete contexts of specific works in which it is developed through specific points. Consequently, this chapter does not seek to give an exhaustive account of Kierkegaard’s relation to German Idealism, whether as a whole or with respect to its particular representatives. Instead, we shall draw attention to particular strands in his complex reception of this movement in ideas and seek to throw light on his self-positioning vis-à-vis idealism in an exemplary panorama. Clearly, each of the aspects to be touched on in what follows merits independent and extensive discussion and, as a result, all we can 2 3

See bibliography. See the bibliography below as well as the exhaustive bibliography in Stewart 2007b: 152–65.

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expect to achieve is to indicate Kierkegaard’s multiple relations to classical German philosophy.4 This study will be both chronological and systematic, i.e. content-led. On the one hand, we cannot ignore certain definite stages in Kierkegaard’s relation to the idealist thinkers and especially to Hegel. On the other, we need to track systematic connections across several works. The pseudonymous writings are, in this regard, of greatest interest, in so far as it is in these that Kierkegaard’s discussion of German Idealism is most fully unfolded. A first survey of Kierkegaard’s works will sketch his ambivalent attitude to Hegel and, at the same time, Schelling’s significance for his criticism of Hegel as well as how he thinks about existence in general (Part II). In systematic terms, this survey is guided by the twin concepts of possibility and actuality. We begin with the Master’s thesis On the Concept of Irony. Via Kierkegaard’s attendance at Schelling’s 1841–2 Berlin lectures we then proceed to take account of his attitude to Hegel and to Schelling in the pseudonymous works up to The Sickness unto Death. In a second survey, we focus on Kierkegaard’s resort to Fichte and Schelling in relation to the theory of subjectivity and its implications for his critique of Hegel (Part III). Here we shall discuss the key issues in terms of self-choice, despair, and sin.

II. Possibility and Actuality: Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Schelling An Ambivalent Beginning with Hegel: On the Concept of Irony Kierkegaard’s first extended discussion of Hegel’s philosophy is found in his 1841 Master’s thesis On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates. In fact, this is the most detailed, most comprehensive and textually close discussion of any of the German idealist thinkers in Kierkegaard’s entire oeuvre. Whilst it is extremely rare that Kierkegaard pays attention to specific texts in his pseudonymous works, he here quotes extensively from Hegel, especially from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, but also from the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lectures on Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Right, and Hegel’s review of Solger’s posthumous writings (for more detail, see Stewart 2007b: 103–275). Hegel 4 For reasons of space we must limit ourselves to the three ‘great’ idealist thinkers and leave to one side less prominent figures, such as Baader, I. H. (‘the younger’) Fichte, and Trendelenburg—to name just three who were of particular importance to Kierkegaard. It is indisputable that a complete picture of Kierkegaard’s relation to German Idealism would need to take account of these figures, since they played a significant role in how Kierkegaard received Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. On Kierkegaard’s German and Danish contemporaries in philosophy and theology see the relevant articles in Stewart 2007; 2007a; 2009; 2009a. 5 See also the chapter by Söderquist in this volume.

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is in fact the main conversation partner in Kierkegaard’s exposition of irony. With regard to the object and subject matter of his investigation, the thesis on irony displays a form of ambivalence that is unique to this work. This is because Kierkegaard’s discussion of irony employs numerous perspectives on the subject that are derived from Hegel in a positive sense whilst yet, at the same time, setting out a series of critical objections—and, in the work as a whole, trying to develop an independent concept of irony distinct from that of Hegel.6 This distinctiveness already reveals the seeds of the main points of criticism that Kierkegaard’s later works will bring to bear on speculative idealism as a whole and Hegel in particular. Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates in the first part of the work already invokes Hegel’s analyses and does so repeatedly and affirmatively. This is especially clear in the section on Socrates’ ‘daimon’ (SKS1: 207–15/CI: 157–67) or the discussion of the Sophists (SKS1: 247n./CI: 201–2n). The most significant point at which Kierkegaard shows a systematic reliance on Hegel, however, is in the way that he adopts a world-historical perspective in which to reflect on and evaluate irony. This can already be seen in the reflections on the relationship between philosophy and history in the Introduction to the first part (cf. SKS1: 71–3/CI: 9–11), but it is especially clear in the second part, where Socratic and Romantic forms of irony are subjected to a comparative analysis. Although Kierkegaard’s terminology of ‘justified’ and ‘unjustified’ forms of irony does not occur in Hegel himself, his criticism of the Romantic form of irony closely follows Hegel. According to Kierkegaard’s ‘world-historical’ way of distinguishing these forms, the first (the Socratic) served to assert subjectivity’s rights and to do so for the first time in world history, whereas the second (the Romantic) proposes a potentiated form of subjectivity that indulges in arbitrary and boundless self-indulgence. Kierkegaard presents this world-historical development as culminating in Hegel: Finally, here irony as well met its master in Hegel. Whereas the first form of irony was not combatted but was pacified as subjectivity obtained its rights, the second form was combatted and destroyed; for inasmuch as it was unauthorized it could obtain its rights only by being annulled [ophævet]. (SKS1: 282/CI: 242)7

That is, Kierkegaard’s criticism of Romantic irony is driven by what are essentially worldhistorical considerations (cf. Söderquist 2007: 22–52; Schwab 2009). Thus the dissertation employs precisely the approach that will be criticized in his later polemics against Hegel and Hegelianism, especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. At the same time, Kierkegaard is already distancing himself from Hegel, and doing so in direct relation to the criticism of Romantic irony. Although Hegel’s judgement on 6 This ambivalence offers a powerful argument against the idea that, in this thesis, Kierkegaard is ironically playing the role of an ‘Hegelianizing historian of philosophy’ so as to trick the examining panel. Moreover, Kierkegaard himself will later criticize his (partial) Hegelianism in the thesis (see e.g. SKS24: NB21:35 [JP4: 4281] ). On the ‘ironic thesis’ ideas see esp. Kütemeyer 1929: 343–5; Thulstrup 1980: 215, 259–60; Mackey 1986; Poole 1993; and the discussion of these positions in Stewart 2003: 135–44; Kleinert 2005: 119f.; Schwab 2012: ch. III.1. 7 Translations from Danish and German have been modified in this and some other citations in this chapter.

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Romantic irony is fully affirmed, the fact that Hegel identifies irony exclusively with its Romantic version shows that he has misunderstood irony as a whole. The ‘weakness’ of Hegel’s understanding of irony consists in the fact that he has ‘one-sidedly’ equated it with Romantic irony and thereby ‘has done irony injustice’ (SKS1: 303/CI: 265). This charge is indicative of Kierkegaard’s attempt to develop an independent understanding of Socratic irony: although he takes up the concept of ‘infinite absolute negativity’ used only once, in passing, by Hegel in referring to Solger and applies it to Socrates (SKS1: 292/ CI: 254; cf. Hegel, 1975: I: 68), it is precisely at this point that he also deviates from Hegel himself. For whereas Hegel, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy cited by Kierkegaard, defines Socrates’ irony along with his maieutic as a ‘method’ and therewith as a mere ‘manner of speech’ and a ‘special way of dealing from person to person’ (SKS1: 304/CI: 266–7; cf. Hegel 1955: I: 401–4), Kierkegaard wants to conceive of it as Socrates’ standpoint: Socrates is an ironist or irony is Socrates’ essence. This would seem at first to be merely a dispute concerning the correct understanding of Socrates. But Kierkegaard is already developing an objection that he will direct against Hegel himself in later works. For if irony is conceived of as a standpoint, then it becomes an attribute of existence and thus indicates a place that cannot be incorporated into a systematic approach. As is already stated in the section on Socrates’ daimon: Generally, we are used to seeing irony understood ideally, assigned its place as a vanishing moment of the system and therefore treated very briefly. For this reason we can not easily comprehend how a whole life can be taken up with it, since the content of this life must be regarded as nothing. But we do not remember that a standpoint is never as ideal in life then it is in the system [. . .]. This is the purely personal life with which science is not involved, even though a somewhat more intimate acquaintance with it would free it from the tautological idem et idem from which such understandings often suffer. Whatever the case may be, grant science to be right in ignoring such things; nevertheless, one who wants to understand the individual life cannot do so. (SKS1: 214/CI: 166)8

The kernel of Kierkegaard’s later invective against a speculative approach that is ‘forgetful of existence’ is already implicit in this opposition of individual life and system. Correspondingly, alongside his ‘Hegelian’ world-historical evaluation of Romantic irony, Kierkegaard formulates an independent, existentially analytical critique of Romantic subjectivity that plainly anticipates the critique of the aesthetic life in his later writings. Romantic subjectivity is said to be a purely ‘hypothetical and subjunctive’ existence which ‘looses all continuity’ and is ‘nothing but moods’—and the only continuity underlying this discontinuous series of indifferent moods is ‘boredom’, which emerges as the basic psychological characteristic of Romanticism (SKS1: 319–20/CI: 284–5). 8 Kierkegaard is also referring here to Hegel’s comment that Socrates’ ‘philosophy’ is ‘not properly speculative philosophy’ but belongs to ‘his individual life’ (Hegel 1955: I: 392). A bit later, Kierkegaard will return to this ‘remark by Hegel’ and comment that ‘strangely enough’ it is by Hegel (SKS1: 263n./ CI: 219n.). Thus, even in one of his central objections to Hegel, Kierkegaard takes his point of departure in Hegel himself.

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The culminating point of Kierkegaard’s ambivalence vis-à-vis Hegel in this work is in the final section on ‘Irony as a Controlled Moment’ (cf. esp. Hirsch 1933: 600–1; Pattison 2002: 96–115; Kleinert 2005: 130–4; Hühn 2009a; Schwab 2012: ch. III.1). It is here that, in connection with his understanding of Socrates’ irony as a ‘standpoint’ and as differentiated from Hegel’s ‘misunderstanding’ Kierkegaard wants to show the ‘truth of irony’ and to do so precisely with reference to individual life (SKS1: 354/CI: 325–6, our emphasis). As a ‘controlled moment’ irony means the ‘absolute beginning of personal life’ such that ‘no genuinely human life is possible without irony’ (SKS1: 355/CI: 326). More clearly than before, Kierkegaard now distinguishes irony as an attribute of existence from a purely scientific or systematic approach. It is precisely ‘in our age’ that controlled irony becomes a sine qua non, because science has come to such an ‘enormous result’ ‘that there must be something wrong somewhere’. But it is at his point that controlled irony helps ‘to personally appropriate’ the results of science (SKS1: 355–6/CI: 327–8). Or, in other words, a science without (controlled) irony ‘forgets’ and overlooks individual and personal existence. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s description of controlled irony reveals Hegelian elements. Although Hegel himself is not named or cited in the concluding section, it is no exaggeration to say that ‘controlled irony’ is thought of in direct dependence on the Hegelian model of mediation and as the ‘reconciliation’ of the individual with the substantial. In contrast to the subjectivism of Romantic irony, controlled irony lets ‘the objective dominate’. In such irony, ‘the essence [is] nothing other than the phenomenon’ and ‘actuality is possibility’; the individual is ‘oriented and thus integrated in the age in which he lives, is positively free in the actuality to which he belongs’. Such controlled irony will in no way allow ‘the substantial Gehalt [to] evaporate into a more and more fugitive sublimate’ (SKS1: 352–4/CI: 325–7). In The Concept of Irony, then, even the objections to a ‘systematic’ and ‘speculative’ approach are formulated with conceptual means derived from Hegel. Thus we can already see the tendency to a ‘productive appropriation’ of idealist thought that will prove typical of Kierkegaard’s relation to his ‘predecessors’. With regard to what follows, however, one thing in particular needs to be borne in mind: that in 1841 Kierkegaard still believes in a mediation between possibility and actuality, which also means a mediation between inner and outer. It remains to show how this position is displaced and, especially, the role of Schelling’s 1841 Berlin lectures in effecting this displacement.

Kierkegaard at Schelling’s Lectures of 1841–2 Just a month after the defence of his Master’s thesis (29th September 1841), Kierkegaard travelled to Berlin, where, from 15th November, he attended Schelling’s inaugural lectures on the ‘philosophy of revelation’. That Schelling was one of the main reasons for his going to Berlin is evident from a letter to his brother, in which he wrote that ‘Had Schelling not lectured in Berlin, I would not have gone’ (LD: 141). Kierkegaard’s expectations regarding these lectures can be seen from a short notebook entry from about a year

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previously: ‘The view that Hegel is a parenthesis in Schelling seems to be taking hold more and more, one is merely waiting for it to be closed’ (SKS19/KJN3: Not5: 18). Since this entry is extremely brief, it is unclear what basis Kierkegaard had for his knowledge of Schelling’s later philosophy at that time and what, in particular, the mention of a ‘parenthesis’ might mean (cf. in detail Olesen 2003: 2–33; Olesen 2007: 230–3). But what is clear is that Kierkegaard’s expectations have to do with how this all relates to Hegel. Schelling seems entirely to have fulfilled Kierkegaard’s expectations—at least at the start of his lectures. In one entry, written shortly after the second lecture of 18th November, Kierkegaard notes: I’m so glad to have heard Schelling’s 2nd lecture—indescribable. So I have been sighing and the thoughts within me have been groaning long enough; when he mentioned the word ‘actuality’ concerning philosophy’s relation to the actual, the child of thought leaped in me as in Elizabeth [cf. Luk. 1,41]. After that I remember almost every word he said. Perhaps here there can come clarity. This one word, it reminded me of all my philosophical pains and agonies. [. . .] Now I have put all my hope in Schelling. (SKS19/KJN3: Not8: 33)

What has compelled Kierkegaard’s attention here is the concept of actuality and the relation of philosophy to actuality, and it is this that he so directly and enthusiastically comments on. In fact, this will prove to be the central point linking Kierkegaard back to Schelling (cf. Hühn 2009: 89–92; Schwab 2012a). Kierkegaard’s lecture notes indicate that in this second lecture Schelling developed the basic distinction undergirding his late philosophy, namely, the distinction between the quid sit, i.e. ‘what’ something is, and the quod sit, i.e. ‘that’ something is (SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 2). In the following lectures Schelling goes on to use this basic distinction to structure his outline of two types of philosophy. Firstly, there is the negative philosophy or ‘science of pure reason [reen FornuftVidenskab]’ that is concerned with the ‘what’ or quidditas and has solely to do with ‘possibility’ or ‘essence [Væsen]’; secondly, there is the positive philosophy that alone attains the ‘that’ or quodditas; it is this kind of philosophy that has ‘actuality’ as its object, or, as Schelling also puts it, ‘existence’ (SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 3). At the same time, Schelling posits a hiatus between the spheres of the possible and the actual. Facticity and existence are not yet given with the concept; what is actual is beyond the mere concept: ‘a concept is expressed by quid sit, but from this it does not follow that I know quod sit’ (SKS19/ KJN3: Not11: 2a). This Schellingian distinction between the concepts of actuality and possibility constitutes a striking contrast to the use of the modal categories in The Concept of Irony. In controlled irony, according to Kierkegaard, ‘actuality is possibility’ and the individual is ‘oriented and thus integrated into the age in which he lives, is positively free in the actuality to which he belongs’ (SKS1: 354/CI: 325–6). This suggests that in 1841 Kierkegaard is still thinking in terms of a unity of possibility and actuality. Furthermore, actuality is at this point taken as referring to substantiality, to the givenness of the ‘historical situation’ and of the age into which the individual is required to integrate himself. Schelling’s project, however, states that there is a fundamental difference between possibility and actuality such that actuality indicates the facticity of

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existence itself, differentiated from the mere possibility of thought. This difference will prove to be of tremendous importance for Kierkegaard’s later works. Against the background of this basic distinction, a further point of significance for Kierkegaard emerges when, in lectures 9–14, Schelling develops his criticism of Hegel’s philosophy. Schelling’s main objection is that, principally in the Science of Logic, Hegel does not keep to the realm of negative philosophy and the science of pure reason, but claims to have reached cognition of what is actual within logic (SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 9–11). Schelling, in other words, accuses Hegel of confusing the spheres: the merely logical and the facticity of what is actual (cf. Hühn 2009: 137–41). Schelling focuses this charge with reference to the beginning and conclusion of the Science of Logic. On the one hand, by structuring the beginning of his logic with Being as actus purus and not with the capacity for Being (potency), Hegel immediately gives his system ‘the direction of an existential system’. In this connection, Schelling also criticizes the role of movement in logic. Hegel did not develop the ‘determinations of the concepts [Begrebsbestemmelser]’ from Being but merely ‘successively posited and annulled [ophævede] [them] in this pure being’. On the other hand, Hegel claimed that he had already achieved the ‘actually actualized idea’ within logic. But for Schelling actuality can only be the object of the second, positive philosophy, and to the extent that Hegel believed he had already reached this within logic ‘philosophy was made into a [. . .] behauptende, dogmatic system’. Hegel had ‘made logic the actual’ and therewith confused both spheres (SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 10–12). The complaint made against Hegel that there is a sphere of actuality and existence that cannot be arrived at by logic alone constitutes the point of contact between Kierkegaard and Schelling’s Berlin lectures, and this Schellingian point will, mutatis mutandis, return in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. But we can already see Kierkegaard deviating from Schelling or, rather, he productively appropriates this fundamental difference alongside the critique of Hegel. For Schelling relates the difference between quid sit and quod sit to all entities. Everything that is may be spoken of in terms of what it is and that it is. Schelling also construes the ‘that’, i.e. facticity, actuality, and existence, as a matter of knowledge and he describes this knowledge as the re-cognition of what is already given in the concept, the ‘what’. As Kierkegaard’s notes put it: ‘one can have a concept without knowledge but no knowledge without the concept. When I see a plant, I recollect it and refer it to the universal, inasmuch as I recognize it as a plant’ (SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 2). Kierkegaard, for his part, performs a twofold reorientation in relation to this. Firstly, his later thought will reserve the concept of actuality in a pre-eminent sense for the individual human existence in its concretion.9 In this way Schelling’s ontological and epistemological distinction is appropriated in a certain ethical sense. Consequently, Kierkegaard can no longer use ‘actuality’ and ‘existence’ to mean the re-cognition of what is already given in the concept. By defining existence in terms of singularity and interest he will deepen the hiatus between the actual and the possible that was posited by Schelling. Kierkegaard thus places existing entirely outside any logical system. That it has forgotten 9

On Kierkegaard’s various ways of using the concept of actuality, see Kosch 2003.

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and ‘gone beyond’ concrete existence is precisely the reproach that Kierkegaard will later make against idealism as a whole, including also Schelling. This critique can be related to Kierkegaard’s ultimate disappointment with Schelling, as expressed in his extremely polemical letters back to Copenhagen (LD: 68, 70). Yet it is beyond doubt that the spur towards the critique of idealism that would be developed in Kierkegaard’s subsequent works is itself rooted in a (late) idealist debate and is inspired by Schelling in particular.

The Inner, the Outer, and Substance: Either/Or During his stay in Berlin (1841–2), Kierkegaard was already working hard on his first pseudonymous work, Either/Or. The Preface to this work—and therewith the pseudonymous authorship as a whole—begins with the following well-known lines: It may have at times occurred to you, dear reader, to doubt somewhat the accuracy of the familiar philosophical sentence that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer. [. . .] I myself have always been rather heretically minded on this point of philosophy and therefore early developed the habit of making observations and investigations myself as well as possible. (SKS2: 11/EO1: 3)

This ‘familiar philosophical sentence’ is found in its systematic context in Hegel’s logic of essence (cf. Hegel 1989: 523–8), and Kierkegaard probably became acquainted with it through its popularization by J. L. Heiberg (see Stewart 2007b: 325–9). This opening sentence is of particularly great importance with regard to the dissertation on irony. There, already, we see Kierkegaard operating with the opposition inner/outer and, indeed, precisely as specifically characteristic of Socrates’ irony. In this connection, he wrote at the end of the introduction that Socrates ‘belonged to the kind of persons with whom the outer as such is not the stopping point. The outer continually pointed to something other and opposite. [. . .] The outer was not at all in harmony with the inner but was rather its opposite’ (SKS1: 74/CI: 12). In other words, Socrates’ specifically ironic existence shows up a contradiction or gulf between the (hidden) ‘inner’ and the (visible) ‘outer’. The concluding section on controlled irony, however, had retracted this opposition and had instead called for the mediation of essence and appearance and of inner and outer. The opening sentence of the Preface to Either/Or, however, offers the reader a hypothetically formulated question as to whether individual existence as such involves an opposition between inner and outer. This motif is not restricted to the ironist but rather stands guard at the entrance to the existential analytic offered in the pseudonymous writings as a whole. As regards Hegel’s version of this proposition, Kierkegaard once more reveals a productive appropriation of idealist thought. The criticism of Hegel implicit in these lines is not carried out on the plane of logic but is transferred to another sphere. Kierkegaard is not here making a criticism within the movement of Hegel’s logic but is drawing attention to a place beyond logic—and it is only in the light of this transference that the critique of the identity of inner and outer acquires its specific emphasis.

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Although Schelling is not mentioned in the Preface to Either/Or and is only referred to once in passing in the entire work (SKS3: 135/EO2: 136), it is tempting to relate the radicalization of the existential differentiation between inner and outer that has taken place since The Concept of Irony to Schelling’s lectures and their emphatic distinction between actuality and possibility. The ‘inner’ refers to the actuality of concrete, individual existence that is incommensurable with its ‘outer’ representation by thought in the mode of possibility. This shows Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Schelling’s fundamental principle of difference, which emerges even more clearly in subsequent works. In Kierkegaard’s perspective, the actuality that is incommensurable with the concept signifies the inwardness of existence: it is the ethical actuality of the single one. That this displacement of conceptuality also contains a criticism of Schelling is apparent in one of the Diapsalmata in the papers of the aesthete A, in which we hear a striking echo of Kierkegaard’s disappointment over Schelling’s lectures (cf. Löwith 1967: 146): ‘What Philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed he would be duped; for the sign is merely for sale’ (SKS2: 41/EO1: 32). The actuality with which Schelling is concerned in his positive philosophy is, for Kierkegaard, apparently not ‘actual’ enough, since it does not correspond to the interest that existence has in existence. Yet it is indisputable that it was Schelling’s lectures that had first drawn his attention to the problem of actuality and its relation to philosophy. If the Preface to Either/Or allows us to extract what is at least an implicit criticism of Hegel’s idea of the mediation of inner and outer and, at the same time, to find a corrective to the mediating notion of a ‘controlled irony’, other passages from Either/Or demonstrate that the reliance on Hegel seen in The Concept of Irony persists. Remarkably enough, this is not only the case as regards the ethicist, Assessor Wilhelm, whose relation to Hegel has often been discussed in the secondary literature (cf. below). Even more notable, however, are passages in A’s papers that once again take up ideas about mediating the individual and the substantial, especially in the investigation entitled ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama’ (cf. Stewart 2003: 218–25). The source for the distinction made in this essay between ancient and modern tragedy, as well as the interpretation of Antigone, is, no matter how modified, Hegel’s Aesthetics, especially the section on the ‘Difference between Ancient and Modern Drama in Poetry’ (cf. Hegel 1975: II: 1205–8; on Antigone, see esp. 1217–8). Even more decisive, however, is that the intention underlying the aesthetic conception of the tragic is entirely in line with a Hegelianizing ‘reconciliation’ of the individual with the substantiality of the universal, as in the conception of a ‘controlled irony’. The starting point for the investigation is the ‘isolation’ of modern subjectivity, which ‘has lost all the substantial categories [Bestemmelser] of family, state, kindred [Slægt]’ (SKS2: 141, 148/EO1: 141, 149). This loss is to be countered with a ‘rebirth of ancient tragedy’ (SKS2: 158/EO1: 159, our emphasis). The aesthete defines his enterprise as ‘the attempt to show how the characteristic feature of the tragic in ancient drama can be incorporated in the tragic of modern drama in such a way that what is truly tragic will become apparent’ (SKS2: 140/EO1: 141). To this end the aesthete directly ‘reactivates’ the attributes of ancient tragedy and wants to

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incorporate these into modern tragedy. This is especially apparent in relation to a pair of concepts that are not found in the Hegelian source. The aesthete ascribes ‘sorrow’ to ancient tragedy, seeing this as an expression for ‘hereditary guilt’ and for the relation to substantial life. Modern tragedy, by way of contrast, is characterized by ‘pain’, as reflecting subjectivity and inwardness (SKS2: 147–9/EO1: 147–50). The ‘modern Antigone’ is to unite both aspects: ‘I give the daughter of sorrow a dowry of pain as her outfit’ (SKS2: 152/EO1: 153). It is precisely for this reason that the aesthete chooses ‘a female character’ as his object, because ‘as a woman she will have enough substantiality for the sorrow to manifest itself ’ (SKS2: 152/EO1: 153–4). The programme of the investigation into the tragic thus corresponds to the treatment of controlled irony. A new conceptualization of the tragic by means of a revitalization of ancient tragedy is to mediate and reconcile the individual to the substantial. This is how the aesthete aims to counter the ‘nihilism’ of modernity expressed in his own late Romantic Diapsalmata. Once more we can discern a productive appropriation of Hegelian ideas. On the basis of Hegel’s analysis of ancient tragedy the aesthete sketches an independent and new concept of tragedy that is clearly shaped by Hegelian conceptuality but that is not to be found in Hegel himself in quite this form. Hegel’s position is modified by seeing tragedy as a whole in terms that Hegel applies only to ancient tragedy (cf. Hegel 1975: II: 1205). However, the ‘staging’ of the ‘modern Antigone’ herself by no means corresponds to the aesthete’s original programme. Instead, his Antigone appears more as a figure for ‘hidden inwardness’ reflected back into itself, such as he also presents in ‘Silhouettes’ and ‘The Unhappiest One’. The ‘reconciliation’ that Hegel identifies as a central characteristic of tragedy as a whole (cf. Hegel 1975: II: 1198, 1218–9) is not to be seen, despite the appeal to the ancient world’s ‘sorrow’. But that means that Antigone represents a type that the aesthete expressly assimilates to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (SKS2: 215–6/EO1: 222). Finally, in Either/Or, the papers of Assessor Wilhelm also demonstrate an ambivalent attitude to Hegel. Here we see the same tension that was already present in The Concept of Irony, albeit in modified form. On the one hand, the ethicist complains about the mediation of the individual’s—here specifically ethical—existence by speculative philosophy; on the other, however, he conceives of the ethical itself as mediating the relationship between the individual and the substantial. With an open allusion to Hegel, the ethicist speaks in his second letter of ‘modern philosophy’s favourite theory that the principle of contradiction is cancelled’ (SKS3: 166/EO2: 170; cf. Stewart 2003: 195–209). In the ethicist’s own perspective, however, this ‘theory’ is only valid with regard to the retrospective view of ‘the past’ and, namely, ‘world history’. But if, from within the ‘domain of practice’, one asks about ‘the future’ and about the ‘action’ appropriate to concrete existence, we find a ‘contradiction’ and an ‘either-or’ that calls for a responsible choice on the part of the one who exists and, to be precise, the ‘absolute choice’ of his own self (SKS3: 166–9/EO2: 170–3). At this point the ethicist introduces a distinction between the ‘two spheres’ ‘of thought and freedom’ (SKS3: 169/EO2: 173). This too recalls Schelling’s lectures in which negative philosophy was associated with the sphere of the concept and of necessity, while positive philosophy was referred to as the realm of

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freedom (SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 18)—albeit not freedom in the Assessor’s ethically focused sense. At first it looks as if the ethicist is only wanting to draw attention to the difference between these spheres. In so far as philosophy keeps to its own sphere, that is the sphere of ‘logic, nature, and history’ (SKS3: 170/EO2: 173)10 and does not arrogate to itself the power to intrude on the realm of freedom, the theory of mediation is within its rights. So long as the spheres are clearly separated, the either-or of freedom is at least compatible with the mediation of thought. However, the ethicist does not stop at this ‘compatibility’ thesis but speaks also of a ‘confusion of the spheres with each other’. Furthermore, freedom and existence have a ‘valid claim against philosophy’ and, in the view of the Assessor, ‘it is truly an enormous argument against [philosophy] if it has nothing to answer’. Against the speculative philosopher who has become forgetful of existence, the Assessor, anticipating later pseudonyms, asserts that such a one is ‘outside; he does not participate’ and confuses his own existence with ‘the absolute’ (SKS3: 168–9/EO2: 171–3). Thus, although the Assessor broadly concedes the legitimacy of mediation and of the Aufhebung of the principle of contradiction within the limits of thought, we can already discern a latent protest against the distortion of the existential through the logical. At the same time, however, the Assessor too and in his own way conceives of a mediation and, indeed, just like Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony and the aesthete in the essay on tragedy, a mediation of individual subjectivity with the substantiality of ethical life [Sittlichkeit] and ‘civic virtues’. Although the basic definition of the ethical in the second part of Either/Or is constituted by self-choice, the ethical is not restricted to the individual’s choice of himself in his self-relationship. It is only the ‘first form’ that selfchoice takes that involves ‘complete isolation’ (SKS3: 229/EO2: 240). The mention of ‘isolation’ recalls the same problematic that was found in The Concept of Irony and in the aesthete’s essay on tragedy, and, as the ethicist writes: ‘The self that is the objective is not only a personal self but a social, a civic self. [. . .] Personal life as such was an isolation and therefore imperfect, but when he turns back into his personality through the civic life, the personal appears in a higher form’ (SKS3: 250/EO2: 262–3). This movement has been interpreted in such a way that the Assessor’s ethical view ‘includes the realm of the ethical [Sittlichkeit] without undoing the standpoint of morality’ (Fahrenbach 1968: 171; cf. Greve 1990: 129–36, Rapic 2007: 18–31). Against this background the ethicist can define personality as the ‘unity of the universal and particular’ (SKS3: 252/ EO2: 265). Although Hegel is not named once in the second part of Either/Or it is clear that the Assessor’s position contains a Hegelian element in the mediation of the (existentialmoral) individual and the (substantial-ethical) universal. A short time later in Fear and Trembling, Johannes de silentio would expressly connect the statement that the ethical is the universal with the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit and with The Philosophy of Right (cf. SKS4: 148–9/FT: 54). At least in the passage cited above, the ethicist’s existing individual 10 As regards history, the Assessor has a twofold attitude. Qua external history it may be treated in world-historical and speculative terms; qua the individual’s own inner history it it’s the history of his freedom. Here we see the ‘double existence’ of the individual (SKS3: 170–1/EO2: 174–5).

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is not yet radicalized in the direction of singularity that would separate him or her from the universal. Neither does the concept of actuality characterize the self ’s relating-itself-to-itself and the facticity of existence but, as in The Concept of Irony, the ‘given actuality’ and the ‘actuality to which one belongs’ (SKS3: 235, 237/EO2: 246, 248)—and therewith the substantial unity through which the self is to mediate itself.

Culmination of the Debate with Hegel: The Concept of Anxiety and the Postscript Kierkegaard’s critical debate with Hegel culminates in The Concept of Anxiety and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It is in these works that the previously adumbrated objection to the ‘forgetting of existence’ on the part of speculative thought is brought to a head, while the idea of a mediation between the individual and the substantial that was present up until Either/Or is no longer discernible. Nor is it accidental that Kierkegaard once more returns to Schelling in these works, especially in The Concept of Anxiety (1844), in which Schelling is named more frequently than in any other work (in seven separate passages, and twelve times in all; cf. Olesen 2003: 72–7, Olesen 2007: 257–61). Recent research has made clear the role of Schelling’s Treatise on Human Freeedom,11 to which Kierkegaard’s attention was probably drawn by Rosenkranz’s monograph on Schelling and which is several times cited by Kierkegaard as a source (cf. Rosenkranz 1843: 300–19; cf. SKS4: 337n./CA: 30n.; Pap. 5 B 53:18/CA: 187). However, Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety, also harks back to the Berlin lectures that Kierkegaard had attended, especially in an informative section of the Introduction (SKS4: 363n./CA: 59n.). Already in 1842–3 a journal entry comprising an excerpt about Aristotle from Tennemann’s History of Philosophy contained the following marginal note: ‘In Berlin Schelling wanted logic to be prōtē philosophía [first philosophy]./ cf. my manuscript’ (SKS19/KJN3: Not13: 27a). In The Concept of Anxiety the same issue is discussed more fully. As Haufniensis writes: Schelling called attention to this Aristotelian term [prōtē philosophía] in supporting his own distinction between negative and positive philosophy. By negative philosophy he meant logic, that was clear enough, on the other hand, it was less clear to me what he really understood by positive philosophy, except insofar as there was no doubt that positive philosophy was that he himself wished to provide. However, since I have nothing to go by except my own opinion, it is not feasible to pursue this subject further. (SKS4: 328n./CA: 21n.)

At first glance it seems as if Kierkegaard is here only referring to Schelling en passant. In fact, the lectures of 1841–2 only rarely associate negative philosophy with logic, more typically describing it as the ‘science of pure reason’ (cf. e.g. SKS19/KJN3: Not11: 3). On the other hand, the comment that the Berlin lectures failed to make clear, as to what 11

See bibliography.

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was meant by the term ‘positive philosophy’ reflects Kierkegaard’s disappointment over Schelling’s exposition of the ‘philosophy of actuality’. Accordingly, the twofold division of philosophy proposed by Haufniensis in his Introduction also deviates considerably from what Kierkegaard had heard in Berlin. This is especially true with regard to the central distinction between first and second ethics, which has no parallel in Schelling. Nevertheless, here too a Schellingian impulse can be shown. For Haufniensis defines the essence of first philosophy, which begins with metaphysics, as ‘immanence’ and the ‘totality of science [videnskabelige Totalitet]’ and the second philosophy, which begins with Dogmatics, as the sphere of ‘transcendence’ (SKS4: 328–9/CA: 21). In this context ‘transcendence’ clearly points to a realm transcending that of logical immanence and therewith to the actuality that eludes conceptualization. With regard to the first ethics, understood as an ideal or ‘immanent’ science, Haufniensis comments that is clearly connected to a moment in Schelling’s philosophy: If this is considered more carefully, there will be occasions enough to notice the brilliance of heading the last section of the Logic ‘Actuality’, inasmuch as [first] ethics never reaches it. The actuality with which logics ends means, therefore, not more in regard to actuality than the being with which it [i.e. actuality] begins. (SKS4: 324n./ CA: 16n.)12

Haufniensis here repeats Schelling’s criticism of Hegel’s claim to have already arrived at the actual within logic. At the same time, Kierkegaard’s own distinctive appropriation of Schelling’s distinction is once more apparent, in that he inflects the concept of actuality ethically and existentially. In fact, Haufniensis had already invoked this Schellingian criticism right at the beginning of his Introduction, making it the point of departure for the entire exposition. If actuality is already dealt with in logic, then ‘neither actuality nor logic is served’ and logic ‘has included something that it cannot assimilate’ (SKS4: 318/CA: 9–10). Haufniensis thus takes his stand on a division between these two spheres and his insistence on this division also provides the background to the more extensive critique of movement in logic in chapter three. With reference to the category of ‘transition’ (cf. Hühn 2003), he writes: [W]hile Hegel and the Hegelian school startled the world with the great insight of the presuppositionless beginning of philosophy, [. . .] there is no embarrassment at all over the use in Hegelian thought of transition, negation, mediation, i.e. principles of motion, in such a way that they do not find their place in the systematic progression. If this is not a presupposition, I do not know what a presupposition is. [. . .] Negation, transition mediation are three disguised, suspicious and secret agents (agentia) that bring about all movements. Hegel would hardly call them presumptuous because it is with his gracious permission that they carry on their ploy. (SKS4: 384–5/CA: 81–2) 12

In fact, the final section of Hegel’s Logic is not entitled ‘Actuality’. This concept is more extensively dealt with in the context of the second part, the logic of essence. Precisely this imprecision suggests that it is likely that Kierkegaard is here thinking of Schelling, who frequently criticizes the transition from the logical to the actual.

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In the Berlin lectures, Schelling too had been critical of movement in the Logic. This critique was also developed earlier on in his Preface to Victor Cousin’s Über französische und deutsche Philosophie, which appeared in 1834 and which Kierkegaard owned. Here Schelling explicitly states that movement in logic is an ungrounded ‘presupposition’ (Schelling 1834: XV).13 However, it is clear that Haufniensis’s interest is not in logic as such but in ensuring that movement is reserved exclusively for the realm of actuality and upholding the proprium of each sphere. Specifically referring to actuality, he adds: ‘The term transition is and remains a smart turn in logic. It belongs in the sphere of historical freedom, for transition is a state and it is actual’ (SKS4: 385/CA: 82). This same constellation of ideas appears again two years later, in Johannes Climacus’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Especially in the fourth of his ‘theses on Lessing’, Climacus develops an extensive discussion of movement in logic and at the same time takes a critical look at how logic might begin—also an element touched on by Schelling in the Berlin lectures. Like Haufniensis, Climacus opposes two distinct spheres and expounds the opposition between existence and system: ‘(a) a logical system can be given; (b) but a system of existence can not be given’. And, once again, he admonishes us to keep these two spheres strictly demarcated: ‘If, however, a logical system is to be constructed, special care must be taken not to incorporate anything that is subject to the dialectic of existence’ (SKS7: 105–6/CUP1: 109). But, like its ‘presuppositionless beginning’, the ‘movement’ of Hegel’s Logic is only brought about by the surreptitious adoption of elements that belong to the realm of existence. Moreover, and at the same time, speculative thinking once more forgets and omits the existing individual. Movement is as such an exclusive attribute of existence and is therefore impossible in logic. The supposedly presuppositionless beginning, that begins with the ‘immediate’ and the ‘most abstract’, really requires a ‘resolution’ on the part of the one who makes the act of abstracting from everything (SKS7: 106–14/CUP: 109–17).14 In broad terms, it is clear that, unlike Kierkegaard himself in The Concept of Irony, the later pseudonyms do not engage in a detailed textually-oriented discussion of Hegel. Precisely at those points where they speak most about Hegel’s Logic, they are not at all interested in logical questions as such. They are not themselves aiming to construct a logical system but are rather criticizing the distortion of the existential by the logical and the confusion of spheres that makes it impossible to think existence. But although Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel is made in very general terms, and although it is doubtless also to be understood in relation to contemporary Danish Hegelianism (cf. Stewart 2003: 378–418, 448–523), it nevertheless points to a fundamental disjunction in their philosophical aims. The critique of Hegel is at one and the same time a ‘negative’ preliminary to Kierkegaard’s own project and a way of drawing attention to the distinctiveness 13 Kierkegaard had probably been directed to this Preface by A. P. Adler’s Popular Lectures on Hegel’s Objective Logic (1842). Cf. Stewart 2003: 405–7. 14 As ‘guarantor’ of his criticism, Climacus refers to A. Trendelenburg, who had already been mentioned in a draft of the Introduction to The Concept of Anxiety (cf. SKS7: 106–7/CUP: 110; Pap. V B 49:6/ CA: 181). Next to Schelling, Trendelenburg is undoubtedly of great importance for Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. See González 2007.

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of the sphere of existence. It is in keeping with this that, already in the first of the theses on Lessing, Climacus opposes his own project to that of a kind of thinking that is indifferent to existence. Climacus’s project is essentially characterized by the interest of existence and it is from this point of view that he introduces a new and decidedly non-systematic method: the double-reflection of indirect communication (SKS7: 73–80/ CUP: 72–80; cf. Schwab 2012, esp. ch. II.1). That Schelling’s basic distinction between the actual and the possible has fundamental significance for Climacus’s contrast between existence and system is, finally, demonstrable in the chapter entitled ‘Actual Subjectivity, Ethical Subjectivity, the Subjective Thinker’. This title already underlines how Schelling’s concept of actuality is transformed by Kierkegaard’s highlighting of ‘subjective’ individual existence or ethical existence. At the same time this chapter also makes clear that the ethical is no longer being thought of in terms of the ‘reconciliation’ of the individual with the universal but as the interest that existence has in itself and which serves precisely to push it away from the universal, now understood as the medium of the concept and of abstraction. Any reliance on the Hegelian idea of substance is thus abandoned. Yet, despite this shift of emphasis on to the ethical, Climacus uses the conceptual pairing actuality/possibility in a way that plainly alludes back to Schelling’s Berlin lectures, and, in so doing, makes clear his own fundamental objection to idealist speculative thought as a whole. To take just one especially eloquent example, he writes that All knowledge about actuality is possibility. The only actuality concerning which an existing person has more than knowledge about is his own actuality, that he exists, and this actuality is his absolute interest. The demand of abstraction upon him is that he becomes disinterested in order to obtain something to know; the requirement of the ethical upon him is to be infinitely interested in existing. [. . .] The actual subjectivity is not the knowing subjectivity, because with knowledge he is in the medium of possibility, but is the ethical existing subjectivity. (SKS7: 288/CUP: 316)

This way of defining the facticity of the actual and of existence over against conceptuality and knowledge and of seeing them as independent spheres that are not to be subject to logical deformation à la Hegel is Kierkegaard’s way of developing an impulse he undoubtedly owed to Schelling. But that speculative thought as a whole is seen as an abstraction that is indifferent to existence and that, conversely, the sphere of actuality is interpreted in terms of an ethical interest in one’s own, ineluctably concrete existence, indicates Kierkegaard’s transformative appropriation of this lateidealist debate.15 15 In addition to what has been discussed here, we should also refer to a further respect in which Hegel and Schelling are juxtaposed in both The Concept of Anxiety and the Postscript. In connection with the question of ‘the beginning’, the pseudonyms several times mention Schelling’s notion of an ‘intellectual intuition’. Although they partially defend this idea against Hegel’s criticism of Schelling’s, it does not seem as if Kierkegaard productively incorporates it into his own thinking. Cf. SKS4: 319/ CA: 11; SKS7: 102–3, 139n., 306/CUP: 105, 149–50n., 335. Cf. also SKS20/KJN4: NB128 (1847), where Kierkegaard develops his ideas on this subject further.

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A Phenomenology of Despair? The Sickness unto Death In the final section of this first part we shall briefly examine The Sickness unto Death, written in 1848 and published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Although Hegel is not named once in this work, commentators have often compared its exposition of the stages of despair in the first part to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and interpreted it as a ‘phenomenology of subjective spirit’ or a ‘phenomenology of despair’ (cf. esp. Janke 1974; Theunissen 1991, 1993; Grøn 1996; Stewart 1997). There is no doubt that The Sickness unto Death is conceptually the most thoroughly worked out and systematic text in Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. If compared with the earlier pseudonymous works, one cannot help but get the impression that Kierkegaard is no longer directly concerned about the fundamental division of the spheres of existence/system and actuality/systematic thought. Nevertheless, here too we encounter comments that point back to the previously articulated difference between possibility and actuality and here too, despite all the undoubted parallels, the difference between Kierkegaard’s thought and that of Hegel’s Phenomenology is especially clear. Admittedly, such passages are found only in the margins of Kierkegaard’s text, going as they do against its main tendency (cf. Schwab 2012: ch. IV.3). Anti-Climacus already makes it clear in the Introduction that his work is not intended to be a scientific exposition but to be ‘upbuilding’. In agreement with the earlier pseudonyms’ polemic against speculation, it is said that it is ‘not Christian heroism to be taken in by the idea of a pure humanity or to play the wonder game with world history’ (SKS11: 117/SUD: 5). Going straight to the work’s central concept, despair, there is an immediate and obvious difference from Hegel’s Phenomenology. There Hegel characterizes the path taken by consciousness towards absolute knowing as ‘the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair’ (Hegel 1977: 49). ‘Despair’ is in this case a methodological definition of transition: it indicates that a specific form of consciousness or knowing experiences itself as limited and thus loses its certainty of itself. It is this negative moment in the transition from one form of knowing to the next that Hegel calls despair. In The Sickness unto Death, however, despair is an existential attribute that is not just put into play to account for transition but is rather seen as a ‘static’ definition of the variously nuanced forms of the self that are analysed in the work. Furthermore, Hegel treats despair as a radicalized form of methodical doubt à la Descartes. For Kierkegaard, however—as was already made clear by the ethicist in Either/Or—doubt and despair belong to two ‘completely different spheres’ (SKS3: 203–4/EO2: 211–13). Doubt is a category of thought, while despair is an attribute of existence and no uninterrupted transition between these spheres is possible (cf. Hühn 2012). The category of transition itself points to a further difference from Hegel’s 1807 work. The logic of the Phenomenology reveals itself in how the individual forms of knowing develop in, through, and out of one another, continuously and necessarily. It is precisely this movement that constitutes the ‘education of consciousness’ (Hegel

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1977: 50). But no continuous movement can be discerned with any consistency in The Sickness unto Death. This is especially true of the forms of despair that are analysed in terms of the polarities finitude/infinitude and possibility/necessity (SKS11: 146–57/ SUD: 29–42). These do indeed relate to one another but they do not develop out of each other and, furthermore, it is unclear how these two pairs are themselves more precisely related. On the other hand, it is possible to demonstrate an approximation to a continuous and sequential development in the section ‘Despair as Defined by Consciousness’, especially between the forms named as ‘In Despair Not to Will to Be Oneself: Weakness’ and ‘In Despair to Will to be Oneself: Defiance’ (SKS11: 163–87/ SUD: 49–74). But it is precisely here that we find one of the few passages in which Anti-Climacus articulates a kind of self-criticism vis-à-vis his own conceptual and abstract expository style: Actual life is too complex merely to point out abstract contrasts such as that between a despair that is completely unaware of being so and a despair that is completely aware of being so. Very often the person in despair probably has a dim idea of his own state, although here again the nuances are myriad. (SKS11: 163/SUD: 48, our emphasis)

Even if it is only en passant, Anti-Climacus too, even in the midst of a systematic analysis of despair, draws attention to the difference of spheres emphasized by previous pseudonyms. In both its singularity and multiplicity, actuality eludes being thought in terms of abstract distinctions.

III. Kierkegaard and the Theology of Sin: Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel From Boredom to Despair: Schelling’s Critique of Fichte and The Sickness unto Death In his last philosophical work, The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard radicalized the basic negative moods of boredom, melancholy, and anxiety in such a way that they were no longer presented as separate experiences. Instead, they came to be seen as manifesting a deficient mode of human existence. Despair is broadened out to become a properly basic disposition of the modern self and defined in such a way as to provide a point of view from which to survey the entire structure of human existence. For the later Kierkegaard, despair is not merely the epitome of what ought not to be: his analyses inaugurate a negative method that has been especially influential in the work of Adorno and Theunissen and according to which, ‘successful life is to be explained by reference to failure’ (Theunissen 1991: 60–1). It is typical of Kierkegaard’s approach that despair always betrays something of its missing opposite, i.e. what might be required in order to succeed in becoming what, in

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truth, human beings ought to be. At the same time this postulated ‘ought’ does not permit being objectivized or normatively defined à la ethics of autonomous action. Kierkegaard is the first post-idealist to deal with basic ethical issues concerning the success or failure of our attempts at self-realization and to do so within the framework of a theology of sin applied to the modern understanding of human freedom. In keeping with the central metaphor of the classical conception of desperatio, Kierkegaard equates despair with sin. In Either/Or he has the ethicist explain that he ‘hold[s] to an ancient doctrine of the church that classifies depression [Tungsind] among the cardinal sins’ (SKS3: 180/EO2: 185; cf. also SKS18/KJN2: EE:117). But Kierkegaard inherits the older tradition of desperatio, epitomized by Thomas Aquinas, which emphasizes the inseparability of the self-relation and the God-relation, in a broken and mediated form, namely, through the distinctive turn given to it by, above all, Schelling in his ‘middle’ period, in the latter’s critical debate with the early philosophy of Fichte. In his Philosophy and Religion (1804), Schelling spoke of Fichte’s philosophy of subjectivity, as set out in the early edition of The Science of Knowledge (1794), as the modern ‘principle of the Fall of Man’ (Schelling 2010: 31). Five years later, in his Essay on Human Freedom (1809), Schelling takes up this objection, already made against Fichte in the Atheism Debate of 1798–9, and polemically develops it against the modern idea of autonomy as a whole, finally arriving at a theory of evil and sin. This is in one respect the culmination of a line of critical attack on Fichte’s early conception of an absolute self-positing found within idealist philosophy for over a decade. This self-positing was depicted as having its ground in a presuppositionless, baseless activity, a so-called ‘Act’ [Thathandlung]: The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits is own existence by virtue of merely existing. It is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action and deed are one and the same. (Fichte 1982: 97)

And, still more clearly: ‘The I undertakes this movement of transition because it undertakes this movement of transition; it determines itself because it determines itself. It accomplishes this transition by means of a self-grounding act of absolute freedom, and this is a creation out of nothing, an act of producing something that did not exist before, an absolute beginning’ (Fichte 1998: 139). This view of a human being as generated of and through itself seemed to its critics perfectly to mirror the Promethean selfempowerment of the modern subject: Thus it is the beginning of sin, that man transgresses from authentic Being into non-Being, from truth into lies, from light into darkness, in order to become a selfcreating ground and, with the power of the centrum which he has within himself, to rule over things. (Schelling 2006: 55)

In another respect, Schelling’s reading of the modern concept of autonomy in the perspective of a theology of sin provides the philosophical background to Kierkegaard’s

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analysis of despair.16 In all their nuances and gradations, the forms of despair that he explores manifest a falling short of what one ought to be, namely, the absence of the divine ground of the self. Kierkegaard also agrees with Schelling’s critique of Fichte in seeing this lack as typifying the modern understanding of autonomy as a whole and as revealing a kind of displacement or repression. As such it is not only a matter of ethical guilt but, in the radical perspective of a theology of sin, is rather to be seen as modernity’s Fall. Following his idealist predecessor, Kierkegaard interprets this in such a way as to see in it a flight from what the self ought to be. At the same time this very flight engenders the negativity that dominates the present age. This is even more the case, even when it presents itself in the garb of a timelessly and aprioristically valid self-positing on the part of an ‘I’ that is presuppositionless and thus maximally unrecognizable for what it truly is. It is therefore no coincidence that the form of despair called ‘In Despair to Will to Be Oneself: Defiance’ (cf. SKS11: 163–87/SD: 49–74) becomes the decisive point around which the whole analysis of despair revolves. Kierkegaard was also in conscious agreement with Schelling in regarding the self as posited by God. Both held this to be so fundamentally inscribed in our existential selfaffirmation in such a way that it always precedes whatever we factically do or leave undone while nevertheless being susceptible to denial and repression—although such repression paradoxically results in its being even more effective in the world. In this way Kierkegaard takes up and transforms Schelling’s emphatic objection to the early Fichte in his essay On Human Freedom, where he stated that ‘The concept of a derived absoluteness or divinity is so little contradictory that it is rather the central concept of philosophy as a whole’ (Schelling 2006: 19). It is therefore no accident that, in the opening passage of his analyses of human despair, Kierkegaard turns Fichte’s figure of radically autonomous self-generation on its head (cf. Hennigfeld 2004): The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a human self had itself established itself, then there could be only one form: not to will oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself. This second formulation is specifically the expression for the complete dependence of the relation (of the self), the expression for the inability of the self to arrive at or to be in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only, in relating itself to itself, by relating itself to that which has established the entire relation. (SKS 11: 130/SD: 16–7)

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According to the Sales Record of his library, Kierkegaard owned Cousin’s work, including a preface by Schelling, Schelling’s Schriften I from 1809 (including the famous Freedom Essay), an edition of the Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums and of the dialogue Bruno, a printed edition of Schelling’s first lecture in Berlin and a volume of Steffens’ unpublished writings containing a preface by Schelling (cf. Rohde 1967: 471, 763–5, 767, 799). As well, he possessed an 11-volume edition of J. G. Fichte’s Sämmtliche Werke from 1834–46 and a separate edition of Die Bestimmung des Menschen from 1838 (cf. Rohde 1967: 489–99, 500).

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It is with regard to the conviction that a theology of sin provides the correct key to the innermost configuration of the self-alienated self as well as supplying a hermeneutic tool with which to both analyse and interpret this configuration that Kierkegaard became Schelling’s most significant follower. In The Sickness unto Death it is the figure of ‘in despair to will to be oneself ’ (cf. SKS11: 130/SUD: 14; cf. Janke 1974) that most mirrors the dialectic of a self that is both excessively presumptuous yet internally deficient and that precipitates the freedom of the modern subject into sinful self-assertiveness. It is no mere rhetorical gesture when, in On Human Freedom, Schelling defines this dialectic as a ‘primal and fundamental willing [Ur- und Grundwollen], which makes itself into something’ (Schelling 2006: 50–1) and interprets the hubris of seeking ‘to become a self-creating ground’ (Schelling 2006: 55) according to the classical theological view of sin as superbia (pride), in which ‘another spirit usurps the place where God should be’ (Schelling 2006: 54). Kierkegaard is never closer to Schelling than when, in the figure of the despair that defiantly wills to be itself (cf. Theunissen 1993: 80–1, 120ff.), he portrays the Promethean forms of the self-assertion of the modern subject while simultaneously subjecting them to an annihilating critique. It is this that underwrites Kierkegaard’s critique of the age, according to which the normalization of such self-assertion, masking the repression on which it is based, condemns modern life to missing out on how it ought to be and nihilistically evacuates it of meaning. Kierkegaard had first pointed to this dialectic of nihilistic devaluation in his analysis of post-Fichtean irony On the Concept of Irony. Subsequently it became a basic feature of aesthetic existence in the doctrine of the stages in Either/Or. Hegel and, following Hegel, Kierkegaard, did not hesitate to criticize the Romantics for flattening out all qualitative differences in the course of a universal levelling. In so doing, they reduced reality to a uniform domain of entities subject to annihilation. They both saw the Romantic version of the self ’s self- and world-relationship as devolving into the loss of both self and world, precisely because it was unable to find a point of rest or to establish an independent position in relation to a ceaseless nihilation. It is this dialectic that Kierkegaard spelled out phenomenologically in terms of the self-contradiction of an ironic form of existence, and he did so with a radicalism that went far beyond Hegel’s critique of Jena Romanticism. In a word, Kierkegaard’s sees the self- and worldrelationship of Romantic subjectivity as based in the experience of total indifference and all-encompassing boredom. Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has. Boredom, this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this superficial profundity, this hungry glut. But boredom is precisely the negative unity admitted into a personal consciousness, wherein the opposites vanish. (SKS1: 320/CI: 285)

Boredom had already been named in On the Concept of Irony as the basic mood underpinning the ironist’s relentless attempts to destroy the whole realm of beings. Behind these attempts lies a compulsive assertion of identity, which is based on an experience of impotence. Only a superficial view can see this as a free and playful way of dealing with

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reality. Instead, it harbours impulses that, from the outset, block the path to a successful self-relationship. Boredom is the dominant basic mood of the ironic form of existence (cf. Greve 1990: 67ff.), and the ironist is in constant flight from its paralysing and selfperpetuating emptiness. Kierkegaard’s thesis can be summed up thus: to the degree that the ironist devalues reality as a whole, thus emptying it of all qualitative contradictions, he is himself exposed to the threat of collapsing into the utter indifference of the resultant emptiness. Or, looking at it from the side of reality, the negative evaluation of the world rebounds on to the sensibility of the ironist in such a way that, floating above the real contradictions of life, he becomes chronically incapable of decision and is as if paralysed. This state powerfully reveals the immanent risk that the ironic way of existence poses to the self. Finally, Kierkegaard’s characterization of boredom as both the obverse and the presupposition of the ironic way of life unmasks the combination of irony and negative freedom found in Romanticism as concealing a ruinous form of self-endangerment and the lack of any existential direction on the part of human subjectivity. It is the existential experience of inner emptiness found in boredom’s directionless vacuum that is the decisive spur to Kierkegaard’s later analyses of human despair. As we have seen, Kierkegaard is dependent on Hegel for much of his own critique of aesthetic existence, but when he shows that the existential risk to the self manifested in boredom is not so much the consequence as the ground of this form of existence, he is striking out on his own. It is no accident that Kierkegaard organizes the three stages of existence depicted in Either/Or—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—according to the intensification of the demand that the existential self-endangerment of the aesthete has to be overcome. To the extent that Kierkegaard thus moves away from Hegel he draws closer to Schopenhauer, who argued that ‘our mental activity is a continuously delayed boredom’ (Schopenhauer, WWR 338; cf. Pattison 2011).

The ‘Instant’ and Hegelian Dialectics The impetus driving both Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existence and his Christology came from his critique of the philosophy of German Idealism, especially Hegel. This critique is developed on the basis of the fundamental difference that the late Schelling introduced as a counter to Hegel’s concept of absolute reason. This, as we have seen in Part II of this essay, is the fundamental difference between reason functioning in the mode of possibility, i.e. of what can be thought (the negative philosophy), and an experience of historical positivity, located in the mode of reality or actuality. In his late philosophy, Schelling had taken a lead from Kant showing that it is impossible for logical thought to go from the ‘what’ or quid of the categories of thought to the ‘that’ or quod of experience. This was of decisive significance for Kierkegaard’s interest in the category of ‘transition’. It is on this speculative figure of the ‘between’, the sudden, the leap, and the instant [Øieblikket] that Kierkegaard bestows a new, Christological sense. At this point there is a clear convergence between Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel and that of the late

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Schelling and this also strengthens the thrust of the approach of the ‘late’ Fichte, as regards the practical self-affirmation of the individual. The Concept of Anxiety is the work in which this line of the critique is most sharply developed and the argument developed there points towards the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where Kierkegaard will once more polemically articulate his objections! It is a widespread interpretative assumption that much of the fire that Kierkegaard directed against Hegel is already revelatory of his own philosophical agenda.(cf. Hühn 2009: 89–137). Kierkegaard confirms this assumption, when he speaks about the transitional category of the ‘sudden’ in such a way as to charge the idealist with having failed to deal with it at all. Finally, the Dane took up the theme of the instant in its entire breadth, from the Platonic exaiphnēs (understood as the occurrence of the timeless in the midst of time) down to the privileged instant of the kairos, particularly in its Christological form (cf. Theunissen 1971). ‘Hegel has never justified the category of transition’ (SKS19/ KJN3: Not13: 50), he wrote, reminding Hegel that it is no small thing to leave this category without any justification. It is therefore not by chance that Kierkegaard emphasizes that Hegel’s mediating dialectic calls for the transitional category of the sudden, since, he argues, only the ‘temporality of transition’ [Overgangens Timelighed] (SKS4: 384/CA: 82) can explain the inner dynamic of the logical event and therewith the law of the immanent progression of the categories. Negation, transition, mediation are three disguised, suspicious, and secret agents (agentia) that bring about all movements. Hegel would hardly call them presumptuous, because it is with his gracious permission that they carry on their ploy so unembarrassedly that even logic uses terms and phrases borrowed from the temporality of transition [. . .]. Let this be as it may. Let logic take care to help itself. The term ‘transition’ is and remains a clever turn in logic. Transition belongs in the sphere of historical freedom, for transition is a state and is actual. Plato fully recognized the difficulty of placing transition in the realm of the purely metaphysical, and for that reason the category the instant cost him so much effort. (SKS4: 384– 5/CA: 82)

Kierkegaard’s constant objection to Hegel is that the German philosopher basically doesn’t know what transition means in a practical sense, since it bears within itself the abyss of a sudden, unmediated, and open event ‘in the sphere of historical freedom’. Even more strongly, he accuses Hegel’s dialectic of having failed as a whole because it does not sufficiently attend to the content of the instant that is at issue in the New Testament, both in Pauline eschatology (1 Cor 15:52; cf. SKS4: 391n./CA: 88n.) and—especially—in the sense of the ‘fullness of time’ mentioned in Gal 4:4 and Mk 1:15. In so far as it deals with the category of the instant it does so in terms of ‘quantitative determinations’ (SKS4: 397/ CA: 93). ‘The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past’ (SKS4: 393/CA: 90). In a certain sense, then, Kierkegaard reads Hegel’s philosophy as an object lesson in how Christianity can revert to paganism. When he writes that ‘By quantitative determinations, paganism stretches out time, as it were, and never arrives at sin in the deepest sense, yet this is precisely sin’ (SKS4: 397/CA: 93) it is Hegel he is writing against.

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For Kierkegaard, Hegel’s philosophy as a whole is the epitome of the return of paganism under the conditions of modernity, and, as such, it necessarily denies and suppresses its own roots. When Kierkegaard accuses idealism not just of a culpable shortcoming but of sin this is much more than a merely rhetorical flourish. The accusation is directed offensively towards a dialectic in which purely ‘quantitative determinations’ devalue all that is, evacuating qualitative differences in advance so as not even to allow them to appear: The spurious infinity is the hereditary enemy of the method; it is the nisse that accompanies every time there is a move (a transition) and prevents the transition. The spurious infinity is infinitely stubborn; if it has to be overcome, there must be a break, a qualitative leap, and that is the end of the method, of the dexterity of immanence and the necessity of transition. (SKS7: 309/CUP: 338)

Kierkegaard’s claim is that Hegel articulates an experience of time that dissolves all qualitatively distinguishable differences and devalues them to the point of uniform exchangeability. It is not only from a Christian perspective that the privileging of such a time-experience leads to the equalizing of everything with everything, but it also levels out and devalues that epochal division of time, that still so eminently readable caesura temporis that divides time into a before and an after. Kierkegaard is merely thinking this process through to its conclusion when, surveying what remains of the basic decisions on which Christianity depends under the dominion of such uniformity, he sees them as having been compounded together with the very opposite of their traditional and historic meaning and treated as a mere stage or phase. Consequently, he sees the German thinker as incapable of thinking the epochal incision into history made by Christianity: The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If attention is not paid to this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept. One does not get the past by itself but in a simple continuity with the future (with this the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption are lost in the world-historical significance and lost in the individual historical development). The future is not by itself but in a simple continuity with the present (thereby the concepts of resurrection and judgement are destroyed). (SKS4: 393/CA: 90)

One could be tempted to say that, from Kierkegaard’s critical point of view, Hegel can never become clear about his ‘transitions’ because even the ‘theo-logical’ impulse of his dialectic—which is at its core the Christological self-explication of God—has been misappropriated and adopted for an alien purpose. From Kierkegaard’s point of view, the suppression of the caesura brought about by the Incarnation suppresses and lets go of what is by no means one historical event among others but is a complex occurrence that concerns the whole of reality, and that constitutes what is essential in it. This suppression reveals that one has placed oneself above the dividing line around which, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, every Christian discourse about God revolves. For this is the world-historical line drawn by the divine act of Incarnation

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that, in the paradox of this exceptional event, has drawn the entirety of actual reality to itself, and ever and again draws it anew. This is far more than the beginning of a merely temporal phase of development, but is drawn with such emphasis as to bestow on it the status of a basic configuration of reality that, within the changing experiences of actual life, sustains the constant repetition and renewal of a basic relationship The form and manner of this repetition can consequently be characterized as an operation that both maintains and renews the tension of the relation to this originary event, a tension generated by the unsublatable and ultimately unfathomable difference between what brings the repetition about and what is repeated. What has to be held firm, then, is that God’s act of Incarnation in Christ is the hinge on which the new definition of reality turns and it is this that provides the criterion that is to be continuously applied anew to human existence. For, no matter how historically distant the ‘prototype’ may have become, it is, so to speak, once more at stake, precisely because it is this that, in the end, is the measure of the meaning and value of every human being born since Christ. It is the pattern of this measure that provides the principle informing every line of Kierkegaard’s authorship and which he seeks to articulate—even if the playfulness and ethically indifferent attitude of his literary writings makes it difficult to grasp. Nor is it accidental that Kierkegaard accentuates the practical demand of such an originary event whose normativity is related to the historically specific act of Incarnation. In Kierkegaard’s eyes, this act would be egregiously misunderstood if its validity and the obligation it carried were to be construed as merely hypothetical, since its demand is the guideline and point of departure for the renewal of human beings’ identity. Attention to the normative content of the truth of the Incarnation is shown as essential, since it is inscribed from the outset in all we do or leave undone as the criterion of a fundamental obligation concerning how we are to be, a criterion that is both morally demanding and rooted in a theology of sin. Above all, Kierkegaard sees the act of Incarnation as having the character of a demand or obligation. This is not to be taken in the sense of demanding that we take up a position defined by the postulates of some watered-down moral principle. Instead, it is to be understood in the perspective of a fundamental ontological demand concerning an originary ‘ought’ that concerns how we are to be. Such an ontological ‘ought’ is more primordial than any worldly action, with its self-alienated and even perverse profits and losses, and it subjects these to a pervasive, unrelenting ‘ethicization’ all the way down. From the point of view of this ethicization, Kierkegaard subjects the entirety of our relatedness to ourselves and to our world to the claims of an actuality that is ethically accentuated, in terms of accountability and responsibility. This actuality came into the world by virtue of the divine condescension, to which Kierkegaard ascribes such a profound value and which he sees as so encompassing as to have implications for the foundations of what should ultimately count as actual or real. The universalizing extension of such an ethicization, sharpened by the insights of a theology of sin, spreads like a net over all human reality and it provides Kierkegaard with a hermeneutical key with which to interpret actuality. One consequence of this is that Kierkegaard can see it as a fault in Hegel that there is no place for an ethics in his

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system, and certainly not a Christian ethics. ‘Therefore the system lacks an ethics; therefore the system knows nothing when the living generation and the living individual ask in earnest about becoming in order, namely, to act’ (SKS7: 279n./CUP: 307n.). In making this objection to Hegel’s system, however, Kierkegaard comes into proximity to the late philosophy of Fichte, who, in precisely the opposite way, makes the practical-ethical dimension of human self-affirmation the centre of his thought.

The Appearance of Time, and Seriousness: Kierkegaard and the Late Fichte For Kierkegaard, then, the actuality of human life is grounded in the unconditional demand made on the self to be what it is. He radicalized the form of the existential selfaffirmation of the ineluctably individual self by tracing it to down to its deepest religious and theological level. There, on the one hand, he let us see that the God-relationship is the properly original dimension of human experience, whilst, on the other, he reveals the freely acting subjective human being in its self-perversion and sinfulness. In this deeper view of the foundations of human self-affirmation, there are elements that are unmistakably analogous to those formulated by the later Fichte. Kierkegaard interest in Fichte’s The Vocation of Man (1800) and The Way towards the Blessed Life (1806) is well documented (cf. Schmidinger 1981; Kangas 2007; Stolzenberg and Rapic 2010). For, in the end, Kierkegaard takes over the self-criticism that Fichte’s late philosophy makes of his own philosophical beginnings and the doctrine of a self-positing subjectivity. This is especially clear where he comes to speak of a deeper understanding of what distinguishes the self-affirmation that results from applying the founding criterion of an original dimension of ontological ‘ought’. Kierkegaard, in his analyses of the aesthetic form of existence, knew as well as did Fichte, in the latter’s critical presentation of a merely apparent life [scheinbares Leben], that the God-relationship belongs to the essence of this absolutely constitutive dimension. No matter how corrupted this relationship may be, even if it is denied, shaken, suppressed, or even perverted into its opposite, it is so original to the self that it can never be completely lost. This is especially significant because it is in the perspective this originary dimension that we can learn what a truly human life could be in relation to the shortcomings that characterize the forms of a life of mere appearance. Kierkegaard may have sought critically to portray the aesthetic life as a perverted form of a life that should be otherwise constituted, but Fichte should rightfully be acknowledged as having decisively anticipated this basic motif of Kierkegaard’s thought. Appearance is a ceaseless change, a continual floating between birth and decay; therefore is also the mere Apparent Life a ceaseless change, ever floating between birth and decay, hurried along through never-ending alternations. [. . .] The Apparent Life lives only in the Transitory and Perishable, and therefore never remains the same in any two successive moments; each succeeding moment consumes and

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obliterates the preceding; and thus the Apparent Life becomes an continuous Death, and lives only in dying and in Death. (Fichte 1849: 6–7)

It is not only in their descriptions of a merely apparent life, lived in the mode of temporal transiency, that Kierkegaard and Fichte converge. Fichte is also more than just the originator of what would be a keyword in Kierkegaard’s own ethical vocabulary: seriousness (or earnestness: Ger. Ernst, Dan. Alvor)—as when he writes ‘[E]arnestness, in opposition to the merry game we play amid the manifold diversities of life’, ‘this profound and thoughtful earnestness, this strict concentration of the mind, and its absorption in itself, is the one condition under which the Blessed Life can approach us’ (Fichte 1849: 15). And what Kierkegaard understood by seriousness (cf. Theunissen 1958), is set out in unambiguous terms in the Lectures on Communication, when he writes ‘To help a person relate themselves to God is seriousness. But it must be done indirectly, for otherwise I become a hindrance to the one being helped’ (SKS27: Papir 365:16 [JP: 649: 23]). *** We have seen how Kierkegaard’s thought was affected in many ways and at many points by the great thinkers of German Idealism, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This relationship is far from being the simple story of ‘Kierkegaard versus Hegel’, familiar from older research. Instead, there is a real and complex story of influence, resistance, and productive appropriation and it is this that we have sought to show.

References a. Idealist Sources Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1849). The Way towards the Blessed Life; or, The Doctrine of Religion, trans. from the German by W. Smith (London: John Chapman). ——– (1982). Science of Knowledge with the First and Second Introductions, P. Heath and J. Lachs (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (1998). Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99), trans. and ed. D. Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1995 [1955]). Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E. S. Haldane (London: K. Paul, Trench, and Trübner 1892–6; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press). ——– (1998 [1975]). Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. Malcolm Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——– (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——– (1989). Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin). Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1834). ‘Vorrede’, in Victor Cousin, Über französische und deutsche Philosophie, trans. from the French by Hubert Beckers (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta), III–XXVIII. ——– (2006). Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. and introd. J. Love and J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). ——– (2010). Philosophy and Religion (1804), trans. and anno. with introd. K. Ottmann (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications).

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b. Kierkegaard and German Idealism (General) Adorno, Theodor W. (1989). Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, trans., ed., and foreword Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). [German: (1979). Gesammelte Schriften, ii. Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp)]. Fahrenbach, Helmut (1968). Kierkegaards existenzdialektische Ethik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann). Greve, Wilfried (1990). Kierkegaards maieutische Ethik. Von ‘Entweder/Oder II’ zu den ‘Stadien’ (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Hirsch, Emanuel (1933). Kierkegaard-Studien. 2 vols. (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann). Hühn, Lore (2009). Kierkegaard und der Deutsche Idealismus. Konstellationen des Übergangs (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). ——– and Schwab, Philipp (2011). ‘Intermittenz und ästhetische Konstruktion: Kierkegaard’, in Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, and Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.), Adorno-Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler), 325–35. Löwith, Karl (1967). From Hegel to Nietzsche. The Revolution in Nineteenth Century Thought, trans. from the German, 3rd edn. David E. Green (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books). [German: (1941). Von Hegel zu Nietzsche. Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (Zürich: Europa Verlag)]. Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (2011). ‘Boredom in Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Lore Hühn, Søren Fauth, and Philipp Schwab (eds.), Schopenhauer—Kierkegaard. Von der Metaphysik des Willens zur Philosophie der Existenz (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 47–66. Rohde, H. P. (ed.) (1967). Auktionsprotokol over Søren Kierkegaards bogsammling (Copenhagen Det Kongelige Bibliotek). Schwab, Philipp (2012). Der Rückstoß der Methode. Kierkegaard und die indirekte Mitteilung (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2007). Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, i. Philosophy (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, 6.1) (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). ——– (ed.) (2007a). Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, ii. Theology (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, 6.2) (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). ——– (ed.) (2009). Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries, i. Philosophy, Politics and Social Theory (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, 7.1) (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). ——– (ed.) (2009a). Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries, ii. Theology (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, 7.2) (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). Theunissen, Michael (1958). Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard (Freiburg and Munich: Alber). ——– (1971). Art. ‘Augenblick’, in Joachim Ritter et al. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, i (Basel: Schwabe), 649–50.

c. Kierkegaard and Fichte Hennigfeld, Jochem (2004). ‘Die Verzweiflung des Selbst. Spuren Fichtes in Kierkegaards “Die Krankheit zum Tode”’, in Marion Heinz and Klaus Hammacher (eds.),

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Recht—Moral—Selbst. Gedenkschrift für Wolfgang H. Schrader (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Olms), 201–13. Hochenbleicher-Schwarz, Anton (1984). Das Existenzproblem bei J. G. Fichte und S. Kierkegaard (Königstein i. Ts.: Athenäum). Janke, Wolfgang (1994). ‘Das Phantastische und die Phantasie bei Hegel und Fichte im Lichte von Kierkegaards pseudonymen Schriften’, in id., Entgegensetzungen. Studien zu Fichte— Konfrontationen von Rousseau bis Kierkegaard (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi), 159–86. Kangas, David J. (2007). ‘J. G. Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence’, in Stewart (2007), 67–96. Kloeden, Wolfdietrich von (1979). ‘Søren Kierkegaard und J. G. Fichte’, in Niels Thulstrup (ed.), Kierkegaard and Speculative Idealism (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, 4) (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel), 114–43. Kosch, Michelle (2006a). ‘Kierkegaard’s Ethicist: Fichte’s Role in Kierkegaard’s Construction of the Ethical Standpoint’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 88, 261–95. Schmidinger, Heinrich M. (1981). ‘Kierkegaard und Fichte’, Gregorianum 62, 499–542. Stolzenberg, Jürgen, and Rapic, Smail (eds.) (2010). Kierkegaard und Fichte. Praktische und religiöse Subjektivität (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter).

d. Kierkegaard and Hegel Deuser, Hermann (1974). Sören Kierkegaard. Die paradoxe Dialektik des politischen Christen. Voraussetzungen bei Hegel. Die Reden von 1847/48 im Verhältnis von Politik und Ästhetik (Munich: Kaiser and Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag). González, Darío (2007). ‘Trendelenburg: An Ally against Speculation’, in Stewart (2007), 309–31. Grøn, Arne (1996). ‘Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1996 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 91–116. Guarda, Victor (1975). Kierkegaardstudien. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Verhältnisses Kierkegaards zu Hegel (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain). Hühn, Lore (2009a). ‘Ironie und Dialektik. Zur Kritik der Romantik bei Kierkegaard und Hegel’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 2009 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 17–40. ——– (2012). ‘Vom Zweifel zur Verzweiflung. Kierkegaard als Kritiker Hegels’, in Axel Hutter and Anders M. Rasmussen (eds.), Kierkegaard im Kontext des deutschen Idealismus (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Janke, Wolfgang (1974). ‘Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards Phänomenologie des subjektiven Geistes’, in Ingeborg Schüßler and id. (eds.), Sein und Geschichtlichkeit. Karl-Heinz VolkmannSchluck zum 60. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann), 103–13. Kleinert, Markus (2005). Sich verzehrender Skeptizismus. Läuterungen bei Hegel und Kierkegaard (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Koch, Carl Henrik (1990). En flue på Hegels udødelige næse eller Om Adolph Peter Adler og om Søren Kierkegaards forhold til ham (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Kütemeyer, Wilhelm (1929). ‘Nachwort’, in Søren A. Kierkegaard, Der Begriff der Ironie mit ständiger Rücksicht auf Sokrates, trans. W. Kütemeyer (Munich: Kaiser), 341–67. Liehu, Heidi (1990). Søren Kierkegaard’s Theory of Stages and its Relation to Hegel (Helsinki: Academic Bookstore). Mackey, Louis (1986). ‘Starting from Scratch. Kierkegaard Unfair to Hegel’, in id., Points of View. Readings of Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press), 1–22.

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Poole, Roger (1993). Kierkegaard. The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia), 28–61. Rapic, Smail (2007). Ethische Selbstverständigung. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der Ethik Kants und der Rechtsphilosophie Hegels (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Schulz, Heiko (2000). ‘Kierkegaard über Hegel. Umrisse einer polemischen Rezeption’, Kierkegaardiana 21, 152–78. Schwab, Philipp (2009). ‘Zwischen Sokrates und Hegel. Der Einzelne, die Weltgeschichte und die Form der Mitteilung in Kierkegaards Über den Begriff der Ironie’, in Niels JØrgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 2009 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 127–52. Söderquist, K. Brian (2007). The Isolated Self. Irony as Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Stewart, Jon (1997). ‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness unto Death’, in Niels JØrgen Cappelorn and Hermann Deuser (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 1997 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 117–43. ——– (2003). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (2007b). ‘Hegel: Kierkegaard’s Reading and Use of Hegel’s Primary Texts’, in Stewart (2007), 97–165. Taylor, Mark C. (1980). Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press). Theunissen, Michael (1991). Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode (Frankfurt am Main: Anton Hain). ——– (1993). Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Thulstrup, Niels (1969). Kierkegaards Verhältnis zu Hegel. Forschungsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). ——– (1980). Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. George L. Stengren (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Westphal, Merold (1998). ‘Kierkegaard and Hegel’, in Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 101–24.

e. Kierkegaard and Schelling Figal, Günter (1980). ‘Schellings und Kierkegaards Freiheitsbegriff ’, in Heinrich Anz, Peter Kemp, and Friedrich Schmöe (eds.), Kierkegaard und die deutsche Philosophie seiner Zeit (Copenhagen and Munich: Fink), 112–27. Hennigfeld, Jochem (1999). ‘Die Freiheit der Existenz. Schelling und Kierkegaard’, in István M. Fehér and Wilhem G. Jacobs (eds.), Zeit und Freiheit. Schelling—Schopenhauer— Kierkegaard—Heidegger (Budapest: Éthos Könyvek), 83–93. ——– (2010). ‘Freiheit—Unschuld—Angst—Zeitlichkeit. Kierkegaard als Erbe der Freiheitsphilosophie Schellings’, in Gunther Wenz (ed.), Das Böse und sein Grund. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte von Schellings Freiheitsschrift 1809 (Munich: Verl. der Bayerischen Akad. der Wiss.), 91–8. ——– and Stewart, Jon (eds.) (2003). Kierkegaard und Schelling. Freiheit, Angst und Wirklichkeit (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter).

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Hühn, Lore (2003). ‘Sprung im Übergang. Kierkegaards Kritik an Hegel im Ausgang von der Spätphilosophie Schellings’, in Hennigfeld and Stewart (2003), 133–83. Kosch, Michelle (2003). ‘ “Actuality” in Schelling and Kierkegaard’, in Hennigfeld and Stewart (2003), 235–51. ——– (2006). Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press). McCarthy, Vincent A. (1985). ‘Schelling and Kierkegaard on Freedom and Fall’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), The Concept of Anxiety (International Kierkegaard Commentary, 8) (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press), 89–109. Olesen, Tonny A. (2003). ‘Kierkegaards Schelling. Eine historische Einführung’, in Hennigfeld and Stewart (2003), 1–102. ——– (2007). ‘Schelling: A Historical Introduction to Kierkegaard’s Schelling’, in Stewart (2007), 229–75. Pieper, Annemarie (1995). ‘Zum Problem der Herkunft des Bösen I: Die Wurzel des Bösen im Selbst’, in Otfried Höffe and id. (eds.), F. W. J. Schelling: Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag), 91–110. Rosenkranz, Karl (1843). Schelling. Vorlesungen, gehalten im Sommer 1842 an der Universität zu Königsberg (Danzig: Gerhard). Schwab, Philipp (2010). ‘Sprung und intelligible Tat. Zu Kierkegaards Transformation einer Grundfigur aus Schellings Freiheitsschrift’, in Gunther Wenz (ed.), Das Böse und sein Grund. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte von Schellings Freiheitsschrift 1809 (Munich: Verl. der Bayerischen Akad. der Wiss.), 99–112. ——– (2012a). ‘ “Das Reich der Wirklichkeit ist nicht vollendet”. Kierkegaard als Hörer Schellings und Kritiker Hegels’, in Axel Hutter and Anders M. Rasmussen (eds.), Kierkegaard im Kontext des deutschen Idealismus (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). Theunissen, Michael (1964–5). ‘Dialektik der Offenbarung. Zur Auseinandersetzung Schellings und Kierkegaards mit der Religionsphilosophie Hegels’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 72, 134–60. Thulstrup, Niels (1979). ‘Kierkegaard and Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation’, in id. (ed.), Kierkegaard and Speculative Idealism (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, 4) (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel), 222–8.

chapter 5

K ier k ega a r d a n d Rom a n ticism w illiam m c d onald

‘First of all I must protest against the view that the Romantic can be captured in a definition, for the Romantic lies essentially in flowing over all boundaries’ (SKS27: Pap. 219 [JP3: 3796]).

Kierkegaard has an ambivalent attitude toward the Romantics. On the one hand, in his master’s dissertation, he savages the concept of irony in the work of the early German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Karl Solger. In Either/Or he satirizes Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde, and in his pseudonymous authorship he relegates the aesthetic, which he takes to be almost synonymous with Romantic (Söderquist 2008: 222), to the lowest stage on life’s way. On the other hand, in his literary reviews Kierkegaard borrows some of his key critical tools from Schlegel. He also models the structure of Either/Or partly on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Confidential Letters On Lucinde (Crouter 2005: 110–17), and he borrows other elements from the late German Romantic Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (Purver 2008: 42–3). But most importantly, Kierkegaard engages vigorously with Romantic aesthetics, analysing, playing with, and critically transforming some of its central concepts, such as irony, the interesting, reflection, the individual and love, as well as some of the early Romantics’ key questions. These include how to distinguish ancient from modern poetry and drama, how to communicate ethical and religious views, how to understand the relative importance of feeling, reason, intuition, sensation and imagination, and how to use the multifarious art of style implicit in the form of the novel to subvert the Bildungsroman (Garff 2006: 83–99) and to represent the unrepresentable, how to rejuvenate religion, and how to become a self in the present age. He shares a love of Socrates and Plato, an admiration for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Goethe, and a fascination for the mythology of the Middle Ages. He also takes seriously the early German Romantics’ view that literature should ultimately serve ethics and religion.

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Most of Kierkegaard’s explicit references to Romanticism in his authorship occur early, particularly in The Concept of Irony and Either/Or. Most references in his Journals and Notebooks are restricted to an even earlier period, from 1834 to 1837. On the other hand, references to some individuals associated with Romanticism—such as Adam Oehlenschläger, Jens Baggesen, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Henrich Steffens—are spread much more widely across both his published and unpublished works. However, these are often in the form of allusions or quotations rather than extended discussions. It seems, on the face of it, that Kierkegaard engaged vigorously with Romanticism only in his youth, indeed, in that period of his life when he cultivated the image of the flâneur, alternating public displays of wit and irony with private melancholic self-absorption, in a quest to live poetically. This appearance is misleading. Although Kierkegaard’s explicit discussions of Romanticism are restricted in his authorship, the metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, and religious questions posed by the Romantics continued to occupy him. This essay will lay out some of the central themes and concepts framed by the Romantics and show how Kierkegaard responded to them. In pursuing this task it will pay particular attention to the work of the early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). However it will not repeat Kierkegaard’s critique of Romantic irony, since that has been dealt with extensively in the literature (cf. Behler 1997; Söderquist 2003; Söderquist 2008; Stewart 2008).1 But firstly we will locate Kierkegaard in the context of Romanticism in Denmark.

I. Romanticism in Denmark By the time Kierkegaard began publishing in the late 1830s, Romanticism as a cultural movement was in decline and many of its progenitors were dead. Kierkegaard himself wrote of it as though it belonged to the past. It had been subjected to serious criticism by Hegel and Danish Hegelians such as J. L. Heiberg, and early Romanticism was dismissed by ‘Young Germany’ as reactionary and anti-rational (Heine 1961, 5: 72–5). While Jena Romanticism had been a heady mix of philosophy, poetry, science, literary criticism, politics, and religion, by the 1830s Danish Romanticism was largely confined to literature, painting, and music, although there were important exceptions in the philosophical 1 Very briefly, Kierkegaard criticized Romantic irony as nihilistic. It oscillates arbitrarily, in Friedrich Schlegel’s words, between ‘Selbstschöpfung und Selbstvernichtung’ [self-creation and self-annihilation] (Stoljar 1973: 49), in pursuit of ‘the interesting,’ instead of being subordinated to an ethical-religious end. Its ‘absolute, infinite negativity’ is an empty repetition of Socratic irony, but lacks the latter’s worldhistorical significance. Romantic irony runs wild in subjectivity, so that it loses touch with actuality. It elevates the category of possibility at the expense of the category of necessity, although (ironically) because of the Romantic emphasis on fate and chance, necessity is what actually rules it, while it retains only the fantasy of freedom. Whereas Socrates’ irony was a standpoint of negative engagement with the world, Romantic irony is a detached attitude. Kierkegaard’s strategic use of mastered irony, by contrast, is an existential commitment. For more on irony, see Brian Söderquist’s essay in this volume.

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aesthetics of F. C. Sibbern (cf. Pattison 1999: 7–9) and in Poul Martin Møller’s Strøtanker [Scattered Thoughts]—a Romantic combination of aphorisms and Socratic dialogue (Thielst 2003: 47–8). While early Danish Romanticism sought the roots of national identity in folktales and folk music, from the mid-1820s Danish Romanticism was inspired by the ‘naturalistic Romanticism’ of Byron, Heine, Victor Hugo, and their associated schools. Naturalistic Romanticism was characterized by individualism, passion, exoticism, and rebellion (Hertel 2003: 362–3). Almost from the outset Kierkegaard took these later forms of Romanticism to be symptomatic of deeper problems which originate with early German Romanticism, in particular its aestheticism. Therefore his criticisms are aimed primarily at the latter. The inception of Danish Romanticism is usually dated from the lectures given in Copenhagen by Henrich Steffens on the study of philosophy in 1802 and on Goethe’s poetry in 1803. Among the most receptive members of the audience were Adam Oehlenschläger and Steffens’ cousin N. F. S. Grundtvig. Steffens had obtained his doctorate in mineralogy at the University of Kiel in 1796, but also studied the philosophy of J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling before he befriended Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and the Schlegel brothers in Jena. Steffens was therefore particularly disposed to emphasize the philosophy of nature to be found in the Jena school (Albeck 1965: 18–21).2 Both Oehlenschläger and Grundtvig then went on to create literary works imbued with Romantic elements, notable for their use of Norse mythology. However, the tracing of the origins of Danish Romanticism to Steffens’ lectures is itself something of a myth, since Oehlenschläger at least had already produced clearly Romantic works as early as 1800 (Shailer-Hanson 2003: 234–5). One mark of literary Romanticism, both in Germany and in Denmark, was fascination with folktales and myths from the Middle Ages. In the mid-1830s, while at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard began an intense study of literature. During this time he became fascinated by the figure of Faust. This in turn led him to an interest in the figures of Don Juan and Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew. Each figure represented an essential idea for Kierkegaard: scepticism (Faust), sensuality (Don Juan), and despair (Ahasverus). In his journals, Kierkegaard played Hegelian variations on the possible dialectical relations among the three characters. He tried Ahasverus as the synthesis of Faust and Don Juan. He tried Faust as the synthesis of Don Juan and Ahasverus. He also framed this dialectic in terms of Hegel’s and Heiberg’s aesthetics, with Don Juan to be depicted lyrically, Ahasverus epically, and Faust dramatically (Fenger 2003: 305). But even in Denmark Kierkegaard was far from alone in this interest. Carsten Hauch had published a tragic drama, Don Juan (1828–30), and Paludan-Müller had written Dandserinden [The Ballerina] inspired by Byron’s story of Don Juan and his young Greek lover Haidee (1830). Ahasverus appears in Hans Christian Andersen’s debut book, A Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of Amager (1829), and again in his 2 Although the philosophy of nature was an important part of Jena Romanticism, and of Danish Romanticism through Steffens, Sibbern, and H. C. Ørsted, Kierkegaard engages with it directly only to make a few dismissive remarks. However, Kierkegaard does criticize Romantic pantheism and religious immanence, and counters its compatibilist position on freedom and determinism by following Schelling’s development of the notion of freedom as spontaneity (cf. Kosch 2006: 87–121, 139–78).

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1847 drama Ahasverus. In 1837 Kierkegaard unhappily discovered that his project to write on Faust had been anticipated in an essay by H. L. Martensen on Lenau’s Faust in Heiberg’s journal Perseus (SKS27: Pap. 244/JP5: 5225). Although Kierkegaard shelved his immediate plan to write an essay on Faust, the themes represented by Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasverus ultimately appear and reappear in Kierkegaard’s authorship from Either/ Or to The Sickness Unto Death. These themes form part of a wider set, which Kierkegaard shared with the early German Romantics and the Danish Romantics.

II. Literary Criticism Kierkegaard’s first public foray into the realm of Romanticism came in the form of literary criticism. In 1838 he published a lengthy review of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler. It seems that Kierkegaard’s main purpose in publishing the review was to gain admission to the Heiberg literary circle. He had originally aimed to have the review published in Heiberg’s journal Perseus, but that ceased publication in August 1838 (Watkin 1990: p. vii). Whatever his personal motivation for writing it, the review was an occasion for Kierkegaard to practice his skills as a literary critic. In the process, he introduced themes that are central to his authorship. These themes include the questions of what makes for good and bad authorship in the present age, and how authentic communication is to be achieved to address the spiritual demands of the age. These themes overlap considerably with those introduced in the literary theory of the early German Romantics, particularly in the Athenaeum-Fragments. Literary criticism, as theorized and practiced by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel in the Athenaeum-Fragments, comprised a number of different approaches. They include, firstly, the approach of the reviewer, who guides and informs the public with respect to new works. This is not central to Kierkegaard’s review of Andersen, even though Only a Fiddler had been published just the previous year. Much of Kierkegaard’s discussion of detail from Andersen’s novel occurs in footnotes. Secondly, there is the approach which tries to discern the qualities of great works of art, especially through comparative studies of acknowledged masters with modern authors, with a view to working out how great literature might emerge in modernity. Kierkegaard pursues a modified form of this, in which he compares Andersen’s work unfavourably with that of some contemporary Danish authors, whose work he tries to demonstrate is masterful. Thirdly, there is the critical evaluation of particular works in order to develop new aesthetic principles that can inform future literary efforts. It is this approach in particular, which informs Kierkegaard’s review. He takes the review as an occasion to introduce his concepts of life-view and life-development, as well as to make some remarks about the nature of genius. The Romantics, too, spilled a lot of ink on the nature of genius, and on the notion of Bildung [cultivation, formation], which Kierkegaard subsequently attacked and for which his notions of life-view and life-development provide early alternatives. Finally there is the purely theoretical approach in which the Romantics sought to establish a new poetic form of criticism, which would combine the artistic sensitivities of the poet with

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critical detachment (cf. Stoljar 1973: 111–12). Kierkegaard positions himself as a poetic critic in his assessment of Andersen as an author who lacks a life-view and a life-development. He writes with the detachment of one who knows what these are, and can also point to their existence in other contemporary literature, such as the cycle of short novels, which began with En Hverdagshistorie [A Story of Everyday Life], published anonymously by Heiberg’s mother Thomasine Gyllembourg in 1828 (SKS1: 20–22/EPW: 64–6). Kierkegaard spends almost the first quarter of his essay on playful polemics against the idea of beginning with nothing, which characterizes ‘the whole newer development’ (namely, Hegelian speculative philosophy), together with the more positive examples in Danish literature of En Hverdagshistorie and the poetry of Steen Steensen Blicher, before he even mentions ‘the not unfavorably known poet Mr H. C. Andersen’ (SKS1: 25/EPW: 69). As if damning with faint praise were not enough, Kierkegaard continues by observing that even in ‘the few really fine lyric productions of his early youth’, Andersen is not ‘authorized by a deep-feeling sensibility for a larger totality, or as a full-toned voice for a folk-consciousness’, or by force of nature (SKS1: 25/EPW: 70). Each of these characteristics, which Andersen is said to lack, is recognized by the Romantic critics as grounds for literary authority. Kierkegaard then goes on to accuse Andersen of having failed in his development as a writer, since after the lyric stage of his work he has ‘skipped over his epic’ stage (SKS1: 26/EPW: 70).3 The main theme of Only a Fiddler, according to Kierkegaard’s review, is ‘the power of genius and its relation to unfavorable circumstances’ (SKS1: 43/EPW: 88). Andersen depicts genius as something that needs cosseting rather than as something with the inner strength and courage to resist the demands of fashion. For Kierkegaard, the strength of genius, won from experience, is woven into a life-view, which has the aspect of totality, so that further experiences can be incorporated into it and explained from its point of view. Andersen’s novel, by contrast, is episodic and suffers from the ‘misrelations’ of incidental mood, incidental knowledge, and incidental association of ideas (SKS1: 44–50/EPW: 89–94). These are incidental in so far as they are not subordinated to a total life-view, and so remain ‘undigested and poetically (not commercially) unused, unappropriated, unfiltered’ (SKS1: 39/EPW: 83). Kierkegaard then extends his critique of Andersen’s novel to Andersen’s personality. The work reflects the author to reveal that ‘Andersen himself has not lived to the first power with poetic clarity since the poetic to the second power has not achieved greater consolidation in the whole and is not leached out enough in detail’ (SKS1: 39/EPW: 83–4). This terminology of ‘first and second powers’ echoes Friedrich Schlegel’s and Novalis’s uses of notions such as ‘the poetry of poetry’, ‘the philosophy of philosophy’, and ‘logological’ to indicate a simultaneous immersion and detachment, which enables a higher and more penetrating point of view (Stoljar 1973: 15). In two footnotes Kierkegaard clarifies his remark by comparing Andersen’s first power to ‘the flowers with male and female on one stalk’, so that there is not enough ‘cleavage’ to ‘demand a 3 Hegel had placed the historical-dialectical development of poetic genres in the order epic, lyric, dramatic, whereas Heiberg argued it should be in the order lyric, epic, dramatic. Kierkegaard concurred with Heiberg’s ordering. While unity of character can be sustained in lyric poetry by mood, the epic requires character development. The dramatic introduces the further element of dialectical development of character.

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deeper unity.’ Implicit in this criticism is the Romantic insistence that greatness in a work of art, as indeed in a person, is measured by unity-in-diversity (Crowe 2010: 66). Kierkegaard goes on to say that Andersen, both as a person and a poet, grows only superficially, by accretion rather than by suffering the self-diremption which makes ‘the poet inwardly freer, richer, more sure of himself ’ (SKS1: 39/EPW: 84). The extension of literary criticism to existential critique of personality is already explicit in Romanticism. For Friedrich Schlegel there is a parallel between the structure of a literary work and the structure of an integrated individual: ‘Some of the most excellent novels are compendia, encyclopedias of the whole spiritual life of an individual of genius. . . . Every human being who is cultivated and who cultivates himself contains a novel within himself. It is not necessary that he express it or write it’ (cited in Crowe 2010: 67). Furthermore, Schlegel compares the formation of a work of art with ‘the education of a young Englishman’ by means of ‘le grand tour’. The expansion, of work or individual, ‘gives its spirit more freedom and inner versatility, and thereby more autonomy and self-sufficiency’ (cited in Crowe 2010: 67). Kierkegaard’s footnote on Andersen is almost a paraphrase. Moreover, Kierkegaard snidely suggests that Andersen, rather like a young Englishman, ‘is better suited to rushing off in a coach and seeing Europe than to looking into the history of hearts’ (SKS1: 55/EPW: 100–1). However, there is more to Kierkegaard’s review of Andersen than sycophancy towards Heiberg and rivalry with Andersen. As Bruce Kirmmse has argued, much of the review can also be regarded as Kierkegaard’s self-criticism (Kirmmse 2006: 16–17). Kierkegaard’s journals make clear that he suffers from the very failings of which he accuses Andersen, including having a style like ‘graduate student prose’ (SKS1: 23/EPW: 67), creating literary works instead of developing himself, seeming like one of his own literary characters, lacking a life-view, and being too clever by half (Kirmmse 2006: 16). On the face of it Kierkegaard’s published review is a savage ad hominem attack on Andersen, ‘a sniveler who is declared to be a genius’ (SKS1: 43/EPW: 88). Kierkegaard might be defended against this appearance by arguing that Andersen’s failings represent more general tendencies in the present age—failings which afflict even Kierkegaard. Therefore his analysis is a form of culture-criticism encapsulated in a case study. In favour of such an interpretation is that this is precisely Kierkegaard’s approach in two other major works of criticism: Two Ages (1845) and The Book on Adler (1846). The former reviews the novel Two Ages by Thomasine Gyllembourg, and is an occasion for Kierkegaard to reflect on the decisive differences between the present age and the preceding age. The Book on Adler reviews the work of Pastor Adolf Adler, a Hegelian author of books in speculative theology who claimed to have had a personal divine revelation. His claim was investigated by the Danish People’s Church and dismissed, with Adler being pensioned off as mad. Kierkegaard’s book, which he withheld from publication during his lifetime (possibly out of consideration for Adler), investigates the relationship between genius, authority, and revelation. In the preface, Kierkegaard claims that Adler stands in for ‘the confusion of the age’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27/BA: 4). In this use of exemplary individuals, Kierkegaard is indebted to Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of ‘characteristic’. On the one hand ‘characteristic’ is a technical term in Schlegel’s

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literary criticism to signify the immanent critique of a work according to the internal standards of its author, in contrast to judging a work on the basis of purported universal standards of aesthetic judgment (Beiser 2003: 127). In addition Schlegel uses the term for ‘the theory of the art of living’ (Schlegel 1981, XVI: 141). In his ‘characteristics’ of great men, including Voltaire, Herder, Goethe, and Lessing, Schlegel searched for the unifying pattern which individuates the men and makes their lives exemplary (Crowe 2010: 70). Kierkegaard’s use of exemplary individuals goes well beyond his literary reviews. His whole authorship could be said to be guided by their lights, starting with Socrates and ending with Christ. Then there is his self-examination, and the use of himself as exemplar. In his retrospective reflections on his work as an author, Kierkegaard regards his authorship as an exemplary intervention in the present age and also as a process in which Governance has brought him up (SKS16/PV: 77). He regards himself as a ‘singular universal’, in the same sense as Socrates, that ‘his whole life was personal preoccupation with himself, and then Governance comes and adds world-historical significance to it’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB10:185 [JP6: 6388]). In his literary criticism, Kierkegaard seems more concerned to develop his own ideas than to account for the texts he reviews. He even remarks in his journal: ‘A thesis: great geniuses cannot really read a book; when they read they always develop themselves more than they understand the author’ (SKS17/KJN1: BB:46). This is certainly the case with his review of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages, where Kierkegaard devotes the last half of his text to a discussion of his own categories for distinguishing the present age from the previous age. The present age, he claims, is characterized by reflection as opposed to the passion of what Gyllembourg refers to as the ‘age of revolution’. Passion, according to Kierkegaard, entails inwardness and immediacy, both of which are missing in reflection. Furthermore, Kierkegaard introduces the categories of levelling, the public, and the press, all of which lead to passionless, abstract reflection, which lacks concrete existential engagement. None of these categories appears in Gyllembourg’s work (Nun 2003: 293–4). When Kierkegaard sent a copy of his review to the author of Two Ages, through J. L. Heiberg, Gyllembourg wrote him a charming letter, in which she recognizes that her work is largely an occasion for Kierkegaard’s own creativity: ‘ . . . when I compare my novel with your book, so richly equipped with such profound, such apt, and such witty observations, then my work appears to me a simple romance from which a poet has taken the subject and wrought a drama’ (cited in Nun 2003: 295).

III. Irony, Reflection, and Self-Development This self-development of the genius by means of critical misprision is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s literary criticism. It is also arguably at the heart of his appropriation of Romanticism. In order to understand an historical individual, claims Johannes

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Climacus, one must first understand oneself (SKS7: 136/CUP: 146–7). But in order to understand oneself, according to Kierkegaard and the Romantics, one must reflect on oneself. To reflect one must split oneself into subject and object of reflection, that is, one must detach or alienate oneself from oneself. Detachment can be achieved by projecting oneself onto another, finding oneself reflected in another or in another’s work, or even by representing oneself in one’s work. For Hölderlin, the gap of self-diremption is opened inevitably by means of judgement, in the opposition of subject and object, as he argues in ‘Urtheil und Seyn’ [Judgement and Being]. Making the most of a pun or bogus etymology, Hölderlin claims that judgement is ‘the very sundering which first makes Object and Subject possible, the Ur-Theilung’ [judgement or originary division] (Harris 1972: 516). Any judgement, including aesthetic and moral judgement as well as judgements about oneself, presupposes a division between the subject who judges and the object judged. This poses a problem for the unity of the self in self-consciousness—a problem recognized and addressed by Hölderlin, Isaak von Sinclair, and Novalis (Frank 2004: 94–7). It is also a problem that occupies Kierkegaard in an authorship abounding in fragmentary self-portraits. To be split reflectively into subject and object opens a gap between the real and the ideal, where both self-development and self-deception can find free play. Between the immediacy of the real and the possibility of the ideal lies ‘interest’—a being-between [inter-esse], which Kierkegaard identifies with both the actuality (SKS7: 286–7/CUP: 314–15) and the subjective consciousness (SKS15: 57/PF: 170) of the existing individual. This is the space of reflection in which imagination generates possibilities. Possibility is a necessary condition of freedom and brings with it the anxiety of responsibility. It includes the possibilities of doubt [Tvivl] and despair [Fortvivelse], but also the possibility of earnest inwardness—all of which contain an implicit doubling of the subject in reflection. Reflection opens the space between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’, where intimation of a discrepancy creates ‘the interesting’. Friedrich Schlegel introduced the interesting as the distinguishing characteristic of modern poetry in his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry—as noted by Kierkegaard in 1836 (SKS27: Pap. 169). For Schlegel, ancient poetry represents ideal forms rather than concrete individuals and therefore is universal and objective. It has character sketches, but not character development (Heiberg 1843: 80). Modern poetry has lost this universality and objectivity and instead appeals to the subjective aesthetic force of the interesting, which is explored through character development. The interesting can be either a substantive category of individual character or a relational category between subject, object, and observer—that is, a character can be intrinsically interesting, or interest can be aroused in an observer because of curiosity about the relationship between the subjective and objective aspects of a character (Koch 1992: 39–40).4 Modern poetry is not superior on this account. On the contrary, ancient 4 Kierkegaard explores the permutations of ‘the interesting’ extensively in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, which can also be read as a satire on Schlegel’s Lucinde. I will not elaborate on Kierkegaard’s treatment here, since it has been discussed at length elsewhere (cf. Koch 1992, Stokes 2010).

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Greek poetry, for Schlegel, had a ‘natural’ literary perfection, whereas ‘artificial’ modern poetry can only strive for perfectibility (Schlegel 1979, I: 253). The development of individual character is always a striving for perfectibility, never its attainment. Its gaps and flaws may be prised open by irony to enlarge the separation between inner and outer, thereby augmenting the interesting.5 Irony as a rhetorical trope operates on the basis of a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, between an ‘insider’ meaning and a ‘public’ norm. Schlegel is credited with radicalizing the concept of irony, which he equated with Socratic dialectics, understood as ‘thought and counterthought as a progressive movement of thinking’ (Behler 1997: 16). In contrast to irony as a rhetorical figure, which is applied only to particular speech acts, Schlegel’s new concept of irony pervades a whole discourse. Schlegel asserts that ‘only poetry can also reach the heights of philosophy in this way, and only poetry does not restrict itself to isolated ironical passages, as rhetoric does’ (cited in Behler 1997: 17). In its thought and counter-thought irony alternates between selfcreation and self-annihilation, and thereby imbues poetic creativity with reflective self-criticism (Behler 1997: 17–18). Schlegel applied this conception in his critical practice, as in his review of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Here his irony operates not only in its critical detachment from Goethe’s novel, but Schlegel later reflects ironically on his own reflections in an attempt to unite the subjective and objective aspects of his relation to Goethe’s novel in ‘the one act of creative criticism’ (Stoljar 1973: 120). This ‘irony of irony’ is an attempt at unification of the split self by means of double reflection. Novalis had proposed a similar solution in his consideration of self-consciousness as a form of ‘reflection’. If we take this metaphor literally, to be a mirroring of the self, then we should expect that the image we perceive of ourselves is inverted. In order to perceive ourselves aright, we need a double reflection, to invert the inversion.6 However, what is revealed for Novalis in this double reflection is a double illusion (Frank 2004: 97–8). His starting point for this thought experiment is Fichte’s notion of an absolute, transcendental ‘I’ which cannot be known but can only be posited precognitively on the basis of intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is supposed to pre-empt the division between subject and object. But, not being a judgement, intuition can never grasp [begreifen] the absolute as a concept [Begriff]. Rather it is a perpetual longing for the absolute, which it implicitly takes as its point of departure. Novalis characterizes this

5 The aesthete A devotes a section of Either/Or to the question of the difference between ancient and modern tragedy. He considers a modern Antigone, who differs from her ancient counterpart precisely by having an undisclosable secret, which marks an irreducible difference between inner and outer. She suffers from tragic guilt as a result of this secret, but is not thereby beyond being an epic figure. She becomes a dramatic figure by falling in love with someone who reciprocates her love, but to whom she cannot reveal her secret, thus deepening her sorrow with a dialectic twist. Her tragedy is still interesting, and therefore within the category of the aesthetic. Otherwise hereditary guilt becomes a matter of the ethical (SKS2: 152–62/EO1: 153–64). 6 This strategy is also pursued by Hegel who criticizes Solger’s notion of irony for only taking the first step of dialectics, namely, the step of negating. Hegel’s dialectics require the further step of negating negation.

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longing as the ‘illusory striding from the finite to the infinite’.7 When we reverse this image by doubling the reflection, we get the ‘illusory striding from the infinite to the finite’ (cited in Frank 2004: 98). But this double illusion still does not deliver the unity of self-consciousness. Novalis identifies the problem in the metaphors of reflection and representation in Fichte’s attempt at transcendentally deducing the unity of self-consciousness. Intellectual intuition cannot objectify, know or represent the absolute. In order to find the unity of selfconsciousness, we need to abandon these metaphors. In their place, Novalis posits feeling. We feel our intuition of the absolute. For Novalis, feeling is ‘a type of receptive consciousness to which something must be given.’ Furthermore, ‘the limits of feeling are the limits of philosophy’ (cited in Frank 2004: 99) and these limits reveal that philosophy is inadequate to represent the unrepresentable. Beyond the limits of philosophical knowledge only the work of art can create meanings adequate to the receptive consciousness of feeling. Kierkegaard, too, criticizes attempts to objectify or represent the absolute—though he seems concerned not so much with Fichte’s absolute ground of self-consciousness as with God. Nevertheless, in his understanding of selfhood as the relating of oneself to oneself, God is the ground of self-consciousness (SKS11: 129–30/SUD: 13–14). Moreover, double reflection is the means by which the inadequacies of representation of the absolute are exposed, and feeling (the passion of faith) is the means of preparing to receive the absolute. Kierkegaard’s quest for selfhood through self-relating draws heavily on exploring selfconsciousness through feeling (mood, emotion, passion) in his characterization of various existential types. Moods, emotions, and passions are used to confer unity on existential types. The mood of boredom, for example, characterizes the aesthete, whose pursuit of the interesting can be seen largely as flight from boredom.8 Virtue-emotions— such as courage, patience, hope, and love—are explored in the Edifying Discourses, those works Kierkegaard invariably addresses to ‘that single individual’ [hiin Enkelte] (cf. SKS16/PV: 37). The category of the single individual, Kierkegaard claims, has a dialectic ‘continually . . . made equivocal in its double movement.’ On the one hand it is used aesthetically, to indicate ‘the outstanding individual’; on the other it is ‘someone every human being is or can be’. This confronts the reader with the possibilities of pride in the one thought and humility in the other, thereby demanding emotional self-relation (SKS16/PV: 115). Faith, the lynchpin of Kierkegaard’s self-relating self, is a passion. Each mood, emotion, and passion has its exemplars, in the form of fictional or biblical characters. For Kierkegaard, as for Schlegel, mood is adequate for unifying character only in lyric poetry (Schlegel 1979 I: 240–1). Ethical character, developed through other-directed emotions, must be unified epically, that is diachronically in action. Religious character must be unified dialectically, that is dramatically, through repetition of the passion of faith. Kierkegaard uses art as a means of going beyond the limits of philosophical representation to open a space of subjective meaning in which these feelings emerge to unify 7 Hegel characterizes it in The Phenomenology of Spirit as ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ (Hegel 1977: 126–38). 8 For an extended discussion of Kierkegaard’s analysis of boredom, see McDonald 2009.

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character. Fiction thereby provides an ‘apprenticeship in the art of living. Through carefully planned experiments one becomes familiar with its principles and acquires the skill to act according to them as one wishes’ (Novalis 1997: 23). Of course Kierkegaard did not just adopt the Romantics’ position on the role of feeling in accessing the absolute. Rather, he criticized it and adapted it. For Kierkegaard, as for Hegel, the characteristic romantic feeling is longing or yearning. The most poignant example of this feeling, for Kierkegaard, occurs in Esaias Tegner’s Frithiof ’s Saga, when Ingeborg, unhappily harbouring the secret that she is to be married to someone else, gazes longingly out to sea as the boat bearing her beloved Frithiof disappears (SKS27: Pap. 128:1[JP3: 3800]).9 A romantic yearning, which has an impossible intentional object, can lead only to unhappiness. Nostalgia for an imagined future and hope for a fantastical past are forms of romantic longing for the impossible, which define ‘the unhappiest one’ in Either/Or. Then, by ironic inversion, the unhappy romantic embraces this unhappiness as the highest happiness, falling in love with his own melancholy (SKS2: 223/EO1: 230). In Kierkegaard’s adaptation, romantic longing is transformed into ethical striving.10 In Kierkegaard’s self-development, the ultimate goal is a ‘higher immediacy’ on the other side of doubt and despair, in which the redoubling of reflection is replaced by a return to the simplicity of faith. This is a goal for Kierkegaard both as an author and as a person. The pivotal point is after the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. As an author he retreats from the convoluted redoubling in parody and satire of Romantic aestheticism and speculative philosophy, which constituted his ‘first authorship,’ to the more straightforward communication of deliberations, reviews, and discourses published under his own name in the ‘second authorship’. As a person, he had aimed to give up being an author altogether, to ‘withdraw to the country and in quiet unobtrusiveness to sorrow over [his] sins’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB5:51 [JP6: 6157]). Kierkegaard’s development in the ‘first authorship’ follows the Romantic and Hegelian journeys from immediacy, through ironic self-alienation to reflective selfformation. In the process, however, Kierkegaard appropriates key concepts in his own peculiar ways. He masters irony, mirrors the reflective surfaces of aestheticism to the point of aporia, uses satire in the direction of a cure, dons the masks of ethicist and religious exegete, and revokes his masks with humour11 and retrospective self-accounting 9 For an extended discussion of this scene and its importance for Kierkegaard’s notion of the moment [Øieblikket], see Eriksen 2000: 69ff. 10 Note that for Schlegel modernity is characterized by constant striving for an infinite reality (Stoljar 1973: 46–7), but Hegel sees in that the symptom of his figure of the Unhappy Consciousness. Even Steffens seems to have understood the Jena Romantics in terms of yearning, which he interprets as presentiment [Ahnelse] (cf. Pattison 1999: 51). 11 One of the masks Kierkegaard uses is the incognito of jest to disguise seriousness. This is tantamount to Schlegel’s definition of Witz [wit] in number 108 of the Lyceum-Fragments (Stoljar 1973: 48). Schlegel also takes wit and sentimentality to be the two essential elements of the Roman [novel] (Stoljar 1973: 125–6). Schlegel took wit to be important in establishing bonds of fellowship, especially in the collegial collaboration he called ‘Symphilosophie’, which Kierkegaard parodies with the Symparanekromenoi [fellowship of buried lives] (SKS2: 163/EO1: 165). Christian fellowship, by contrast, is founded on shared faith, suffering, and love.

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in a manner which not only parodies Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (McDonald 1998) but also exemplifies Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of the literary arabesque. In his trajectory from redoubled reflection to simplicity, Kierkegaard aims to be receptive to the absolute through the passion of faith and to become as nothing before the God of love. His Romantic movements are punctuated by critiques of Romanticism and twisted through the demands of indirect communication and the ‘inverse dialectic’ of Christianity.

IV. Religion, Love, and Indirect Communication Schlegel, too, appropriated concepts and terminology for his own ends. This is the case with his use of the term Roman [novel], from which the word ‘Romantic’ is in part derived. He regarded the Roman as ‘the absolute work of literature,’ which was to be the vehicle for his vision of a new bible. The new bible, in turn, was to embody an allegory of the organic universe (Stoljar 1973: 124). The concept of Roman also allows mixtures of poetry and prose, though it is better suited to epic than to dramatic structures, because epic enables the use of historical materials, such as memoirs and diaries. The incorporation of real and historical materials is one of the hallmarks of modern poetry for Schlegel (Stoljar 1973: 128). Schlegel took Roman to be synonymous with Romantic poetry, which was not bound to the form of a single genre. In his Brief über den Roman [Letter on the Novel], Schlegel assimilated the notion of Romantic poetry, and therefore of the Roman, to the concept of the arabesque. The arabesque enables structural eclecticism, so that the Roman might embrace various genres, framing devices, quotations, confessions, interludes, and points of view (cf. Strathausen 2000: 376). This is exemplified in Schlegel’s own Roman, Lucinde, with its ‘cultivated chaos’ [gebildetes Chaos] (Stoljar 1973: 130).12 Lucinde comprises letters, confessions, reminiscence, and dialogue. It was meant to be a religious book, in the sense that it was to be ‘a new mythology, a new morality, and a new philosophy’ rolled into one, with its protagonists Julius and Lucinde as its priest and priestess (Firchow 1971: 23). The heart of this new religion is love. As such, love provides the unity of self-consciousness. The divisions into subject and object, self and other, spirit and sense, which characterize self-consciousness, are embodied in male and female respectively and are reconciled in the greater whole their love comprises (Pattison 2002: 118). Love as the ‘ecstasy of the unconditioned’, in which the individual attains self-realization only in conjunction with another, is averred not only by Schlegel, but also by Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and even Schiller (Frank

12 While Kierkegaard takes music to be the medium of sensual immediacy (as in Mozart’s Don Giovanni), and poetry to be the medium of reflection, we might think of the arabesque as a medium of refraction.

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2004: 87–9, 129–30). As Schelling puts it: ‘It is the mystery of love, that it bonds in such a way, that each can be for itself, but neither is nor can be without the other’ (cited in Frank 2004: 89). The wholeness given by heterosexual love is an end in itself for Schlegel. For Schleiermacher, on the other hand, love is not the fulfilment of religion but its presupposition (Pattison 2002: 122). Although Schleiermacher’s Confidential Letters on Lucinde generally defends Schlegel’s Roman by criticizing its critics, it also contains the trenchant criticism of Lucinde that it is too abstract and analytical in its depiction of love (Pattison 2002: 124). This detracts from the possibility that Lucinde is the first gospel of a new bible, as Schlegel thought it was (Firchow 1971: 38–9), since it looks more like empty fantasy than revelation. Kierkegaard is much more scathing in his assessment of the religion of love contained in Lucinde, though he took it seriously enough to reflect its shortcomings in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’. Kierkegaard’s Seducer is not someone drawn into a greater whole by love of another, but a narcissist who uses others to gratify his aesthetic pursuit of ‘the interesting’. Judge Wilhelm, on the other hand, the ethicist who writes letters to the aesthete, defends the aesthetic validity of marriage—an institution in which one humbles oneself and one’s love under God (SKS3: 101/EO2: 99). Ultimately for Kierkegaard, religious love is a duty rather than an erotic attraction. It should be practised as selfsacrificing agape as opposed to the self-interested eros favoured by Schlegel. Nor is there a simple continuity between eros and agape, a scala paradisi modelled on the ascent to the divine in Plato’s Symposium (cf. McDonald 2003). Christian love, for Kierkegaard, requires one to become as nothing so that divine love can shine through in works of love. An author should not presume to put his name to works of love, since the only author of such works is God. Therefore, in the conclusion to Works of Love, Kierkegaard erases his name with a dash, to make way for the words of the Apostle John (SKS9: 367/WL: 374).13 Self-sacrifice and self-erasure, then, are the end point of the Christian quest for self-realization, in marked contrast to Romantic self-realization through love. The subtitle of Lucinde is ‘Confessions of a Blunderer’, where this refers to the persona of Julius. Schlegel made a great deal of the concept of persona, which he traced to the device of parabasis in ancient Greek comedy, in which the chorus addresses the audience directly in the name of the poet (Firchow 1971: 29). This interruption of indirect communication by direct communication enables different levels of awareness of the work and is closely connected to Schlegel’s concept of irony, which he defined at one point as ‘permanent parabasis’ (Firchow 1971: 29). This dual perception, which for Schlegel allows simultaneous proximity and distance from reality, recalls Kierkegaard’s figure of the glasses, which simultaneously magnify and diminish their objects (SKS2: 33/EO1: 24). Irony also enables human beings, according to Schlegel, to commit to finite reality and simultaneously to keep the eternal in view (Firchow 1971: 30). This dual perception is also at work in Kierkegaard’s practice of indirect communication, whose aim is to communicate an ethical-religious capacity rather than objective 13 Note that in the English translation this important dash has been omitted from the very end of the chapter before the conclusion, thereby erasing the point of Kierkegaard’s self-erasure.

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information. This can only be done through art, not through science: ‘The ethical must be communicated as an art, simply because everyone knows it’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 81). In so far as this is ‘second ethics’ informed by religion, rather than the morality of mores teleologically suspended by faith, it has an eye on the eternal. Since it is known by everyone, it entails a commitment to finite reality. Double reflection ‘is already implicit in the idea of communication itself ’ because the subjective individual wants to remain in inwardness—a process which is never finished—while at the same time wanting to communicate this inwardness directly, which requires a finished result. ‘So it is also in the God-relationship. Just because he himself is continually in the process of becoming in an inward direction, that is, in inwardness, he can never communicate himself directly, since the movement here is the very opposite. Direct communication requires certainty, but certainty is impossible for a person in the process of becoming, and it is indeed a deception’ (SKS7: 74–5/CUP: 73–4). In their aspiration to find a new bible as the foundation of a religion adequate to modernity, Schlegel and Novalis sought a structure like the Roman, with the capacity to change and grow in accordance with the living spirit of religion (Stoljar 1973: 86). Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication requires similar flexibility, but it aims to engage its receiver with existence through action rather than merely through reflection.14 One crucial difference, however, is that Schlegel regarded the poet as the priest of the new religion. He thought genius an adequate basis for religious authority. Kierkegaard attacks just this assumption in his ethical-religious essay of 1847, ‘The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’. The principal difference for Kierkegaard is that genius and apostle belong to the qualitatively different spheres of immanence and transcendence respectively. Although the genius can bring something new, it ultimately disappears into ‘the human race’s general assimilation’, while what the apostle brings is ‘something paradoxically new’, which cannot be assimilated (SKS11: 98/WA: 94). Novalis has a view somewhere between Kierkegaard and Schlegel’s. He regards sacred texts as only partly the product of artistic imagination, and partly of inexplicable origin. Novalis thinks of sacred books as independent forms of life, like human beings or human communities (Stoljar 1973: 87). Nevertheless, he shares the Romantic metaphysics of immanence, which seeks to synthesize ‘Fichte’s idealism, indeterminism, and dualism . . . with Spinoza’s realism, determinism, and monism’ (Beiser 2003: 131). The crucial move in the synthesis is to apply the metaphor of organism to nature as a whole. Everything in nature is then construed as a different level of organization of the pervading life force. Self-consciousness, whether felt or articulated in art or science, becomes a matter of nature redoubling by folding itself. While Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication seems to constitute an attempt to represent the unrepresentable, using the structure of Romantic irony (Schwab 2008: 40), his assertion of the qualitative difference between immanence and transcendence prevents his own art, or anyone else’s, from achieving the task. Moreover, though 14 Kierkegaard shares with Fichte the idea that engagement with existence must be an act rather than a reflection (Kangas 2007: 70).

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he retraces many of the steps of enculturation [Bildung] and Romantic self-creation in his authorship, Kierkegaard ultimately ascribes his creative output to ‘upbringing’ by Governance (SKS16/PV: 77). Despite the claim that his writing is not the work ‘of the poet passion or of the thinker passion, but of devotion to God’ (SKS16/PV: 73), he writes without (divine) authority. He does not aim to write a new bible, but only ‘once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers’ (SKS7: 573/ CUP: 629–30). His critical misprisions, double reflections, pseudonymous and fictional self-diremptions, parodies, satires, and ironies lead him to the edge of a faith which must be given as an act of grace by a transcendent God. But it seems the striving for simplicity, like Schlegel’s striving for perfectibility, is never done. One waits in patience and humility for grace, having prepared for its reception through resignation, sin-consciousness, and repentance. Despair then reappears as a necessary condition for the reception of faith. Despair arises from an intensification of sin-consciousness—the feeling of distance from the absolute—until, at breaking point, the ‘inverse dialectic’ of Christianity converts adversity to prosperity, hopelessness to hope, suffering to joy, and sin to atonement. Yet the mark of each positive attribute is its negation, and even faith is maintained in a double vision—of offense and blessedness (Walsh 2005: 34–5, 123–9). Kierkegaard claims that as a poet he can express more than he is capable of achieving as a man. He says of his use of the pseudonym Anti-Climacus that it indicates ‘that it is a poet-communication’, yet adds that ‘what I am saying is the very truth, but the fact that I am saying it constitutes the poetic aspect’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB14:19/PC: 293–4). Although Kierkegaard insists that he speaks without authority and distinguishes Christianity by means of transcendence, his role as poet veers almost indiscernibly close to the Romantic vision of the poet as the mediator of religious truth. Art overflows the boundaries of representation, revokes the very notion of representation, and keeps flowing. Kant, however, made an important distinction between a border [Grenze] and a limit [Schranke]. While either side of a border is continuous with the other, the other side of a limit is limitless (Llewelyn 2004: 90–3). Kierkegaard’s indirect communication differs from the Romantic poet’s by pointing to the sign of the God-man. Whereas the Romantic merely overflows a border, this paradoxical sign is taken by faith to be a radical incursion of the transcendent, a tear in the fabric of sense, through which the individual reader may glimpse the unlimited possibility of atonement in the twinkling of an eye [Øieblikket].

References Albeck, Gustav (1965). ‘Romantik (1800–1820)’, in P. H. Traustedt (ed.), Dansk Litteratur Historie Bind 2: Fra Oehlenschläger til Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag), 11–244. Behler, Ernst (1997). ‘Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Romanticism’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard Revisited:

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Proceedings from the Conference ‘Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It’ Copenhagen, May 5–9, 1996 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 13–33. Beiser, Frederick C. (2003). The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press). Crouter, Richard E. (2005). Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press). Crowe, Benjamin D. (2010). ‘Friedrich Schlegel and the Character of Romantic Ethics’, Journal of Ethics 14, 53–79. Eriksen, Niels Nymann (2000). Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Fenger, Henning (2003). ‘Kierkegaard: A Literary Approach’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 301–18. Firchow, Peter (1971). ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. and introd. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 3–39. Frank, Manfred (2004). ‘Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self-Consciousness from Kant to Kierkegaard’, trans. Peter Dews and Simon Critchley, Critical Horizons 5: 1, 53–136. Garff, Joakim (2006). ‘Andersen, Kierkegaard—and the Deconstructed Bildungsroman’, trans. K. Brian Söderquist, in Niels Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2006 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 83–99. Harris, H. S. (1972). Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Heiberg, J. L. (1843). Intelligensblade 2, (Copenhagen). Heine, Heinrich (1961). Werke und Briefe in zehn Bänden, ed. Hans Kaufman (Berlin: Aufbau). Hertel, Hans (2003). ‘P. L. Møller and Romanticism in Danish Literature’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 356–72. Kangas, David (2007). ‘J. G. Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome I: Philosophy (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). Kirmmse, Bruce H. (2006), ‘ “Sympathetic Ink”—The Sniveler and the Snail: Andersen and Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark’, in Niels Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2006 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 8–21. Koch, Karl Henrik (1992). Kierkegaard og ‘Det interessante’: En studie i en æstetisk kategori (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Kosch, Michelle (2006). Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Llewelyn, John (2004). ‘On the Borderline of Madness’, in Elsebet Jegstrup (ed.), The New Kierkegaard (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 88–111. McDonald, William (1998). ‘Retracing the Circular Ruins of Hegel’s Encyclopedia’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, Vol.12: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Macon: Mercer University Press), 227–45.

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McDonald, William (2003). ‘Love in Kierkegaard’s Symposia’, Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 7, 60–93. —–— (2009). ‘Kierkegaard’s Demonic Boredom’, in Carlo Salzani and Barbara Dalle Pezze (eds.), Essays on Boredom and Modernity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 61–84. Novalis (1997). Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed, Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Nun, Katalin (2003). ‘Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and her Portrayal of Everyday Life’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 272–97. Pattison, George (1999). Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, 2nd edn. (London: SCM Press). —–— 2002). Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Purver, Judith (2008). ‘Eichendorff: Kierkegaard’s Reception of a German Romantic’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature and Aesthetics (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate), 25–49. Schwab, Philipp (2008). ‘Innen und Außen: Zu Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit der romantischen Ironie vor dem Hintergrund der Mitteilungsform von Entweder/Oder’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2008 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 38–52. Shailer-Hanson, Kathryn (2003). ‘Adam Oehlenschläger’s Erik and Roller and Danish Romanticism’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 233–47. Söderquist, K. Brian (2003). ‘Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of “Irony” ’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). —–— (2008). ‘Friedrich Schlegel: On Ironic Communication, Subjectivity and Selfhood’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature and Aesthetics (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate), 185–233. Stewart, Jon (2008). ‘Solger: An Apostle of Irony Sacrificed to Hegel’s System’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature and Aesthetics (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate). Stokes, Patrick (2010). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Stoljar, Margaret (1973). Athenaeum: A Critical Commentary (Bern and Frankfurt: Herbert Lang). Strathausen, Carsten (2000). ‘Eichendorff ’s Das Mamorbild and the Demise of Romanticism’, in Martha B. Helfer (ed.), Rereading Romanticism (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi), 367–87. Thielst, Peter (2003). ‘Poul Martin Møller: Scattered Thoughts, Analysis of Affectation, Struggle with Nihilism’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), 45–61. Walsh, Sylvia (2005). Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press). Watkin, Julia (1990). ‘Historical Introduction’, in Early Polemical Writings by Søren Kierkegaard, ed., trans. introd. and notes Julia Watkin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

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Suggested Reading Beiser (2003). Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen, Deuser, Hermann, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.) (2008). Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2008 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Frank, Manfred (2004). The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (New York: State University of New York Press). Kosch (2006). Pattison (1999). Schlegel, Friedrich (1958–1991). Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 35 vols., eds. Ernst Behler et al. (Munich: Schöningh). Jon Stewart (2003). Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). —–— (ed.) (2008). Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries. Tome III: Literature and Aesthetics (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate).

chapter 6

k ier k ega a r d a n d th e ch u rch a nders holm

I. Introduction Kierkegaard’s relationship with the Church is complex, although he does not differ in that respect from most other theological thinkers. In Kierkegaard’s case, however, the relationship is exceptionally problematic and in many ways. On the one hand, he sees the church as a place of comfort and edification; on the other hand, he regards it as a corrupt and disgraceful business enterprise. The problem is already present in Kierkegaard’s use of the word ‘Church’, which he uses in at least three different senses. Firstly, Kierkegaard associates Church with the act of going to church for public worship. He was a frequent churchgoer himself, and he had strong opinions about, for example, the role of the sermon in Lutheran worship (although, despite the fact that he was a qualified theologian and many of his religious writings have a sermon-like character, he himself only ever preached on a few occasions). Secondly, Kierkegaard works with a theological or an ecclesiological conception of the Church as a congregation (ecclesia or congregatio sanctorum). Generally, he is very critically disposed towards this way of imagining the Church, not least when he expresses his opinion on the clergy. Therefore, if there is any sense in speaking of a positive ecclesiology in Kierkegaard, it is determined by his view of Christianity as a matter of the individual. The Church belongs to hidden inwardness and does not have many—if any?—outward signs of existence (nota ecclesiae). In his late works, however, Kierkegaard becomes so sceptical of the institutional Church of his time that he finds it necessary to set out his own particular, visible signs of the true Church. Kierkegaard’s third use of the word Church connects unequivocally with the institution, and how this institution has developed from the early Church to the contemporary local national Danish Church. Consequently, in many parts of his authorship the word is infused with his view of this development.

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This chapter discusses in three parts these three uses of the word ‘Church’ in Kierkegaard. Section II describes Kierkegaard’s own experiences of going to church and of writing and giving sermons. Sections III and IV discuss different aspects of Kierkegaard’s own (anti-)ecclesiastical conception of the Church, and Section V deals with Kierkegaard’s criticism of the development of the Church as an institution. The chapter ends with a few concluding remarks.

II. Kierkegaard in the Church ‘On the theater poster it always states plainly: money will not be returned’ (SKS13: 274/M: 235). Kierkegaard notes this in the periodical The Moment, no. 6 from August 1855, suggesting, it seems, that a similar poster would never be put up outside the church. ‘Yet,’ he adds ‘the church does not shudder at insisting, even more stringently than the theater, that money will not be returned’ (SKS13: 274/M: 235). Kierkegaard’s disappointment is clear. When he looks at the Church in Denmark in the middle of the nineteenth century he is unable to find the kind of trustworthiness that is to be expected of a Christian Church. Because of its marriage to the State, the Church has developed into a den of thieves or a calculating and profit-orientated company in which livelihood rather than vocation has become the motivation for preaching. This means that the clergy have abandoned the Christianity of the New Testament according to which all Christians are expected to imitate the suffering Christ, who prioritized truth higher than his own life. This article was published just a few months before Kierkegaard’s death and is representative of his late view of the Church. At that time, Kierkegaard’s relationship with ‘official Christianity’ had become so strained that he no longer set foot in the church. Even on his deathbed, he refused to receive the Eucharist from any priest employed in the National Church. That had not always been the case, however. Most of his life, Kierkegaard had been one of the most regular churchgoers in Copenhagen. As a matter of fact, both his diaries and statements by his contemporaries suggest that up until 1853, Kierkegaard went to church almost every Sunday. As a child, he went along with his family and later in life, on his own. With the exception of a few short journeys, Kierkegaard lived most of his life within a very small radius of central Copenhagen. Within this radius, however, he alternated between several different churches. This was quite common but contrary to Danish law before 1855, which stated that the citizens were tied to one specific church. Kierkegaard, for instance, belonged to the parish of Our Lady (Vor Frue) his entire life, but it is likely that he found it interesting to visit and compare the different local churches. His reports from the Copenhagen church life are of outstanding interest. As in his descriptions of daily life on the streets, Kierkegaard paints a careful picture of the social life in and around the churches and deeply reflects on these observations. What did the priest say and why? How did the listeners react? Who was late? What were the differences of status in the congregation? Throughout his writings Kierkegaard is very critical

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of what he observes. In some ways, he is disgusted by people’s motives for going to church, and he scrutinizes the hidden social power games that take place there. For instance, Kierkegaard often shows awareness of the phenomenon that the purpose of going to church is not always in order to worship but just as often to be ‘seen there’ by other people (e.g. SKS10: 288/CD: 269–70). Throughout his writings, Kierkegaard is especially critical of the largest and most prestigious churches attended by the rich and well educated. The grandiosity of the church buildings and the status games played out within them divert attention from the solemnity of worship and from the existential seriousness that ought to be the purpose of being there. That poor and ordinary people are not, or at least do not feel, welcome in these large churches makes Kierkegaard indignant. In this regard he might well have been influenced by his visits to the smaller churches or by his childhood visits to the Moravian Church. For instance, in a journal note from 1848, in which he pours out the following brusque words about a sermon in the Castle Chapel by chaplain H. L. Martensen (1808–84) about God’s selection of the poor and disregarded (1Cor: 1, 26–31): ‘A handsome court preacher, the cultured public’s chosen one, steps forward in the magnificent castle church, faces a chosen group of distinguished and cultured people, and preaches movingly on the apostle’s words: God chose the lowly and despised.—And no one laughs.’ (SKS23/KJN7: NB15:34 [JP3: 595]) Kierkegaard’s point is clear. He interprets the absence of laughter as a clear sign that the churchgoers in this particular situation do not recognize the difference between a church that is truly evangelical and a church for the social elite. A form of socially privileged cultural life is being mistaken for Christianity. Everything is façade or a kind of theatre. In another journal note from 1848 it is Bishop J. P. Mynster who is Kierkegaard’s victim.1 Mynster is portrayed as being more of an artist than a priest. Kierkegaard is thoroughly merciless in his satirical criticism: There one sits in a cozy church, surrounded by beauty and magnificence (yet, as in a theater)—then a man steps forward, an artist, a man dressed in fine clothes, possessing all life’s favors—and he speaks about the highest, about sacrificing everything. O, it looks lovely, quite different from losing the littlest bit in earnest. O, terrible seduction, what refinement, to have everything—and then do all this artistically. (SKS21/KJN5: NB6:86 [JP1: 663])

In fact, Kierkegaard tried to hear Mynster’s sermons whenever possible. This might seem rather surprising in the light of the above passage. But Kierkegaard had a specific reason for this: Mynster talked to the individual (e.g. SKS18/KJN3: EE:165 [JP5: 5408])2 To Kierkegaard, one of the most important reasons (if not the only reason) for maintaining something like the Church was that it gave the individual the possibility of finding comfort and being edified. This is a thought that runs through that part of his own authorship that he himself refers to as ‘edifying’ or ‘upbuilding’. Furthermore, even

1 2

On Mynster, see also the chapter in this volume by Bruce Kirmmse. See also e.g. J. P. Mynster (1854).

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though it is difficult to draw sweeping conclusions in this regard, the only three regular sermons that Kierkegaard himself actually preached in church (in 1841, 1844, and 1851) clearly subscribed to this philosophy. An important issue in his sermons is a general sense of the confidence in God as opposed to the fragility of earthly existence. For instance, in his third sermon, Kierkegaard talks deeply and edifyingly about the changelessness of God as opposed to the ephemerality of earthly things: ‘It is really so that when you, weary from all this human, all this temporal and earthly changefulness and alteration, weary of your own instability, could wish for a place where you could rest your weary head, your weary thoughts, your weary mind, in order to rest, to have a good rest—ah, in God’s changelessness there is rest!’ (SKS13: 336/M: 278). According to Kierkegaard, the best sermons are not performances or lectures. A good sermon cares for its listener, is attentive, and never loses its focus. If it does, it becomes meaningless. Therefore, Kierkegaard preferred sermons with a certain spontaneity; sermons which had not been finished at the desk; sermons that adapted to the demands of the situation. A certain H. P. Holst (1811–93) tells that he had once asked Kierkegaard who among the clergy he preferred to which Kierkegaard had promptly answered: Visby, and I will tell you why. When one of the other pastors has written his sermon counting on sunshine, he will talk about sunshine, even if it pours rain, but when Visby preaches, and a ray of sun comes into the church, he grasps that ray and speaks about it at such length, and so beautifully and edifyingly, that you leave with a ray of sunshine in your heart. He is the only improviser of them all. (Kirmmse 1995: 13)

This remark is worth noticing because it shows that Kierkegaard was aware of the importance of the spoken word. Despite being a very prolific writer himself, Kierkegaard knew that the spoken word had a distinctive ability to touch and change human beings in a manner different from that of the written word. He typically recommended that his readers read his own edifying discourses aloud. And although he was reluctant to call the discourses sermons (probably on account of his not having the authority conferred by ordination), quite a few of them very closely resemble sermons in form and content. There are many examples, but the large group of discourses called ‘Discourses at Communion on Fridays’ must be mentioned at this point. Faithful to his family tradition, Kierkegaard regularly attended the Friday Communion service in Vor Frue Kirke (the Church of Our Lady) and the discourses were part of this distinctive service, which included an act of corporate confession and absolution followed by communion.3 During the service there was a hymn and a short sermon-like discourse of approximately ten minutes between the confession and communion. Most of Kierkegaard’s Friday discourses were purely literary compositions, but three of them were in fact delivered at this service in the years 1847 and 1848. It is obvious that this meant a lot to him, but the reason why these discourses are interesting in connection with the theme of Kierkegaard and the Church is especially due to the fact that they 3

About Kierkegaard’s attendance at this service, see Cappelørn 1996.

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are highly informative about his understanding of worship. For instance, it becomes clear in the second of the three discourses that he actually delivered that Kierkegaard considers the communion more important than the sermon. The discourse is inspired by the Gospel John 10:27: ‘My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me’ (SKS10: 288/CD: 269). Kierkegaard uses this sentence to set the scene for the Friday churchgoer. When one chooses to go to church on a Friday, it must be because one wishes to do so, he claims. On a holy day, it is natural to assume that a person is on his way to church. This is not the case on a Friday when nobody would expect you to be going to God’s house: It seems to me that this mysteriousness might, if possible, make it even more inward. Openly before everyone’s eyes and yet secretly, the single individual came to church today, secretly or along the secret way. No one except God knew his way; it did not occur to any passerby that you were going to God’s house, something that you yourself do not say, since you say that you are going to Holy Communion, as if this were even more inward and solemn than going to church. [ . . . ] Nor was it your attention only to worship, to praise, and to thank God, as on the festival days, when you therefore could not wish to be alone. Your intention is to seek the forgiveness of sins—so you must want to be alone. (SKS10: 288/CD: 269–70)

In the discourse, Kierkegaard distinguishes between the church and the altar. The church is a social club; the altar is where the individual goes after absolution. In the liturgical context, the only function of the discourse is to make the individual pause on his way to the communion table, Kierkegaard states. Today, however, the listener has not turned up to listen to the sermon as usual but rather to listen to ‘His voice’, as it says in the text by John. The ordinary sermon surely witnesses to Christ and his words and doctrines, but it is not His voice. ‘At the communion table, however, it is His voice you are to hear’ (SKS10: 290/CD: 271). Otherwise, going to the altar is in vain. Kierkegaard’s reasoning is that at the altar the issue is solely between Christ and the individual. Christ knows ‘you’, is present, and, importantly, can therefore go with you when you leave the church and will be with you in blessing in your life in the world outside. It is thus possible to talk about a real presence of Christ that continues outside the church building. The church walls have become permeable: ‘Where he is, there is the communion table’ (SKS10: 292/CD: 273). The congregation no longer mediates between the individual and Christ.

III. Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Church as Congregation When one looks at Kierkegaard’s reasons for going to church and his statements about it, a clear pattern emerges. It is not the Church as congregation Kierkegaard seeks but rather he experiences the liturgy of the Church as addressing the questions of individuals concerned about their eternal happiness. As always in Kierkegaard’s writings, it is the

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individual, or subjectivity, that is the point of departure. Therefore, Kierkegaard turns against any ‘objective’ idea of Christianity, which in fact means most of the historically dominant ways of understanding the Church. But through his criticism, his own positive view of the Church slowly emerges. A good illustration of this can be found in his critique of the contemporary Churchman N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), a man who is still considered by many to be by far the most influential theologian and hymn writer in Denmark. Grundtvig was in many ways just as much of an anarchist as Kierkegaard. Already in his own lifetime Grundtvig gathered a huge movement, later referred to as the Grundtvigians. Kierkegaard, being a 30-year younger child of the same town, could therefore not avoid noticing Grundtvig. In fact, everyone in Copenhagen had heard of Grundtvig. As a young rebel in the 1810s, Grundtvig had provoked a debate with a major part of the intellectual élite through a number of controversial statements about the lack of Christianity in what was a supposedly Christian country. In 1825, he insulted H. N. Clausen, a leading professor of theology, in such extreme terms that Clausen accused him of libel, resulting in Grundtvig being condemned in October 1826 to lifelong censorship. This restriction was gradually eased through the late 1820s, contributing significantly to Kierkegaard’s view of Grundtvig. It was not until the 1830s, however, that Kierkegaard was old enough to pay serious attention to Grundtvig. Kierkegaard saw Grundtvig as someone who had been a rebel of the past but now had a growing influence and importance. Furthermore, before turning twenty, Kierkegaard had got close enough to Grundtvig and the Grundtvigian milieu to know its main personalities and ideas quite well. At the beginning of the 1830s, Kierkegaard’s older brother, the theologian P. C. Kierkegaard became a lifelong disciple of Grundtvig and attached himself to the Grundtvigian movement. However, Kierkegaard disliked not only Grundtvig but the whole movement from the very beginning. He considered the Grundtvigians to be a flock of ‘Yes men’ who looked down upon people outside their inner circle and, like many of his contemporaries, Kierkegaard loathed the over-excitable atmosphere surrounding the charismatic Grundtvig.4 In Kierkegaard’s opinion, one of the major problems regarding Grundtvig himself was his preaching. Of course, Kierkegaard could not deny the fact that Grundtvig attracted a lot of people with his words; his sermons just did not deal with Christianity. For example, after having heard one of Grundtvig’s sermons in 1839, Kierkegaard writes critically in his journal: All of Grundtvig’s preaching is nothing but a perpetually repeated exodus of the imagination so that it is impossible to follow along, a weekly evacuation. He continually says the reason the Church up until now has not appeared in its full radiance is that it suffers from external pressures; when these are gone, it will be seen—yes, then it will be seen whether this Church of his is the perfect Church or whether in many ways it does not need a preacher like Mynster, who always leads 4

See e.g. SKS17/KJN1: DD: 161 [JP1: 134]; SKS17/KJN1: DD: 175 [JP5: 5356]; SKS18/KJN2: EE:115 [JP4: 4096]; SKS18/KJN2: EE:196 [JP2: 1583]. For further information, see also Holm 2009.

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everything back to the individual; that is where the battle must be and must not lose itself in such historical ramblings. (SKS18/KJN3: EE:165 [JP5: 5408])

The problem that Kierkegaard wishes to illustrate is not only the unintelligible historical visions characteristic of Grundtvig’s sermons, but also how they fail to draw in the individual churchgoer. According to Kierkegaard, the individual goes to church in order to be built up, encouraged, and to find consolation. In that respect, he sees a fundamental pedagogical problem in Grundtvig’s way of preaching. However, the main problem according to Kierkegaard is Grundtvig’s many claims about the ‘people’, history, political life, and not least ‘Church’ as a community of believers. Kierkegaard objects to any philosophy that claims that the inward and important parts of the individual’s interests can be found in such communities. Community life is of course important but focusing on it too much, as Grundtvig tends to do, easily makes the individual forget himself and the questions that form the basis of every human being. Grundtvig’s own concept of the Church was based upon a critique of the Lutheran view that the Bible is the basis of the Church. Grundtvig had discovered an alternative to this ‘exegetical papacy’: the Church or bond connecting true Christians through time, true Christianity, was not based on the Bible, he claimed, but on the fact that, at baptism, Christians accept the offer of salvation to which the Apostolic Creed bears witness.5 The consequence of this was radical. According to Grundtvig, the Bible became secondary in questions about salvation. The Bible was not in itself a divine revelation, but a useful and instructive historical book, which, just like other historical sources could elucidate the true Christian life in the Church. But the only true Church is the one found in the Church or in the congregation of believers—and not a community found in any book. Kierkegaard’s most stinging attack on Grundtvig is launched by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in the first part of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. At the beginning of the first chapter, Climacus makes it clear that ‘science’ (Videnskab) will never bring anyone closer to Christianity. Even if scholarly inquirer or researcher was infinitely interested in finding information about the Christian doctrine in history, they would end up in despair. Historical knowledge can never become more than an ‘approximation’ for this kind of interest. This view clearly reflects Kierkegaard’s reading of G. E. Lessing, whose writings had once and for all questioned the legitimacy of using historical texts in issues of contemporary importance. This is where Grundtvig enters the picture. Grundtvig is right in saying that modern biblical research does not result in anything of significance for someone who is passionately interested in his eternal happiness, Climacus notes. Bible research faces the same problems as historical research in general: ‘Even if the heads of all the critics were mounted on a single neck, one would never arrive at anything more than an approximation’ (SKS7: 31/CUP1: 24). Even if the Bible could be regarded as a certain place to search for the correct Christian doctrine, this type of objective science would still not come up

5 See e.g. Grundtvig et al. 2008. The texts referred to are: Om den Sande Christendom (1826) [On true Christianity] and Om Christendommens Sandhed (1826–7) [On the truth of Christianity].

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with answers for the individual. Certainty does not correspond to the passion which is needed to believe the paradox that God became a human being. On this particular point, Climacus deviates from Grundtvig. By choosing the Church, Grundtvig has picked the wrong alternative to the view that the Bible cannot provide the believer with a certain basis: ‘Turning the matter so as to relinquish the Bible and resort to the Church’ (SKS7: 42/CUP1: 36) does not, according to Climacus, solve the problem that eternal salvation cannot be based on an approximation. This leads Climacus to criticize Grundtvig’s view of the Church, according to which the congregation is seen as the place for the individual’s salvation. Grundtvig is simply not aware of the fact that the movement of faith is inward and that: ‘the truth is the subject’s transformation within himself ’ (SKS7: 44/CUP1: 38). The problem is the absence of any dialectic in Grundtvig and Climacus sees Grundtvig’s theory of the Church as an attempt to guarantee immediate certainty for the congregation. That is not possible, however; Christian faith is determined by the paradox, and a paradox will never correspond to this kind of nondialectical certainty. Climacus sees the issue epitomized in Grundtvig’s high estimation of infant baptism. According to Climacus, Grundtvig’s view of baptism is required by his need to find a fixed point through which he can avert the intrusion of any dialectical factors. But this makes it simply a matter of superstition, according to Climacus and he wonders whether Grundtvig’s view of baptism can be distinguished from the Jews’ view of circumcision, asking rhetorically: On this question of one’s eternal happiness, I shall not undertake to decide whether in other respects it is not unchristian to find repose in the certainty that one is baptized, just as the Jews appealed to circumcision and to their being Abraham’s children as a decisive demonstration of the God-relationship, that is, to find repose not in a spiritual relationship with God and freedom but in an external event, that is, to hold the temptation away by means of this magical baptism and not to want to permeate it with faith. (SKS7: 50/CUP1: 44f.)

The point here is not anti-Semitic. For Climacus, baptism and circumcision are similar in the sense that they are nothing but outward historical events that cannot make the individual more or less Christian. This means that attaching decisive significance to baptism, as Grundtvig does, ultimately disregards the hidden inward interest of eternal happiness. His critique of Grundtvig leads to Kierkegaard’s dismissal of the idea that the victories of the Church during 1800 years can prove anything about the truth of Christianity to the interested individual. Implicit in this way of thinking, one finds a certain rhetorical feint, Climacus claims. The question is whether the individual dares to deny the truth of millions and centuries, as is actually the demand of true Christianity: . . . it is Christianity itself that attaches an enormous importance to the individual; it wants to be involved with him, him alone, and thus with each one individually. It is in a way an un-Christian use of the eighteen centuries to intend with them to entice the single individual into Christianity or to frighten him into it: he still does enter

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into it. And if he does enter into it, he does so whether he has the eighteen centuries for him or against him. (SKS7: 54/CUP1: 49)

Through these remarks in the Postscript, Kierkegaard points to a Church which is connected to paradox-determined hidden inwardness. The signs of such a Church are obviously difficult to spot. In principle, the individual can only determine where the Church is for himself.

IV. Taking Leave of Hidden Inwardness When the truth is invisible and one is not able to point to a better alternative, the difficulty in arguing that everyone else is on the wrong track does not become less significant. This problem is as old as the Church itself. How is it possible to criticize other conceptions of the Church unless a positive characterization (nota ecclesiae) of ‘Church’ is on offer? To be taken seriously, more is needed than speaking of a hidden inward Church that is neither visible nor comprehensible to others in any direct way. In the years after the Postscript, this problem became more and more unbearable to Kierkegaard. He finally realized that he needed to confront the Church as an institution more directly and had to point towards a more precise alternative solution. The key work in this development is Practice in Christianity, which was published in 1850 but mainly written in 1848. Although his name suggests a certain opposition to Climacus, Anti-Climacus, the pseudonym author of this work, is like Climacus in denying that history or the life of the congregation can prove that Christ was God. Christ’s life does not reveal anything about who He was or about the truth of Christianity. AntiClimacus, however, takes the argument one step further than Postscript. The problem is that there are no signs that Christianity actually exists. What is needed is something actual that will really show the world what true Christianity is all about. In this connection, Practice in Christianity comes up with a more direct solution than previously seen in the authorship by offering a theory about the connection between the narratives of the life of Christ in his earthly humiliation (status exanitionis) and Christ as a prototype for the believer. The true Christian is the one who imitates the degraded and suffering Christ and only relates to the exalted Christ from afar. Practice in Christianity links the relation between abasement (Fornedrelse) and exaltation (Ophøjelse) to the promise in Matt 11:28, ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest’. Through this invitation, the believer is drawn to Christ and drawn in such a way that it becomes possible to endure worldly suffering. In this respect, the invitation and the drawing are connected with rest (Hvilen). This does not mean, however, that suffering disappears. The object is to become reconciled with suffering or, more precisely, imitation can only be imagined as connected with reconciliation and vice versa. The concept of rest aims at a rest that makes the earthly suffering endurable but it only exists by virtue of the realization of what is awaiting and inviting one from ahead. In other words, rest is eschatologically defined.

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In Practice in Christianity Anti-Climacus offers a thorough exposition of these statements. He is fully aware that humans do not chose suffering naturally and it is certainly not easy to become a Christian. In this respect, Anti-Climacus distinguishes between universal suffering and the specifically Christian suffering. Universal suffering is the suffering that Christians and everyone else share by virtue of being human (sickness, accident, disease, etc.). Christian sufferings are what Christians experience by virtue of being Christian, such as persecution, abuse, or ill-treatment by the world. This choice demands enormous courage, and ‘if this Christian didn’t have the prototype to look at, he would not persevere’ (SKS12: 196/PC: 197). It is crucial to know that the premiss of this way of thinking is still closely connected to the thought of faith as something that relates to the paradox that God became man. Voluntarily to subject oneself to this kind of irrational suffering is connected with the fact that the believer is essentially related to the paradox. In Practice in Christianity, this thought finds expression in the idea of Christ as a sign of contradiction. The present believer—who is religiously speaking in the same situation as those contemporary with Christ—sees only the suffering and humiliated Christ and not his divine being. Christ thus contradicts how he is expected to be, Anti-Climacus claims. So, in a similar vein to Kierkegaard’s criticism of public worship, Anti-Climacus sees this as meaning that the sign of contradiction contradicts common human conceptions of status, honour, wealth, fame, and public glory. It is simply not possible to see what Christ signifies in any direct sense, Anti-Climacus claims. Unfortunately, this has been forgotten through the centuries, and contemporary sermons deal predominantly with the triumphs of the victorious Christ. In true Christianity, however, the real Christ does not evoke the victorious Christ but rather the sign of contradiction. Moreover, having one’s conventional ideas contradicted in this way importantly challenges one’s sense of self. One sees oneself as in a mirror and feels that one is under accusation: And only the sign of contradiction can do this; it draws attention to itself and then it presents a contradiction. There is something that makes it impossible not to look—and look, as one is looking one sees as in a mirror, one comes to see oneself, or he who is the sign of contradiction looks straight into one’s heart while one is staring into the contradiction. (SKS12: 131/PC: 126–7)

What Anti-Climacus proposes is therefore a description of a radical experience of consciousness. The confrontation with the narratives of the New Testament makes clear that we today probably wouldn’t have acted differently towards Christ than his first-century contemporaries. The mirroring function of the biblical text is at the same time a disclosure of the individual and an indirect message about the necessity of reduplicating and repeating the life and sufferings of Jesus. In this regard, then, Anti-Climacus is not far from many classical Christian ways of envisaging the Christian life as being conformed to Christ’s image (conformitas Christi).6 6

See e.g. Bernard of Clairvaux 1976.

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This is the very place where one finds an important transition between the early and late Kierkegaard’s concept of the Church. Anti-Climacus realizes that it has become too easy just to be a Christian in hidden inwardness without attending to the demands consequent upon accepting Christ as Saviour. In line with this, Kierkegaard’s later authorship sees the contemporary Church as identifying itself with the triumphant Church (ecclesia triumphans), which, to Kierkegaard, means that the Church has abolished Christianity. In terms of the Hongs’ translation, Anti-Climacus distinguishes between Christianity (Dan. Christendom) and Christendom (Dan. Christenhed). The established triumphant Church corresponds to Christendom, which attempts to profit from the life of Christ as if its results were due to the efforts of the contemporary Church. According to AntiClimacus, this catastrophic mistake springs from the fact that the Church has preached only about the victorious Christ and forgotten the humiliation of his earthly life. The result is fateful: the Church has forgotten that a true Christian Church is always a struggling Church (ecclesia militans), so that the task is now to try to revive Christianity despite Christendom.7 This diagnosis provides a basis for comprehending the late Kierkegaard’s critique of the Church qua congregation. His concern is focused on the phenomenon of the congregation becoming the connecting link between the individual and God. The problem is that the congregation too easily becomes a hindrance to the individual’s recognition of sin and his relationship to God. In the triumphant Church, the individual disappears as the individual. What used to be the Church militant has been reduced to a pleasant place in this world where its members can enjoy all kinds of earthly advantages. The true Church, however, is not of this world and is not commensurate with worldly comfort. The emphasis on the Church triumphant thus reflects the human impatience that wants to benefit now from what can, in fact, only be given subsequently. Anti-Climacus strongly mistrusts this development: ‘As soon as Christ’s kingdom makes a compromise with this world and becomes a kingdom of this world, Christianity is abolished’ (SKS12: 207/PC: 211). This makes Anti-Climacus able to distinguish between the signs of the struggling and the triumphant Church: If in the first case I am a true Christian, this will as a necessary consequence (since the theater stage is indeed the opposite) be inversely recognizable by the opposition I experience, and to the degree that my being a Christian has more truth, to the same degree would be recognizable by the greater opposition. In the second case, being a Christian will as a necessary consequence (for the theater stage is indeed homogeneity) be directly recognizable by the favor, honor and esteem I win in this world—but what am I saying, ‘in this world,’ this world is of course Christendom, and therefore I will be directly recognizable by the favor, honor, and esteem I win in Christendom. (SKS12: 208–9/PC: 212–13)

Anti-Climacus here distances himself from the unrecognizable Church connected to the hidden inwardness that one finds in the early Kierkegaard. For hidden inwardness 7

See SKS12: 115–16; 215–27/PC: 107–8; 220–32.

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has become an easy excuse for not interfering with the world and Kierkegaard now realizes that the true Church is—inversely—recognizable in the struggle and suffering that follow from the encounter with the world. How is that possible? According to Anti-Climacus, the Church and the Christendom of modern times desperately need a martyr, or at least someone who is willing to be sacrificed. Anti-Climacus unhesitatingly admits that he can’t live up to the demand, but this doesn’t mean he is not a Christian. With regard to this particular point, Kierkegaard is not yet as radical as in some of his very late works where he more overtly equates becoming a Christian with becoming a martyr. What Kierkegaard expresses through Anti-Climacus is something entirely different, namely that being a true Christian involves at least ‘making a humble admission that he has been let off far more easily than true Christians in the strictest sense’ (SKS12: 221/PC: 227). According to Anti-Climacus, a closer look at the contemporary Church shows a complete lack of any admission in that direction.

V. The Late Kierkegaard’s Confrontation with the Church as Institution Practice in Christianity can be seen a transitional stage towards Kierkegaard’s final Church struggle (Kirkekampen) of 1854–5. The book is clearly aimed at the existing Church, the Church that is developing as Kierkegaard writes his book. The book was in fact written at a time of considerable turmoil, when Denmark was in the process of changing from absolute to constitutional monarchy.8 The new political system meant that religious freedom was written into the constitution, but it did not involve any essential change in the relationship between the State and the Church. Kierkegaard was not enthusiastic about this development, which suggested that the State and the Church were an inseparable entity without anyone even imagining that things could be different. This challenged his view that only individuals and not peoples or states can become Christians. In Kierkegaard’s opinion it was impossible to find a connection between the meaning of Christianity and the political bargains that were introduced as a result of the changes in society. In other words, his criticism was first and foremost religiously motivated. In a thought-provoking manner, he comments on the people’s revolutionary procession to the King in 1848 in the following way: And so I sit here. Out there everything is agitated; the nationality issue inundates everyone; everyone is talking about sacrificing life and blood, is perhaps willing to do it as well, but shored up by the omnipotence of public opinion. And so I sit in a quiet room (no doubt I will soon be in bad repute for indifference to the nation’s cause)— I know only one risk, the risk of religiousness, but no one cares about that—and no one has any intimation of what is taking place in me. (SKS20/KJN4: NB4:118 [JP5: 6125]) 8

See the chapter by Bruce Kirmmse in this volume.

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In the work A Literary Review from 1846, Kierkegaard had contrasted the mediocrity, conformity, and indifference that characterized the present age with the passion of the revolutionary period of the 1790s—a passion that corresponded well to the religious passion described in the Postscript and in Practice in Christianity, the religious passion with relation to the paradox. But he did not see the events that took place in connection with the political changes in 1848 as being in any way infused with this kind of revolutionary spirit. Indeed, he tended to regard the political endeavours of the time with great suspicion. He saw all ideas relating to religious tolerance, equality, democracy, and religious freedom as far too easily shifting the focus away from the heart of the matter: the individual’s interest in his eternal happiness and his responsibility to himself and his neighbour. A new democratic constitution would not enhance this sense of responsibility at all, Kierkegaard thought. Only as individuals before God do humans become equal; not as pawns in a political system. It would not be unreasonable to claim that Kierkegaard was hopelessly conservative in many ways, and naive and one-sided in his view of political developments. In order to understand his position, however, it is necessary to bear in mind that his criticism was closely related to his fear of a cultural development that could potentially obliterate what Christianity was all about, for instance, if issues of Christian doctrine were to be decided by balloting. In questions like this, the struggles of the Church militant did not become any less important to him. This also explains why, while all the changes are taking place, Kierkegaard claimed that he wanted to maintain the established State Church despite his fervent criticism of the institution. He simply feared that the alternative would be worse. Up until the Church Struggle in 1854–5, Kierkegaard consistently stated that he would like to see certain individuals replaced but not the Church as institution, as expressed in the following often-quoted journal note from 1850: ‘My task has been to apply a corrective to the established order, not to introduce something new which might nullify or supplant it’ (SKS24: NB21:122 [JP6: 6693]). It is of course often difficult to determine precisely how much was at stake for Kierkegaard in such reflections. However, in the years around 1849, it seems likely that he might have been wary of the fact that a possible new organization of the Church could also change the liturgy of the church service. As already mentioned in the first part of the article, Kierkegaard was a frequent churchgoer who cared a lot about the forms of worship he knew and especially the sacrament of communion. Would all this disappear in a new system? Maybe he was afraid of losing the Church he knew after all. One thing remains certain, however: Kierkegaard was merciless in his remarks about the clergy. Mynster, Martensen, and Grundtvig all participated in drawing up the new constitution, and in so doing, in his opinion, they had forgotten their Christian duty not to negotiate the basic structure of Christianity. This was not only harmful to the Church but also subversive of the whole of society. This partly explains the enormous efforts Kierkegaard spent on writing about the Church leadership in the years to come, as in this note in the journals of 1851:

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When a society goes to pieces the way it did in 48, it is not the fault of kings and nobility- but essentially the fault of the clergy. [ . . . ] Christianity is political indifference; engrossed in higher things, it teaches submission to all public authorities. [ . . . ] Nowadays everything is politics, and the clergymen are the first to run for parliament. If someone speaks up and tries to explain that it is the ‘crowd’ which must be opposed, the clergy may perhaps think there is something to that, but the clergy themselves are just as vote-hungry as others. (SKS24: NB22:124 [JP4: 176])

Once again, according to Kierkegaard, the development shows that the Church has conformed to the world instead of being a critical voice. In other words, there is an obvious parallel between his scepticism regarding political development and his general criticism of the undemanding Christianity of the Church. By this stage, then, Kierkegaard had prepared the ammunition he would use in his final attack on the Church in 1854–5. This ‘Church struggle’ started with the famously scandalous article in the paper Faedrelandet (The Fatherland) on 18th December 1854, which was the first publication from Kierkegaard’s hand in three years. The article castigating the memorial sermon preached by H. L. Martensen earlier the same year in connection with Bishop Mynster’s death, an address that had helped elevate him to the position of the diocese in succession to Mynster. Kierkegaard was furious. In his address, Martensen had characterized Mynster as a witness to the truth. To Kierkegaard, this statement bore testament to how wrong things had become in the Church. Nothing could be more mistaken. Clearly inspired by the idea of the prototype in Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard listed his own criteria of how to identify a witness to the truth: the destiny of a true witness to the truth is suffering that can be seen and felt, and there is no alternative. Suffering is ultimately an integral part of being Christian—and the absence of suffering is a clear sign of the absence of Christianity. In his article Kierkegaard emphasizes these points as offering a complete contrast to how the highly esteemed Bishop Mynster had enjoyed all the pleasures of this world. This man didn’t hate himself, nor was he crucified or tortured. In fact, Mynster didn’t suffer on account of Christianity at all, despite this being the demand that is made by the New Testament, which contains the directives of the original and authentic Christianity. Therefore, Mynster’s life and work are in no way comparable to what it really takes to be a Christian: This is all very easy to see ‘when the New Testament is placed alongside Mynster’s preaching’ (SKS14: 23/M: 3). Kierkegaard’s struggle with the Church became a public scandal. After the opening article, he loudly and unhesitatingly proclaimed his support of the kind of radical Christianity that made him known at his own time in Copenhagen. His attack was particularly effective not only because of its hitherto unheard of forcefulness, but also because it was broadcast through the press. Until his death ten months later, Kierkegaard often more than once a week expressed his view of ‘the official Christianity’ in various papers as well as in his own one-man periodical, The Moment. Bluntly, eloquently, sarcastically, and creatively he exposes the obvious differences between the Christianity of the New Testament and the Christianity of the contemporary Church. His verdict is unambiguous: the marriage between State and Church is unforgivable, and the wages

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and status of the clergy un-Christian (cf. SKS14: 191–4/M: 54–5). With increasing scepticism, Kierkegaard analyses the unquestioned link between earning a living and ordination in the Lutheran State Church, a link which was not abolished with the new constitution in 1849. As a final step, in 1855, Kierkegaard stopped defending the established Church and, in a series of newspaper articles followed by his own self-published pamphlets entitled The Moment recommends a separation of Church and State. The one who is looking for Christianity in the Church is looking in vain, he claims. Things have to change. The clergy ridicule our Lord, and they are liars and hypocrites. Not a single one of them is willing to carry the cross, tell the truth, and be an honest Christian, Kierkegaard claims in his articles from the last year of his life. Kierkegaard collapsed on the street and died a month later in hospital during this attack on the Church. Against his own will, Kierkegaard’s relatives decided to have him buried from Our Lady on 18th November 1855. A huge crowd of people followed his coffin from the church to the graveyard where a final scandal was waiting. After the priest had finished the official ritual, Kierkegaard’s nephew began to speak, reading aloud Kierkegaard’s article ‘We all are Christians’ from The Moment, no. 2, simply to illustrate how disrespectful it was to bury this man at a Christian church. His finished his speech by saying: Therefore, both on his behalf and on my own, I protest viewing our presence here as a participation in the worship of God sponsored by official Christianity, because he has been brought here against his repeatedly expressed will, and has in a way been violated. And I have come along only in order to ascertain what has now taken place. In any other case, after having understood what ‘official Christianity’ is, neither I nor he would have been present at any ‘officially Christian’ action. (Kirmmse 1995: 135; Fædrelandet 22/11–1855)

It is hardly surprising that these words were followed by complete silence, according to those present.

VI. Conclusion In one of his few replies during the Church Struggle, Martensen emphasized that Kierkegaard’s Christianity was a ‘private religion, a Christianity in which the Christian Church and the works of the Holy Spirit in the congregation are left out’ (Berlingske Tidende, 28th December 1854). From what has become clear through this article, this answer is understandable. However, what conception of the Church (ecclesiology) springs from Kierkegaard’s work? The first answer is that it is primarily a concept that does not and cannot involve prudential calculations. Kierkegaard wants to point out the possible dangers of what can happen when the individual’s relationship with God goes numb through the triumphant self-celebration of the congregation. The congregation can never become a reliable

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mediator of divine truth for the individual. Especially the late Kierkegaard points through his criticism of the triumphant Church (ecclesia triumphans) to the Church militant (ecclesia militans) as the only alternative and visible sign of the true Church (nota ecclesia). The sign of the Church is inversely recognizable: it should never be seen as a victory of the institution but rather as a victory of the individual which in turn is an eschatological victory and not a victory in any worldly sense. This often leads to a very one-sided emphasis in Kierkegaard on suffering as a sign of Christianity, an emphasis that triggers an obvious question: is it really possible to measure the existence of the true Church? Grundtvig, for example, in response to Kierkegaard questioned if suffering is more Christian than joy?9 Having read Kierkegaard’s early productions, one could add whether suffering is a more obvious sign of Christianity than love? Furthermore, it is possible to question whether the late Kierkegaard really does in fact conform as closely to the New Testament as he claims. Where is the joy of the resurrection, for instance, in his interpretation of that book? Yet his appeal to the individual that things have become too easy, remains an uneasy caution against any too comfortable version of Christianity. If it is possible to talk about a concept of the congregation in Kierkegaard, this congregation does not exist until after the Holy Spirit has had its effect on the individual. Kierkegaard clearly stresses that Christianity can be accessed only through the individual’s consciousness of sin. This fact cannot be ignored no matter how much Christianity is discussed. Therefore, Kierkegaard stresses again and again that only individuals have access to Christianity, which only allows them to become equal with others in the perspective of eternity. According to Kierkegaard, the congregation is an eschatological category (cf. SKS12: 218/PC: 223), and that seriously challenges many of the assumptions implicit in common ways of talking about the Church. It is easy to understand why Kierkegaard stopped going to church; in a way, he had to. It is harder to make sense of why Kierkegaard was an avid churchgoer most of his life and yet so critical of the Church. There is no easy way to explain this. Maybe he felt comforted and edified by what took place despite his fervent criticism, and maybe that is exactly why he got so angry when things didn’t turn out the way he had wished for. One thing is certain: the impassioned attack on the Church found in Kierkegaard’s writings would never have occurred if it had not been for the fact the Church was very important to him and a place he cared strongly about.

References Bernard of Clairvaux (1976). ‘Sermon 21’ in On the Song of Songs II, trans. Kilian Walsh (Michigan: Cistercian Publications Inc.). Bertelsen, Otto (1999). Den kirkelige Kierkegaard og den ‘antikirkelige’ (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel).

9

See e.g. his sermon on July the 29th 1855 in N. F. S. Grundtvig 1974.

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Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen (1996). ‘Die ursprüngliche Unterbrechung. Søren Kierkegaard beim Abendmahl im Freitagsgottesdienst der Kopenhagener Frauenkirche’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, eds. N. J. Cappelørn, H. Deuser, and B. Söderquist (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Garff, Joakim (1995). ‘Tekst og kirke’, in Vinduer til Guds Rige, ed. Hans Raun Iversen (Copenhagen: Forlaget Anis). —–— (2005). Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Grøn, Arne (1995). ‘Synligt og usynligt’, in Vinduer til Guds rige (Copenhagen: Forlaget Anis). Grundtvig, N. F. S. et al. (1974). Konfrontation. Grundtvigs prædikener i kirkeåret 1854–1855 på baggrund af Kierkegaards angreb på den ‘officielle’ Kristendom, ed. P. G. Lindhardt (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag). —–— (2008). N. F. S. Grundtvig. A Life Recalled. An Anthology of Biographical Source-Texts, trans. from the Danish and ed. S. A. J. Bradley (Aarhus:Aarhus University Press), 168–71. Holm, Anders (2005).‘The Contemporary Grundtvig. An Addition to Climacus’ Critique in Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook, eds. N. J. Cappelørn, H. Deuser, and B. Söderquist (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). —–— (2009). ‘N. F. S. Grundtvig: The Matchless Giant’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries: Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 7, Tome II: Theology (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate). Kirmmse, Bruce (1995). ‘Tordenveiret. Søren Kierkegaards ekklesiologi’, in Vinduer til Guds rige (Copenhagen: Forlaget Anis). Mynster, J. P. (1854). Prædikener holdte i Aarene 1846–52, vols. I–II (Vinter- og SommerHalvaaret) 2nd edn. (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandlings Forlag). Tudvad, Peter (2004). Kierkegaards København (København: Politikens Forlag).

Suggested Reading Bertelsen (1999). Cappelørn (1996). Garff (1995, 2005). Grøn (1995). Holm (2005, 2009). Kirmmse (1995). Tudvad (2004).

chapter 7

k ier k ega a r d a n d gr eek phil osoph y r ick a nthony f urtak

References to ancient Greek philosophy can be found throughout Kierkegaard’s writings, and they include general remarks and observations as well as highly specific quotations and allusions. His enthusiasm for classical thought is evident to any careful reader of his work, and it has been increasingly recognized as one of the distinguishing features of the Kierkegaardian corpus—that is, both the pseudonymous texts and those to which he signed his own name. But what is the significance of this? Is it just one of the many inexplicable peculiarities of an idiosyncratic author? What I will argue in this chapter is that Kierkegaard uses classical thought as an essential point of reference in defining his own intellectual project: hence, if we understand what it is that he admires about the Greeks, and what he learns and appropriates from them, then we will have an excellent key for interpreting his entire body of work. We will also be able to appreciate a defining feature of what has come to be known as ‘existential’ philosophy, because a number of other thinkers who share a family resemblance with Kierkegaard also regard themselves as inheriting the legacy of ancient philosophy.

I. Ethics and Existential Thought Kierkegaard studied some classical authors and texts in a scholarly manner, giving sustained attention to these works in the original languages and consulting the secondary literature by leading historians of philosophy such as Schleiermacher, Hegel, W. G. Tennemann, P. M. Møller, and F. C. Sibbern. In other cases, his engagement with ancient philosophy was more in the manner of an enthusiast who selected favourite ideas without paying much heed to their context. Yet he was always reading with an interest in finding resources that could inform his own thinking. Searching for alternatives to the prevailing trends in the intellectual climate of his time, Kierkegaard was

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encouraged by the examples of unconventional figures such as Hamann and Jacobi, which aided him to some degree as he developed and clarified his own sense of purpose. However, none of the more recent thinkers who inspired Kierkegaard were fully acceptable as role models (at least, not in his eyes), so he had to look further back into the history of ideas in order to find examples of the radically different kind of philosophy that he wanted to pursue.1 Only in classical thought did he find sufficient philosophical inspiration for his own projects, and this is why both he and his pseudonyms frequently refer to the ancient Greeks as a standard against which modern philosophers can be measured. As Louis Mackey has observed, Kierkegaard’s ‘veneration for the Greeks’ is opposed to his ‘vitriolic critique’ of the speculative philosophy that was predominant during the nineteenth century, and a major goal of his authorship is to reinstate a classical model of philosophical thought and practice (Mackey 1971: 268). As we shall see, this project involves appropriating numerous themes and ways of thinking from the ancients; but none of these is as important as the classical Greek conception of philosophy itself. In particular, what appeals to Kierkegaard is the way that ancient philosophy was not ‘a merely theoretical discipline’, but an integrated mode of life in which theoretical reflection was meant to affect one’s character (Nehamas 1998: 2). It is beyond my scope at present to evaluate whether Kierkegaard’s view of modern philosophy is entirely fair or accurate, but it is well worth noting that the ‘primacy of practical reason’, as Kant describes it, was implicit in the very idea of Greek philosophy (Hadot 2009: 113–14). Whatever it may have become in the modern era, the philosophical life in ancient times was a practice guided by the love of wisdom; a reflective discipline oriented towards the goal of living with insight and understanding. And even if this notion of philosophy has gone missing, Kierkegaard suggests that it is still available to us today. He claims that those who ‘loved wisdom’ in the ‘old days’ can give us a model from which to learn (SKS20/KJN4: NB5:144 [JP3: 3314]); for this reason, he refers to ‘the Greeks’ as ‘my consolation’ during a time when the philosophical tradition has drifted away from its original ideals (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:288 [JP3: 3300]). ‘Greek philosophy’, according to the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Prefaces, ‘did not abandon people for the purpose of sounding like a voice from the clouds’, but ‘remained on the earth, in the marketplace, among the occupations of people’ (SKS4: 503/P: 41–2). In other words, the arguments of the ancient philosophers were intended to address the most urgent concerns of human beings, and the practice of philosophy consisted not only in developing and memorizing these arguments, but in allowing them to influence one’s way of life.2 When the Stoic Epictetus distinguishes between a mere ‘grammarian’ and a philosopher, he defines the former as someone who analyses philosophical texts without any interest in putting abstract ideas into practice.3 Theorizing 1 Cf. Sløk 1972: 457. See also Evans 2009: 4, on why ‘taking Kierkegaard seriously as a philosopher’ may involve restoring the ‘conception of philosophy that inspired the Greeks.’ 2 Cf. Hadot 2002: 172–3; and Hadot 1995: 60. On Kierkegaard’s relation to ancient thought, see also Furtak 2007, 2010c. 3 Epictetus, Encheiridion 49; see also Discourses I.4.6–8 and I.4.13–14. Even if theory alone is insufficient, theoretical discourse is regarded by the Greeks as a valuable guide to practice.

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on its own is pointless, of course, if philosophy is not viewed as a ‘narrowly technical or academic’ pursuit, but as offering ‘a comprehensive outlook on the world’ (Long 2002: 18). In so far as Kierkegaard is an advocate of philosophy in this broader sense, we should expect him to be drawn to ancient thinkers that exemplify it, from the Presocratics through to the Hellenistic sages. It is important to see why Socrates is an exemplary figure for Kierkegaard, in his own right and also as the epitome of Greek philosophy at its best. Rather than speaking in an impersonal philosophical jargon that ‘explains nothing and understands nothing’ (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:230 [JP4: 4536]), which Kierkegaard accuses some modern philosophers of doing, Socrates distrusts ‘the crowd’ and addresses himself to individuals, allowing the problems of philosophy to arise out of the context of ordinary life (SKS20/ KJN4: NB2:16 [JP5: 5979]; SKS24/KJN8: NB21:35 [JP4: 4281]). As Aristotle and Cicero would later point out, Socrates brought philosophy down to earth, leaving aside cosmological inquiries and investigating ethical questions instead.4 Socrates ‘inaugurated a new era’ in philosophy ‘by abandoning cosmology and physics’, and making ‘ethics the first and central subject to which anyone who aspired to the name of philosopher had to turn’, in such a way that his successors ‘all gave precedence’ to ‘ethical thought’ in one form or another (Cooper 1999: p. ix). Thus, what it would mean to become ‘a little more Greek’ in the modern age, Kierkegaard says, would be to become ‘more human’, more concerned about matters of practical reason.5 The ‘Socratic ideal’ is ‘a life that aims at cultivating the self while also serving as an occasion for one’s fellow citizens to examine themselves more closely’ (Muench 2009: 390). Socrates is indisputably a premier representative of the Greek notion that truthfulness should be attributed to persons, not to propositions,6 since his beliefs were expressed in his life in such a way that ‘theory and practice were in harmony’, on Kierkegaard’s view, and his understanding was embodied in his existence (SKS1: 112/CI: 51).7 Yet Socrates is not the only one who epitomizes the classical standard of philosophy that Kierkegaard holds in such high esteem. Many other ancient Greek thinkers are singled out for praise at one point or another in Kierkegaard’s writings, and ancient philosophy is repeatedly cited as a model of what philosophy ought to be. Socrates is, however, an all-important figure for Kierkegaard, in his own right and as an emblematic representative of the classical ideal of philosophy as a way of life. So although such a figure as Heraclitus is admired for his unique voice and his focus on the 4 See, e.g. Aristotle, Metaphysics 987b; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations V.4. See also Plato, Phaedo 96a–99e: this is where Socrates narrates his own intellectual biography, then explains why he abandoned his early interest in natural science. On his distrust of the crowd, see Plato, Apology 31e–32a. 5 From an unpublished 1844 fragment (Pap. V B 53: 29/PF: 191). See also SKS7: 140/Hannay 2009: 161: ‘I believe every Greek as well as every rational human being will understand what I am saying.’ As Johannes Climacus adds, defining existential thought, ‘the stamp of ethical approval is what everyone existing has a right to demand of anything calling itself wisdom’ (SKS7: 233–4/Hannay 2009: 259). 6 On the kind of truth that is embodied in a person, see the pseudonymous Practice in Christianity (SKS12: 201–2/PC: 205), and compare Barrett 1958: 171: ‘subjective truth is not a truth that I have, but a truth that I am.’ 7 See also SKS21/KJN5: NB10:68 (JP6: 6360) and SKS26/KJN10: NB31:94 (JP4: 4301).

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realm of change, it is nonetheless fair to say that ‘Kierkegaard’s attraction to Heraclitus is basically the same as to other Greek philosophers’, as a ‘hero of engaged existential living’ and an alternative to merely theoretical philosophy.8 The idea that insight into the nature of reality could inform a life of wisdom, already present in Heraclitus and other Presocratics, is prominent in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and survives into the late ancient period through authors such as Marcus Aurelius and Plotinus.9 Abstract inquiry into the structure of the universe and of the human soul is justified, for these thinkers, in terms of how this kind of knowledge would enable us to live well. Ethics is thus grounded in epistemology and metaphysics—or ‘logic’ and ‘physics’, as these areas were often called—in such a way that all realms of philosophy would inform ethical practice. If one believes, with Heraclitus and the Stoics, that a cosmic principle of reason is echoed within the human mind, then the best life one can lead will be based upon abiding by this principle. The idea that philosophical inquiry provides each individual with the resources for living well, and that it addresses urgent questions that pertain to human life, is prominent throughout the classical period. So when contemporary scholars refer to the ‘existential’ character of ancient philosophy, regardless of whether they have in mind Socrates, Epictetus, or Sextus Empiricus, what they are emphasizing (albeit anachronistically) is the classical notion that philosophical reflection can lead to insight about the meaning of existence, and that this insight will issue in a way of living.10 Because of the emphasis on ethics and the care of the soul that is so widespread in the classical era, it is accurate to say (as ‘Johannes Climacus’ does) that ‘Greek philosophy always had a relation to ethics’ (SKS7: 117/Hannay 2009: 104), although not to the exclusion of more abstract inquiries. Kierkegaard could point to any number of ancient thinkers as examples of ‘existential’ thought, in the sense of thinking which pertains to existence. Since the philosophical approach that Kierkegaard advocates is so prevalent in ancient philosophy, we can grasp his meaning when he praises Fichte as ‘a thinker in the noble Greek sense’ (SKS15: 91/BA: 226), or when his pseudonym calls Trendelenburg a ‘Greek thinker’ who has ‘sound’ and ‘sober-minded’ ideas, adding that to ‘live like a Greek philosopher’ in current times would be a matter of ‘expressing existentially’ a ‘life-view.’11 This is not to say that all Greek philosophers or philosophical

8 Jensen 2010: 159–60. On Heraclitus, see, e.g., SKS18/KJN2: JJ:69 (JP2: 2285) and SKS19/KJN 3: Not1: 41. See also Fear and Trembling (SKS4: 210/FT: 123), and compare Kahn 1979: 5–22, on the logos as ‘the universal principle in accordance with which all things come to pass’, which is mirrored in the human psyche. 9 Neither the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, nor the Alexandrian Neoplatonist, qualifies as Greek in the strict sense, of course. Yet throughout this chapter, I follow Kierkegaard’s practice in using ‘Greek’ to designate all the ancient philosophers whose writings survive in the Greek language. 10 The ‘existential’ or ‘existentialist’ aspects of ancient philosophy are noted by Hadot (1995: 155 and 271), Long (2002: 34), and Stewart (2010: 90–2), among others. Thomas Flynn points out that ‘existentialism represents a long tradition in the history of philosophy’, extending back ‘at least to Socrates’ (2006: 1–3). 11 SKS7: 106–7, 32/Hannay 2009 93 and 295–6. On the Greek idea of a ‘life-view’, see SKS3: 229–30/ EO2: 240–1. Kierkegaard mentions his own goal of ‘remaining intellectually true in the Greek sense to my existence-idea’, after the Corsair incident (COR: 211). See also SKS24/KJN8: NB23:134.

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views are regarded with equal admiration by Kierkegaard. He displays mild derision toward absent-minded thinkers such as Thales and Anaxarchus, who fall into ditches after losing sight of human life in order to theorize about higher realities. 12 He has little use for the Atomists and is largely critical of the Eleatics—and, as we shall see, he has significant disagreements with Aristotle and with Platonism, some of which has to do with Plato’s alleged tendency to ‘lose himself in speculation’ about ‘universal concepts’ such as ‘the in-and-for-itself good’ and the notion of ‘recollection’. 13 The overall tone and focus of Hellenistic schools such as Stoicism and Scepticism impress Kierkegaard more than any Stoic or Sceptic principles (as we shall also see), and even Socrates does not escape criticism: for often leaving his interlocutors ‘empty-handed’ and sometimes being ‘cold’ to them, in addition to seeming occasionally ‘less virtuous’ than a sincere lover of wisdom ought to be.14 Greek concepts such as Aristotle’s kinêsis are more valuable to Kierkegaard than ideas such as the reality of ‘that which always is’, as one might expect;15 so he can be found responding to metaphysical speculation among the ancients with some of the same objections that he raises against modern philosophy. On the whole, however, Kierkegaard tends to adopt a charitable attitude toward Socrates and the rest of the Greek philosophers. When Kierkegaard wrote in his early journal entries about his quest to find ‘truth which is truth for me’, to find an idea that could guide him in life, rather than ‘so-called objective truth’ which held no meaning for his own existence (SKS17/KJN1: AA:12), he had in mind a variety of truth that would not be impartial or disinterested. And, based on his less than charitable interpretation of modern philosophy, this sort of truth was not to be found there. Elsewhere in his journals he laments the ‘contempt for the edifying’ that can be seen in Hegel’s work,16 countering that ‘that which builds up’ is not irrelevant for knowledge (SKS27: Pap. 264:6 [JP1: 1588]), but actually essential for some forms of knowing. Whatever may be said on behalf of philosophy as an academic enterprise involving conceptual analysis for its own sake, there are central philosophical questions that cannot be pursued in a manner that fails to take account of the individual for whom existence is

12 See, e.g. Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, SKS15:39/PF: 146; Plato, Theaetetus 174a; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1141b and Politics 1259a. 13 I cite The Concept of Irony (SKS1: 130–1/CI: 71–2); and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (SKS7: 188–90/CUP1: 206–7). In each case, a clear distinction is drawn between Socratic and Platonic views. 14 See The Concept of Irony (SKS1: 221–2/CI: 173–5); and also Pap. V B 4: 3/PF: 189, where Socrates is described as being ‘cold’ toward Alcibiades. On Kierkegaard’s sense of the ‘less virtuous’ or ‘nihilistic’ side of Socrates, see Söderquist 2007: 55–6. Far from thinking that Socrates is always in the right, Kierkegaard even claims that Aristophanes has come ‘close to the truth’ in his depiction of Socrates (SKS1: 65/CI: 6). Aristophanes presents Socrates in The Clouds as a buffoon with his head in the clouds, ‘a critical, atheistic philosopher of nature and a Sophist in the pejorative sense’, as Ricken (1991: 53) says. 15 Cf. Plato, Republic 485a–b, on our longing to know ‘that which always is’, and on the security of eternal being; on our knowledge of what is unchanging see also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1139b–1140a, and SKS19/KJN3: Not13: 17 [JP2: 2281]). On kinêsis, see, e.g., SKS18/KJN2: JJ:467 [JP1: 771]). 16 For Hegel’s dismissal of ‘mere feeling,’ and of ‘unsystematic philosophizing’—which can only express personal particularities of mind—see, for instance, The Encyclopaedia Logic §§ 14, 19.

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‘at issue’: questions such as the one Kierkegaard asks in his 1835 journals, about the meaning and purpose of his own life. From his earliest work, he stresses the importance of a ‘life-view’, or an outlook developed out of one’s particular experience; and he suggests that some truths that concern each of us personally must be appropriated wholeheartedly in order to have any concrete meaning (SKS1: 32/EPW: 76; see also SKS5: 233–4/EUD: 233–4). In working out an interpretation of the oracle, Socrates follows the Delphic injunction to ‘know thyself ’, forming a conviction about what his life means.17 To forbid this belief from qualifying as philosophical unless it could be scientifically verified, or found to be universally valid, would be to make an assumption about the nature of philosophy which distorts the notion of wisdom that we find in ancient Greece. So instead of regarding Socrates as a cold logician, or as a fanatical champion of abstract rationality,18 Kierkegaard views him as the foremost exemplar of the Greek way of orienting philosophical inquiry towards existentially relevant themes. He points out in Johannes Climacus that ‘the conduct of the Greek skeptics’ is ‘more consistent than the modern overcoming of doubt’, since ancient scepticism recognizes that our doubts arise from an interest in knowing, and that we can ‘cancel doubt by transforming interest into apathy’ (SKS15: 57/PF: 170). Modern speculative thought, on the other hand, does not indicate that the search for sceptical equanimity takes place only ‘within existence’, for a person who practices the discipline of suspending judgement: because it tends to assume a disinterested vantage point, it struggles to make sense of scepticism as a moral undertaking that is carried out by someone in particular (SKS7: 44, 289/CUP1: 38, 318). Even Aristotle at his most theoretical speaks of contemplation as an activity practiced by human beings, and one that constitutes the best mode of existence for such creatures as we are; and he maintains that the satisfaction inherent in philosophical activity ‘is not at all like the fun of doing a crossword puzzle, where there is no value in what is known’.19 In similar fashion, when the Platonists encourage us to purify our minds by attending to universal truths, this too is a path suited for human beings, a practice whose transformative effects are described in first-personal, experiential terms.20 In many respects, the less evidently practical aspects of ancient Greek philosophy were integral parts of an examined life. This is what the pseudonymous author of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript—like its ‘editor’, Kierkegaard himself—admires above all in the ‘beautiful Greek way of philosophizing’, according to which ‘to philosophize’ is ‘an action’, and the philosopher never ceases to be ‘someone who exists’ (SKS7: 97, 302/Hannay 2009: 84, 277). 17 Plato, Apology 20e–23b. Cf. Howland 2006: 61–4. On misrepresenting ancient Greek thought by failing to see that there may be ‘different types of rationality’, see Kingsley 1995: 372–3. 18 On those in the modern age who are guilty of an ‘irrational exaltation’ of speculative reason, see the remarks by ‘Johannes Climacus’ early in Philosophical Fragments (SKS4: 215–17/PF: 5–8). Nietzsche, who describes every great philosophy as a personal or individual vision, an ‘involuntary and unconscious auto-biography’, castigates Socrates for being a monstrous, logic-chopping rationalist from The Birth of Tragedy through Twilight of the Idols. I quote from Beyond Good and Evil § 6 (Nietzsche 1997: 4). 19 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1177a–1179a. I cite Sparshott’s commentary on this passage (1994: 340–1). See also Irwin 1988: 344–6, 608. 20 Plato, Phaedo 79a–80e, 114c; Plotinus, Enneads I.6, III.8, V.9.

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It is also in keeping with the spirit of the ancient philosophers to experiment with various styles of writing. Although the realm in which philosophical ideas are taken to heart and put to use is not within a text of any kind, nevertheless some literary methods are arguably better than others at addressing readers directly and making them feel that their own existence is at issue.21 Kierkegaard seeks to address the reader in this way, to speak about matters that concern him or her quite intimately, and that pertain to his or her concrete situation. That is why he does not adopt a mode of discourse that seems remote from human life, or that appears not to be about anyone in particular. The way that his pseudonym ‘Johannes de Silentio’ introduces the idea of infinite resignation, for instance, is through a narrative about a specific character, a ‘young lad’ who falls in love with a princess (SKS4: 136–7/FT: 41–3). Like the author of the Symposium, he shows that philosophical ideas are meant to apply to our lives, and that philosophy as the love of wisdom must come to terms with our individual circumstances. The wide array of literary styles used by classical philosophers—including dialogues, discourses, letters, poems, aphorisms, and meditations—gives Kierkegaard a model to emulate as he alters his own mode of expression depending on his audience and his topic. In our pursuit of philosophical truth, we must not forget that it is as finite and striving beings, engaged in the ethical ‘task’ of being human, that we are practicing philosophy. As the Postscript explains, Socrates never ceases striving to discover ideas that he can live by, since he always remains unfinished and in the midst of becoming, even at age seventy—and that is how he is able to bring the ethical to light, to make it clear that philosophy is by and for a particular existing person. ‘Existential thought’ is best expressed in a novel form of literary-philosophical writing—not in a bland, uniform style. This is why the Platonic dialogues are an especially rich source of inspiration for Kierkegaard, offering an example of how ideas can unfold in relation to characters and situations, in addition to a variety of striking images, anecdotes, and jokes, which Kierkegaard weaves into his own works.22 The narratives in Diogenes Laertius, and the pointed exhortations of the Stoic sages, provide him with examples of significant gestures and memorable sayings, which also provide raw material for his own creations.23 Kierkegaard, who portrays himself as ‘a 21 See also Furtak 2008: 68–70. Hadot notes that, in reading the works of the ancient philosophers ‘one is always faced with a writing . . . of circumstance’, one that is ‘particularized’ rather than universal and impersonal (Hadot 2009: 53–4). The existential thinker rejects the ‘exposition of abstract thoughts’ in isolation, and explores ‘literary techniques of presenting individual character’, believing that meaning can be found only in ‘existence’ (Ong 2009: 173). 22 For instance: the image of Eros as the child of poverty and plenty (Plato, Symposium 203b–c), those lines about Socrates not knowing if he is a gentle creature or a complex being puffed up by more pride than Typhon (Phaedrus 229e–230a), or the Socratic joke about ‘giving birth’ only to ‘a wind-egg’ when one’s arguments have faltered and the ‘midwife’ has failed to deliver (Theaetetus 210b). 23 Such as: Diogenes the Cynic walking across the room to refute the Eleatics (Diogenes Laertius VI.39), Socrates replying to a young man, who asked whether it was a good idea to get married, by assuring him that he would regret it either way (Diogenes Laertius II.33), and Epictetus upbraiding someone who wished to study philosophy only in order to solve logical paradoxes, by telling him to go hang himself (Discourses II.17.34). Aristotle points out the difference between learning something ‘by rote’ without appreciating what it means and ‘assimilating’ it so that one more thoroughly ‘knows’ its meaning: see Nicomachean Ethics 1147a–b, with reference to Empedocles.

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singular kind of poet and thinker’ (SKS12: 28/WA: 165), revives the classical ideal of the literary philosopher, bringing individual life more emphatically back into the orbit of philosophical writing.

II. Doubt and Socratic Faith Because Kierkegaard views potentially ‘edifying’ truth as the kind that matters most, he is intrigued by the ancient Greek understanding of sceptical doubt, and belief, as intimately bound up with the emotional life of each moral agent.24 This is yet another way in which philosophical ideas are constantly linked with practice in the classical era: Sceptics such as Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus consider the suspension of judgement to be a grounding principle of ethics. The reason for abiding by the sceptical tenet that we must always suspend judgement is that it will bring about peace of mind by curing us of our inveterate and unsettling desire for knowledge.25 By ceasing to reach for something that will always remain beyond our grasp, we can secure tranquillity. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym states in Philosophical Fragments, the classical Sceptic reasons as follows: if I can avoid forming beliefs, or drawing conclusions, then ‘I shall never be deceived’ (SKS4: 281–3/PF: 82–4). In defending this attitude, which Kierkegaard regards as an essentially passionate stance, Sextus Empiricus borrows from the arguments of Parmenides, who first argued that nothing true can be predicated of anything but unchanging being.26 It follows for Parmenides that the realm of temporality and change is profoundly illusory; for the Sceptics, however, this conclusion is accepted only in its negative form. We can know nothing certain about reality based upon our experience of what happens to exist, and which could have been otherwise than it is. No necessary truths are to be found in the realm of becoming. Confining secure knowledge to ‘that which always is’, Aristotle also discerns that what is ‘scientifically knowable’ is ‘the necessary, the eternal’—that which is ‘absolutely everlasting’, as Kierkegaard records in his notes on the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics (SKS19/KJN3: Not13:17 [JP 2: 2281]). For ancient scepticism, this is why it is most rational, as well as ethically advisable, for us to avoid forming any strong opinions whatsoever. The upshot of all this radical doubt regarding our capacity to know anything with certainty—which is introduced by the Eleatics and defended by the classical Sceptics, which takes a different form in Sophism, and appears again in all the Platonic dialogues that end without arriving at any definite answer (see SKS18/KJN2: JJ:482 [JP4: 4266])— is clear, as far as Kierkegaard is concerned. Although he identifies even Socrates as ‘a sceptic’ because of how frequently his method of questioning has ‘negative’ results 24 Only edifying truth is ‘for you’, as Kierkegaard says in an 1843 notebook entry (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:53). The same claim appears at the very end of Either/Or (see SKS3: 322/EO2: 354). 25 The core doctrines of Scepticism are formulated by Sextus Empiricus: see Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.3–4, 1.6–8, and 1.12. On Kierkegaard and ancient scepticism, see also Rudd (1998). 26 See, e.g., Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.3. Cf. SKS19/KJN3: Not14:1.

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(SKS24/KJN8: NB24:84 [JP4: 4285]), he also thinks that Socrates’ ability to paralyse people into doubt by undermining their former beliefs and leaving them with ‘nothing’ is a crucial aspect of the Socratic mission (SKS1: 25/CI: 210).27 It uncovers the pervasive uncertainty of human existence, and illustrates the risk of error that is inherent in our most ordinary beliefs. Socrates understands that all of our claims to knowledge are insubstantial, and that we cannot presume to have a secure hold on the truth from a merely human perspective. And yet his testimony in the Apology makes it clear that he upholds a meaningful interpretation of his purpose in life, trusting in his daimonic promptings and seeking insight even though he is sceptical as to whether it can be found (Apology 31c–d, 40b; Meno 86c). Socrates also demonstrates a kind of faith by taking the ‘noble risk’ of believing that the soul may be immortal, although he realizes that he cannot prove this conclusively (Phaedo 91a–b, 107b, 114d). Kierkegaard expresses admiration for this outlook in many places, and regards it as a classic example of faith. Like Abraham, Socrates abides by his beliefs in the context of finite existence, orienting his life in accordance with a conviction that is formed and maintained in the face of uncertainty.28 The best sceptical arguments thus help us to appreciate the importance of holding beliefs about important yet unknowable matters: wanting to secure oneself absolutely against the risk of error, then, is like ‘wanting to know with certainty that one can swim before going into the water’ (SKS4: 282/PF: 83). This is the significance of classical scepticism for Kierkegaard. He suggests that a person who only has the ability to ‘doubt everything’, but not to develop any convictions, will find that his life is ‘utterly meaningless’ as a result (SKS2: 32, 45/EO1: 23, 36). The ancient Sceptic is ultimately portrayed in Kierkegaard’s writings as a coward, someone whose only way of coping with his own unrealistic demand for assurance is to avoid the risk of believing anything. Socrates, by contrast, serves as an essential point of reference throughout Kierkegaard’s writings, especially after The Concept of Irony. He is exemplary not so much for what he believes, but because he shows why ‘existential faith’ is important (Pap. X 6 B 80/CUP2: 163–4 [JP1: 11]), and how it could be maintained. And Aristotle provides the philosophical justification for non-scientific knowledge, or practical wisdom, which has to do with matters of actual, contingent existence. Referring to the Rhetoric, Kierkegaard claims that, ‘as far as every existential proposition is concerned, for every proof there is some disproof, there are a pro and a contra’. And he adds: ‘the man of conviction is not ignorant of this’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB:102 [JP2: 2296]). If we learn through philosophical inquiry that we cannot be perfectly certain of anything

27

Cf. Plato, Meno 80a–d and 86b–c. Regarding the Socratic disavowal of knowledge, see also Plato, Apology 21d–23b. For an account of how Socrates surpasses the Sophists in his destructive and ‘nihilistic’ irony, see Söderquist 2007: 59–60, 187–8. As Kierkegaard writes, the ignorance professed by Socrates is ‘the nothing with which he destroys any knowledge’ (SKS1: 307–8/CI: 270–1). By Kierkegaard’s own standards, Socrates was ‘the first existential thinker’ because he ‘discovered the ultimate bankruptcy of reason’ (Wild 1940: 538–9). 28 See, e.g., SKS23/KJN7: NB20:58 and SKS7: 184–5/Hannay 2009: 169–70. McPherran (1996: 200–8) remarks on the resemblance between Abraham and Socrates as exemplars of faith in the context of finite existence. See also Howland 2006: 43–4, 68.

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except what is necessarily true, then we have good reason not to seek this degree of precision in forming beliefs about human life. The term used by Aristotle to describe moral certainty or conviction is pistis, as Kierkegaard notes (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:305c [JP1: 628]),29 which is also the Greek word for ‘faith’ that is used in the New Testament. Here, the continuity between philosophical and religious forms of belief is obvious—and it will inform Kierkegaard’s exploration of our passionate capacity to sustain convictions in the face of uncertainty, in texts such as Works of Love and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. As he realizes, partly through his engagement with ancient philosophy, the epistemic demand for certainty or proof may deprive us of any firm standpoint regarding issues that are so practically urgent that we can hardly avoid thinking about them, at least while we exist.

III. Wisdom and the Passions When the ancient Sceptics doubted, they did so ‘within existence’, for the sake of attaining peace of mind; in a sense, they ‘needed passion’ in order to cultivate ataraxia (SKS7: 289, 323/Hannay 2009: 266, 297). According to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym in the Postscript, each human being has a passionate interest in understanding his or her own existence, and Socrates was right to emphasize this kind of knowledge. A theme which is repeated in other Kierkegaardian texts is that we need to recapture a classical Greek conception of wisdom according to which understanding is essentially linked to ethical life (see SKS11: 203–5/SUD: 90–2). As living human beings, we cannot help but care about questions that pertain to the way we exist, and that are related to how we experience and interpret the world. This is one reason why ‘passion’ is among the main attributes of the ‘authentic existing thinker’, in Kierkegaard’s view.30 In this respect, Greek philosophy sets an example that modern philosophy ought to follow. Moreover, the prominent focus on passion and emotion that persists throughout Kierkegaard’s writings has been cited as one of the most distinctively ‘classical’ of his philosophical concerns (Roberts 1998: 179–84).31 It allows him to find inspiration even in ancient schools of thought that regard passions or emotions with considerable distrust. Not only is Kierkegaard well acquainted with Aristotle’s emphasis on the ethical task of cultivating one’s dispositions toward 29 Kierkegaard is alluding to Aristotle, Rhetoric 1354a–1357a. See also Nicomachean Ethics 1094b, 1098a, and 1139b–1142a. Aristotle makes it clear that phronêsis, practical wisdom, is not the same as epistêmê, or ‘scientific’ knowledge. Cf. Schulz 2010: 88–92. 30 My translation of Scopetea 1995: 395. As she correctly notes, this ideal can to some degree be ‘traced back to Greece’. On the centrality of ethics in ancient Greek philosophy, and the recognition of ‘the role of the emotions in informing us about matters of ethical significance’, see also Nussbaum 2001: p. xvi. 31 See also Roberts 1998: 189–92; Gouwens 1996: 76–9, 106–7. Roberts and Gouwens both make note of the cognitive significance of emotions and the role they play in informing us about matters of ethical value. On Aristotle’s sense of the ‘intimate link between knowledge and affectivity’, see Hadot 2002: 85; see also Metaphysics 1072a–b, De Anima 433a.

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emotion (see, e.g. SKS19/KJN3: Not13:12), a notion that he has good reason to admire, but he also draws upon ancient Stoicism in the process of articulating a standard of passionate wisdom that diverges quite radically from the Stoic ideal of the tranquil sage. On the topic of ‘authentic pathos’, Kierkegaard praises the same ‘vulnerability toward emotion’ that a Stoic would guard against (SKS18/KJN2: FF:152 [JP3: 3070]). Classical Stoics such as Chrysippus and Epictetus embraced a systematic philosophy in which logic (or epistemology), physics (or metaphysics), and ethics were integrated into a coherent doctrine that could provide guidance for human beings in every walk of life. The ethical aspect of Stoic philosophy includes a cognitive theory of emotions, as well as principles for becoming dispassionate—which, for the Stoics, is the result of bringing one’s mind into harmony with a cosmic principle of reason.32 Emotion, or passion, has to do with the apparent value of something that is beyond one’s own control. Believing in the value of these contingent ‘external goods’ disposes a person towards a wide variety of emotional responses. ‘To cherish something’, that is, ‘to ascribe to it a high value’, is to become vulnerable to such passions as ‘fear when it is threatened’, or ‘grief when it is lost’, as the Stoics argue (Nussbaum 1994: 370). In other words, any concern, interest, care, or enthusiasm ‘can give rise to’ a ‘whole range of emotions’ (Roberts 1998: 186). The Stoic attempts to avoid this vulnerability, removing the liability to emotions by remaining indifferent about whatever lies beyond his or her moral control. Because passions arise from ‘beliefs about what is good and what is bad’ in the realm of what is out of our control, the ‘most important’ distinction in Stoicism is between that which is within in our power, or ‘up to us’, and that which is not (Epictetus, Discourses I.1.14–17, Encheiridion 1): as Kierkegaard notes in a journal entry, this is the ‘main thesis’ in Stoic thought (SKS24/ KJN8: NB24:156 [JP4: 3863]). The Stoics deny that anything outside of us, or anything besides one’s own moral purpose, is truly important or valuable. To believe that a contingent event can affect us for better or worse is to make a basic error about the nature of reality. This is why a recurrent theme in Stoic philosophy is that we should resist being moved—for instance, by the observation that a child is precious or that a violent storm is threatening.33 As the Sceptics also recognized, appearances or impressions of value do not force us to give assent to them in one way or another.34 But once we have done so, the Stoics claim, our emotions take on a momentum of their own—and the feeling of an emotion carries an intrinsic sense that what we are perceiving is truly the way it appears, that the storm is a threat or that the child is precious. This is why it is necessary for the Stoic to be vigilant about eradicating all dispositions towards emotion: for instance, by thinking of his or her nearest family members in such a way that he or she will not be troubled when they pass away. The way to console a person in mourning, according to Epictetus and 32 See Epictetus, Discourses II.8.12–13 and Diogenes Laertius VII.88. Cf. Long 2002: 118–19. On the Stoic account of emotion, see also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations IV.27. 33 Epictetus, Discourses II.18.30 (on the storm) and I.23.5–6 (on the child). Cf. Diogenes Laertius VII.110, on the error that is allegedly involved in becoming disturbed by such things. 34 See, e.g., Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.10 and 1.13. See also Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.52 and Epictetus, Encheiridion 5.

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Chrysippus, is to convince him that his grief involves a mistaken sense of value (see Gould 1970: 132–3).35 If we educate ourselves about what is truly of value, the Stoics argue, we will not be susceptible to passions any longer.36 Emotional attachment is ‘a certain recipe for disappointment, anxiety, and unhappiness’ (Long 2002: 28–9). By placing no value on ‘external goods’, a person can remain in a blissful state of apathy. Yet Kierkegaard reproaches the Stoics for this goal of cultivating passionless detachment (SKS24/KJN8: NB22:30 [JP4: 4515]). He disputes their thesis that everything beyond our power is insignificant to us. In an 1848 notebook entry, he refers to the claim made by Epictetus that, if one eradicates the idea that an emotionally disturbing event is truly significant, then one will cease to be pained by the emotion (SKS21/KJN5: NB8:5 [JP4: 4625]).37 He alludes to this Stoic notion that ‘all pain resides in the idea’, or in one’s way of thinking, in a sketch for Either/Or (Pap. III B 180: 13/EO1: 489). While this may be true, as Kierkegaard acknowledges in the same notebook entry, he quickly adds that we should not therefore eliminate all impressions of affective significance. In one of his earliest works, Kierkegaard writes that a life-view ought to open up deeper experiences of meaning than Stoicism does (SKS1: 32/EPW: 76). Although the one admitted Stoic in his pseudonymous works, ‘Constantin Constantius’ in Repetition, says that he has always ‘strongly mistrusted all upheavals’ (SKS4: 45/R: 171), Kierkegaard himself claims that a Stoic self—with its fear of upheaval and its defensive autonomy—is ‘the most isolated self ’ of all (SKS21/KJN5: NB8:8 [JP4: 3898]).38 And the list of the varieties of despair in The Sickness Unto Death includes the following statement about defiance: if a ‘generic name’ were to be applied to this form of despair, ‘it could be called Stoicism’ (SKS11: 182–3/SUD: 68–9). In this mode of despair, ‘the self is its own master, absolutely its own master, so-called; and precisely this is its despair’, although it is in this very fact that the Stoic takes pride. Ostensibly, ‘the Stoic takes earthly sufferings [and] adversities’ so lightly that they effectively ‘do not exist for him’ (SKS23/KJN7: NB17:83). Yet the Stoic doctrine of dispassion and self-sufficiency forms a sharp contrast with some of Kierkegaard’s core ideals. Impassive detachment is incompatible with the unconditional engagement of a loving person, and for this reason Kierkegaard’s vision of ethical life is quite unlike the Stoic paradigm of wisdom. Indeed, he ultimately defends the view that passion can be a valuable mode of perception, even going so far as to declare that ‘only great souls are exposed to passions’ (SKS18/KJN2: FF:152 [JP3: 3070]). 35 Epictetus, Encheiridion 3, Discourses IV.1.65–9. Cf. Sherman (1997: 108): ‘false belief ’ is responsible for passions, and ‘the cure’ for passions is ‘true and reasoned belief about what is of value or worth’. By contrast, Aristotle views emotions as potentially accurate perceptions of value: see, e.g., Rhetoric 1378b–1379a. According to Aristotle, ‘emotions are perceptions or appearances of particulars as good or bad’, such that ‘when we perceive particulars as bad or they appear to us as bad, we are pained’, as Achtenberg explains (2002: 164–8). 36 See, e.g. Epictetus, Discourses III.1.40. The ensuing discussion overlaps in part with Furtak 2010b, a discussion of Stoic themes in Kierkegaard’s work which contains further references to their historical and intellectual context. See also Furtak 2005: 17–33 for an account of ancient Stoicism in its own right. 37 In the margin, Kierkegaard quotes from Epictetus, Discourses I.4.23 (SKS21/KJN5: NB8:5.a). 38 Here, he cites Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.3. Clearly, this is at odds with Kierkegaard’s view of the self as a network of ‘life-defining relationships’ (Mooney 2007: 101).

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This is worlds apart from the Stoic position that wisdom consists in apathy: Kierkegaard in fact explicitly sets himself against the Stoics, saying that what he wishes to see in a person is exactly the ‘disposition to passion’ that a Stoic has to set himself against (SKS18/ KJN2: JJ:55 [JP4:4512]). Rather than striving to develop an invulnerable soul, Kierkegaard suggests, we should adopt the contrary aim of becoming loving subjects who are emotionally open to, and engaged in, the world of others. Despite his veneration for the existential spirit of ancient Stoic philosophy, Kierkegaard’s encounter with Stoicism eventually leads him to develop an antithetical ideal of radically passionate subjectivity, one in which the human being is rooted and grounded in love. According to Kierkegaard, love is a condition of moral agency as well as a source of insight, the ‘ground of all things’ (SKS9: 227/WL: 225) which forms the heart as it flows from the heart. He suggests that God ought to be understood in terms of ‘pure passion and pathos’ (SKS26/KJN10: NB31:76 [JP3: 2447]) and as love itself, the ‘middle term’ in any relationship between lover and beloved (SKS9: 124/WL: 121). Along with an account of love as the source of emotional life, Kierkegaard also develops a normative ideal of passionate wisdom. Yet his understanding of the passions and of their cognitive significance retains unmistakably Greek traces, even as he departs from ancient views according to which dispassionate tranquillity is the essence of wisdom.

IV. On Love and Virtue It is a virtue ‘to be truly in love’, as Kierkegaard writes in The Book on Adler (Pap. VII 2 B 235: 195/BA: 108), and it is our capacity to love that gives shape and orientation to our lives. His attention to love, even in abstract theoretical works such as Philosophical Fragments, indicates that Kierkegaard agrees with the classical focus on love as a worthy topic for philosophical investigation. From Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium, through Books VIII and IX of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, all the way to Plotinus’s Enneads, we find major ancient philosophers addressing love as a moral phenomenon and as the ‘Socratic pathos’ that inspires ‘a passion for truth’ (Gouwens 1996: 44) and promises a higher kind of insight. This includes erôs and philia, as well as agapê—the last of which is considered in Stoicism and repeatedly in the Platonic dialogues.39 Although Kierkegaard finds nothing in pagan Greek thought that entirely resembles the Christian ideal of love that he endorses, he is nevertheless preoccupied throughout his literary career with the accounts of love that he finds in ancient philosophy. His enthusiasm for Plato’s erotic dialogues, for instance, extends from his earliest work through some of his latest religious writings. Kierkegaard takes seriously the Platonic notion that love can be interpreted as a divine power: for him, God is the ‘source of all love’ (SKS9: 12/WL: 3). The ontology developed 39 See Plato, Symposium 180b, 181c, 210d; and Plato, Phaedrus 233e, 241d, 247d, 253a, and 257e. See also Cobb 1993: 5. On agapê as one of the Stoic eupatheiai, see Sorabji 2000: 47–8 and Diogenes Laertius VII.116.

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in Works of Love hearkens back to the Platonic notion that the truth may be available only to someone with the temperament of a lover, since Kierkegaard claims that we will be comprehensively ‘deceived’ if we do not ‘believe in love,’ by trusting in the veracity of what it reveals (SKS9: 13–15/WL: 5–7). He praises both the Symposium and the Phaedrus for their portrayal of love (SKS19/KJN3: Not6:12 [JP3: 2387]; Pap. III B 26 [JP3: 3323]). His own texts share with these Platonic dialogues an interest in the way that love is involved in moral education, by influencing a person’s formation. Kierkegaard’s primary criticism of Eros as conceived in the Platonic dialogues is that it is not sufficiently a love of the individual; another of his main concerns is that it is too selfish and acquisitive. He observes that, in the speech of Socrates in the Symposium, love becomes ‘disengaged more and more from the accidental concretion in which it appeared’, ascending higher into the atmosphere ‘until breathing almost stops in the pure ether’ (SKS1: 102–7/CI: 41–6). This speech, much of which is attributed to a woman named Diotima, is often regarded as the most reliable source for Plato’s own doctrine of love.40 Love is defined not only as the power that moves human beings with erotic longing, but it is also said to inspire artistic creativity, ethical striving, and insight into ultimate reality. Eros is associated with everything from raw physical desire to the most noble aspirations of the human soul, including the yearning for immortality. Love is also construed in the speech of Socrates as an intermediary between mortal and divine realms of being. We cannot long for what we already have, so if love is a wish to possess the beautiful and the good, then love itself cannot be imagined as a perfect being who is already in possession of goodness and beauty. This shows why Platonic Eros might be considered acquisitive: I long for what is good for me, and I long to have it for my own benefit. On this view, love is a sense of violent longing for what one lacks. There is also reason to worry about what is left behind on the erotic progress described in Diotima’s narrative, according to which ‘the object of love’ is initially an individual human being; once aroused, however, love is redirected towards more abstract objects such as customs and sciences, until it arrives at ‘the beautiful’ itself (SKS1: 160/CI: 107). Beauty itself is said to be uncorrupted by human flesh or colouring or any of that other ‘mortal nonsense’ (see Plato, Symposium 211e), and one who has ascended to this level of abstraction will think less of the distinct reality and value of individuals, which are nothing more than steps on a ladder that leads beyond them. Opposing this Platonic view, Kierkegaard suggests that in order to love actual human beings, we must ‘give up all imaginary and exaggerated ideas’ about a ‘dreamworld’ in which the perfect love-object can be found (SKS9: 162/WL: 161). In other words, love should not be used as a means of escape from the concrete reality of the human world into a contemplation of higher and more perfect things. In the Phaedrus, Socrates first defines love as an irrational desire, then retracts what he has said so far as a kind of blasphemy and promises to repent for it by giving another speech in honor of Eros.41 This time, love is described as a sacred madness, a heaven-sent 40

Plato, Symposium 201d and 204e–206a. See also SKS20/KJN4: NB5:16 (JP6: 6144). The entire speech, including the parts that are ascribed to Diotima, spans from 198a–212c of the Symposium. 41 Plato, Phaedrus 238b–c, 242d–245c, and 249d–250e. For a more detailed discussion of the ‘madness’ of ‘erotic love’ and the ‘puzzle’ of ‘human nature’ in the Phaedrus, see Possen 2010: 74–7.

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blessing, which provides the one who loves with intoxicating illumination. As in the Symposium, the vision of earthly beauty is a precipitating factor, inspiring us with lofty aspirations. Unlike the Symposium, however, the Phaedrus does not present the individual beloved as being of merely instrumental value, a step on the way to true enlightenment. It ‘begins and ends with the love-relationship between individuals’, depicting the emotional tie to another person as precisely that which can guide the lover ‘to an understanding of beauty and truth.’42 The divine madness of love has the ability to lift us to a more elevated level of happiness and wisdom than we could reach through the aid of merely human prudence or secular reason. Kierkegaard echoes this idea when he suggests that earthly love bears the imprint of divine love (SKS5: 83/EUD: 75). Yet, on his view, the earthly love relationship is not only a step on the way to the eternal, just as it is not interpreted in merely mundane terms: rather, it is seen as the infusion of an eternal power into finite existence. The unique individuality of the person who is loved, therefore, is an end in itself, not the launching pad for a flight towards the ‘great sea of beauty’ (see Plato, Symposium 210d) and away from the beloved person. In the ‘Young Man’ of his own Symposium, the dialogue on love at the beginning of Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard creates a character who thinks that ‘the lovable’ is a dubious notion if it cannot be defined in a way that would command universal assent (SK 6: 36–43/SLW: 31–40). Only a misguided lover, Kierkegaard suggests, would need to define ‘the lovable’ in advance, so that he could be guided by predetermined criteria in deciding what is worthy of love. Elsewhere, referring back to Socrates, Kierkegaard indicates that there must be an error involved in thinking that we can love only what is ‘objectively’ lovable (SKS9: 365–7/WL: 371–3). He regards it as ‘a sad but all too common inversion’ to accentuate ‘how the object of love must be’ in order for it to be ‘loveworthy’ (SKS9: 159/WL: 159), so Kierkegaard can be classified as an advocate of agapê rather than erôs. However, he does not share the view of Anders Nygren that the two forms of love are mutually exclusive and violently opposed to one another (1959: 6). He is much closer to Thomas Aquinas, for whom Eros inspires a striving for perfection, and Augustine, who views divergent forms of love as flowing from one source. Like the ancient Greek philosophers, Kierkegaard uses multiple words to refer to love: Kjerlighed and Elskov. Yet he sometimes uses Kjerlighed in reference to Platonic Eros, and Elskov in discussing Christian love of neighbour.43 This suggests that he considers agapê and erôs to be different manifestations of love, not as discrete powers. One reason why Kierkegaard is drawn to Platonic Eros is that he wants to learn how love can motivate human beings towards the good. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, his pseudonym refers to ‘the Greek conception of Eros as found in [Plato’s] Symposium’ (SKS7: 91/CUP1: 92), as a representation of the way in which an existing thinker is perpetually striving to understand. This once again raises Socrates to the level 42

Grube 1958: 112–13. See also Nussbaum 2001: 220–1. See Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (SKS5: 423/TDIO: 47), where Kierkegaard alludes to Plato, Symposium 178b. In Works of Love he also cites Socrates, that ‘simple wise man of old’, to the effect that ‘Love is a son of wealth and poverty’, translating the Greek term erôs with the Danish word that he uses for neighbourly love (SKS9: 175/WL: 175). Kierkegaard is quoting from Symposium 203c. 43

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of an exemplary figure, as the embodiment of philosophical Eros whose entire life is an impassioned search for wisdom. Most importantly, though, love for Kierkegaard has to do with the realization of each person’s distinctive potential. What it means to love the neighbour is ‘to will to exist equally for unconditionally every human being’ (SKS9: 89/ WL: 83–4). That is, to love a person is to affirm his or her existence. Nothing else in ancient Greek philosophy approaches so closely to this ideal as Aristotle’s notion of friendship that consists more in loving than in being loved, and which entails wishing that good things happen to one’s friend for his or her own sake.44 Love thus defined makes life worth living, according to both Aristotle and Kierkegaard (see SKS9: 368/WL: 375).45 Kierkegaard is also following in the footsteps of Aristotle when he portrays love as that which enables a person not only to ‘seek his own’ but to take an interest in the interests of the other (SKS9: 267–8/WL: 269). The capacity to love is aligned with the task of realizing each person’s unique particularity, since love involves affirming and encouraging a person’s development, seeking to aid his or her flourishing, and believing in the reality and value of his or her life as an end in itself. This is what it means to love another person, and this conveys the sense in which love might enable us to know, as Kierkegaard suggests that it should (SKS20/KJN4: NB3:59 [JP2: 2003])—namely, because it serves as a subjective condition for the realization and appreciation of human individuality.

V. The Legacy of Ancient Greek Philosophy With the notion that love in any form could be a source of insight, rather than an influence that blinds us or distorts our vision, we are brought back to the general theme of classical philosophy and its significance for Kierkegaard. By suggesting, for instance, that some truths are only available through a mode of experience in which we abandon rational sovereignty, ancient Greek thought offers hypotheses and ways of thinking that differ from what Kierkegaard was able to discover in his immediate intellectual context. This is not to say that nothing in modern philosophy could have provided inspiration to Kierkegaard on this topic, and others that were dear to his heart; however, his tendency was to approach recent authors and thinkers more critically, while being generous and receptive towards classical thought. In the works of his contemporaries there were ideas he might have admired that he simply did not: towards the Greeks, his attitude was not uniformly reverential, but there was much that he found encouraging, and which made him wish that philosophers in his own age would become ‘more Greek’ (Pap. V B 53: 29/ 44

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1159a. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1155a–b; Rhetoric 1380b. On philia as ‘love’, see Vlastos 1981: 4–6. See also Price 1989: 144, 149–50 and Nussbaum 2001: 354. Aristotle’s lost writings on erôs are listed in Diogenes Laertius V. 22–7; see also Posterior Analytics 68a–b and Price 1989: 238–41. For more on Platonic Eros in relation to Kierkegaard, see Furtak 2010a. 45

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CA: 191). Whether accurately or not, the portrait of modern philosophy that emerges from Kierkegaard’s writings is of a discipline caught up in irrelevancies, and neglecting the genuine perplexities of human existence (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:288 [JP3: 3300]). What is required, then, is a return to the ancient conception of philosophy, according to which a philosopher was ‘an ardent existing person impassioned by his thinking’ (SKS7: 280/ CUP1: 308). And when Kierkegaard’s pseudonym makes this declaration, the thinker he has in mind above all is Socrates. In his own voice, Kierkegaard characterizes Socrates as a figure with whom he has always had an uncanny ‘rapport’, and as the ‘only analogy’ that he has for understanding his own ‘mission’ in life (SKS24/KJN8: NB23:102 [JP6: 6839]). Among the many reasons for this analogy, one is that Socrates conceived of philosophy as a personal enterprise: in his own case as well as for everyone he encountered, he practiced philosophical inquiry in a way that engaged the individual human being as such, addressing his or her actual beliefs (see SKS24/KJN8: NB21:35 [JP4: 4281]). One could reject this conception of philosophy, in favour of an impersonal ideal of philosophy as offering abstract models of reality that do not take individual life into consideration; measured in terms of this ideal, Kierkegaard would qualify as having a philosophical agenda only in a loose or anachronistic sense. Yet the impersonal ideal of philosophy will be the one that seems deficient, if one accepts the ancient concept of philosophy according to which one’s life ought to be the embodiment of one’s thought. In any event, it is evident that Kierkegaard found sanction for his own work as a writer and thinker in the Greek understanding of philosophy as a way of life. If we distinguish the sort of philosophical approach that ‘avoids personal style and idiosyncrasy as much as possible’ from philosophy as an ‘art of living’, Kierkegaard would clearly fit in the latter category, as one of its finest exemplars and as a vehement critic of the former approach. Yet when Alexander Nehamas adds that the philosophers who adopt a more personal mode of writing must be preoccupied with the ‘fashioning’ and ‘construction’ of the self (Nehamas 1998: 3–4), he names a goal that fits poorly with Kierkegaard’s priorities. Much more in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s work is a statement made by Iris Murdoch, that ‘to do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament’, while ‘at the same time to attempt to discover the truth’. This implies that one could hope to find, through one’s own idiosyncratic temperament, a truth that is not of one’s own creation, ‘a philosophy one could live by’ (Murdoch 1991: 46–7). Philosophical activity construed in this way calls for humility, a character trait that does not show up on Aristotle’s list of virtues and that is not so obviously exhibited by Socrates, but which is nonetheless a virtue that does appear in the Greek philosophers more readily than in most of the moderns. Despite his less-than-apologetic tone in Plato’s Apology, Socrates displays a pronounced lack of hubris in stating that his vocation was not of his own making, and in recognizing that his knowledge is limited and uncertain.46 This contrasts starkly with the Hegelian idea of ‘absolute knowing’, and with modern assumptions about rational agency. Some scholars like to scoff at the ‘primitive’ Greeks who viewed 46 See, e.g., Plato, Apology 20e–21b and 33c. On Socratic humility, see also McPherran 1996: 216–18 and Howland 2006: 125, 192. Cf. Söderquist 2007: 196–200.

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human beings as influenced by deities, instead of being actuated by their autonomous ‘power’ of will (Snell 1982: 19–22). During a time when philosophy was ‘merely a life’ (SKS25/KJN9: NB28:24 [JP3: 3317]), Socrates viewed his own existence as beholden to higher powers, like the lives of the Homeric characters to which he was so fond of alluding. And when Kierkegaard invokes the world of the ancient Greeks, he recalls an entire framework in which human life is interpreted against the background of a universe animated with sacred meaning. That unfashionable vision of reality seemed attractive to Kierkegaard, for whom the God of love made him feel ‘that I could not do otherwise’ but accept the imperative to write as the sign of a vocation: ‘it was not at all my idea,’ he says, yet he came to regard it as ‘my duty’ (SKS15/PV: 23, 86–7). By claiming that we are nothing until we accept the imperative ‘you shall’ (SKS9: 9/WL: 90), and by forming beliefs about his own life tasks as if he were not the artist but the work of art, Kierkegaard revives the classical virtue of humility. In so doing, he relies upon a way of thinking that might seem wildly irrational to champions of secular reason, but which would not have appeared so bizarre to the Greeks. As we have seen, this is typical of the way in which Kierkegaard looks to ancient philosophy for alternatives to prevailing modes of thought—and finds respectable, even heroic, antecedents for his own views.

References CLASSICAL WORKS are cited according to standard pagination format, and I quote my own translation unless otherwise specified. Achtenberg, Deborah (2002). Cognition of Value in Aristotle’s Ethics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Barrett, William (1958). Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books). Cobb, William S. (1993). Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Cooper, John M. (1999). Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Evans, C. Stephen (2009). Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Flynn, Thomas R. (2006). Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press). Furtak, Rick Anthony (2005). Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). —–— (2007). ‘Kierkegaard and the Passions of Hellenistic Philosophy’, Kierkegaardiana 24, 68–85. —–— (2008). ‘Love and the Discipline of Philosophy’, in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). —–— (2010a). ‘Kierkegaard and Platonic Eros’, in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato, eds. Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). —–— (2010b). ‘The Stoics: Kierkegaard and the Passion for Apathy’, in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, II: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors, eds. Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (Burlington, VT: Ashgate).

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—–— (2010c). ‘The Kierkergaardian Ideal of “Essential Knowing” and the Scandal of Modern Philosophy’, in Critical Guide to Kierkegaard’s ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript,’ ed. Rick Anthony Furtak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gould, Josiah (1970). The Philosophy of Chrysippus (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Gouwens, David (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Grube, G. M. A. (1958). Plato’s Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Hadot, Pierre (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell). —–— (2002). What Is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). —–— (2009). The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, trans. Mark Djaballah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Hannay, Alastair (2009). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs, by Søren Kierkegaard and ‘Johannes Climacus’, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company). Howland, Jacob (2006). Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Irwin, Terence (1988). Aristotle’s First Principles (New York: Oxford University Press). Jensen, Finn Gredal (2010). ‘Heraclitus’, in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, II: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors, eds. Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Kahn, Charles H. (1979). The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kingsley, Peter (1995). Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Long, A. A. (2002). Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Mackey, Louis (1971). Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). McPherran, Mark L. (1996). The Religion of Socrates (University Park, PA: Penn State Press). Mooney, Edward F. (2007). On Søren Kierkegaard (Aldershot: Ashgate). Muench, Paul (2009). ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Point of View’, in A Companion to Socrates, eds. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Blackwell). Murdoch, Iris (1991). The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge). Nehamas, Alexander (1998). The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997). Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications). Nussbaum, Martha (1994). The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). —–— (2001). The Fragility of Goodness, rev. edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Nygren, Anders (1959). Agape and Eros, trans. P. S. Watson (New York: Harper and Row). Ong, Yi-Ping (2009). ‘A View of Life: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Novel’, Philosophy and Literature 33, 167–83. Possen, David (2010). ‘Phaedrus: Kierkegaard on Socrates’ Self-Knowledge—and Sin’, in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato, eds. Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (Burlington, VT: Ashgate).

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Price, A. W. (1989). Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Ricken, Friedo (1991). Philosophy of the Ancients (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Roberts, Robert C. (1998). ‘Existence, Emotion, and Virtue: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rudd, Anthony (1998). ‘Kierkegaard and the Sceptics’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 6, 71–88. Schulz, Heiko (2010). ‘Rhetoric: Eloquence, Faith, and Probability’, in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, II: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors, eds. Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Scopetea, Sophia (1995). Kierkegaard og Grœciteten (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels). Sherman, Nancy (1997). Making a Necessity of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sløk, Johannes (1972). ‘Kierkegaard as Existentialist’, in Contemporary Philosophy in Scandinavia, eds. Raymond E. Olson and Anthony M. Paul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Snell, Bruno (1982). The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover Books). Söderquist, K. Brian (2007). The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘On the Concept of Irony’ (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels). Sorabji, Richard (2000). Emotion and Peace of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press). Sparshott, Francis (1994). Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Stewart, Jon (2010). Idealism and Existentialism (London: Continuum). Vlastos, Gregory (1981). ‘The Individual as Object of Love in Plato’, in Platonic Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Wild, John (1940). ‘Kierkegaard and Classic Philosophy’, Philosophical Review 49, 536–51.

Suggested Reading Daise, Benjamin (1999). Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Furtak (2005: ch. 5, 2007). Greenspan, Daniel (2008). The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and the Rebirth of Tragedy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Harrison, Paul R. (1994). The Disenchantment of Reason: The Problem of Socrates in Modernity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), ch. 2. Himmelstrup, Jens (1924). Søren Kierkegaards Opfattelse af Sokrates (Copenhagen: Arnold Busck). Howland (2006). Johansen, Karsten Friis (1976). ‘Kierkegaard and “The Tragic” ’, Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 13, 105–46. Kloeden, Wolfdietrich von (1985). ‘Sokrates’, in Kierkegaard’s Classical Inspiration, eds. Niels Thulstrup and Marie M. Thulstrup, 104–81. Mooney (2007: chs. 1–3). Muench (2009).

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Rilliet, Jean (1943). ‘Kierkegaard et Socrate’, Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 31, 114–20. Roberts (1998). Rudd (1998). Scopetea (1995). Söderquist (2007). Stewart, Jon (2003). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 640–52. Stewart, Jon; and Nun, Katalin (2010). Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Stewart, Jon; and Nun, Katalin (2010). Kierkegaard and the Greek World, II: Aristotle and Other Greek Authors (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Wild (1940).

chapter 8

k ier k ega a r d a n d the bibl e paul m artens

The simple juxtaposition of Kierkegaard and the Bible belies the complexity of the indelible imprint that the Bible left on Kierkegaard’s life and writings. The Bible provided him with innumerable literary images and tropes; it provided him with ethical imperatives and ammunition for cultural critique; and perhaps most important of all, it provided him with spiritual nourishment and direction in his relationship to God. Kierkegaard’s debts to the Bible are so great that Paul Minear and Paul Morimoto, in the first extensive English-language examination of Kierkegaard’s use of the Bible, boldly claimed that ‘we do not hesitate to predict that coming generations will increasingly reckon with him not so much as a philosopher, as a poet, as a theologian, or as a rebel against Christianity, but as an expositor of Scripture’ (Minear and Morimoto 1953: 7–8). To a limited extent, Minear and Morimoto were right, as there has been an increasing resurgence in research concerning Kierkegaard’s use of the Bible. This diminutive renaissance has revealed, however, that the relationship between Kierkegaard and the Bible is rather complicated, perhaps illustrated most effectively by Kierkegaard’s own suggestion that his contemporary Denmark needed a religious hero who had the courage to forbid people to read the Bible (SKS21/KJN5: NB8:47 [JP1: 209]). Before moving to the intricacies in Kierkegaard’s thought that have left a loaded legacy, a sketch of Kierkegaard’s encounter with the Bible is necessary, beginning with his early university studies.

I. Exposure and Education Kierkegaard was born into an intensely Christian home. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was strongly influenced by Herrnhut pietism and attended the Copenhagen Congregation of Brothers on Sunday evenings, in addition to his regular attendance at

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Copenhagen’s principal church, The Church of Our Lady. Kierkegaard speaks equivocally about being brought up in this enormously strict Christian home (SKS20/KJN4: NB2:69). Yet, the emphasis on the suffering Christ and the anti-clerical and anti-intellectual emotionalism associated with his father’s pietism remained with him (Barnett 2011) and profoundly informed his own reading of the Bible. Evidence of this anti-intellectual influence appears very early in Kierkegaard’s academic life in claims such as that ‘the whole mass of interpreters damage the understanding of the New Testament more than they benefit an understanding of it . . . [and] one has to overlook them, if possible, or manage to enter by a passage which is not yet blocked’ (SKS27: Pap. 67 [JP1: 202]). Kierkegaard’s resistance to academic forms of biblical interpretation was, however, not a simple, uninformed resistance. Or, more accurately, Kierkegaard was not antiintellectual but merely selectively critical of certain movements and their representative intellectuals. During his years at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard attended lectures on the Bible, including those offered on the synoptic gospels (1832/3) and Acts (1833/4) by H. N. Clausen and on 1 and 2 Corinthians (summer 1834) by C. E. Scharling. Other professors like Martensen and Grundtvig also contributed to his biblical education directly and indirectly (Kirmmse 1990; Pons 2004: 50–4; Pattison 2007). Beyond the lectures, Kierkegaard also spent considerable time translating parts of the New Testament from Greek into Latin, with the assistance of C. G. Bretschneider’s Lexicon manuale Græco-Latinum in Libros Novi Testamenti (Kloeden 1978: 20–3). These translations—drawn from the texts of Acts, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, and James in the fourth edition (1829) of Novum Testamentum Græce, edited by Georg Christian Knapp—occupied Kierkegaard from 1833–6 and constitute nearly all of his unpublished Journal CC (SKS17/KJN1: 139–88; Bruun and Jensen 2010). Alongside these activities, Kierkegaard engaged a range of related secondary texts in the 1830s, including L. J. Rückert’s Der Brief Pauli an die Epheser (Leipzig 1834), L. Usteri’s Entwicklung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes (Zürich 1832), D. Pott’s Epistolæ catolicæ Græce, perpetua annotatione illustratae (Gott 1786–90), H. Olshausen’s Ein Wort über tiefern Schriftsinn (Königsberg 1924) and Commentar über sämmtliche Schriften des Neuen Testaments (Königsberg 1837) (Kloeden 1978: 23–7). Despite the above, Kierkegaard’s academic encounter with the Bible in his years at the University of Copenhagen could also be described as rather narrow. First, it appears that his focus was generally confined to the New Testament. It is true that Kierkegaard’s personal library included texts that also addressed the Old Testament, texts such as Friedrich Tholuck’s Das Alte Testament im Neuen Testament (Hamburg 1836) and Wilhelm Wette’s Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die Bibel Alten und Neuen Testaments (Berlin 1833), yet his library only contained one Old Testament commentary: Ernst Rosenmüller’s Scholia in Pentateuchem (Leipzig 1828) (Müller 2010: 312, n. 109). Although the number of commentaries need not directly correspond to his valuation of the Old Testament, it is one indicator of relative value that will be overtly confirmed later. Further, W. Glenn Kirkconnell has suggested that, although the Apocrypha was valued even less than the Old Testament, not only was Kierkegaard familiar with it, but he also

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found it a ‘deep and at times unique source of spiritual insight and instruction’ (Kirkconnell 2010: 262). The same can be said about the Old Testament, as evidenced in Fear and Trembling and throughout his corpus. Nevertheless, it is clear that the New Testament forms the centre of Kierkegaard’s academic studies, the same group of texts that come to affirm some of the pietistic emphases of Kierkegaard’s own upbringing as normative for Christianity. Second, Kierkegaard’s academic engagement with the Bible seems to pass very quickly over the developments in biblical interpretation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mogens Müller suggests that Kierkegaard was not significantly influenced in any way by the dramatic developments that had been occurring in biblical studies—particularly in Germany—over the previous decades (Müller 2010: 285). On the surface, Müller is correct, as Kierkegaard rarely engages contemporary biblical scholarship in a sustained way in his published works. Perhaps the exception one could point to lies in his explicit use of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as a most useful resource for his reflections on history and subjectivity in the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. In particular, Kierkegaard affirms that Lessing (contra several of his own Danish Hegelian professors) did not allow himself to be tricked ‘into becoming world-historical or systematic with the religious’, that he understood very well that the religious had infinitely ‘to do with God’ and nothing to do directly with any human being (SKS7: 67/CUP1: 65). The explicit appeal to Lessing in Postscript suggests that Lessing also haunts the first of the texts attributed to the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus, namely, Philosophical Fragments. Philosophical Fragments begins with a question that reveals a preoccupation with Lessing and the questions Lessing linked to the Bible’s historical claims about the life of Jesus (Lessing 2005): ‘Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?’ (SKS4: 213/PF: 1). Therefore, despite the limited engagement with Lessing as the lone non-Danish representative of the larger historical-critical debates occurring at the time, one could make the case that Kierkegaard is, in fact, significantly influenced by the dramatic developments occurring in biblical studies. The influence, however, would be negative in nature (and it appears that Müller might also grant this) since Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic approach to the Bible (and Christianity in toto) is intended to be a challenge and corrective—both theoretically and practically (Pons 2004: 56)—to the ‘scientific’ scholarship of his day (Rasmussen 2010: 254). Therefore, although Kierkegaard’s early academic engagements with the Bible may be described as narrow, one must also say that they profoundly shaped his continued use of it. It is difficult to understand claims like ‘Following the path of the commentators is often like traveling to London; true, the road leads to London, but if one wants to get there, he has to turn around’ in any other way (SKS27: Pap. 211 [JP1: 203]). And, even if his academic engagements may be described as narrow according to certain criteria, his own careful study of the Bible—further illustrated by the 131 marginal notes and markings in his twelve-volume study edition of the New Testament (Dewey 1967:

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392)—continued unabated for the rest of his life. Minear and Morimoto recognized, earlier than most, that the ubiquitous presence of the Bible in Kierkegaard’s writings—‘on almost every page’—betrays a profoundly rich and consistent immersion in ‘frequent, regular, thorough and thoughtful listening to the Bible’ (Minear and Morimoto 1953: 3).

II. A Ubiquitous Presence As the English-speaking world began to realize the importance of the Bible in Kierkegaard’s thought, quantitative metrics served very well to indicate significance. For example, the index compiled by Minear and Morimoto—roughly confirmed by the Cumulative Index to Kierkegaard’s Writings (Hong et al. 2000)—suggests that nearly 3000 New Testament passages appear with varying explicitness in the Kierkegaard corpus (Polk 2010: 238, n. 6; see also Rosas 1994: 157–96). Further, direct claims concerning the importance of the Bible were gleaned from the corpus in order to support the quantitative metrics, perhaps none as important as the comment made by the pseudonym Frater Taciturnus in Stages on Life’s Way: ‘The Bible lies on my table at all times and is the book in which I read the most’ (SKS6: 214/SLW: 230). These quantitative means of indicating the importance of the Bible reinforce the import of the Bible in Kierkegaard’s writings. The last decades, however, have seen a pronounced shift in emphasis towards qualitative analysis, which assumes the presence of the Bible in Kierkegaard’s thought and presses further by asking what sort of role(s) the Bible plays in Kierkegaard’s thought. A rough initial typology was offered by L. Joseph Rosas—based on Minear and Morimoto’s index—that catalogued appearances of the Bible in the corpus as either remote allusions, allusions, references, quotes, or focal texts of a discourse (Rosas 1994: 157–96). As useful as this typology might appear, it has usually been relativized or deconstructed in subsequent attempts to illuminate the fact that the Bible is present not merely in fragmentary or ornamental passages utilized in the service of Kierkegaard’s philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, or religious agendas but as ‘a constructive power behind all the major issues discussed in Kierkegaard’s work’ (Pons 2004: 146). Or, as Leslie Dunstan noted already in 1952, ‘S. K. had lived so fully with the Bible that it had become part of him. Not only were its words and phrases part of his mental equipment, but the living reality portrayed in its pages had become a living reality for him’ (Dunstan 1952: 318). A brief glance at Fear and Trembling might begin to illustrate these points. As indicated obliquely already, Kierkegaard challenged historical-critical scholarship largely because of its assumed objectivity. In the face of contemporary readings, Kierkegaard sought to provoke a subjective encounter with the Bible, a passionate inwardness that is necessary for the Bible to become scripture for the reader (Polk 1997: 4–5). Perhaps Kierkegaard’s most familiar biblical provocation in this direction is found in Fear and Trembling which is, in part, an idiosyncratic, pseudonymous retelling of Genesis 22 against the grain of early nineteenth-century scholarship (Dalrymple 2010: 57–63).

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Kierkegaard makes no attempt to address the historicity of the story; rather, according to Pons, Fear and Trembling aptly displays the subjunctive use of the Bible, a use of the Bible that takes the form of possibility, a use that is expressed through a reinvention of the story and in the ‘diffusion’ of the same story in several variations (Pons 2004: 69). Kierkegaard’s Johannes de silentio begins the text with a short preparatory tale (the Exordium), complete with a familiar ‘Once upon a time . . .’ preamble. The man in the tale heard the story of Abraham and Isaac as a child and, when he grew older, could wish for nothing other than to witness the events on Mount Moriah, to become contemporaneous or present with Abraham through reflection and appropriation (SKS4: 105/FT: 9). In quick succession, four variations follow, all possibilities that might have occurred instead of the story that is told in Genesis 22 (SKS4: 107–11/FT: 10–14). This destabilization of the familiarity of the biblical narratives, playing stranger ‘with the old and familiar’ cultural artifacts of a reified Christian tradition (SKS9: 213/WL: 210; Damgaard 2009: 104), thus sets the stage for reading the story anew. Part of reading the story with new eyes, so to speak, is to imagine reading the story through the eyes of the contemporary witness imagined in the Exordium. In short order, however, the reader is challenged to become that witness. Although one might think of Fear and Trembling as part of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship and, therefore, an expression of indirect communication, there is no confusing de silentio’s provocation in directly addressing the reader: ‘We read in sacred scripture: “And God tempted Abraham and said: Abraham, Abraham, where are you?” But Abraham answered: “Here am I.” You to whom these words are addressed, was this the case with you?’ (SKS4: 117/ FT: 21). The unmistakable point, here, is to force the reader to grapple with the call of God directly, subjectively. That said, several further comments are in order. First, a careful reader will also notice that the exchange between God and Abraham quoted here— ‘ “Abraham, Abraham, where are you?” But Abraham answered: “Here am I” ’—is missing from the version of Genesis 22:1–2 cited before the first of the four possible variations at the beginning of Fear and Trembling (SKS4: 107/FT: 10; Pons 2004: 74). With this apparent misquotation followed by the correct quotation a few pages later, Kierkegaard has not simply made an absent-minded mistake. Rather, he seems to be suggesting that this direct communication between God and Abraham is tied to Abraham’s obedience (and therefore the ‘happy resolution’ that is missing in the four possible variations sketched at the beginning of the text). Second, Abraham’s response, his ‘Here am I’, is the same response he makes later to the angel of the Lord sent to Mount Moriah with the message not to sacrifice Isaac (and one can easily imagine how different the story would end if the second ‘Here am I’ was not uttered). Further, this response evokes a latent intra-textual reminder (Polk 1997: 82–4) that the response is not unique to Abraham but it is always the appropriate way to respond to the call of God, as these are the words also uttered by Jacob (Gen 31:11; 46:2), Moses (Ex 3:4), Samuel (1 Sam 3), and even attributed to Christ himself (Heb 10:7, 9). These brief comments merely begin to scratch the surface of the way in which the Bible gives shape to Fear and Trembling, that lyrical representation of the story of Abraham and Isaac under the titular phrase invoked by a rather motley crew of biblical

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characters: Eliphaz the Temanite (Job 3:14), David (Psalm 55:5), and the apostle Paul (Phil 2:12). Other writings lean more heavily on different biblical texts. For example, Kierkegaard returns to James 1:17–21—the text he refers to as my first, my favourite text, my first love, even my only love—to which one returns again and again and again and always—to focus four of his discourses.1 And other writings draw upon different biblical themes and images. For example, Kierkegaard draws heavily upon the ‘birds of the air’ and the ‘lilies in the field’ described in Matthew 6 in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Christian Discourses, and Without Authority (Beabout 2006: 127–46; Pattison 2006: 111–25). All of the writings imaginatively and persistently twist the biblical text to refract them ‘kaleidoscopically’ and to wring out new meaning for Kierkegaard’s reader (Polk 1997: 17). This is not, however, the performance of infinite play with the text. For Kierkegaard, the truths drawn from biblical texts become definite ideas (Dunstan 1952: 316) or, to restate more accurately, ‘the conception of discipleship he develops out of the Bible aims to move beyond textuality—from literary imitation to existential imitation’ (Rasmussen 2010: 253). And, even though Polk may be right that praxis outstrips theory—if these can, in fact, be separated—in Kierkegaard’s handling of the Bible (Polk 1997: 17), examining an articulation of his programmatic or normative vision of how the Bible ought to be read is nevertheless necessary and, indeed, helpful for grasping why the Bible is so important for Kierkegaard.

III. A Programmatic Vision To gloss over a very complicated development (or series of developments) in his authorship, Kierkegaard autobiographically comments that his later texts have moved beyond indirect communication (e.g. pseudonymity) in order to communicate the truth directly (SKS13: 14/PV: 7). This claim, however, does not necessarily imply a differing understanding or use of the Bible because, as Polk rightly highlights, the Bible itself always communicates indirectly with the intention of instigating appropriation (Polk 2010: 244); this claim does not signal, as some might fear, a shift from the imaginative exegete to the dogmatic exegete. Rather Kierkegaard’s use of the Bible remains substantially the same throughout, even if certain theological themes are pronounced more acutely (Peterson 1990: 355). In this sense, Kierkegaard remains, throughout his corpus, a poet of the Word (Kuethe 1983). As Kierkegaard’s authorship was drawing to a close in 1851, he wrote a series of three Christian discourses, published under the title For Self-Examination, that display many of the features of the role of the Bible in his authorship that are indicated above. The first of these discourses, growing out of a reading of James 1:22–7, self-consciously attempts to thematize several of the roles that the Bible has played throughout the corpus. This 1 See SKS5: 39–56/EUD: 31–48; SKS5: 129–42/EUD: 125–39; SKS5: 143–58/EUD: 141–58; SKS13: 321–39/M: 263–81.

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discourse is titled with a question that penetrates to the first of Kierkegaard’s exegetical concerns: ‘What Is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?’ and it is in this discourse that Kierkegaard delineates many of the key themes—e.g. the difference ‘between reading and reading’ (SKS13: 55/FSE: 27) and obedience—and metaphors—e.g. mirror, love letter, and royal decree—that programmatically define his biblical interpretation. The discourse begins with a prayer that, much like Augustine’s Confessions, has multiple hearers in mind. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s expression of thanks to God also reveals a considerable number of background assumptions to the human reader: Father in heaven! . . . Truly, in nothing do you leave yourself without witness; and finally you gave him your Word. More you could not do. To force him to use it, to read it, or to listen to it, to force him to act according to it—that you could not wish. Ah, and yet you do more. You are not like a human being . . . You, however, O God, you give your Word as a gift—that you do, Infinitely Sublime One, and we humans have nothing to give in return. And if you find only some willingness in the single individual, you are promptly at hand and are, first of all, the one who with more than human—indeed, with divine—patience sits and spells out the Word with the single individual so that he may understand it aright; and then you are the one who, again with more than human—indeed, with divine—patience takes him by the hand, as it were, and helps him when he strives to act according to it—you, our Father in heaven! (SKS13: 43–4/FSE: 13–14)

Right from the start of the text, Kierkegaard reveals the theological foundation of his understanding of the Bible. First, Kierkegaard does not use the term ‘Bible’ but the Word, God’s Word. The distinction that then emerges between the Word (the text) and the Word (Jesus Christ) is one of the debts Kierkegaard owes to Luther and it becomes important in the distinction between reading and reading, as we shall see below. Second, evoking James 1:17–22—the passage that percolates just beneath the surface in nearly all Kierkegaard’s writings—Kierkegaard defines the Word as a gift, one of God’s gifts. Third, as it is a gift, God does not force people to read it. Fourth, if one attempts to read it, God is immediately ‘at hand’ to sit and patiently explain it. Finally, fifth, if one tries to act according to it, God also provides assistance in appropriation. Stepping back to examine this short preliminary list, it would seem fair to suggest that Kierkegaard’s understanding of the process of understanding and appropriating the Bible is profoundly theocentric. Leading the reader to engage God subjectively through an encounter with the text is, therefore, the purpose of For Self-Examination. To this end, Kierkegaard renders the rich complexity of the Word through several guiding metaphors. The first metaphor Kierkegaard employs, drawn from the discourse governing the text, is ‘the mirror of the Word’ (James 1:23). Initially, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the mirror metaphor is negative, as it is employed in the service of his sharp polemics against biblical criticism. A mirror undermines questions such as ‘Which books are authentic? Are they really by apostles, and are the apostles really trustworthy?’ (SKS13: 53/FSE: 25) because, as long as one looks directly into the mirror, one cannot actually see the mirror but only the face that it reflects. The mirror metaphor, therefore, fittingly supplements

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Kierkegaard’s description of commentaries as distracting parerga: ‘Read the N.T. without a commentary . . . With the help of God I understand it all right. Every commentary detracts. He who can sit with ten open commentaries and read the Holy Scriptures— well, he is probably writing the eleventh, but he deals with the Scriptures contra naturam’ (SKS23: NB16:84 [JP 1: 210]). Positively, the metaphor is employed to shift the focus from the text itself to the reader, to shift from the objective to the subjective. A prerequisite to seeing oneself in the mirror, however, is that one has to stand before the mirror, one must ‘be still’ and separate oneself from the crowded busyness of life (SKS8: 174/UDVS: 67). Once this first step is taken, one is ready to begin to see oneself truly in the mirror. In Kierkegaard’s corpus, one never sees one’s own reflection in the biblical heroes, or at least in their praiseworthy actions. For example, he calls his readers to aspire to be like Abraham, Moses (SV XII: 472/JFY: 206), Simeon and Anna (Barrett 2010), and even the woman in sin (SKS11: 271–80, 12: 257–73/WA: 135–60). He almost universally assumes, however, that his contemporary readers would find themselves mirrored more accurately by the Pharisee (Martens 2010). Some have also suggested that his corpus provides a glimpse into how Kierkegaard viewed his own life through the mirror of the Word (Fishburn 1985: 238). Returning to the logical progression of For Self-Examination, we find that Kierkegaard introduces the encounter between King David and the prophet Nathan found in 2 Samuel 11:1—12:10 as a paradigmatic example of the difficulties of looking at oneself in the mirror of the Word. As he does throughout his corpus, Kierkegaard makes the familiar story ‘really contemporary’ and ‘modernizes’ it by retelling it with an eye to challenging an aesthetic or scholarly reading (Pyper 1992: 127). He recounts how David desired Bathsheba, how David had Uriah killed so that he could marry Bathsheba, and how David’s conscience was not bothered by his own actions. Kierkegaard then continues with Nathan’s visit to announce God’s judgement on David and the indirect manner in which Nathan recounts the same story metaphorically. In Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic telling, David responds as a highly stylized nineteenth-century Dane: he listened attentively and impersonally and evaluated the prophets ‘charming little work’. In short, he judged it as ‘we cultured people tend to judge a sermon’ (SKS13: 65/FSE: 38). Kierkegaard’s retelling (like the original) then climaxes with Nathan’s damning proclamation: ‘Thou art the man’ (SKS13: 65/FSE: 38; cf. 2 Sam 12:7). Evoking and echoing the intentions of Abraham’s ‘Here am I!’ Kierkegaard continually drives home the importance of personally encountering the terrifying voice of God within the text (SKS13: 66/FSE: 39) (or, in parallel fashion, within all religious discourse (SKS8: 225/UDVS: 125)). God’s voice is not always terrifying, however, and the remaining two metaphors emphasize two different yet overlapping tonalities of God’s voice. The second pivotal metaphor Kierkegaard introduces is the Word as a love letter. The underlying assumption with this metaphor is that when one receives a love letter, it is not the letter that one cares about but the beloved who sent the letter. The Bible is just such a letter and Kierkegaard captures this point poignantly in the claim that ‘The Holy Scriptures are the highway signs: Christ is the way’ (SKSNB20:161 [JP1: 208]). (It should not surprise anyone that Kierkegaard assigns the title ‘Christ Is the Way’ to the second

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discourse in For Self-Examination.) This echoes a Lutheran view of Scripture that Christ is the Word of God who speaks through the biblical testimony without being identical with it (Pedersen 1978: 30). Although the Bible was initially written in languages that frequently require translation before reading is possible, Kierkegaard is quick to assert that such translation, although necessary (and here we find his muted affirmation of scholarly preliminaries as ‘a necessary evil’ (SKS13: 55/FSE: 27)), is not real reading. Of course, one does not need continually to remind oneself to whom the love letter is written and it is this disposition that one must adopt when reading the Bible. And, reaffirming the anti-social elements of the mirror metaphor, a love letter is not a public letter but a letter that—much like the way Jesus taught the disciples to pray (Matt 6:7)—is read in private, behind locked doors (SKS13: 58/FSE: 30). Behind locked doors one may finally find silence—another ubiquitous theme in Kierkegaard’s corpus—which is a prerequisite for God’s Word to be heard above the ‘hullabaloo’ of the world (SKS13: 73/FSE: 47). Life behind locked doors, however, is not the telos of the love letter’s message. It is not a cloying aesthetic missive; it demands action. For Kierkegaard, true reading is only possible when ‘the thought of the beloved is vividly present and my purpose in everything is to will according to her will and wishes’ (SKS23: NB16:84 [JP1: 210]). For Kierkegaard, even love letters contain requests and, to reinforce the demand for obedience to the requests found in the love letter, Kierkegaard appeals to one more metaphor: the Bible as a royal decree. The image of a royal decree—expanding the definition of the command to love as ‘the royal Law’ found in Works of Love (SKS9: 31–3/WL: 24–5)—introduces several new elements, especially authority and, with it, the possibility of judgement upon the reader for not reading rightly. At this point, one of the more humorous Kierkegaardian illustrations makes an appearance, namely, the reader of the royal decree who, afraid of the requirement contained therein, ‘cunningly shoves, one layer after another, interpretation of scholarly research, and more scholarly research (much in the way a boy puts a napkin or more under his pants when he is going to get a licking)’ (SKS13: 62/FSE: 35). Although Kierkegaard’s critique wears a little thin by now, it is clear he is working hard to ensure that true reading maintains an ethical bite, maintains the ‘Go and do likewise’ that the Word addresses to the reader (Luke 10:37; SKS13: 68/FSE: 41), maintains the demand that ‘You shall love’ (Matt 22:39; SKS9: 25–95/WL: 17–90). And, although Kierkegaard is always concerned with how an action is performed, the emphasis of how over what should never obscure what Kierkegaard believes is so straightforward it hardly needs repeating: It is only all too easy to understand the requirement contained in God’s Word (‘Give all your goods to the poor’. ‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left’. ‘If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also’. ‘Rejoice always’. ‘Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations’ etc). It is just as easy to understand as the remark ‘The weather is fine today’ . . . The most limited poor creature cannot truthfully deny being able to understand the requirement—but it is tough for flesh and blood to will to understand it and to have to act accordingly. (SKS13: 61/FSE: 34–5)

It is precisely the simplicity of the New Testament’s message that fuels Kierkegaard’s increasingly sharp critique of Danish Christendom. David Gouwens rightly notes

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that Kierkegaard invokes the authority and the perspicuity of Scripture in The Moment, both positions that were also shared by his contemporaries. Further, there was a shared conviction that the New Testament ‘points to a pattern for existence’ (Gouwens 2003: 84). Kierkegaard’s hope and task was to help those who shared these now routinized and reified common convictions to see them anew, to encounter them subjectively. And, to this end, he increasingly ramped up his rhetoric, rhetoric in which he eventually calls for putting a stop to reading the Bible (either through prohibition by a religious hero (SKS21/KJN5: NB8:67 [JP1: 209]) or by asking God to take it back (SKS26: NB31:19 [JP1: 216])). Despite his various provocative means— all inflected by his biblically informed imagination, including the allusion to Matthew 8:34 in the request for God to take the Bible back—Kierkegaard’s programmatic vision for reading the Bible consistently calls his contemporary Christians into a subjective existence before God which, by definition, entails obedience (Emmanuel 1996: 60).

IV. A Loaded Legacy Although the Bible plays a fundamental role in illuminating, informing, and shaping Kierkegaard’s thinking and writings, biblical scholarship has generally disregarded Kierkegaard to the same extent that Kierkegaard disdained scholarship. There are exceptions, however, and these exceptions are not negligible. Perhaps the most significant appearance of Kierkegaard in the history of biblical interpretation occurred in 1921 in the pages of Karl Barth’s Preface to the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans: ‘[I]f I have a system, it is limited to the recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity’ (Barth 1968: 10). One could probably make too much of Kierkegaard’s appearance in The Epistle to the Romans but, granting that Barth’s reception of Kierkegaard is not univocally positive (Barrett 2012), his appropriation of this Kierkegaardian theme profoundly inflected not only his commentary on Romans but his larger theological project as well. History is full of ironies, however, and one of these ironies is that Kierkegaard was also often considered to be the progenitor of the biblical interpretation and theology of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann’s understanding of the nature and role of kerygma—the irreducibly personal proclamation of the gospel—certainly is indebted to elements of Kierkegaard’s distinction between the Word as Scripture and the Word as Christ alongside his emphasis on subjective appropriation. In fact, in the 1960s, one could straightforwardly claim that ‘Kierkegaard is understood as being simply the progenitor of Rudolf Bultmann’, even if one’s purpose was to undermine this link (Eller 1968: 54; cf. Bultmann 1971: 70–1, 133, 362, 443, 583; and Jaspert 1971: 12, 103, 163). Undeniably, Kierkegaard was appropriated by Heidegger, then directly and indirectly by Bultmann, and once again directly and indirectly through both by Paul Tillich. Yet, pressing these links further (including the link between Barth and Kierkegaard) quickly draws one into

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the competing idiosyncrasies of their respective theological frameworks and, therefore, away from the narrower focus of this discussion. It seems to me that it is exactly this sort of temptation that has left Kierkegaard’s role in the history of biblical interpretation relatively unexamined and ignored in the late twentieth century. In 1999, however, Kierkegaard reappeared with a vengeance deep within the heart of biblical scholarship: Richard Bauckham, a prominent New Testament scholar, published a commentary on James. Not only did Bauckham include quotations from Kierkegaard to stand at the head of each chapter, he utilized the entire Prologue to illuminate the challenge Kierkegaard levelled against academic interpretation of the Bible and then devoted a large portion of a subsequent chapter to explicate what it meant to read James in nineteenth-century Copenhagen (Bauckham 1999: 1–10, 158–74). Invoking Kierkegaard against the grain of most contemporary scholarship, Bauckham draws upon the nineteenth-century Dane to complete the movement towards appropriation and imitation described in For Self-Examination, towards a place ‘beyond where . . . study can reach’ (Bauckham 1999: 159). Unsurprisingly, Bauckham’s commentary did not fundamentally alter the discipline of biblical interpretation. He did, however, force Kierkegaard and his challenge irreversibly into the academic discourse (especially concerning James), further exemplified by Luke Timothy Johnson’s acknowledgement, in Brother of Jesus, Friend of God, that Kierkegaard ‘does not so much try to figure out what James meant as to consider what his own life means in light of James’ (Johnson 2004: 243). The few comments about Kierkegaard’s legacy provided above are intended to intimate the constructive manner in which Kierkegaard’s reading of the Bible has been appropriated in various directions. Paying closer attention to Kierkegaard’s reading of the Bible, however, also presents his reader with several challenges that are also part of his legacy. To conclude this brief presentation of Kierkegaard’s legacy, I would like to draw attention to three continually contentious elements of Kierkegaard’s mode of biblical interpretation. In his sympathetic summary of Kierkegaard’s place in theology, Murray Rae rightly emphasizes Kierkegaard’s self-understanding as a corrective voice, as an ‘existentialcorrective’ to the established order (SKS24: NB23:15 [JP1: 708]; Rae 2010: 167). Acknowledging Kierkegaard’s corrective intentions, however, does not necessarily free Kierkegaard from some of the potential excesses that emerge within his own position, the first of which Bauckham notes in his otherwise positive account of Kierkegaard’s interpretation: the loss of a hermeneutic community. After noting that James addresses his readers in the plural while Kierkegaard’s paraphrases attribute to James the habit of addressing the single individual, Bauckham continues: ‘The problem is that Kierkegaard envisages only the two alternatives of the person who is absorbed in the unreflective mass . . . and the person who in inwardness before God becomes an individual aligned with God’s will and practicing love in the world precisely by not being of the world’ (Bauckham 1999: 173). This form of polemically truncated individualism, according to Bauckham, does not allow us to envisage that which James took for granted, namely, a community formed by the practice of neighbourly love and devotion to God. The anti-communitarian charge against

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Kierkegaard is familiar and it is dependent upon what one assumes Kierkegaard ‘took for granted’. If one reads Kierkegaard as not assuming the same communal context as James, then Kierkegaard could be construed as a radical individualist of sorts; if one reads Kierkegaard as a corrective, one might determine that Kierkegaard understood that the Christian community was ‘taken for granted’ and that all he needed to encourage was subjective appropriation of an authoritative text already held in common by the community. Therefore, the first challenge Kierkegaard leaves to his readers is that of contextualizing his biblical interpretation within the larger convictions—both stated and implied—contained in his writings (which is not unrelated to whether and to what extent one understands Kierkegaard as standing behind Barth or Bultmann, or both). The second challenge is nearly as contested: in his challenge of the supremacy of historical-critical or ‘objective’ interpretation, it is difficult to determine the limits of the role of the biblical text itself. Or, to rephrase, it seems to be more difficult to parse the Word from the Word than Kierkegaard suggests. Or, to rephrase one more time, when and how does one shift from merely reading to reading in an intensive, existential sense? What is at stake in this question is whether the biblical text remains relevant or whether it can be discarded once the reader encounters Christ through the text. As much as Bauckham appreciates Kierkegaard’s corrective, it must also be noted that the majority of his commentary is made up of the form of reading disparaged by Kierkegaard—Bauckham’s commentary provides nearly 150 pages of academic ‘reading’ necessary to get to the point when a fully-informed shift to appropriative ‘reading’ can be made. In Kierkegaard’s own context, Adolph Peter Adler—a former childhood friend and Danish pastor who claimed to have received visions from Jesus—unintentionally pushed Kierkegaard to address this issue. Adler’s (alleged) visions eventually forced Kierkegaard in the direction opposite to the direction he was working towards in Fear and Trembling; they forced Kierkegaard to wrestle with the normative role of the biblical text and its apostolic authors as constraining parameters for determining legitimate encounters with the Word as Christ. After revising his response several times, it was only published posthumously as The Book on Adler. Again, Kierkegaard’s solution to this tension remains largely unresolved in the corpus itself, leaving his readers looking to context for further clarity. Thirdly, reflecting strands of his Pietist upbringing and partially as a result of his quest for a normative guide for interpreting the biblical text, Kierkegaard strongly emphasized the New Testament as containing normative Christianity. The New Testament alone contains the right ‘highway signs’ that point to Christ. His journals contain comments like ‘It is a very simple matter. Pick up the New Testament: read it’ (SKS21: NB10:40 [JP3: 2865]) and ‘Take any words in the NT; forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly’ (SKS23: NB17:102 [JP3: 2872]). Alastair McKinnon’s statistical analysis of Kierkegaard’s writings confirms these overt statements: there is a clear division in the appearance of the New Testament and the Old Testament in Kierkegaard’s corpus, a division McKinnon believed was ‘strongly underscored in Kierkegaard’s own thought’ (McKinnon 1980: 143). The strong New Testament appeal, therefore, is not merely benign as it also entails a dialectic devaluing of the Old Testament, exemplified but not limited to the following: ‘It is not easy to have both the Old and the New Testaments, for the OT

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contains altogether different categories. What, indeed, would the NT say about a faith which believes that it is going to be well off in the world, in temporality, instead of giving this up in order to grasp the eternal? Hence the instability of clerical discourse, depending on whether it shows forth the Old or New Testament’ (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:146 [JP1: 206]). Given his critical comments concerning the Old Testament in his journals and papers, one might suggest that Kierkegaard shares in aspects of the Marcionite heresy, ‘revealing his own complicity in Christendom’s deep and abiding anti-Semitism’ (Polk 1997: 83). On the other hand, one might also want to call his own texts (such as Fear and Trembling and Works of Love) as witnesses against this conclusion (Polk 1997: 83; Martens 2008). But, here again, Kierkegaard—much like a significant portion of nineteenth-century Lutheran interpreters—leaves a loaded legacy that must be handled with care to avoid premature conclusions that elide the complexity of his own wrestling in the mirror of the Word.

V. Conclusion Minear and Morimoto were right when they claimed that ‘Histories of twentiethcentury hermeneutics, unlike those of the nineteenth, will be quite unable to ignore the influence of this “genius in a market town” ’ (Minear and Morimoto 1953: 12). Kierkegaard can no longer be ignored as a substantial participant within and contributor to the history of biblical interpretation. As I have attempted to demonstrate above, Kierkegaard is personally and authorially inculturated in the world of the Bible. He is, in short, profoundly formed by his continual return to the Word through the Word; his task is to encourage the same in his readers. Yet as Kierkegaard’s published and unpublished writings earn increased scrutiny, a more complex picture emerges than suggested by his mid-twentieth-century advocates. As important as his critical challenge to the limits of ‘objective’ scholarship might be, his self-conscious strategy of articulating a radical critique occasionally permits—despite considerable continuity through the corpus— equivocations to creep in, equivocations that have allowed Kierkegaard to serve as an instigator for the work of both Barth and Bultmann, equivocations that may still confound us and force a repeated return to his writings for clarification and contextualization. And, looking forward, how one handles this loaded legacy gifted to us by Kierkegaard will determine precisely what role Kierkegaard plays in the yet-to-be written histories of twentieth-century hermeneutics.

References Barnett, Christopher B. (2011). Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Aldershot: Ashgate). Barrett, Lee C. (2010). ‘Simeon and Anna: Exemplars of Patience and Expectancy’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 3–16.

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—–— (2012). ‘Karl Barth: The Dialectic of Attraction and Repulsion’, in Jon Stewart (ed.) Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology, Tome I, German Protestant Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate), 1–42. Barth, Karl (1968). The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bauckham, Richard (1999). James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (London: Routledge). Beabout, Gregory R. (2006). ‘The Silent Lily and Bird as Exemplars of the Virtue of Active Receptivity’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), Without Authority (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 127–46. Bruun, Niels W. and Jensen, Finn Gredal (2010). ‘Kierkegaard’s Latin Translations of the New Testament: A Constant Dialogue with the Vulgate’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 221–36. Bultmann, Rudolf (1971). The Gospel of John: A Commentary, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press). Dalrymple, Timothy (2010). ‘Abraham: Framing Fear and Trembling’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I, The Old Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 43–88. Damgaard, Iben (2009). ‘ “My Dear Reader”: Kierkegaard’s Reader and Kierkegaard as a Reader of the Book of Job: Reception and Transformation in the Writings of Kierkegaard’, in Kirsten Nielsen (ed.), Receptions and Transformations of the Bible (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press), 93–106. Dewey, Bradley (1967). ‘Kierkegaard and the Blue Testament’, Harvard Theological Review 60, 391–409. Dunstan, J. Leslie (1952). ‘The Bible in Either/Or’. Interpretation 6, 310–20. Eller, Vernard (1968). ‘Fact, Faith, and Foolishness’, The Journal of Religion 48 (January), 54–68. Emmanuel, Steven M. (1996). Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (Albany: State University of New York Press). Fishburn, Janet Forsyth (1985). ‘Søren Kierkegaard, Exegete’. Interpretation 39:3, 229–45. Gouwens, David J. (2003). ‘Kierkegaard’s Hermeneutics of Discipleship: Communal and Critical Uses of Scripture in the 1854–55 Attack’, in Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino (eds.), Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and Criticism (Copenhagen: C. A. Rietzel), 81–92. Hong, Nathaniel J., Hong, Kathryn, and Prenzel-Guthrie, Regine (eds.) (2000). Cumulative Index to Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Jaspert, Bernd (ed.) (1971). Karl Barth—Rudolf Bultmann: Briefwechsel, 1922–1966 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt). Johnson, Luke Timothy (2004). Brother of Jesus, Friend of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). Kirkconnell, W. Glenn (2010). ‘Kierkegaard’s Use of the Apocrypha: Is it “Scripture” or “Good for Reading”?’ in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I, The Old Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 253–62. Kirmmse, Bruce H. (1990). Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press). Kloeden, W. von (1978). ‘Biblestudy’, in Niels Thulstrup and Maria Mikulová Thulstrup (eds.), Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel), 16–38.

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Kuethe, John George (1983). ‘Kierkegaard, Poet of the Word’. Word and World 3: 3, 294–302. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (2005). Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McKinnon, Alastair (1980). ‘Kierkegaard’s Perception of the Bible’. Kierkegaardiana 11, 132–47. Martens, Paul (2008). ‘Authority, Apostleship, and the Difference between Kierkegaard’s Old and New Testaments’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Book on Adler (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 121–41. —–— (2010). ‘The Pharisee: Kierkegaard’s Polyphonic Personification of a Univocal Idea’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 93–106. Minear, Paul S. and Morimoto, Paul S. (1953). Kierkegaard and the Bible: An Index (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Müller, Mogens (2010). ‘Kierkegaard and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Biblical Scholarship: A Case of Incongruity’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 285–324. Pattison, George (2006). ‘The Joy of Birdsong or Dialectical Lyrics’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), Without Authority (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 111–26. —–— (2007). ‘D. F. Strauss: Kierkegaard and Radical Demythologization’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and his German Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate), 233–57. Pedersen, J. (1978). ‘Kierkegaard’s View of Scripture’, in Niels Thulstrup and Maria Mikulová Thulstrup (eds.), The Sources and Depths of Faith in Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: C. A. Rietzels), 27–57. Peterson, Elaine (1990). ‘Kierkegaard’s Exegetical Methodology’, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 19: 3, 351–9. Polk, Timothy Houston (1997). The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). —–— (2010). ‘Kierkegaard’s Use of the New Testament: Intratextuality, Indirect Communication, and Appropriation’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 237–48. Pons, Jolita (2004). Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible (New York: Fordham University Press). Pyper, Hugh S. (1992). ‘The Apostle, the Genius and the Monkey: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s “The Mirror of the Word” ’, in George Pattison (ed.), Kierkegaard on Art and Communication (New York: St Martin’s Press), 125–36. Rae, Murray (2010). Kierkegaard and Theology (London: Continuum). Rasmussen, Joel D. S. (2010). ‘Kierkegaard’s Biblical Hermeneutics: Imitation, Imaginative Freedom, and Paradoxical Fixation’, in Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate), 249–84. Rosas, L. Joseph, III (1994). Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard (Nashville: Broadman and Holman).

Suggested Reading Barrett and Stewart (eds.) (2010a). Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I, The Old Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate)

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—–— (2010b). Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament (Aldershot: Ashgate). Emmanuel (1996). Kloeden (1978). Minear and Morimoto (1953). Polk (1997). Pons (2004).

chapter 9

k ier k ega a r d a n d the history of theology david r . l aw

I. Introduction The study of the relationship between Kierkegaard and the history of theology brings together two problematic terms. The first of these is ‘history of theology’, which combines two notions that arguably belong in distinct spheres, namely ‘history’ and ‘theology’. The second problematic term is Kierkegaard himself. The problem of the relationship between history and theology is well expressed by the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic scholar Johann Adam Möhler, who writes: How is it possible for the truth given by Christ to have a history? We cannot conceive of a history in any other way than that some object passes through a series of changes. But it has been said that the truth revealed and imparted by Christ is to remain as it was originally given. Here, therefore, there does not seem to be any object of history present. For that which abides transcends all change; it is a continuous being, not a becoming. (Möhler 1958–61, vol. 2: 726; Pelikan 1971: p. xiii)

The ‘history of theology’ would thus seem to be an oxymoron. It combines two terms which simply do not belong together. However, the growing awareness, especially since the eighteenth century, that Christian doctrine did not fall fully formed from heaven, but has come about as the result of a process of historical development, has prompted attempts to think through the relationship between Christianity and history. This has led to the emergence of the branch of Christian theology known as historical theology. The problem here is that there seems to be little consensus on what this term means. ‘Historical theology’ is sometimes conceived of as the history of dogma or doctrine. Here ‘historical theology’ is understood as the study of the history of the theological propositions accepted as authoritative by the Church, often coupled with the notion of

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development. Alister McGrath, for example, holds that, ‘Historical theology is the branch of theological inquiry which aims to explore the historical development of Christian doctrines, and identify the facts which were influential in their formulation’ (McGrath 1998: 9). Alternatively, ‘historical theology’ can be understood as the history of theology or the history of Christian thought. Here ‘historical theology’ is understood as the study of the history of the Church’s theologizing rather than the history of its fixing of certain doctrines as orthodox and binding on believers. For Jaroslav Pelikan, ‘historical theology’ in this sense denotes the history of theological systems in a way that parallels the history of philosophical systems (Pelikan 1971: p. xvii). On this understanding, historical theology is a subdivision of the history of ideas. The greater consciousness of how theology is conditioned by its environment has led some to conceive of historical theology as the study of how theology is the product of the age in which it was conceived. This is one of the definitions of historical theology advanced by McGrath, who writes: ‘Historical theology is the branch of theology which aims to explore the historical situations within which ideas developed or were specifically formulated’ (McGrath 1998: 10). On this understanding, historical theology is concerned to place theology in its historical context and study how this context has informed the formulation of theological concepts. Historical theology in this sense is the study of theology in relation to and in dialogue with its cultural environment. With regard to the notions of historical theology sketched thus far it is not necessary for those engaged in its study to be committed to the Christian faith. A purely historical study of Christian theology is possible without any commitment to the beliefs that are the subject of investigation. Thus understood, historical theology is primarily a historical discipline. It is concerned not with drawing on the theologies of the past for doing theology in the present, but on recording and understanding the past intellectual movements that underlay and gave rise to the distinctive mode of intellectual activity known as Christian theology or Christian thought. Some commentators, however, have considered historical theology to be first and foremost a theological discipline. This is a view held by Geoffrey Bromiley, who holds that ‘historical theology is not just a history of Christian theology but is itself theology. Hence the observer ceases to be mere observer and becomes participant. He is himself a Christian doing theology in its historical dimension’ (Bromiley 1978: p. xxv). On this understanding, historical theology is the study by modern theologians of how past theologians have attempted throughout the ages to mediate the Word of God to their contemporaries with a view to modern theologians doing the same in the present. Here the student of historical theology is not a neutral observer, but a participant in the process of hearing and passing on the Word of God to contemporary and future generations (see Engel and Wyman 1992: 9, 10). This understanding of historical theology as a theological task means that the standard of judgement the historical theologian applies to the study of the history of theology will be fundamentally different from that of the historian of ideas. As Bromiley puts it, ‘the criterion will not be whether theologians make what [the historical theologian]

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takes to be a negative or positive contribution to human thought, but whether they help the church of their own times and other times to speak faithfully and responsibly about God in conformity with God’s Word’ (Bromiley 1978: p. xxvii). To put it still more succinctly, ‘The Word of God is adopted as the criterion of historical assessment’ (ibid.). This means, as McGrath points out, that historical theology ‘has both a pedagogic and a critical role, aiming to inform systematic theologians about what has been thought in the past (and why!), while identifying the factors which make some form of restatement necessary’ (McGrath 1998: 10, original emphasis). The pedagogic role of historical theology consists in theologians learning from the past in order to construct a viable theology in the present: the past provides the resources for doing theology in the present. The critical role involves exposing the inadequacies of past formulations of the Christian faith in order to construct a more viable understanding that meets the needs of the present generation of Christians. One of the tasks of this study will be to consider which, if any, of these different notions of historical theology are applicable to the way Kierkegaard engages with the history of theology. As we shall go on to see, Kierkegaardian historical theology consists of two elements, namely, recovering the voices of the true Christians of the past who genuinely followed Christ in suffering and martyrdom, and tracking the process of decline from the Christianity of the New Testament to the enfeebled caricature that passed for Christianity in contemporary Denmark. As noted above, the second problematic term in the phrase ‘Kierkegaard and the history of theology’ is Kierkegaard himself. The multiple meanings of Kierkegaard’s authorship and the many masks he adopts in his works make the study of his relation to historical theology complex and difficult. The situation is complicated still further by Kierkegaard’s critical attitude towards both theology and historical study. In an early journal entry he comments: To me the scholarly world of theology is like Strandveien on Sunday afternoon in the Deer Park season—they rush past one another, yell and shout, laugh and make fools of one another, drive their horses to death, tip over and are run over, and when they finally reach Bakken covered in dust and out of breath—yes, then they look at one another—and go home. (SKS17/KJN1: AA: 12 [JP5: 5092])

Kierkegaard’s views of theology became even more hostile in his later years. In a journal entry made in 1847 he states that if the proud possessor of a summa cum laude in theology were to read ‘one of those old theological works by an authentic spiritual guide’, he would ‘learn to be nauseated by all [his] knowledge qua theological knowledge’ (SKS20/ KJN4: NB3:31 [JP4: 4778]). Two years later he complains that all scholarly theology ‘has wanted to be the supreme wisdom instead of remaining what it is, an unassuming triviality’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:98 [JP4: 4780]). A study of Kierkegaard in terms of historical theology or any other kind of theology would thus seem to wish to impose upon his work a category which he viewed with suspicion, if not contempt. Kierkegaard was similarly critical of historical study. In the semi-autobiographical De Omnibus Dubitandum Est Kierkegaard writes of ‘Johannes Climacus’ that, ‘Historical

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works did not engage him, because the preponderant development of his mind had deprived him of a sense for empirical actuality, and just as he was usually indifferent to what other people said and thought it if had no relation to thinking, so, too, he was indifferent to all accounts of what was said and done by those who had lived earlier’ (SKS15: 24/PF: 129). The problem with historical study is that it suppresses the individuality and freedom of the human beings of the past and subsumes them into a systematized presentation of the ideas they developed, represented, or embodied. This is one of the concerns that underlies Climacus’s discussion of the ‘necessity’ of the past in Philosophical Fragments (SKS4: 272–86/PF: 72–88), the key point of which is that history is not predetermined but is made by free individuals making free choices. Consequently, a presentation of history in terms of necessity is a distortion of history, for it fails to take into account the most important feature of human history, namely freedom. The danger of historical study with regard to Christianity is that it runs the risk of reducing Christianity to a merely historical phenomenon, thus failing to do justice to Christianity’s transcendental character. Unlike other historical facts, the incarnation is what Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus calls in Philosophical Fragments an ‘absolute fact’ (SKS4: 296 PF: 99), which is the paradoxical presence in history of an eternal fact. To treat the absolute fact in purely historical terms is to ignore its eternal nature, for the absolute fact has ‘a unique quality in that it is not a direct historical fact but a fact based on a contradiction’ (SKS4: 286/PF: 87). Because the absolute fact is a historical fact which is simultaneously and paradoxically an eternal fact it falls outside the sphere of competence of historical study. In Postscript Climacus continues his critique of the historical approach by exposing the inadequacy of basing a God-relationship on the historical reliability of the Bible or on some other historical reality such as the Church (SKS7: 30–55/CUP 1: 23–49). The flaw of the historical approach is that it proceeds according to what Climacus calls an ‘approximation process’. The question of how we respond to Christianity is put off until the historians have established the historical reliability of the events upon which Christianity is based. The problem with the historical approach is that it is impossible to arrive at certainty. The best the historian can achieve is an approximation to the truth. Doubts always remain or what were once considered to be secure results can be overthrown by new historical investigations. The consequence is that the choice of faith or offence, of believing in or rejecting Christ is postponed indefinitely. If the validity of Christianity is made dependent on first securing its historical truth, then we will never arrive at the point where we are actually confronted by the question of faith. Not only do historical approaches to Christianity obscure the choice between faith and offence, they also confuse the question of faith with the history of how faith has been understood over the centuries. As Climacus puts it in Postscript: The New Testament is something of the past and is thus historical in a stricter sense. This is the beguiling aspect that prevents making the issue subjective and treats it objectively, whereby it never comes into existence at all.—Philosophical Fragments focuses on this difficulty in chapters IV and V by canceling the difference between the contemporary follower and the latest follower, who are presumed to be separated

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by 1800 years. This is of importance lest the issue (the contradiction that the god has existed in human form) be confused with the history of the issue, that is, with the summa summarum of 1800 years of opinions etc. (SKS7: 44/CUP1: 38)

One of the purposes of Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘contemporaneity’ is to place history in its proper relation to faith. It is important to put aside the centuries that have elapsed since Jesus’s earthly ministry, so that the individual is confronted by the paradox of the God-man and the choice between faith and offence with which he confronts each human being. The centuries intervening between the historical Jesus and present human beings are merely a distraction. History is important only as the antithesis of eternity. It is required in order to set up the contradiction of time and eternity that constitutes the paradox of the God-man. The historical basis of Christianity is also important in making clear that Christianity is not a set of universal truths that can be detached from their historical context, but is dependent upon and conditioned by the historical event of Christ’s life and death. Christianity cannot be separated from this event, precisely because God’s presence in history is essential for creating the paradox. Consequently, although the God-man is situated in history, he cannot be explained (away) by historical study, precisely because the paradoxical character of the God-man cannot be grasped by human thought. Human beings encounter the God-man only in faith, by means of which they become contemporary with Christ regardless of the centuries that separate them from the historical Jesus. For Kierkegaard, historical investigation of Christianity is in any case redundant, for the meaning of Christianity is straightforward and has no need of the assistance of scholarship, historical or otherwise. As he points out in For Self-Examination, ‘It is only all too easy to understand the requirement contained in God’s Word’, as is evident from such biblical passages as giving one’s property to the poor and turning the other cheek. Such passages, Kierkegaard comments, are ‘all just as easy to understand as the remark “The weather is fine today” ’ (SKS13: 61/FSE: 34). Similarly, he states in Christian Discourses that, ‘Ordinarily everyone who lives in Christendom has unconditionally enough knowledge about Christianity to be able to invoke and supplicate, to be able to turn in prayer to Christ’ (SKS10: 251–2/CD: 246). We do not need to wait on the deliberations of theologians or historians to know what God requires of us. Indeed, for Kierkegaard scholarly research is a stratagem that crafty human beings employ to avoid taking seriously the challenge that Christianity presents to each and every one of us: ‘All this interpreting and interpreting and scholarly research and new scholarly research that is produced on the solemn and serious principle that it is in order to understand God’s Word properly—look more closely and you will see that it is in order to defend oneself against God’s Word’ (SKS13: 61/FSE: 34). In view of Kierkegaard’s critique of both theological and historical study we might be led to conclude that the study of his relationship to the history of theology would consist of little more than a statement of his arguments for its inadequacy. Such a conclusion, however, would be mistaken. No thinker begins his/her work from a blank slate, nor does s/he develop his/her theology de novo. In the case of Christianity, the Christian thinker’s work is carried out in engagement with a long history of theological reflection.

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In this respect Kierkegaard was no different from any other Christian author. Despite his originality and creativity, Kierkegaard’s thought did not come into existence in a vacuum, but in dialogue with other thinkers both past and present.1 This dialogue is particularly evident in his journals, notebooks, and papers. Indeed, it is here that we see Kierkegaard’s engagement with the theological tradition at its clearest, for we can track in his journals how he works out his own position in debate with other theologians. In his published works we tend only to see the fruits of this work. The question is whether Kierkegaard’s engagement with the history of theology is merely sporadic and ad hoc or whether it is the expression of a distinctive historical theology in one of the senses outlined above. In what follows we shall consider the character of Kierkegaard’s encounter with the history of theology in three phases of his intellectual development, namely, during his university studies, in his authorship from Either/Or to Practice in Christianity, and finally in the period from c. 1850 to his attack on Christendom in the last year of his life. This survey will enable us to identify whether it is possible to speak of a distinctive Kierkegaardian historical theology.

II. Kierkegaard’s Knowledge of the History of Theology Kierkegaard’s University Studies In October 1830, Kierkegaard enrolled as a student at the University of Copenhagen. Theology, however, was only one of his many interests and indeed a relatively minor one, as the following journal entry from 1 June 1835 makes clear. As far as little irritations are concerned, I will remark only that I am embarked on studies for the theological degree, an occupation that does not interest me in the least and which therefore is not going particularly quickly. I have always preferred free, perhaps therefore also rather indefinite, studies to the offerings at private dining clubs where one knows beforehand who the guests will be and what food will be served each day of the week. (SKS17/KJN1: AA:12 [JP5: 5092])

This reluctance to commit himself fully to his theological studies does not mean, however, that Kierkegaard was antipathetic towards Christianity. That he was profoundly interested in the Christian faith is evident from the Gilleleje journal entry, in which he makes clear that what he is searching for is not a mass of information about Christianity, but an entry point into Christianity which will allow it to come alive for him. He asks, 1 For studies of Kierkegaard’s reception of individual theologians and philosophers, see the multi-volume series edited by Jon Stewart et al., Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources (2007–).

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‘What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and my life?’ (SKS17/KJN1: AA:12 [JP5: 5100]). In other words, Kierkegaard is searching for the existential meaning of Christianity. He is concerned to find a truth worth living and dying for, as he puts it in the same journal entry. The problem with his theological studies is that they appeared to bypass this existential meaning and reduce Christianity from being a living faith to a catalogue of information. Kierkegaard’s lack of interest in his theological studies and his preference for free study is reflected in the sketches and notes in his journals, which make clear that, although his heart was not in his studies, he read widely in other areas. Although Kierkegaard attended H. N. Clausen’s lectures on dogmatics in 1833–4 (SKS19/KJN3: Not1:2–9) and in 1834 engaged Hans Lassen Martensen as his theological tutor, between spring 1835 and the end of January 1837 he focused primarily on literary works (SKS17/ KJN1: BB:1–25; 51; SKS19/KJN3: Not2:2–3.18; SKS27: Pap. 141; 180; 215; 249; 252: 1–5; 253) and followed closely developments in contemporary philosophy. From the receipts of his book purchases and from the works mentioned in Kierkegaard’s journals and published works it is evident, as Niels Thulstrup points out, that ‘in the latter half of the 1830’s SK acquired and read generally what were at that time the latest German and Danish philosophical writings’ (Niels Thulstrup 1978: 57). He kept up with contemporary theological and philosophical debate by subscribing to two journals, namely Tidsskrift for udenlandsk theologisk Litteratur and Zeitschrift für Philosophie und speculative Theologie. From autumn 1837, Kierkegaard began to give greater attention to theological questions. He attended Martensen’s lectures on speculative dogmatics in the winter semester of 1837–8 (SKS19/KJN3: Not4:3–12) and he embarked upon a close reading of J. E. Erdmann’s Vorlesungen über Glauben und Wissen (SKS19/KJN3: Not4:13–40). According to Thulstrup, ‘Erdmann’s book is one of the very few modern works on philosophy of religion which SK read in its entirety’ (Niels Thulstrup 1978: 53). Kierkegaard’s university studies prompted him to acquire the standard textbooks in Christian theology of his day, which he read to a greater or lesser degree.2 Until the death of his father in 1838, however, Kierkegaard’s interests were more philosophical than theological. As he states in his petition to the theological faculty to be permitted to sit the examination in theology, ‘I daily grew farther and farther away from theology and in the course of time with all sails set slipped into the study of philosophy’ (LD: 10). On his father’s death, however, he felt duty-bound to ‘resume the studies I had already consigned to oblivion’ (LD: 10). The record of the Examen theologicum, which he took on 3rd July 1840, indicates that he satisfied the examiners in the major theological disciplines, including the history of theology (LD: 10–16). Of those theologians Kierkegaard mentions in the journals of this period his references to Tertullian and Augustine are particularly noteworthy. Tertullian seems to have made an impression on Kierkegaard from a very early date. In a journal entry dated 3rd 2

For a list of the works owned by Kierkegaard, see H. P. Rohde 1967.

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July 1839 he makes his first reference to Tertullian’s notion of credo quia absurdum, a phrase to which he would often return in later works. He derived this phrase not from reading Tertullian, however, but from de Wette (SKS18/KJN2: EE:103 [JP4: 4095]). Augustine may have planted the seeds of Kierkegaard’s theory of three spheres of existence. In an early journal entry Kierkegaard notes that in contrast to Pelagius, whose ‘system appeals to man as he is’, Augustine’s ‘system acquires three stages: Creation—the Fall and, as a consequence, death and powerlessness—and a new Creation, so that man is placed in the position of being able to choose, and afterward—if he chooses— Christianity’ (SKS17/KJN1: AA: 14.2 [JP1: 29]). Kierkegaard’s postgraduate studies continued the trend evident in his undergraduate studies of focusing primarily on philosophical rather than theological issues. Study of the history of theology played little role in Kierkegaard’s research for his dissertation on irony, which focused above all on Plato and Hegel, but also engaged with Fichte, Schlegel, and others, and it was submitted in the Faculty of Philosophy. In The Concept of Irony there are, however, occasional references to theologians, whom he cites primarily in order to illustrate a point connected with his argument concerning irony. In the notes he made while working on his dissertation, Kierkegaard makes a brief mention of Clement, commenting that ‘there is humor in Clement of Alexandria’s praise of writing allegories so that the heathens could not understand’ (Pap. III B 5 [JP2: 1724]). Kierkegaard briefly mentions Augustine’s description of sin as beata culpa in the course of a discussion of Socrates (SKS1: 139/CI: 173), while in the final paragraph of the work he draws a parallel between irony and ‘the old thesis credo quia absurdum’ (SKS1: 357/CI: 329). Sometimes Kierkegaard cites a theologian not for theological reasons, but simply because that theologian provides a choice phrase which he can employ to add colour to his argument. An example is provided by Kierkegaard’s citation of Abraham à Santa Clara. In the course of a discussion of the proliferation of ideas in contemporary thought Kierkegaard states that ideas which briefly come into existence before quickly expiring are ‘like the child Abraham à Santa Clara tells of, who in the moment it was born became so afraid of the world that it rushed back into its mother’s womb’ (SKS1: 90/CI: 28).

Kierkegaard’s Engagement with the History of Theology from Either/Or until Practice in Christianity Kierkegaard’s engagement with the history of theology after the completion of his postgraduate dissertation continued along lines laid down during his university studies. His reading after The Concept of Irony continued to be dominated by philosophy, especially in 1842–3, when he read deeply in classical philosophy, but also engaged with such thinkers as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. The thinkers who engaged Kierkegaard’s attention and from whom he learnt most were those who had a strongly existential dimension to their thought and were opposed to systematization. These were above all Socrates, Hamann, and Lessing.

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Kierkegaard’s engagement with the theological tradition during this period was not as sustained as his engagement with philosophy and literature. This is evident both in his published works and his journals. His publications from Either/Or to Practice in Christianity do not engage in any detail with the work of earlier theologians, even when Kierkegaard is dealing with overtly theological themes. A trawl through the indexes of the works published between 1843 and 1850 will reveal many more references to philosophers and literary authors than to the classic theologians of the Christian faith. The most extensive engagement with the history of theology in the published works of this period appears in The Concept of Anxiety, in which Vigilius Haufniensis devotes a section to the discussion of ‘Historical Intimations regarding the Concept of Hereditary Sin’ (SKS4: 332–6/CA: 25–9). In this section Vigilius provides a brief survey of different views of original or hereditary sin, referring to the harmatologies of Catholicism, the Greek Church, and Protestantism as well as citing Tertullian, Augustine, the Lutheran Smalcald Articles and the Formula of Concord, before briefly touching on Pelagianism and Socinianism. The journals provide more evidence than the published works of engagement with the history of theology, but this too is not on the scale of his engagement with other branches of study. Perhaps the reason for this is that the issue that concerned Kierkegaard was not doctrine, for he simply accepts as given the core doctrines of the Christian faith. As he puts it in a journal entry of 1850, ‘On the whole, the doctrine as it is taught is entirely sound. Consequently that is not what I am contending for. My contention is that something should be done with it’ (SKS24: NB22:23 [JP6: 6702], cf. NB23:197 [JP6: 6753]). The question for Kierkegaard is not the validity of the doctrinal claims made by Christianity, but how we realize Christianity in our own individual lives. Consequently, Kierkegaard is rarely concerned with doctrinal issues for their own sake, but tends to deal with them only in so far as they are significant for the existential appropriation of the Christian faith. Despite this, Kierkegaard does occasionally engage with the history of theology. This engagement rarely takes the form of a sustained study of the major theologians of the past, however. A good example of how he treats past theologians is provided by his treatment of Clement of Alexandria. Kierkegaard seems to have been drawn to Clement primarily because of the affinity of his notion of indirect communication with Clement’s understanding of allegory. We saw earlier that when working on The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard made a note on Clement’s use of allegory to conceal the truth from heretics. He takes up this theme again in Repetition. Lamenting the fact that few people now concern themselves with the art of being a good reader, Constantin Constantius, the pseudonymous author of Repetition comments: ‘Of course, this deplorable state has its effect on an author who, in my opinion, very properly joins Clement of Alexandria in writing in such a way that the heretics are unable to understand it’ (SKS4: 91/R: 225). Kierkegaard returns to this notion in The Concept of Anxiety, where Vigilius Haufniensis cites Constantin’s reference to Clement in his review of Repetition (SKS4: 325/CA: 18n.). Clement’s influence seems to have been decisive in dissuading Kierkegaard from responding to J. L. Heiberg’s review of Repetition. One of the reasons why Kierkegaard eventually

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decided against publishing the response he had drafted was that: ‘Since I wrote that little book “so that the heretics would not be able to understand it,” it would be stepping out of character to explain it in somewhat greater detail’ (Pap. IV B 109/R: 282). Another Church Father who interested Kierkegaard in the 1840s was, once more, Tertullian, whose notion of credo quia absurdum continued to influence his thinking. Johannes Climacus cites the phrase in his discussion of the paradoxical character of Christianity in Philosophical Fragments (SKS4: 256–7/PF: 52–3). Johannes de silentio’s notion of faith as movement by virtue of the absurd in Fear and Trembling also has affinities with the credo quia absurdum, although Johannes mentions neither this phrase nor Tertullian by name. Towards the end of the decade Kierkegaard seems to have become more interested in Luther. He had some knowledge of Luther from his upbringing in the Lutheran Church and his university studies, but he confesses in a journal entry that, ‘I have never really read anything by Luther’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB3:61 [JP3: 2463]). From this time onwards, however, Kierkegaard began to read more extensively in Luther’s works, above all his Postils and sermons. Many of the journal entries of this period are appreciative of Luther, precisely because Luther writes edifying, upbuilding works that bring out the existential character of Christianity. Kierkegaard was not uncritical of Luther, however. In a journal entry he states that ‘Luther’s mistake was that he did not go back far enough, did not make a person contemporary enough with Christ’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB5:91 [JP1: 691]). Kierkegaard does not elaborate on this remark, but his criticism is presumably that Luther was unable to arrive at the notion of true contemporaneity with Christ, which as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus make clear, consists not in temporal proximity to Christ but in the believer’s existential commitment to Christ regardless of where the believer is situated in time. Kierkegaard became increasingly interested in mystical works and in the writings of various Pietist authors, since these provided examples of Christians who understood Christianity to be a way of life than merely a system of thought. Kierkegaard was drawn to the Flemish mystic Louis de Blois, whose Comfort for the Fainthearted he held in high regard. He was impressed by the spiritual guidance it provided, and complained that, ‘Nowadays there are no longer pastors as spiritual advisers but only as mere spectators, naturally, because it is not lived any more’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB97[JP1: 381]). A less appealing work Kierkegaard read during this period was Joseph Görres’s study of mysticism Die christliche Mystik. Kierkegaard disliked the work, describing it as unheimlich [uncanny/unsettling] (CA: 208/Pap. V B 63). In The Concept of Anxiety,Vigilius Haufniensis recommends the work to anyone desiring material dealing with the religious spiritual trial, but ‘I sincerely admit that I never had the courage to read the work completely and thoroughly, because there is such anxiety in it’ (SKS4: 443/CA: 143n.). Among the Pietist writers he was reading at this time Kierkegaard was drawn particularly to Johannes Arndt and was moved by Arndt’s question, ‘How can God dry your tears in the next world if you have not wept’ (SKS8: 206/UDVS: 102; SKS18/KJN2: JJ:451 [JP5: 5920]). He also learnt from Arndt that we should contemplate Christ’s suffering and death ‘in order to get a conception of what sin means to God’. The fact that human beings’ sin could be

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addressed only by Christ’s suffering reveals ‘how revolting sin is in the eyes of God’ (SKS23: NB15:70 [JP4: 4026]).3 Kierkegaard was also drawn to certain Roman Catholic writers, notably the French Roman Catholic bishop François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, ‘a pious man’ (SKS22/ KJN6: NB12:102 [JP4: 4638]), for whom he had a critical appreciation. In 1844 Kierkegaard had drawn on the German translation of Fénelon’s Lebens-Beschreibungen und Lehr-Sätze der alten Welt-Weisen as a source for his meditation on Periander in Stages on Life’s Way (SKS6: 301–5/SLW: 323–8; Pap. V B 124/SLW: 566; SKS18/KJN2: JJ:238 [JP5: 5736]). He also made use of a passage from Fénelon he had found quoted in Jacobi in his upbuilding discourse ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’ (SKS5: 302/EUD: 310, cf. Pap. V B 201), and later noted in his journal a passage from St Theresa he had encountered in Fénelon’s works (SKS21/KJN5: NB10:210 [JP3: 3435]). Fénelon exerted his greatest influence on Kierkegaard, however, while the latter was deliberating on whether he should hold off publishing Practice in Christianity and The Sickness unto Death in order not to jeopardize his chances of gaining a church appointment. While pondering his options Kierkegaard cites two passages from Fénelon’s work. Firstly, he cites Fénelon’s observation ‘that it must be frightful for a man “from whom God had expected more or upon whom God had counted for a decision of greater amplitude” ’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:192 [JP 6: 6426]). Secondly, he mentions being ‘struck by what I read today in Fenelon, part 2, p. 26 (Claudius’ translation)’ (ibid.), which the Hongs inform us is a reference to a passage on God’s forbearance in not forcing human beings to sacrifice something they have loved without his first giving them insight into it and providing human beings with the power to carry out such sacrifice (JP6, p. 606n. 2289).4 The first of these two passages made a particularly powerful impression on Kierkegaard, for he repeats it in a modified form two years later when looking back on his decision to go ahead with the publication of the Anti-Climacan works (SKS24: NB24:54 [JP6: 6762]). Kierkegaard’s appreciative but critical view of Fénelon is evident in his criticism in a journal entry made in 1849 of ‘the otherwise noble Fénelon’ for resorting to the disastrous medium of eloquence to proclaim Christianity and his failure to grasp that ‘sarcasm, irony, humor lie far closer to the existential in Christianity’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:215 [JP1: 818]). In another entry of the same year Kierkegaard paraphrases Fénelon’s comparison of sorrow with an arrow which embeds itself every more firmly in the breast of a wounded deer the more the deer attempts to flee from it (SKS22/KJN6: NB12:119 [JP4: 4638]). He also notes Fénelon’s inversion of the syllogism that the false miracles of pagan religions prove that Christian miracles are also false. On the basis of the principle that ‘underneath such a universally human error there must be something true,’ Fénelon

3

Kierkegaard may be referring to Arndt when he refers to an ‘old devotional book’ he values (SKS5: 333/EUD: 344; SKS6: 228/SLW: 230; SKS7: 473/CUP1: 460), which may be allusions to Arndt’s True Christianity. Kierkegaard owned Johann Arndt, Sämtliche geistreiche Bücher vom wahren Christenthum (Tübingen, 21777; ASKB 276) and Fire Bøger om den sande Christendom (Christiana, 1820; ASKB 277). 4 The Hongs claims that Kierkegaard is referring to Fenelons Werke religiösen Inhalts, trans. Matthias Claudius, I–III (Hamburg: 1823), I: 220–1 (ASKB 1914).

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concludes that the presence of miracles in paganism points to the truth of the Christian miracles (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:148 [JP4: 4863]). Kierkegaard frequently cites remarks of theologians which chime with or anticipate his own thinking, or which simply appealed to him. Thus in Philosophical Fragments Climacus appropriates Lactantius’ phrase ‘glittering vices’ to illustrate how the paradox confers on the understanding a consciousness of its own magnificence (SKS4: 256/PF: 52–3). He quotes de Blois on the effects of the love of Jesus (SKS20/KJN4: NB3:35 [JP3: 2413]) and cites his definition of perfection as humility (SKS20/KJN4: NB3:47 [JP5: 6084]). Kierkegaard was taken by a comment Augustine made about forgiveness: ‘Augustine has said it so well: Certainly God has promised you forgiveness—but he has not promised you tomorrow’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB3:56 [JP2: 1210]). In Tauler’s Nachfolgung des armen Lebens Jesu Christi Kierkegaard found ‘a striking similarity to what I have developed in Christian Discourses’, and notes with approval Tauler’s view that ‘love prefers to obey counsel rather than commands’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB4:6 [JP2: 1844]). Kierkegaard made notes on Tersteegen’s sermons (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:177 [JP2: 1390]; SKS22/KJN6: NB11:182, 184, 188, 190; NB12:31, 65; SKS23: NB19:26, 43, 45, 68, 78; NB20: 6, 32 [JP4: 4750–63]; SKS22/KJN6: NB11:192 [6: 6426]), in which he found beautiful thoughts and penetrating observations.5 On other occasions Kierkegaard simply notes without comment statements by theologians which appear to have interested him.6

Kierkegaard’s Engagement with the History of Theology from 1850 until 1855 One strand of Kierkegaard’s engagement with the history of theology between 1850 and 1855 follows the pattern we have observed in the preceding sections. Kierkegaard continued to note agreements between his views and those of other theologians as well as anticipations of his own ideas in the history of theology. For example, he found in Clement of Alexandria an anticipation of his notion of martyrdom (SKS26: NB33:50 [JP2: 2080]) and in Tertullian a version of his distinction between direct and indirect recognizability (SKS24: NB23:135a [JP4: 4766]). Kierkegaard cites with approval Hugo of St Victor’s view that faith is greater than reason and states that he has developed the same view in Postscript (SKS23: NB15:25 [JP1: 7]). In Tersteegen’s work Kierkegaard found several anticipations of his own ideas, such as Christ’s incognito and indirect communication (SKS23: NB19:22a [JP4: 4040]; cf. SKS23: NB19:43a [JP4: 4758]). He describes Tersteegen’s comment that many people have ‘the words of truth, but not the truth of the words’ as ‘a superb expression’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:184 [JP4: 4751]), 5 Kierkegaard owned Tersteegen’s collected works (ASKB 827–30), but tended in his journals to refer to the anthology compiled by Georg Rapp. Georg Rapp (ed.), Tersteegens Schriften, Nebst dem Leben desselben (Essen, 1841; ASKB 729). 6 See for example SKS20/KJN4: NB2:196 [JP1:179] (Augustine), SKS22/KJN16: NB14:4 [JP6: 6524] (Thomas à Kempis), and SKS22/KJN6: NB11:31 [JP3: 2490] (Luther).

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presumably because this is a succinct summary of his own conviction that many who know the truth fail to live by it. As before, on many occasions Kierkegaard simply notes in his journals passages from theological works that impressed him. For example, he refers to Augustine’s ‘masterful’ phrase that human weakness and ignorance do not excuse sin, but rather testify to the consequences of sin (SKS24: NB23:168 [JP4: 4047]). He quotes Chrysostom’s ‘superb’ comment that, ‘The house did not fall because the storms came—but because it was built on sand’ (SKS24: NB23:47 [JP1: 577]). Similarly, he cites the ‘splendid observation’ Chrysostom makes in a letter to Theodore of Mopsuestia that, ‘If the Christian does not do himself harm, nothing will harm him, he is impregnable’ (SKS24: NB22:123 [JP4: 4466]). At other times Kierkegaard simply quotes an author without comment. Such journal entries witness to a continuation of the practice we noted in the previous section of Kierkegaard’s citation of passages from earlier theologians’ works which illustrated or supported a point he wished to make or which simply interested him. The main reason for Kierkegaard’s interest in the history of theology after 1850, however, was his growing awareness that certain theologians of the past provided him with resources in his struggle against the lukewarm Christianity of his contemporaries. Kierkegaard became increasingly critical of the disparity between contemporary Christianity and what he took to be true Christianity, namely the Christianity of the New Testament. He hoped that his Practice in Christianity would elicit a confession from the primate of the Danish Church, Bishop Mynster, of how far the Danish Church had fallen short of genuine Christianity. When no such confession was forthcoming, Kierkegaard began to marshal his forces for an open attack on the Church. The key source for his thinking was the New Testament, but he also found resources in those epochs of church history when Christians still genuinely lived according to the faith they professed. It is for this reason that it is in the final five years of his life that we find Kierkegaard’s most extensive engagement with the history of theology. Although Kierkegaard owned many of the primary texts, both in the original languages as well as in translation,7 after 1850 he refers mostly not to the sources themselves but to various manuals of church history, especially Friedrich Böhringer’s Die Kirche Christi und ihre Zeugen.8 We also find between 1850 and 1855 an interest in medieval, mystical, and pietist authors, in whom Kierkegaard found insights into the character of Christian existence (see M. M. Thulstrup 1978: 60–80). Kierkegaard’s concern with the history of theology in this period takes three distinct forms. (1) Kierkegaard draws on the history of theology first and foremost as a source of inspiration on the nature of true Christianity. He finds this inspiration in those theologians who took seriously the imitation of Christ as the mark of the true disciple and above all

7 For Kierkegaard’s ownership of works on and by the Fathers and medieval theologians, see ASKB 113–53. 8 See, for example, SKS23: NB23:117 [JP3: 3162], 129 [JP4: 4046], 141 [JP2: 1196], 156 [JP4: 4470], 165 [JP2: 1197], 166 [JP2: 1198], 167 [JP2: 1199], 168 [JP4: 4047], 172 [JP2: 1269] 205 [JP1: 532]; SKS27: Pap:520 [JP1: 616], and many others.

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in the ‘truth-witnesses’ (SKS13/M, passim) or ‘glorious ones’ (SKS13: 347–8, 349, 382–6/M: 289, 291, 321–5) who suffered persecution and martyrdom for their faith. For these reasons Kierkegaard was drawn particularly to ‘the Ancient Church Fathers’, who understood literally and personally Christ’s command to sacrifice everything (SKS24: NB23:116 [JP4: 3830]). Today, however, Kierkegaard complains, Christians ridicule such commitment as ‘ludicrous exaggeration’ (SKS24: NB23:116c [JP4: 3831]). It is, however, these ancient Christians who provide us with an insight into what it really means to take Christianity seriously and to live a genuinely Christian life. Kierkegaard continued to value Tertullian, whom he describes as ‘the unconditionally most consistent and most Christianly two-edged of all the Church Fathers’ (SKS25: NB28:9 [JP1: 542]). In a journal entry of 1851, Kierkegaard notes that Christianity can be presented ‘either in man’s interest (mitigating accommodation) or in God’s interest (true Christianity)’. As an example of someone who has presented Christianity in God’s interest Kierkegaard once again cites Tertullian, writing that, ‘Hardly any Church Father has presented Christianity in God’s interest so powerfully as Tertullian has’ (SKS24: NB23: 133 [JP4: 4764]). Tertullian was a Christian who held firmly to the truth, as evidence for which Kierkegaard quotes a passage on Tertullian from Böhringer, namely ‘He who has known the truth cannot do otherwise, he must cling to it’ (SKS24: NB23:134 [JP4: 4765]). Kierkegaard links Tertullian’s holding fast to the truth with ‘old Father Socrates’, who ‘advances a similar meaning of “to understand.” ’ What links Socrates and Tertullian is that they both understand that ‘to do the truth is the criterion for having understood it’ (ibid.). In other words, what is significant about Socrates and Tertullian is that they both recognize that it is not enough to grasp the truth intellectually or cognitively, but to appropriate and realize it in one’s own existence. A survey of Kierkegaard’s journals between 1850 and 1855 will reveal numerous citations of passages from the early Church Fathers that touch on the need to live according to the truth one claims to believe in and on the suffering and martyrdom intrinsic to Christian discipleship. Kierkegaard is drawn above all to those who understand Christian discipleship to mean the imitation of Christ in his suffering, persecution, and martyrdom. In a journal entry of 1854 Kierkegaard notes how simply Cyprian solved the problem of ‘whether or not the cup should be withheld from the laity by answering: If they are required to shed their blood for Christ’s sake, we dare not deny them Christ’s blood’ (SKS25: NB28:59 [JP2: 1924]). Kierkegaard notes a similar connection between Christ’s suffering and the suffering of the true disciple in a comment by Tertullian, who insists that, ‘He who himself does not wish to suffer cannot love Him who has suffered’ (SKS24: NB23:140 [JP4: 4771]). In journal entries made in 1854 Kierkegaard cites Tertullian in support of the view that confessing Christ should involve danger, noting that ‘Tertullian also says very correctly: Confession takes place only where there is persecution’ (SKS27: Pap. 520 [JP1: 616]), and quoting in Latin Tertullian’s statement that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church (SKS26: NB32:128 [JP1: 559]). Kierkegaard contrasts Augustine’s view that being a Christian entails suffering unfavourably with contemporary Christianity, which wishes merely to enjoy life (SKS24: NB23:154 [JP4: 4670]).

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Kierkegaard was interested in the Pietists for similar reasons. Tersteegen became influential on Kierkegaard from 1849. As we saw in the previous section, Kierkegaard held Tersteegen in high regard. Indeed, he considered Tersteegen to be ‘incomparable’ and found in him ‘genuine and noble piety and simple wisdom’ (SKS23: NB19:43 [JP4: 4757]). The importance of Tersteegen to Kierkegaard is evident from the fact that he used a verse from Tersteegen as the epigraph for On My Work as an Author (SKS13: 8/PV: 2). What attracted Kierkegaard to Tersteegen was the latter’s emphasis on the importance of Christians living out the Christianity they profess. Thus he cites Tersteegen’s comment concerning the commitment shown by the three kings, who were moved by a mere rumour to travel a great distance to see the infant Jesus, while the scribes in Jerusalem did nothing despite knowing where the messiah was to be born (Matt. 2:1–12). Kierkegaard comments, ‘Alas, in similar fashion a person can know all about Christianity, but it does not move him’ (SKS23: NB19:43 [JP4: 4757]). In another journal entry Kierkegaard notes with approval Tersteegen’s view that ‘if faith does not move a man to act according to it, his having faith is imaginary’ (SKS23: NB19:78 [JP4: 4761]). What Kierkegaard values in the writings of the Pietists is their emphasis on the humility of Christ, Christ’s sufferings, and the notion of Christian discipleship as imitation of Christ in his humility and suffering. Kierkegaard read the Fathers, mystics, and Pietists, because he found in them models of true Christian existence. They provided examples of genuine believers who imitated Christ’s example, took up their cross, and suffered for the sake of their faith. Kierkegaard shows little interest, however, in their specific theologies. (2) The second motive for Kierkegaard’s engagement with the history of theology from 1850 to 1855 was to collect ammunition for his attack on contemporary Christianity. In this period Kierkegaard frequently notes in his journals texts and ideas which lend support to his struggle against ‘Christendom’. These notes are of two kinds. Firstly, Kierkegaard makes notes on past theologians’ critiques of the subordination of faith to knowledge, reason, philosophy, or scholarship. Secondly, he collects evidence from the history of theology for the decline of Christianity. (2)(a) Kierkegaard was attentive to passages in older theological works that made clear the fundamental difference between faith and reason. Thus Kierkegaard sees Tertullian as an ally, because Tertullian rightly distinguishes ‘between faith and nonChristian wisdom’ (SKS24: NB23:136 [JP4: 4767]). For similar reasons, he cites with approval Thomas à Kempis’ exhortation to his reader to ‘be not lifted up on account of any skill or knowledge, but rather fear on account of the knowledge that is given you. For the more you know and the better you understand it, the more rigorously you will be judged if you have not lived more holily’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB13:24 [JP4: 4785]). Kierkegaard was impressed by Tersteegen’s observation that the writings of the mystics tend to be less highly regarded and widely read than other theological writings. Tersteegen ascribes this to the fact that ‘curious reason’ does not find sufficient nourishment in such writings and because they demand of the reader not reason and speculation, which are what appeal to the old Adam, but rather mortification and denial, which the old Adam finds distasteful (SKS22/KJN6: NB12:31 [JP4: 4754]).

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(2)(b) Kierkegaard was alert to evidence in the history of theology for the decline of Christianity and the corruption of the Church. In Origen he finds support for his demand that clergy should not receive salaries, for like Kierkegaard Origen urged priests not to accept money for performing their duties (SKS24: NB23:117 [JP3: 3162]). Kierkegaard quotes with approval a passage from Neander’s biography of Chrysostom Der heilige Johannes Chrysostomus und die Kirche, which describes how Chrysostom censured a Christian for attempting to demonstrate Christianity’s truth by proving that Paul was more eloquent than Plato. Chrysostom rightly recognizes that the lack of learning and eloquence of the apostles ‘was itself proof that Christianity was not human wisdom but God’s cause’. Kierkegaard agrees and contrasts Chrysostom’s insight with the misunderstanding of his own age: ‘How correctly Chrysostom grasped the issue! But what is all modernity if not the very retrogression which this Christian displayed. Christianity is presented in direct categories—far deeper, more profound, higher, etc. than Plato, etc.—rather than in the category of being foolishness to reason, the absurd’ (SKS24: NB22:138 [JP1: 575]). Kierkegaard also cites Chrysostom’s condemnation of ‘the habit of regarding clergymen merely as orators and the view common in the great cities dominated by Greek culture that religious address is practically the same as the Sophists’ deluxe oration’ (SKS24: NB22:129 [JP3: 3161]). In the same journal entry Kierkegaard quotes without comment Chrysostom’s complaint that ‘there are few who are really earnest about faith and life, but many who speculate about things which we cannot possibly grasp, yes, which call down God’s wrath on us for wanting to speculate on them.’ An anecdote from Böhringer describing Anselm’s lack of support from his bishops when he got into a conflict with the king forms the basis of Kierkegaard’s reflection on the lack of commitment to the Christian faith among contemporary clergy (SKS27: Pap. 457 [JP1: 21]; cf. SKS24: NB23:198). Kierkegaard was also struck by Thomas à Kempis’ comment that one should be desirous of doing another’s will rather than one’s own (SKS22/KJN6: NB11:101 [JP3: 2691]). Clergymen whose will one could indeed follow no longer exist in Kierkegaard’s age, however, and, ‘If I were to submit to any clergyman, I am sure he would secularize my whole endeavor by promptly getting me into the establishment, into the moment, into an office, into a title, etc.’. Kierkegaard cites a story concerning Bernard of Clairvaux that ‘parents held back their children and wives their husbands— lest Bernard should persuade them to become Christians in such a way that they actually forsook everything’. This holding back of people to prevent them from becoming genuine Christians Kierkegaard sees as ‘a sample of Christendom’ (SKS23: NB15:48 [JP1: 201]) and is all too evident in contemporary Denmark. The contrast between the lives of the clergy and the faith they claim to profess was why Kierkegaard was interested in the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroek. He quotes Ruysbroek’s comment that many glosses and commentaries would be needed to prove that the secular lives of the monks were expressions of the rule of Benedict or Augustine. Applying this to contemporary Christianity, Kierkegaard remarks that ‘a great many glosses and commentaries, entire sciences’ would be required to show that the supposedly Christian lives lived by his contemporaries were expressions of the New Testament (SKS23: NB15:45 [JP3: 2759]).

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(3) Although Kierkegaard often cites past theologians in support of his own position on a variety of subjects, he takes issue with these selfsame theologians when he believes that their teaching falls short of the Gospel. On these grounds he is critical of Clement of Alexandria, since Clement ‘declares that we must substitute the purely human— reflection, scientific scholarship, etc.—for what the apostles had directly through the spirit’ (SKS24: NB23:107 [JP4: 3861]). Clement is in error because what the disciples received through the spirit was not ‘profundity, speculative intuition,’ but authority. The result of substituting scholarship for what the apostles had received through the spirit is that ‘it is forgotten that Christianity is existential’ (ibid.). Kierkegaard singles out Augustine for particular criticism, complaining that despite the fact that ‘Christianity is praxis, a character-task’, it has been turned into doctrine, an object for passive, brooding meditation, and lamenting that ‘even an Augustine is like this!’ (SKS25: NB28:43 [JP3: 3864]). Kierkegaard cites Augustine as an example of what muddleheads Christian philosophers are. Augustine’s stupidity is evident in his attempt to refute the Donatists merely by appealing to the fact that the membership of the Church is larger than that of the Donatists. In appealing to superiority of numbers Augustine has failed to recognize that ‘Christianity is related to the category of the single individual’ (SKS26: NB31:42 [JP4: 4299]), and thereby reveals that he misunderstands the nature of the Christian faith. In another journal entry Kierkegaard is even more severe in his criticism of Augustine, stating that, ‘Augustine has . . . done incalculable harm’. The reason for Kierkegaard’s condemnation is that he holds Augustine responsible for the degeneration of faith into doctrine: ‘The whole system of doctrine through the centuries relies upon him—and he has confused the concept of “faith.” ’ Kierkegaard’s criticism stems from his conviction that ‘Augustine had reinstated the Platonic-Aristotelian definition, the whole Greek philosophical pagan definition of faith’, which conceives of faith not in existential terms, but as ‘a concept which belongs in the sphere of the intellectual’. The result of this misunderstanding is that ‘faith is related to probability, and we get the progression: faith-knowledge’. Christianly understood, however, ‘ “faith” is at home and has its place in the existential and forever has nothing to do with the comparative or the superlative in requiring knowledge’ (SKS25: NB30:57 [JP1: 180]). In a later journal Kierkegaard adds the Alexandrians to his list of culprits responsible for reducing faith to an inferior form of knowledge: ‘The confusion of the concept of faith comes most directly from the Alexandrians. Augustine has also confused it by drawing the qualification of his concept “faith” directly from Plato (in the Republic)’ (SKS27: Pap. 486 [JP2: 1154]). Kierkegaard attributes this confusion of faith and knowledge apparent in the Alexandrians and Augustine to a general malaise that had already long been infecting Christians. He complains that, ‘already at the time of Augustine, Christianity was much too much at rest, had leisure to enable the scientific or scholarly to rise—with its conceited and misunderstood importance—and then we get pagan philosophy—and this is supposed to be Christian progress . . . .’ (SKS25: NB30:57 [JP1: 180]). Kierkegaard is also critical of Augustine’s concept of election by grace, which he sees as a means of avoiding the strenuousness of having to strive for eternal salvation in time (SKS25: NB30:112 [JP3: 2551]).

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Another architect of the decline of Christianity was Bernard of Clairvaux, whom Kierkegaard criticizes for preaching crusades to masses of people. In so doing, Bernard ‘is working in the direction of the animal-category, to work men together into—a crowd’. This is in contrast to Socrates, who worked ‘to split up the “crowd” and to seek “the single individual”—this is the spirit-category of what it is to be man’. Kierkegaard concludes that although Bernard was a Christian and Socrates a pagan, ‘yet there is more Christianity in the Socratic approach than in Saint Bernard’s’ (SKS25: NB28:42 [JP4: 4295]). Despite his appreciation of Luther’s Postils and sermons, Kierkegaard became increasingly critical of Luther. Luther, he complains, ‘was no dialectician; he always saw only one side of the matter’ (SKS24: NB24:141 [JP3: 2541]). This one-sidedness is evident in the way Luther treats the New Testament, for he ‘onesidedly draws Paul forward and uses the gospels less’ (SKS22/KJN6: NB14:70 [JP3: 2507]; cf. SKS26: NB 32:67 [JP3: 2554]). Luther’s lack of a comprehensive view of Christianity made him an inadequate reformer, for ‘to reform Christianity requires first and foremost a comprehensive view of the whole of Christianity’ (SKS25: NB30:22 [JP3:2550]). Furthermore, ‘Luther has actually done incalculable harm by not becoming a martyr’ (SKS25: NB29:12 [JP3: 2546]). The result of Luther’s inadequate understanding of Christianity is that he has contributed to the secularism that now dominates contemporary Danish society and which is confused with Christianity (SKS26: NB31:105 [JP3: 2553]). For Kierkegaard, ‘Luther reduced Christianity’. What he blames Luther for ‘is that he did not make this manifestly apparent’ (SKS24: NB28:7 [JP3: 2898]). Despite these criticisms, however, Kierkegaard valued Luther, because he ‘expresses a halt, an act of awareness. In him mankind or Christendom comes to be aware that between the God-man and us other men, yes, between the apostle and us other men, there is a qualitative difference, and that therefore “grace” must be introduced’ (ibid.). It is his recovery of this critical idea that prompts Kierkegaard to state that, ‘Next to the New Testament Luther is the truest figure’ (ibid.).

III. Conclusion: A Kierkegaardian Historical Theology? Kierkegaard’s focus for the larger part of his authorship was on contemporary theology and philosophy and the threat he believed they posed to genuine Christianity, by which he meant first and foremost the Christianity of the New Testament. His interest in the history of theology is subordinated to this concern. The main motivation for Kierkegaard’s interest in the history of theology up until c. 1850 was to fulfil the requirements of his theological degree and to acquire illustrations and examples to support his own thought. After c. 1850, however, he comes to see the history of theology as a source of useful materials in his struggle against the watered down, complacent form of Christianity practised by his contemporaries. This concern prompts him in the last

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phase of his authorship to engage with the history of theology in three distinct ways. Firstly, he draws on the theological tradition as a source of examples of genuinely Christian lives. Secondly, he cites those theologians who corroborate his assessment of the parlous state of contemporary Christianity or provide ammunition for his attack on Christendom. Thirdly, he criticizes those past theologians who laid the foundations for the subsequent decline of Christianity. Although Kierkegaard’s engagement with theological tradition is often eclectic and sometimes superficial, the way he engages with this tradition arguably reveals an underlying and distinctive Kierkegaardian historical theology. This historical theology differs in important respects from the types of historical theology outlined earlier, however. Historical theology understood as the study of the historical context of theology is of no concern to Kierkegaard, for it reduces Christianity to a purely historical phenomenon. Kierkegaard is not concerned with historical questions for their own sake, nor is he concerned with how history has influenced the formation of Christian doctrine. The definition of historical theology as the study of the historical development of dogma or doctrines is inappropriate to the way Kierkegaard deals with past theologies for two reasons. Firstly, thinking of Christianity in terms of doctrine overemphasizes Christianity as a mode of thought at the expense of Christianity’s character as a mode of existence. As Johannes Climacus puts it in Postscript, Christianity is not a doctrine but an existence-communication (SKS7: 346, 348, 509, 512–13, 518, cf. 297/CUP1: 379–80, 383, 560, 562, 564, 570, cf. 326). Secondly, the development of doctrine is quite simply not one of Kierkegaard’s concerns. Kierkegaard generally accepts the core doctrines of the Christian faith and is not concerned with how the Church came to formulate these doctrines or with tracing their development. For Kierkegaard, the key issue is: how do I live according to the Christian faith and what difference would it make to my life if I actually took Christianity seriously? Having said that, towards the end of his life Kierkegaard does show increasing interest in what we might loosely call doctrinal development, for he believes that some doctrines and practices of the Church have been a development away from the true character of the Christian faith (cf. SKS13: 273/M: 219). Kierkegaard explores this theme, however, not by tracing the historical development of the doctrines he wishes to critique, but by juxtaposing the current beliefs and practices of the Church with the teaching of the New Testament and the truth witnesses who suffered persecution and martyrdom for their faith. Of the definitions of historical theology outlined in our introduction perhaps the most appropriate to Kierkegaard is the notion of historical theology as the study of the history of the mediation of the Word of God. One of Kierkegaard’s major concerns throughout his life was to bring to the fore the existential character of faith. Faith is not so much something to be thought as to be lived. This fundamental conviction determines the way he engages with the theological tradition. Kierkegaard valued those past theologians who contributed to making the existential character of faith apparent, but was critical of those who watered down the Christian demand and attempted to make Christianity comfortable for human beings. That is, to put it in the language used in our discussion of the different conceptions of historical theology, it was important to

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Kierkegaard to differentiate between forms of theological thinking which contributed to the mediation of the Word of God and those which impeded it. This led him, particularly in his later thought, to recover the voice of the ‘glorious ones’, the authentic Christians of the past who truly lived their lives according to the Christian faith and suffered and died as a consequence. On this basis it is possible to conceive of a Kierkegaardian historical theology as consisting of a critique of contemporary Christianity by recovering the voice of ‘the glorious ones’. It would be possible for Kierkegaard to write a historical theology in which he tracked the process of decline from the stringent Christianity of the New Testament to the watered down version of Christianity practised in the nineteenth century. Something like this was undertaken but not completed by Franz Overbeck, who constructed such a study in order to show the radical difference between late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Christianity and the Christianity of the first Christians. Overbeck, however, undertook this historical study in order to demonstrate that Christianity was no longer tenable for modern human beings (see Law 2012). A Kierkegaardian historical theology on the other hand would comprise two elements. Firstly, it would provide modern Christians with examples of true Christian lives of commitment, imitation of Christ, suffering, and martyrdom, which modern believers are called upon to emulate if they are to be worthy of the Lord they claim to follow. Historical theology provides us with ‘derived prototypes’ (SKS13: 349–50/M: 291–2), i.e. with examples of Christians who have genuinely emulated the prototype that is Christ. Secondly, a Kierkegaardian historical theology would be concerned to track the deceitfulness of previous theologies and expose the stratagems human beings employ to dilute the demand of the Gospel. This would require disclosing the way the history of theology has been exploited by modern theologians to avoid following the Gospel. As Kierkegaard puts it dramatically in number 9 of The Moment, it would involve exposing the ‘cannibalism’ of modern Christians, by which he means the way Christians of today feed off the suffering of the genuine Christians of the past, but without ever following their examples of martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel (SKS13: 382–5/M: 321–3). A Kierkegaardian historical theology would thus demonstrate both the pedagogic and critical roles McGrath identifies as characteristics of historical theology as a theological discipline. Any historical study beyond the identification of examples of Christian discipleship and exposure of the deceitful strategies human beings have employed to dilute the Gospel, however, would undermine a key feature of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, namely that it was something to be appropriated and acted upon, not something to be studied objectively. A Kierkegaardian historical theology would therefore do just enough to expose the falsity of what people take to be Christianity, but without becoming immersed in historical study for its own sake. For this it would be sufficient to contrast contemporary Christianity with the New Testament and the witness of the true Christians of the past. Anything beyond this would once again constitute an attempt to subordinate Christianity to the canons of human reason. Finally, we should note the irony that Kierkegaard has himself become part of the history of theology. He was conscious of this danger and feared it. In the last edition

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of The Moment, which remained unpublished at his death, he warns his reader that his understanding of his life as a sacrifice ‘does not lead straight to profits; that will not be the case until after my death, when the oath-bound tradesmen will also appropriate my life for the salt-meat barrel’ (SKS13: 410/M: 345). On the other hand, the fact that Kierkegaard himself now contributes to the resources of historical theology is not of itself a bad thing, so long as we take seriously his practice of drawing on the examples of the ‘derived prototypes’ of the past as resources not merely for thinking about the Christian Gospel but for acting upon it. B. A. Gerrish describes historical theology as ‘a determination to make one’s theological decisions in the best company’ (Gerrish 1992: 290). In drawing upon Kierkegaard’s insights when considering how to live genuinely Christian lives in the present, we are surely doing theology in the best company.

References Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (1978). Historical Theology: An Introduction (Edinburgh: T & T Clark). Engel, Mary Potter and Wyman, Jr. Walter E. (1992). ‘Introduction’, in Mary Potter Engel and Walter E. Wyman, Jr (eds.), Revisioning the Past: Prospects in Historical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress), 1–10. Gerrish, B. A. (1992). ‘Theology and the Historical Consciousness’, in Engel and Wyman, Revisioning the Past, 281–97. Law, David R. (2012). ‘Franz Overbeck: Kierkegaard and the Decay of Christianity’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 10, Tome III: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology—German Protestant Theology (Farnham: Ashgate), 223–40. McGrath, Alister E. (1998). Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought (Oxford: Blackwell). Möhler. J. A. (1958–1961). Symbolik oder Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegensätze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren öffentlichen Bekenntnisschriften, ed. J. R. Geiselmann, 2 vols. (Cologne, Olten: Jakob Hegner). Pelikan, Jaroslav (1971). Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine (London: Hutchinson). Rohde, H. P. (1967). Auktionsprotokol over Søren Kierkegaards Bogsamling/The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: The Royal Library). Thulstrup, Marie Mikulová (1978). ‘Studies of Pietists, Mystics, and Church Fathers’, in Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup (eds.), Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1: Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel), 60–80. Thulstrup, Niels (1978). ‘Theological and Philosophical Studies’, in Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup (eds.), Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1, Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel), 38–60.

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Suggested Reading Bromiley (1978). Engel, Mary Potter and Wyman Jr, Walter E. (1992). McGrath (1998). Pelikan (1971). Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2007–). Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources (Aldershot and Farnham: Ashgate). Thulstrup, Niels and Thulstrup, Marie Mikulová (eds.) (1978). Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1, Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). —–— (1981). Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 6: Kierkegaard and Great Traditions (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel).

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pa rt i i

SOM E M AJOR TOPIC S I N T H E AU T HOR SHIP

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chapter 10

pseu don yms a n d ‘st y l e’ e dward f. mooney

I. Pseudonyms What does it mean to sign one’s name, or withdraw it, at the close of a piece of writing? Librarians dedicate a yard of shelf space to an author they name ‘Kierkegaard,’ but opening the books shelved there, we find that they are written by a motley crew sporting names like ‘Johannes Climacus’, ‘Johannes de silentio’, ‘Vigilius Haufniensus’, and many others. We could find the anonymous ‘A’, the enigmatic ‘Anti-Climacus’, one ‘Constantine Constantius’, and so forth. Few in Copenhagen were fooled by these pseudonyms, nor are we fooled today. So why indulge Kierkegaard’s hide-and-seek? Is there a literary, moral, or religious rationale to this amusing veiling, unveiling? Are these phantom authors, instead, mere flourish, like a book’s front illustration or back cover blurb?1 Pseudonyms are,to be sure, an attention-grabbing flourish but that’s hardly the end of the story. These flourishes make us ask what it means to be an author, what in a book’s impact is an impact of its author, and what ‘essential’ moral or religious truth (if any) authors and books can convey. At the very least, the pseudonymic flourish directs us away from pondering the street conversations, polemics, or broken engagements of an eccentric resident of 1840s and 1850s Copenhagen. Yes, there is a taxpaying citizen found walking about town, possessed of an acerbic wit, fine gastronomic tastes, and a monstrous intelligence. Yet immediately before us is not citizen-Kierkegaard but Johannes de silentio (or Johannes Climacus), who buffer the citizen from our gaze. We wonder about Homer’s link to the Odyssey, Plato’s link to Socratic dialogues, an unknowable poet’s link to the biblical Book of Job, Shakespeare’s link to an actor-director named Hamlet. But this wonder can disappear. Captured by the world of Socrates, Homer, Job, or Hamlet, the question of authorship can vanish. Our attention is absorbed by the old nurse who recognizes Odysseus’ scar, or by Socrates incautiously requesting 1

Parts of this chapter lean on Mooney 2007: ch. 11 and 2009.

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free meals as punishment, or by the Whirlwind’s display of vultures feasting on human blood, or by Hamlet’s deft staging of a play before the murderous king (and his wife). Wonder about who writes the story of the nurse, or of Socrates, or of vultures, for the moment disappears. The part played by writer-Kierkegaard (not exactly the citizen) in literary production, his importance and authority, might intrigue us. Yet immersed in the portrait of the taxpaying knight of faith, the wonder about who writes Fear and Trembling easily disappears. Yet it can become urgent to know who writes what. As we ponder a text, its pseudonym can become a key to interpretation. For if we declare that Johannes de silentio (of Fear and Trembling) is an autonomous author, then his accounts of faith are not necessarily Kierkegaard’s. And if Johannes Climacus (of Concluding Unscientific Postscript) is not ‘Kierkegaard-the-writer’, then the Postscript distinction between religiousness A and religiousness B is not necessarily a Kierkegaardian distinction. On the other hand, we might revert to the stance of the good librarian. All works shelved under ‘Kierkegaard’ are the work of a single writer, and the pseudonyms, no more than a cocky flourish. We might consider, as a third option: just bypass any concern with authorship. Texts are primary and always trump (more or less superfluous) issues of authorship. We take up the account of faith in Fear and Trembling and set it beside the account in Postscript, and set both beside accounts in the Discourses. We develop a deep appreciation of these texts without caring who wrote them. If each washed up in a bottle by the sea, lacking an author’s signature, we would still have in hand texts worthy of a lifetime’s attention. Like the Dead Sea scrolls, the writing would be primary. Say I learned that a committee of twenty, with shifting membership, worked diligently over centuries to compile and revise the Book of Job. My admiration for the text will be neither diminished nor enhanced. Of course Job belongs originally to an oral tradition, where authors are typically unknown, and singers of stories are constantly revising ‘the text’ in endless recountings over time. Yet at some point, oral traditions begin to compete with literary ones. The literary challenge brings with it signed authorships. With the emergence of writers and signed works, as readers we discover that we have what amounts to a metaphysical need for identifiable authors. Kant posits an inescapable need of reason (or need for reasons) that merges with a need to know origins.2 We crave knowledge of fathers and mothers, of first causes, of first settlers of the land. We want narratives to be truthful, and at some point we link this to a need for truthful narrators. It is not enough that in the beginning was waste and welter; we crave the good God who creates a viable world from welter and waste. Creation (so we think) requires a creator.3 We posit authors even when we know absolutely nothing, biographically speaking, about them. Homer must be more than a librarian’s filing device. We’d be crushed if ‘Kierkegaard’ turned out to be a storytelling troupe. 2

‘[T]he expectation of being able some day to . . . derive everything from one principle—the undeniable need of human reason, which finds complete satisfaction only in a complete systematic unity of its cognitions’ (Kant 1902: 91). 3 The Hebrew tohu wabohu is given as ‘welter and waste’ (rather than ‘formless void’) (Alter 1997).

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Our biographical instincts point to Copenhagen, journal records on file, a weathered headstone with chiselled words provided by the author himself. Yet our philosophical instincts aren’t easily quelled. Perhaps Kierkegaard is a citizen and also a storytelling troupe or its theatrical director. We have the stage names of his players: among others, ‘Inter et Inter’ and ‘Vigilius Haufniensis’ (Watchman of Copenhagen, whose Freiburg reincarnation kept anxious watch over Being).4 The plot thickens when we realize that granting a metaphysical or literary multitude at work, this creative ensemble pens a part for an author named ‘Kierkegaard’. Then he can seem single, legion, and even selfcreating. ‘S. Kierkegaard’ and others are stage names the ensemble puts forth.5 A creative genius named Kierkegaard creates an ensemble only a few of whom will answer to the name ‘Kierkegaard’. Yet without the skill and talent of a pseudonymous (and veronymous) ensemble, we’d lack any figure history would remember as ‘Kierkegaard’. In Fear and Trembling, de silentio says that the person of faith ‘gives birth to his own father’ (SKS4: 27/FT: 27). Could the ensemble ‘give birth to its own father’? The span of books that librarians innocently (and properly) shelve under ‘Kierkegaard’ is a city of troubles and wonders, a hydra headed set of biographical, literary, and philosophical enigmas.

Self: Single or Legion Melville wrote to his neighbour Hawthorne, ‘This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will mis-send it—for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper.’ (Melville 2001: 44) Melville suffers a lack of felt-identity through time. It disturbs him. He writes: ‘Lord, when shall we be done changing?’ (ibid.) Heraclitus wrote that one couldn’t step in the same river twice. Melville seems to doubt, that he, or anyone else, can encounter the same Melville twice. When Melville gets immersed in Ahab, Ishmael, or Starbuck, one by one he becomes the players in this performance, and so vanishes as a perduring, authoritative presence. Does Kierkegaard become a new author each time he starts a new book (under a new pseudonym, or non-pseudonym)—the new author only problematically related to predecessors and successors? But surely Kierkegaard-the-writer is an inescapable presence in European, American, Asian, and other cultural histories. His monumental status as the source of an oeuvre remains. Here are four lines of sight on ‘Kierkegaard’ that don’t easily converge. ‘Kierkegaard’ appears 1) as a familiar object of biographies of the Copenhagen citizen and writer. But perhaps instead he will appear 2) as a useless phantom: like Melville, he disappears or evaporates behind texts. More metaphysically, ‘Kierkegaard’ might appear 3) 4 Vigilius Haufniensis is the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety. His vigil (or anxious watch) foretells Heidegger’s ‘watch over being.’ Heidegger’s Augenblick is also taken from Anxiety. 5 Westfall 2007 is path-breaking.

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as an implied author, as a posited transcendental subject that unifies an array of texts, functioning not unlike ‘Homer’; he would be a Kant-like ‘transcendental unity of authorial production’ presupposed in reading Postscript or Fear and Trembling. Finally, far less metaphysically, ‘Kierkegaard’ appears 4) as a cultural figure without whom we would have far less grasp of Heidegger, Rilke, Ortega, Barth, Auden, or the Kyoto School. Lacking Kierkegaard, none of these would exist exactly as we know them. Spans of the familiar texture of twentieth century thought would be altered.

Hamlet Harold Bloom holds that Shakespeare’s consummate invention is Hamlet, who embodies—he says, ‘invents’—our modern notion of the human (Bloom 2003: 8). Although there is no shrine to mark the bones of an historical Prince of Denmark worthy of biographies, Prince Hamlet, Shakespeare’s invention, has an incredibly powerful poetic and cultural actuality, as Bloom avers. Johannes de silentio or Johannes Climacus will never be subjects of biographies, but they have a powerful poetic and culture presence, in undergraduate classes—a presence reinforced through the artistry of Ibsen, Kafka, Walker Percy, Derrida, Ingmar Bergman, and endless others. Hamlet’s play within the play, ‘Mousetrap’, will flourish in the flow of cultural history, as will de silentio’s multiple Abraham scenarios. Hamlet directs that play before his mother and the king to test them. Climacus casts Socrates in a solo dance before God to test our credulity (SKS7: 63/CUP1: 89).6 He gives lines to a figure named ‘Kierkegaard’ in Postscript’s ‘A Contemporary Effort’ (SKS7: 187f./CUP1 251). ‘S. Kierkegaard’ makes a late intervention at the close of Postscript (SKS7: 475–80/CUP1: 617–23).7 This extraordinary nesting of texts within texts, authors within authors outshines even the endlessly inventive Hamlet—Hamlet does not insert ‘Will Shakespeare’ in his play before the king, nor let ‘Shakespeare’ comment sotto voce from the stage on Hamlet’s inventiveness.8 A Copenhagen citizen and literary genius adopts an authorial strategy, darting forward and back as ‘Kierkegaard’, and as this pseudonym or that. He seduces, then abandons, his readers, playing a kind of fun and dangerous hide-and-seek. The problem of the Kierkegaardian authorship is ultimately our own. We have an obsessive desire for the real, single Kierkegaard to please stand up!

Sublime Unsettling What can we make of these antic authorial proliferations and imbrications? As it dodges stable representation, the sublime unsettling that we call ‘Kierkegaard’s works’ 6

Kierkegaard 2009. Climacus dances with death in Philosophical Crumbs (see Preface, last sentence). The final inserted sheets, initialled ‘S. K.’, are unpaginated. 8 Climacus lets himself explain the authorship of which he is a member (as if Hamlet’s play, Mousetrap, were to explain the play Hamlet, or perhaps, all of Shakespeare). 7

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nevertheless has a halting, mobile, ever changing sense. A carnival’s confusion makes some sort of sense, even though it can overwhelm in its spectacle, noise, disorientation, chaos, and colour.9 Call that moment of excitement and fear the ‘carnivalesque’ sublime (Bakhtin 1984: 107). It shimmers a many-sided kind of sense that emerges as we escape the immediate crush and glitter of arcades. As we escape (if we do), the flickering sense we can carry away is not like a wellfocused snapshot or clearly drawn map. It comes despite unsettled disorder, as a sigh of relief—as we achieve safe distance. A taste for the everyday is revived. We might relish a nostalgic calm, having ridden a large wave without mishap. And we suppress the intimation that at any moment a swirl can reappear. The sea has its rogue waves, but for the moment, the last word is not sound and fury signifying nothing.

Who Determines Identity? Tax collectors know how to nail down a tax liable resident of Copenhagen, and librarians know how to shelve an author whose books arrive in the mail. When it comes to full authorial identity, however, they don’t have a clue. They duck all interest in Johannes Climacus, humorist and author of Concluding Unscholarly Postscript, for he has no taxliable, shelf-location status. Nevertheless, Climacus demands that we determine an identity for him as source of a book or two whose shelf location is ‘Kierkegaard’. Do we hold a pseudonym responsible for what’s said in his book? Kierkegaard-thewriter might or might not be responsible for the opinions of Climacus, who in turn might or might not be responsible for what he says about Johannes de silentio. Is writer-Kierkegaard responsible for opinions inserted at the end of Postscript, signed ‘S. Kierkegaard’? Is Climacus responsible for letting S. Kierkegaard glue unnumbered pages to the end of his tome? Each instance of alleged responsibility cries for testing, one by one, and the jury may remain hung. Do the opinions of S. Kierkegaard from the end of Postscript trump opinions voiced from the body of Postscript? Why accept remarks that purport to give a retrospective assessment of a Postscript authored by Climacus? If I avow that I believe in God, or that I believe love should hold sway here, or that from now on I will support my son, then (in the right settings), my saying so to some open extent will make it so. My avowals work on the model of a promise, of a performative. In apt settings, my saying ‘I promise’ makes a promise happen, changes the world. A judge’s saying ‘you can go free’ makes me free in the very saying. My identity is based partially on my avowals (‘I am—I will be—a good parent! ’) and partially on how others take me (they may well reject my self-avowals). And importantly, my avowals of care and commitment can be embodied non-linguistically in gesture and responsiveness as I lovingly play with a grandchild. My identity in that setting is locked into how I avow, express, or enact, my care. 9 Fear and Trembling is a sublime spectacle that parallels the new Tivoli Gardens (Mooney 2007: ch. 8).

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In The Point of View of my Work as an Author, Kierkegaard avows that he has always been a religious author (SKS16/PV: 41–2). Does his saying so make it so? The jury is out. ‘S. Kierkegaard’ declares that he takes responsibility for Climacus’s Postscript. Can he usurp responsibility from Climacus by mere declaration? The implied author of the Kierkegaardian oeuvre transfers authorial powers to Climacus. Some time later ‘S. Kierkegaard’ seems to renege. Does ‘S. Kierkegaard’ have the authority to strip Climacus of authorship? He says he is the ‘author, as people would call it’, of eight major works from Either/Or through Postscript (SKS7: 569ff./CUP1: 623ff.). Does his saying so make it so? Perhaps no one has authority to strip Climacus of his authorship—once granted. In Melville’s great book, Ahab has authority to cast judgement on Starbuck. In Postscript, Climacus casts judgement on de silentio (SKS7: 195f./CUP1: 261f.). Although Ahab can’t cast judgement on Melville, the infinitely clever Climacus casts judgement on Kierkegaard, feigning annoyance that someone in Copenhagen is stealing his lines and publishing his ideas in books with titles like Either/Or and Fear and Trembling.10 Ahab can’t comment on Melville, and Hamlet can’t comment on Shakespeare. Climacus, however, can come alive and talk back, a version of Pygmalion, who makes a statue that comes to life. Kierkegaard dreams up Climacus who is dreamily amused at the dreamer who dreams him.

Veronyms, Pseudonyms It’s natural to think that texts signed ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ minimize doubts about authorial responsibility. Those signatures ought to point to ‘the true Kierkegaard’, apart from the masks. Yet some years after Søren’s death, his brother Peter suggested, in effect, that works signed by Søren should be treated as if written by a pseudonym (Hannay 2001: 422–3). Peter wanted to have a high opinion of his brother. He also wanted to reject his brother’s well-circulated polemics against the Danish Church hierarchy and against a godless Danish society. Peter was a high-ranking Bishop in the Danish State Church, the very Church Søren relentlessly ridiculed. As his brother was dying, Peter might have sought to forgive, but didn’t. Years later he had every reason to wish that his brother’s attacks on the Church did not represent Søren’s real views. Perhaps his brother’s now famous polemics were just another mask.11 Then Peter could despise the mask and embrace the brother. Peter’s hypothesis has some plausibility. ‘Kierkegaard’ might be just another pseudonym. An only implied author of an oeuvre has some of the irreality of a pseudonym. Peter’s flesh and blood brother walked the streets, attended church, and paid taxes. Peter’s brother stands to Climacus and the author of the excoriating ‘attack literature’ as a flesh 10

Plato is the classic precursor here: he authors Socrates, yet Socrates speaks Plato’s lines and even upstages him, just as Climacus can upstage Kierkegaard, ribbing him. 11 I reject the premise that the variety of masks Kierkegaard presents betray a penchant for deception (Mooney 2007: ch. 5).

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and blood Copenhagen judge might stand to ‘Judge William’. The gap between ‘Judge William’ and any factual Judge might be as large as the gap between a ‘Kierkegaard’ (whose books librarians shelve), and a resident of Copenhagen whose brother was Peter. In the long run, Peter is almost right. It is the implied author of the oeuvre, rather than any particular resident of Copenhagen, who will (or will not) have made an indelible mark on the times and beyond. Peter’s younger brother can be freed from the irascible critic we call Kierkegaard just as Shakespeare can be freed from the agony and madness of King Lear. Or so it seems. Against Peter’s view, Climacus and the author of the ‘Attack Literature’ are Kierkegaard, in the way Lear and Hamlet are Shakespeare. The Shakespeare who did or didn’t pay his taxes is of no more interest than the Kierkegaard who did or did not put his brother to shame, but of enormous interest are Shakespeare taken as Lear and Hamlet, and Kierkegaard, as Climacus and de silentio.

Difficult Reality Have we volatilized Kierkegaard? Does Kierkegaard perform a kind of self-volatilization? If Melville has authority to say to Hawthorne that his identity seems volatilized, who is the Melville who can thus undo himself? If he is volatile, he has no position or authority from which to speak of his undoing. Without a position, he can’t write, ‘the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper’. Perhaps Kierkegaard can’t fashion himself as ephemeral, shifting with each new voice, lacking a stable identity. He surely changes, yet he must just as assuredly not change (too radically). If an author is like a speaker, she must have enough permanence to promise, avow, take something as her own, and enough permanence to hold her future self responsible for her present or past declarations. Otherwise, no declarations or promises can be made. (Yet Hamlet can promise!) Melville’s Copenhagen counterpart writes a carnival of creations that seems to volatilize its director and producer and performer—yet logically that venture can’t quite succeed. The conundrum is rooted in what Cora Diamond aptly calls ‘difficult reality’ (Cavell et al. 2009: ch. 1). We must hold steady two (or more) conflicting views. Sitting up from the steady side of the bed, we know that Kierkegaard knows that it is the same ‘he’ who sips coffee, who gives lines to Climacus, who sincerely writes signed religious discourses—who takes back Climacus’s status as author, who gives Johannes de silentio such a loud and raucous voice. Sitting up from that assuredly non-metaphysical, practical, and everyday side of the bed, however, does not foreclose our sitting up from the unsteady side. As in an all too-real dream, we fall into the mix, glitter, and darkness of the oeuvre, wherein the author and others (including myself as awakening reader) float eerily—float within an elusive, ghost-like multitude. There is no ‘right side’ from which to sit up. Reality is difficult. The existential literary worries about permanence that Kierkegaard and Melville present are not to be dismissed as frivolous, ill-founded, or hysterical. We must resist the

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temptation to conclude that on pain of contradiction, one or the other of these standpoints must be rejected. We are simultaneously old and young, happy and sad, single and legion. We are, and inhabit, a rather anomalous reality that suspends tensions not easily resolvable, and are sometimes irresolvable. A young woman holds the hope of the world in her smile; we see simultaneously the hope of the world shattered in her smile, for she has but minutes to live. A young writer holds the hope of a strong and resilient identity in his pen; we see simultaneously that this hope is shattered as his pen moves in ways that are self-volatilizing. The writer both laments and celebrates puzzles and anxieties about who he really is, and by implication, about who anyone really is. And as I read with empathy, indeed, I celebrate and lament the puzzles of who I am at last. Reality resists a comforting seamlessness.

II. Genres Kierkegaard pens his way into history as master of an incredibly varied number of genres. These should catch our attention even more than his neon-lit pseudonyms. He resists, even scorns, a standard philosophical or theological prose. He is in turn a dreamer, fabulist, and diarist; a publicist, dramatist, and dialectician; a sermonizer, satirist, and lyricist; a conjurer of pseudonyms, an ironist, humorist, and poet; a polemicist and aphorist. And he invents works that defy all known genres—that are one of a kind: we are offered a so-called ‘book’ of nothing but prefaces (SKS4: 463–527/P). Perhaps the key to Kierkegaard’s multiple identities is not the varied signatures. Mixed genres signal mixed identities. Johannes de silentio calls Fear and Trembling a ‘dialectical lyric’. What sort of genre is that? Climacus identifies the genre of Postscript as ‘unscholarly’—in the manner of a ‘postscript’ to some ‘philosophical crumbs’. And the genre is further specified as a ‘mimic-pathetic-dialectic compilation’, and an ‘existential contribution’. We can only applaud such framing clarity! We’ve asked how authorial prerogative pervades a text (or doesn’t). Now we ask how genre exerts its prerogatives (or doesn’t). Genre provides a subtle, intimate frame to lead us to appropriate ways of reading. We read a discourse in one way, a set of aphorisms in another, and a book of nothing but prefaces in yet another. Issues of authorial identity shift to issues of genre identity, and issues of multiple authors retreat as we take up issues of multiple genres. Fear and Trembling, for instance, is claimed by but a single pseudonym, but the genres within that slim text are amazingly varied. The panoply includes the carnivalesque and bawdy, the fairy tale or fable, the satirical, burlesque, or farcical, the tragic, the labyrinthine unfathomable, the grotesque and the sublime, the dialectical and lyrical, the fantastical and dreamlike, the antinomian, apophatic, and eucatastrophical (an unexpected finish that’s marvellously good). Local history gets written up in one genre (we might call it factual), and local poetry gets written up in another. The genre of Judge William’s letters differs from the genre of a sermonic discourse. The implied author of Johannes de silentio’s ‘Speech in Praise of

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Abraham’ is slightly different from the implied author of the earlier section, ‘Attunement’. Judge William may not speak from the factual, but he is surely not speaking from the neighbourhood of Batman or Snow White. Poetic actuality is as varied as factual actuality. Beyond the familiar (and flawed) fact-fiction duplet, taking up a multiplicity of genres can be taking up multiple metaphysical possibilities. Authors of the non-factual aren’t thereby captive of the fictional. Are my dreams my fictions or my intimate facts? Hamlet is neither ‘merely fictional’ nor ‘poetic’. Our sensibilities outstrip our lexicons. Dialectical writing (say, Philosophical Crumbs or Unscholarly Postscript) implies an author in philosophical space—not exactly poetical or fictional space. The genre of The Point of View of my Work as an Author is contested: it’s too simple to say we have a factual Copenhagen resident reporting the facts about a writer who is also a local resident. We’ve said Kierkegaard can write as a dreamer or fabulist, diarist or publicist, dramatist or dialectician, sermonizer, satirist, and more. There are not just one or two metaphysical slots (say the poetical-fictional and literal-factual) within which to sort this marvellous array.12 Looking at the variety of writing spaces might be like looking at a variety of places where action and reception occur: spaces of confession, for exhortation, of song, for exposition, of thanksgiving, of critique, of history lessons, of storytelling, of quiet listening—and so forth. Genres would pair up with sorts and styles of action and reception. The spaces where Kierkegaard writes then proliferates as varied as these spaces are. At these sites of action and reception and communicative exchange are the items just listed (thanksgiving and storytelling, for instance) and also oratory, monstrosity, circus, the ridiculous academic and the political harangue—in endless variety, all in a carnival whirl.

Change and Changelessness An outpouring of genres, an ongoing motley of the carnivalesque and more didactic or prayerful writings, carries an existential lesson, a determined refusal to stop time. The onrush of genres marks an exhilarating embrace of temporality. This is an embrace of the endlessly surprising—the newness, sufferings, and restorations of time. As noted, Melville cries out to Hawthorne, ‘Lord, when shall we be done changing?’ He’s desperate as he is gripped by Ahab, then Ishmael, and loses his centre, just as Kierkegaard is gripped by Johannes de silentio, then Climacus, and so opens the issue of an everchanging centre. As if frightened by ephemerality, Melville hopes that Hawthorne’s friendship will be saving. ‘Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.’ (Melville 2001: 44). In contrast, Kierkegaard is exhilarated. Change is a bracing condition to live out and replicate in literature. 12

The burlesque is suggested as a Kierkegaardian genre (Jordan 2011). Polonius reports the variety of genres in a Kierkegaardian spirit when he promises ‘the best actors in the world/either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral/pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical/tragical-comicalhistorical-pastoral/scene individable, or poem unlimited’ (Hamlet, Act 2, Sc. 2, 405; Bloom 2003).

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Opposed to the sense of endless change is the presumption of a minimal stability.13 Melville did not create Ishmael, Ahab, or Starbuck to make readers wonder where, or who, or whether he, Melville exists now and tomorrow. But I suspect Kierkegaard created Climacus and Anti-Climacus (and a dozen other figures) to disrupt stability, to vex readers. The texts of the oeuvre set us wondering where (and whether) a character or writer was and will be; and where and whether I, as a reader, exist and will be. To exist and own a life parallels performing a character and owning the performance—enacted here or there—and to be invested in how that performed life fared yesterday, and fares now, and will fare tomorrow. Thus a now-familiar tension: it matters where, when, and how a writer and reader stand, changing yet changeless. Writers give their work a kind of imperishable existence or immortality (Westfall 2007: 51). Death and resurrection are in play as tax-liable Kierkegaard dies, and impliedauthor Kierkegaard, a cultural presence, gradually rise up from the grave. As we read, we find an author alive post-burial. There is yet another way to think from the far side of the grave. Kierkegaard writes looking back on past thoughts and intuitions that were his and are now past, left behind by time. It’s as if he places himself beyond the grave, and looks back. The true poet, we may think, is engaged in ‘posthumous production’. Kierkegaard gives as a subtitle to one of his treatises, ‘A Posthumous Work of a Solitary Human Being’ (SKS11: 57/WA: 51). Posthumous work is work of one who has died and is now alive, resurrected, beyond bones marked by a headstone. Any praising or deflationary biography addressing the mortal taxpayer and flawed suitor becomes superfluous on this view. ‘The freedom of literature—its true immortality—is its absolute distance from the factual’ (Westfall 2007: 135). And flight from the factual is not flight to the fictional. As I dream of tomorrow, recollect my early childhood, or get my life in view as if it were done, I think neither fact nor fiction. And a text’s immortality also means that readers are equal over time in addressing it. No nineteenth-century Danish writer has privilege in fixing the meaning of a part or the whole of the authorship. Kierkegaard is dead, and hence disabled from giving the ‘incontrovertible last word on Kierkegaardian authorship’ (Westfall 2007: 77).14 And in so far as he is alive, he gives multiple, unsettling answers.

13 Existential stages combine the stability of a stage with the instability of stage-shift. Because each stage-heading oversees many genres, however, stability is diluted. 14 As a visitor to Copenhagen, I want to meet Kierkegaard to get him to sign my copy of Concluding Unscholarly Postscript. I ring his bell. Noting the tome and divining my purpose, he says, ‘I’m sorry, there is no Johannes Climacus at this address—you’ve been misinformed.’ I try to match wits. ‘Ah! But Mr Climacus has added a few pages at the end—they declare that S. Kierkegaard, not Climacus, is the author!’ He retorts, ‘Young man, I wouldn’t believe everything you read in books, especially in books that are dialectical and unscholarly, written by fanciful and humorous authors, full of dubious mental exercises and imaginative travels! Neither S. Kierkegaard nor Climacus reside here!’ Although Kierkegaard is clearly cagey and elusive, I reject the premiss that he is therefore deceptive. See note 11, above.

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Whirl and Sudden Centre Subjects reside in intersubjective relations, not in isolated Cartesian mental substances or Cartesian-Sartrean centres of choice and action. They reside, as Kierkegaard stages things, often in a street theatre or carnivalesque whirl. That’s the way it can feel from the inside as we face the array of ‘Kierkegaardian’ texts, and the way it may feel as we enter any one text. No doubt there are days when our own lives have the excitement and anxiety of whirl—no reassuring anchor of identity to grip. All that notwithstanding, subjectivity and intersubjectivity can appear not only from the inside in the midst of moments of whirl, but also from some relatively more distant vantage of composure. Stepping back, say in retrospect, I may reflect that the carnival scene that sweeps me up is put together by the vision, execution, and managerial skills of CEO Jones, CEO Kierkegaard. He is its heart and soul, what holds it together. So although KierkegaardJones is from one angle just another subject in intersubjective space, from another he is boss, inspiration, and source of power—however artfully he may hide this fact, and deflect attention away from himself towards the multitude performing and caught up in the whirl. Similarly, I can be caught up in the whirl, and seem to myself to be as centreless as my surround. But the spell can be broken. Suddenly a small child darts towards the Ferris wheel. Without losing a beat, I grab her hand. I may not have been aware of a centre for myself apart from the engulfing whirl. But after my action, I know there was a ‘me’ at the ready, prepared to take charge, alert to practical emergency, ready to act from a singular centre, from an identity, a strong integrity. Being a self in a mobile world presents a ‘difficult reality’ for philosophy. There are tensions between at least two senses of our existence. We have subliminal confidence (usually) that a centred self is at the ready. It will spring into action and forestall doubts. Yet we admit that we may lose even the confidence of a self at the ready. This may occur because of inattention, carelessness, or despair. But also, more sanguinely, a dependable identity can be swept away in a fluid mood of love, in a rising arc of music or poetry or dance, in being swept out of ourselves by majestic seas or landscapes, or swept up in the crush of Mardi Gras. Difficult realities make for difficult philosophy. Kierkegaard was polemical and cagey enough to revel in the changing shadows of a self and in the difficulties others would have in finding him. And he was sharp enough to see a moral and religious advantage in elusiveness. He continually intimates that only where radical openness to change is present—that is, only where a solid self can’t be pinned down—can there be hope of real transfiguration. The apparent ‘solid self ’, often enough, is only a social shell, a convenient surface for others, lacking a personal heart. Melville avowed that knowing Hawthorne persuaded him of ‘our immortality’. Kierkegaard saw writing itself working towards an eternal transfiguration. In a moment of prophecy, he declares that Fear and Trembling will make his name immortal. And if he were persuaded of immortality, it would not be (as with Melville) through a glimpse of undying friendship. He craved, we suppose, the glimpse of a God who would acknowledge his authorship, and furthermore, place him beyond all change and corruption.

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III. Communications Kierkegaard writes in his journals, ‘Real ethico-religious communication is as if vanished from the world’ (SKS27 Pap. 371: 428 [JP1: 656 (p. 302)]). In the Postscript he writes, ‘In its inexhaustible artistry, such a form of [ethico-religious] communication . . . renders the existing subject’s own [inexhaustible] relation to the idea (SKS7: 80/CUP1: 80). I take these words to mean that an ethical-religious status or posture or bearing can be communicated by mentors, writing, or events in a medium of infinite artistry, and be received by a subject whose relation to a proper ethico-religious aspiration [‘the idea’] will itself be a medium of infinite artistry, an ongoing and inexhaustible receiving and making real. We crave the specificity of a particular life that, in its vivid detail, can exemplify one that could be ours. Kierkegaard brings moral knowledge and its art, the lively artistry of the soul, down to earth, letting it speak in its varied plenitude, in its alluring, halting, terrifying energies. Having pseudonyms present various viewpoints and embody various stances encourages our free responsiveness across a range of affect. We can take Kierkegaard’s works (the pseudonymous ones, at the very least) to be works of art that address us. They appeal to and activate our interpretative sensibilities, and nicely detour around an argumentative essay’s explicit propositional outcomes, or a preacher’s imperious or intimidating (or quite gentle) exhortations. These works of art (as I’ll call them) have pedagogical aims. Their aim, for instance, might be to show how an Abrahamic stance, or a Socratic or Christian one, might animate one’s life. Accordingly, Kierkegaard artistically displays, or enacts, the ‘dialectical lyric’ of a Johannes de silentio (as he mulls through multiple versions of the Abraham story in Fear and Trembling). He artistically sketches out the ‘comic-pathetic- dialectic’ of a Johannes Climacus in the Postscript, a figure who might as well be a voluble Socrates. We see thinking on the go, improvising, exploratory, as art can be mobile, improvisatory, exploratory—sketching a possibility of action or understanding, but not spelling it out in the way a treatise or lecture in morality would. We can ask what happens or is communicated as one is overtaken by a work of art, or overtaken by a pseudonymous work, or some portion of it? This brings us to Kierkegaard’s contrast between direct and indirect communication—what I prefer to call the contrast between objective and subjective communication.

Objective and Subjective Communication ‘Information-only’ communication contrasts with subjective communication— communication of affect or virtue or ‘existential status.’ When I take in an ‘objective communication’, I take in information, doctrine, or creed, delivered in explicit propositions or argument. On the other hand, when I take in a ‘subjective communication’

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I take in an affect, virtue, or status (I’m a new man!)—I take in an existential orientation, mood, or disposition. A mentor, piece of literature, or an event can be an occasion of transforming reception. We might receive generosity or courage, cunning or playfulness, honesty or outrage, imaginative freedom, combative intellect, or surpassing kindness. If these lodge in the soul, it is not as new information. Religious or ethical writing, and religious or ethical acting, found in exemplary lives, and in stage, cinematic, or street performance, or in liturgical ceremonies, can have deeply transformative, non-propositional impact (Aumann 2010: 295–324). Kierkegaard correctly stresses the importance in a life of the transfer of ‘existential’, or ‘subjective’ significance. But he fails to see that communication of ‘facts-only’ can be indirect, and that the communication of affect or virtue can be direct. His oppositional ‘direct/indirect’ can’t do the job he wants done. If I read a medical journal’s account of pulmonary embolism, the medical writer intends to transfer bare bones, objective-only content. Under Kierkegaard’s rubrics, this is direct communication. But for me, a lay reader, the delivery is indirect, for I must detour through dictionaries and other articles to get the simple facts straight. (Of course, this is not what Kierkegaard means by ‘indirection’, but that’s my point: what he has in mind does not coincide with our ordinary intuitions about ‘indirection.’) Coming at this awkward rubric from the other side, some of what Kierkegaard labels ‘indirect communication’—the transfer of subjective affect or virtue (say) rather than objective-only content—has an unequivocally direct impact. If I express my rage by yelling ‘No!’ in your hearing (or express my joy by yelling ‘Yes!’), an existential or subjectively experienced fear or alarm, or an existential delight or affirmation, will arc from my voiced-body and enter yours—directly. Thus Kierkegaard’s contrast must travel under new names. A relay of something objective can happen indirectly; and a relay of something subjective can happen directly.

Simultaneously Subjective-Objective Utterances are not definitively one or the other, subjective or objective. Some are neither (say a policeman’s asking me to pull over). Many are both. If I yell ‘Watch out for the truck!’ I convey objective information: the truck approaching presents an objective danger. I also want my words to startle you, to arrest your motion, to transfer passion or fear that (I hope) will be like a physical push to get you out of the way. I need both subjectivity and objectivity to be directly conveyed in my ‘Watch out!’ In my intensely vocalized ‘Yes!’, I convey something subjective—that I’m utterly enchanted. But I’m enchanted about an objective fact, a ‘bare fact’, if you will: we share a magical view of surf through the Pacific mist. My ‘Watch out!’ or ‘Yes!’ release affect and subjectivity aimed in your direction in the hope that my subjectivity is imparted to you. That imparting can be as immediate and as direct as a blow to the chest or a touch of a hand. What gets imparted is not just objective information but my passion, my orientation, perhaps even my freedom. My ‘Yes!’ is my release, my

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freedom, my unabashed delight that if successfully imparted invites you to share in this unrestrained delight.

Paraphrase Propositional or information-transfer can easily be paraphrased. ‘It’s raining in California’ might be paraphrased, ‘if you go to California, you’ll discover a downpour’. On the other hand, the expression of mood, affect, or freedom, resists paraphrase. The launch of affect or mood is not the launch of a string of words to interpret with other words. When we hear Lear’s anguished ‘No! No! No! No!’ the bulk of what’s conveyed is a kind of desperate agony and anger. You can’t paraphrase a ‘No!’ If you hear it you’re moved. King Lear transmits not a proposition, but some mix of despair, rage, deep refusal, desperation. The affect is a ‘what’ that requires a proper ‘how’. The rage can’t be voiced casually, flippantly, in a monotone. He must cry, cry out—‘No! No! No!’ How that cry arrives, inflected at its apt degree of passion, will make all the difference in what arrives. Voiced properly, we have nothing like data for a log. Imagine the bland entry: ‘Tuesday, 12:01 p.m. King said ‘No’ five times. Bad weather’. A cry reduced to data is no longer a cry. Everything subjective about Lear arrives in an anguished ‘No!’ Everything subjective about Molly Bloom arrives in an ecstatic ‘Yes!’ No fact or piece of creed, no ‘objectivity-only’ expresses her ecstasy or his anguish. And these passions are imparted to me, rend my heart, opening the felt possibility of a passion that might just be mine—is, for the moment, mine. Any single utterance can simultaneously transfer a mix of objective content and subjective disposition. And the objective-subjective contrast does not exhaust the types of interpersonal communication. If I am a policeman I may order you to stop. That will not be an ethical-religious communication, but more like grabbing your arm. As a cop, your action matters to me, and you should heed my imperative. But I have no aim to alter your ethical-religious constitution. There need be nothing indirect about our commonplace capacities to share a sense of confidence, a mood of terror, a spirit of playfulness, a passion for truth. Yet it’s not easy to understand how these conveyances work. You communicate your phone number. If asked how I got it, I say, ‘you spoke clearly, I wrote it down’. End of story! Socrates imparts his allure—I’m shattered. Asked how I got seduced, I stumble: ‘That turn of phrase . . . you know, that gentle wit, his touch, his intelligence!’—I’m inarticulate and blush.

Socratic Subjective Communication In Postscript, Climacus ponders how Socrates can teach while withholding objective content. Something gets transferred from mentor to student, but it’s hard to pin down exactly what. Let’s say that to be won over by Socrates is to fall in love as he asks questions,

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to fall in love with his orientation towards inquiry. Socrates does not pass on a doctrine or creed to shout from the rooftops. We receive (through Plato’s rendition) a transfer of allure. Socrates is a master at drawing us into his net (which is not teaching us the truth of a proposition). And the impact of his allure can be as direct as a lover’s touch, or the intimate gaze of his eyes—just ask Alcibiades, who falls directly, madly, in love. When Kierkegaard addresses me in his discourses, ‘My dear reader . . . ’ he is directly inviting an intimacy, directly transferring his subjective openness in a way he hopes we will accept. When Dostoevsky has Christ kiss the Grand Inquisitor on the lips, the intimacy and subjective impact is deep and striking—even as we struggle with the hermeneutical question of what, objectively speaking, that kiss is supposed to mean (is it acquiescence, approval, forgiveness, resignation, pity . . . ?). We will quickly sound foolish trying to say what (objectively) it is, exactly, in the person who steals our heart, that dispossesses the mind, which allows the theft. Take Socrates. Is it the look in his eye, the slight hesitancy in his rough speech, a melting in his shoulders as they turn slightly to one side? Is it the sensation that he sees through me, and is close enough to touch me? In the case of Kierkegaard, is it his sparkling wit, his intimate address, his sense of the great pain of love and devotion, his capacity to have Christ walk hand in hand with Socrates?15

Theatre and Freedom Perhaps what steals our hearts is Kierkegaard’s exuberant launching of street theatre—a young swain in love with a princess, an ex-alcoholic seeing a friend (a suicide) drawn from the Seine, a barefoot dancing Socrates, a mother weaning her child with Abraham’s knife over her shoulder. Sometimes Kierkegaard’s array of books, each book an array of unexpected drama, can operate like a theatre troupe in waiting. Now one ensemble of actors steps forward, now another, pseudonym by pseudonym, signed work by signed work, this section of Either/Or, now that section of Either/Or. Now we see the knight of faith as a dancer— now, the knight as a woman knitting—now, the quixotic knight as a jaunty burgher whistling all the way home. This artistic troupe can be shifting and elusive in its address, but at the level of individual subjective impact, it can be as direct as can be. Improvising political street theatre, antic troupes in a beleaguered and melancholy city can communicate politics (or an ethico-religious truth, as in a medieval mystery play) without placards or requisite chants from the crowd or mandatory parades or riotous sweeps into battle (or rushes to conversion). One by one our hearts can be affected. How the transfer of political or ethico-religious affect will play out in our subsequent thought and comportment is an open question. Kierkegaard and Socrates leave us in a space of responsive freedom. Our ethicoreligious imaginations have been invaded by a wondrous, even sublime, allure that 15

Kierkegaard gives Christ and Socrates a collaborative identity (Mooney 2007: ch. 3).

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leaves us ripe for change or consolidation. And a wide range of objective uncertainty or ignorance accompanies this ‘subjectivity transfer’. Socrates says with a wink, ‘I know nothing!’ (yet speaks on); Johannes de silentio says with a wink, ‘I am silent!’ (yet writes on). With a wink (after 500 pages of tome-like disquisition) Kierkegaard-Climacus writes ‘I take it all back’ (yet leaves us a jewel).

Finding a Life If one aim of spiritual or moral communication is ministering to others in their existential need, then Kierkegaard insists that renewed examination of old creeds or propositions, or the conveyance of new ones, is way off the mark. What is needed is change of affect, orientation, virtue, or enablement. Kierkegaard’s great insight is that we don’t always need more discussion of facts or revision of theories. Our need is to find a life, say of Socrates or Christ, of devoted knitting or dancing, of inspired writing or talking, of holy walking or comforting, a life that exemplifies what’s best—morally, spiritually, religiously. This happens as an exemplar’s power enters our lives, or as the artistry of the written word enters our lives, or as the allure of street theatre enters our lives—to be taken up and expressed in whatever way seems fitting (or not)—from my point of view, in a life that is mine. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms opens our frustrations, apprehensions, curiosities, alert interests. There is more to this than being coy, exhibitionist or secretive, more than being perverse or provocative, teasing, wicked, or deceptive, more than being playful, jesting, experimental or evasive. We’re forced to figure what’s going on, to at least partially resolve the whirl, to gather our imaginative capacities and focus them on the matter at hand, the difficult reality impinging. Perhaps entering the field of pseudonyms and varied genres creates the tension between representation and what exceeds and defies representation so familiar in encountering the sublime. And the sublime, in eluding our grasp, sets us free. Pseudonyms create an aperture for freedom, for realization of an interpretative existence that sloughs off the automation of direct data absorption or creedal transfer. Like a good metaphor, the shocking interruption of a pseudonym spawns an abundance of thought, feeling, and images. I experience my mind-body soul at sea, thrown into the labyrinth of freedom—not just told about it. Without a proper distance between a pseudonym and its creator, a reader will mistake Kierkegaard for an authority on some matter of fact or doctrine, an authority charged with communicating in objective address—with all urgency. However, Kierkegaard’s task is to awaken our subjectivity. Accordingly, he must partially veil or disguise his seriousness, for authorities can intimidate or overpower, as well as inspire and command. Yielding to his charisma, our freedom is at risk.16 Socrates must hide to protect his 16

Climacus brings out the contrast between Socrates’ outwardly unfavourable appearance and his inner beauty. Through the repellent effect exerted by the contrast, the learner understands that he has essentially to do with himself: inwardness or wholeheartedness is not fusion with a common truth but a separation in which each exists in the truth.

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students from too easy a seduction, and of the wrong sort. Kierkegaard must hide so that his reader may come to ‘exist in the truth.’17 No authority, but a pseudonym speaks. With that, anxiety is conferred, but also essential freedom.

Freedom In Postscript, Climacus tells us, ‘The secret of communication [or imparting] specifically hinges on setting the other free’ (SKS7: 75/CUP1: 74). In line with this, Climacus appends to the very end of the Postscript a revocation of all he’s so far asserted. In the tome’s ‘final explanation’ to make matters worse, under the signature ‘Kierkegaard’, an author of that name distances himself from the entirety of the pseudonymous works (including Postscript). Creating distance between texts and authors reduces their looming authority. The printed word is released to speak on its own, a word addressed from a subjectivity to a subjectivity, who in turn can speak (or remain silent). Veiling a word’s authority promotes a reader’s freedom from an author’s pressure or coercion. Kierkegaard is not a policeman shouting ‘stop!’ The space between reader and text is aesthetically maintained. As Climacus puts it, Wherever the subjective is of importance. . . . communication is a work of art; it is doubly reflected, and its first form is the subtlety that the subjective individuals must be held devoutly apart from one another and must not be left coagulating together in objectivity. (SKS7: 79/CUP1: 79)

We don’t parrot slogans. Artistry protects subjective freedom to enable another to become ethical, Socratic, or Christian. If Kierkegaard’s only thrown a bone to a bored intelligentsia who coagulate in a crowd chanting objectivities, then he’d rather take the book back.

Exemplars and Artistry If I teach ‘Thou shall have no disciples’ in such a way that disciples gather around, or if I teach ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ as a random truth for mindless duplication on exams, then I have failed to communicate an appropriate concern. The outcome,

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If I tell you that I’ve just become a grandfather, I may find myself overtaken by the wonder and fear crystallized in the advent of a child, the fragile abundance of its coming to pass—of my passing, and of the passing of a world that both pulls me forward and leaves me behind. More dramatic is the pathos of Socratic encounter, the passion of Lear’s cries, the subtle irony of pseudonyms, are relatively dramatic cases of subjective (or existential) communication. They are also instances of the connection between encounter with the sublime and the freedom of the interpreter. Yet the sublime can appear in the relatively pedestrian. Mentioning I’ve become a grandfather is one of those moments of sharing and everyday transfer of subtle affect, mood, passion, and orientation that make up rich and fragile lives.

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as Climacus would say, is comic. I will not have exemplified the relevant truth in the telling. To fail in this regard is to have failed to convey decisive subjectivity, a capacity for living in a certain way. With regard to the human ideal, ‘[t]he simple as well as the wise man must be so obliging as to exist in it’ (SKS7: 334/CUP1: 367). Showing or exemplifying truth is distinct from stating truth. If an ethical or religious individual wishes to convey the truth she inhabits, she must avoid the appearance and the reality of reducing it to a telling or a statement, even a roundabout telling. Socrates would dodge telling if he thought his interlocutors were just looking for a slogan or principle to run with. If a Christian should communicate compassion, that can’t be by saying ‘be compassionate’, or ‘I’m compassionate, follow me’. Perhaps an ‘existence communication’ of compassion is most salient in silence, taking no part in what William James calls the chatter of the boundlessly loquacious mind (James 2002: 62).18 Kierkegaard fears for our souls because he knows our susceptibility to street gossip, celebrity, and political chatter, to academic vanguardism, news-speak and newspeak. Ethico-religious communication is ‘vanished from the world’.

Teaching Subjectivity and Freedom Socrates can turn a soul, unleash a life. There is no simple statement that says how he or a Christ or an ethico-religious teacher might turn a soul, how they impart necessary passion. ‘I only wish,’ Socrates confesses in the Symposium, ‘that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.’ (Plato 2002: 175d)19 An exemplar’s life administers independence even as it bequeaths a pattern and swerves away from doctrine—of rights or sin, of rituals for birth, marriage, or death, of catechism or creed. Accepting the allure of a Socrates is a commitment to him and to the path he lights up. But the path he lights up will be (and become) my own. As Climacus puts it, no one is so resigned as God; because he communicates creatively in such a way that in creating he gives independence vis-à-vis himself. The most resigned a human being can be is to acknowledge the given independence in every human being, and to the best of one’s ability do everything in order truly to help someone retain it. (SKS7: 236/CUP1: 260)

The independence necessary between persons and the divine is maintained by the artistry of the divine, who on pain of stealing freedom withdraws as creator from creation.

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See also Taylor 2002: 52 and Mooney 2007: ch. 13. The Shelley translation (Plato 2002) captures the visceral immediateness of being touched by ‘wisdom-in-Socrates’: ‘It would be well, Agathon, if wisdom were of such a nature that when we touched each other it would overflow of its own accord . . . ’ Grant that wisdom is in fact conveyed in the way a lover’s touch conveys love. As I read this passage, that doesn’t mean it will simply flow of its own accord, like water gravitationally pulled. The flowing touch will be much more subtle, delicate and complicated, like conveying extreme delicacy in musical phrasing, requiring interpretative delivery and attuned interpretative reception. 19

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Just so, the independence (and dependence) necessary between persons is maintained by a reciprocal respect, artistry, and reserve or withdrawal.

Pseudonymity, Genre, Communication, for Freedom In Kierkegaard’s practice, the matters of pseudonymity, genre, and communication are interlocked, joined in the service of bringing an ethico-religious individual to life, joined in the service of increased freedom from a stifling onslaught of false authority, pervasive gossip, and sloganeering, of objective-only measures of truth rather than measures of truth that radiate from exceptional artistic, dialectical, ethical, religious, persons like Socrates: his is the vocation of an ethico-religious individual, which centrally involves communicating an identity, a life. Kierkegaard said at the end of his life that his task had always been Socratic. The best way to frame his proliferation of style, genre, artful communication, and pseudonymity, is through the light of the Socratic: dialectic and eros in the service of goodness, beauty, and the divine. The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist. To exist is an art. The subjective thinker is esthetic enough for his life to have esthetic content, ethical enough to regulate it, dialectical enough in thinking to master it. (SKS7: 321/CUP1: 351) The subjective thinker’s form . . . is his style . . . His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious. (SKS7: 326/CUP1: 357)

References Alter, Robert (1997). Genesis, trans. and comm. (New York: W. W. Norton). Aumann, Antony (2010). ‘Kierkegaard on Indirect Communication, the Crowd, and a Monstrous Illusion’, in R. L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Point of View (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Bloom, Harold (2003). Hamlet, Poem Unlimited (New York: Penguin). Hannay, Alastair (2001). Kierkegaard, a Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). James, William (2002). The Varieties of Religious Experience, Centenary Edition (New York: Routledge). Jordan, Mark D. (2011). ‘The Modernity of Christian Theology or Writing Kierkegaard Again for the First Time’, Modern Theology 27: 3, 442–51. Kant, Immanuel (1902–). Critique of Practical Reason, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Akademie edn. vol. 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Kierkegaard, Søren (2009). Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs and Repetition, ed. Edward F. Mooney. Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Melville, Herman (2001). Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. and intro. John Bryant (New York: Modern Library).

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Mooney, Edward F. (2007). On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time (Burlington VT: Ashgate). —–— (2009). ‘What is a Kierkegaardian Author?’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 35:7, 869–82. Plato, (2002). The Symposium of Plato, The Shelley Translation, ed. and intro. David O. O’Connor (South Bend Indiana: St Augustine’s Press). Taylor, Charles (2002). Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Westfall, Joseph (2007). The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism (Berlin: de Gruyter).

Suggested Reading Cavell, Stanley, Diamond, Cora, et al. (2009). Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press). Crites, Stephen (1972). ‘Pseudonymous Authorship as Art and as Act’, Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Josiah Thompson, 1st edn. (New York: Anchor Books). Lippitt John (2000). Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (New York: St Martins). Mooney (2007, 2009). —–— (1996). Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology From Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death (New York: Routledge). Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology (New York: Routledge). Strawser, Michael (1997). Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification (New York: Fordham University Press). Westfall (2007).

chapter 11

ethic s c . s tephen e vans and r obert c . r oberts

In all of Kierkegaard’s enormous literary output, perhaps no concept is used in more different ways than the concept of ‘the ethical’. This makes any attempt to summarize in a single chapter what Kierkegaard said about ethics a hopeless undertaking. Hence in what follows we make no attempt at a comprehensive survey of the subject. Rather, after a brief account of some of the different ways ‘the ethical’ figures in his authorship, we will focus on two areas of ethical thinking about which we think Kierkegaard has important things to say: the relation of divine commands to moral obligations and the nature of virtues and the roles they play in ethical life. One might think that the complexity of Kierkegaard’s literature, and especially the pseudonymous character of so much of it, makes it impossible to give any account of Kierkegaard’s view of the ethical, since no single, coherent account can be found in his writings. The problem, it might be thought, is not just that Kierkegaard’s views are complex, but that no coherent view is present. To some extent, we will try to avoid this problem by focusing our attention on non-pseudonymous works. However, in the end, the problem is not a serious one for us, since our purpose is not to say definitively what Kierkegaard thought about ethical questions, but rather to point to some themes in Kierkegaard’s writings that provide helpful insights for contemporary ethics. For this end, it does not matter whether the insights in question are Kierkegaard’s or merely ‘Kierkegaardian’. Insights can be found in Kierkegaard’s writings. This is primarily an essay on contributions Kierkegaard has made and can still make to our ethical thinking.

I. The Ethical as a Stage or Sphere of Existence We begin with a brief review of some important ways ‘the ethical’ arises in Kierkegaard’s writings, although after some initial exploration and clarification, we will set most of them aside. It is natural to think first of Kierkegaard’s idea that there are three ‘stages’ or

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‘spheres’ of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These ‘stages’ play a major role in Kierkegaard’s writings. Indeed, one of us has written an introduction to Kierkegaard as a philosopher that is organized around this idea (Evans 2009). The claim that there are spheres of existence pervades Kierkegaard’s authorship, and provides a unifying structure for it. He uses both ‘stages’ and ‘spheres’ to describe these ways of living, since he thinks that a fully developed person would characteristically traverse these ‘spheres’ in passing through the stages of life. However, since a person may choose to remain in a particular stage, these ‘spheres’ can also confront each other as rival views of life. In Either/Or II and also in Stages on Life’s Way, Judge William, a major pseudonymous character, describes the ethical life as a path to a unified self, achieved through enduring ethical commitments. On his account, the ethical life requires commitments to friendship, a personal vocation expressed primarily in work, and, above all, lifelong monogamous marriage. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his influential book After Virtue, sees Either/Or as occupying a strategically important place in the history of ethics (MacIntyre 1984: 36–50). According to MacIntyre, Either/Or embodies Kierkegaard’s recognition that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in reason failed. He thinks that Kierkegaard’s own solution was to ground morality in an act of will, a ‘radical choice’ for which no reasons can be given, since it is a choice about what will count as a good reason. MacIntyre’s reading of Kierkegaard fits nicely with Kierkegaard’s reputation as the ‘father of existentialism’, since on this reading Kierkegaard’s view of the ethical resembles that of Jean Paul Sartre (Sartre 1957: 15–22). This reading has been influential and has given rise to some important debates (Davenport and Rudd 2001). However, we think that MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard’s view of the ethical takes us down the wrong track, for several reasons. First, MacIntyre’s reading ignores the pseudonymous character of Either/Or. Even if the reading were in some sense correct, it would not necessarily tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought about the ethical life, but only about the views of the aesthete ‘A’, Judge William, and other pseudonymous authors whose writings appear in the book. To understand why Kierkegaard might have created these pseudonymous authors and their views one must read what Kierkegaard says in his own voice. Second, it is by no means obvious that MacIntyre’s reading gets even the pseudonymous authors right. The aesthete in volume I seems to endorse a kind of arbitrariness in how life should be lived, but Judge William gives reasons why the ethical life should be preferred to the aesthetic life, reasons that even an aesthete should understand and be moved by. Perhaps someone might think that the book’s inconclusive ending, with no evidence that either the aesthete or the Judge has changed his views, shows that Kierkegaard thinks the choice must be a ‘radical’ one. However, if this line of reasoning were correct, one could infer that a novelist like Dostoevsky thinks that the choice of religious faith is arbitrary and unjustifiable, simply because in The Brothers Karamazov Ivan does not convert Alyosha, nor Alyosha Ivan. We surely cannot infer that there are no good reasons for a choice simply because a literary character (or even a real person)

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is not moved by those reasons. Humans, whether fictional or actual, are not fully rational and are not always moved by good reasons. Finally, it is important to distinguish between ‘the ethical’ as a stage or sphere of existence, and ethics as a pervasive feature of human existence. Existence is partly a series of choices, and a choice is at least partly an exercise in value-ranking. If I regularly choose to play computer games rather than read philosophy, I am implicitly saying that I care more about computer games than I do philosophy—and this is to rank the values by which I live. If we think of an ethic as a set of value-rankings, then every human, regardless of which ‘sphere’ or ‘stage’ of existence he or she occupies, must have an ethic. This is as true of the aesthete or the religious individual as it is of an ‘ethicist’. Thus human existence has an ethical dimension that is universal and inescapable, which must be distinguished from ‘the ethical stage’ or ‘sphere’ that represents a particular approach to human existence. There are also good reasons to think that the concept of the ethical ‘stage’ is not completely uniform in Kierkegaard’s writings, but is treated differently in different contexts. In Either/Or the ethical stage seems to include a strong emphasis on acceptance of social roles and institutions such as marriage. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, on the other hand, the ethical stage involves the discovery of the self as an ideal that must be distinguished from social roles and expectations (SKS7: 222/CUP: 244). In Either/Or Judge William clearly thinks of himself as a deeply religious man, and there is no sense of a sharp distinction between ethical and religious existence. In Postscript, however, the ethical life is seen as the beginning point for forms of the religious life that are more than ethical and that must be distinguished from the ethical life.

II. ‘The Ethical’ in Fear and Trembling We should say something about the treatment of ‘the ethical’ in Kierkegaard’s widely read Fear and Trembling. In this pseudonymous work, Johannes de silentio characterizes Abraham’s action in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command as a paradigm of faith. Johannes argues strongly that Abraham’s faith cannot be understood in ethical terms: ‘The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he intended to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he intended to sacrifice Isaac’ (SKS4: 126/ FT: 241). In this work the ethical is linked both to ‘the universal’, and to what can be rationally defended and explained (SKS4: 172–207/FT: 71–106). The life of faith, by contrast, is a response to God’s call to a particular individual made through a revelation to that individual. Thus, the person who acts on the basis of faith does not rely on what we today might call ‘public reasons’. 1 All references to Fear and Trembling in this chapter will be to the translation by Sylvia Walsh (Kierkegaard 2006).

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Although Fear and Trembling is a powerful and important book, it would be a mistake to treat it as Kierkegaard’s definitive account of the ethical life. To begin, we again have a pseudonymous author, one who cannot be automatically identified with Kierkegaard; Johannes de silentio confesses that he does not have faith and does not understand it or how to acquire it. The major polemical target of the book seems to be eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, who in different ways see the ethical life and the life of faith as essentially similar. Johannes, at least for his purposes, accepts a characterization of the ethical life that resembles the Hegelian view that the highest expression of the ethical is to be found in Sittlichkeit, the laws and customs of a people. (We disagree with those who think the relevant conception of ‘the ethical’ in Fear and Trembling is Kantian.2) Johannes accepts what he sees as the dominant conception of the ethical life because his main point is that faith cannot be reduced to the ethical life in that sense. Thus, as Ronald Green has argued, the book is not fundamentally about ethics at all, but about faith (Green 1992). In particular it is a sustained argument that the life of faith must be sharply distinguished from the ethical life understood in Hegelian terms. To gain some sense of what Kierkegaard has to say about ethics that might be helpful to contemporary discussions, we must therefore look primarily at Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous writings, and not to Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, or even Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In the non-pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard speaks in his own voice, and also we find him addressing questions about the ethical as a universal and inescapable element of existence, not simply as a ‘stage’ of existence. We shall focus on two distinct but equally important areas: the place of divine authority in ethics, and the virtues, the personal characteristics that we must acquire to be fully whole and healthy.

III. The Significance of Divine Authority for Kierkegaard One of the most significant works of Kierkegaard is one that he never published, though he worked on it perhaps more than any other of his works, leaving at least three complete versions in his papers at the time of his death: The Book on Adler. Adolph Peter Adler was a Danish pastor who was deposed and pensioned by the Church because of his claim to have received a direct revelation from God. Kierkegaard was drawn to the case because it seemed to him to embody what he termed the ‘confusion’ of the contemporary age, a confusion that is rooted in a failure to grasp the significance of divine authority: ‘the concept of authority has been completely forgotten in our confused age’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 76/BA: 4). For Kierkegaard this confusion is no slight intellectual problem, but a ‘calamity’ that has ramifications for politics, religion, and ‘everything else’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 78/BA: 5). 2

See e.g. Arbaugh and Arbaugh 1967: 109; Schrader 1972: 324–5.

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In The Book on Adler, as well as other closely related works such as ‘The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle’, Kierkegaard discusses the concept of divine authority chiefly with respect to the question of a special revelation as the basis of Christian belief. He argues that the decline of religious belief in the modern world does not stem from the intellect but from the will; the cause of this decline ‘is not doubt about the truth of the religious but insubordination to the authority of the religious’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 78/BA: 5). Christian faith is grounded in an apostolic revelation that ought to be believed because it has divine authority. In the modern world, however, ‘profundity has been mistaken—for authority; the intellectual—for the ethical; being a genius—for being an apostle’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 27 78/BA: 5). As this last quotation implies, Kierkegaard sees the loss of divine authority as devastating not merely for religious faith but for ethical life as well. MacIntyre is right to credit Kierkegaard with realizing that the Enlightenment project of grounding ethics in human reason was doomed to failure. However, the solution, as Kierkegaard saw it, was not to ground ethics in an act of human will, but to seek to recover divine authority as the basis of ethics. Kierkegaard is concerned about what Christine Korsgaard has called the ‘sources of normativity,’ particularly the kind that we call moral obligation (Korsgaard 1996). The essence of normativity is that it constrains us. What we ought to do is what we are somehow bound to do, obligated to do. But what is the source of this normativity? Korsgaard and other contemporary philosophers think that an account can be given without invoking divine authority, but Kierkegaard believes this is not possible.

IV. Works of Love and the Source of the ‘Ought’ There are of course a variety of ways in which the term ‘ought’ is used in English. Some of these are not difficult to explain. For example, if someone wants to drive from Waco, Texas, to Austin, Texas, on the fastest, most direct highway, then that person ought to take Interstate Highway 35. The kind of ‘ought’ that such ‘means to an end’ situations involve seems straightforward. Perhaps somewhat more significantly, one may say that a person who wants to have an honest character ought to be especially careful to be truthful in small matters. Even this kind of ‘ought’, however, still seems short of the unconditional obligation that we think of as a moral duty. It is this kind of ‘ought’ that requires explanation. In Works of Love Kierkegaard gives a powerful account of ethical obligations towards other humans as summarized in one of the great commandments found in both Judaism and Christianity: ‘love your neighbour as yourself ’. He argues that this obligation to love is grounded in a human person’s relation to God. The duty to love is rooted in God’s command, and thus the human person has a task assigned by God. Kierkegaard

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compares the human person who carries out this task to a well-brought up child, who is away from his parents and with strangers, but continues to behave as his parents have taught him (SKS9: 189–90/WL: 189–90). Such a child does not worry about how other children are behaving, nor how the strangers may view his behaviour, for the ‘child never forgets that the judgement is at home, where the parents do the judging’ (SKS9: 189/WL: 189). A person’s responsibility to love others is thus grounded in the fact that he is ultimately responsible to God, who will pass judgement. Kierkegaard thinks that without this sense of being accountable or responsible to someone or something ‘higher’, ethical life lacks ‘earnestness’. The modern world, as he sees it, has attempted to develop alternatives to divine authority as the foundation of the ethical. What are the alternatives to God as the foundation of this moral task? There are several possibilities, but Kierkegaard believes that all of them fail, and fail disastrously. One possibility that has been extensively explored by existentialists is that the individual can be the ground of moral obligation. (This is ironical since, as noted earlier, Kierkegaard is often called ‘the father of existentialism’.) For example, someone might think that a person can simply adopt an ideal as his or her commitment and try to be faithful to it. Kierkegaard thinks that such an account cannot do justice to the actual character of the ethical life. A freely adopted ideal cannot bind if its normativity stems from the person’s choice, for such a choice can always be undone. ‘The deficiency in even the most noble human enthusiasm is that, as merely human, in the ultimate sense it is not powerful itself, because it has no higher power over itself ’ (SKS9: 191/WL: 190). Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus expresses the same idea, by calling the commitments of an autonomous self with no relation to God ‘experiments’, regardless of the energy that the self devotes to them (SKS11: 184/SUD: 68; trans. modified). What about the Kantian view that the source of normativity is human reason? In a well-known journal entry Kierkegaard clearly rejects the claim that human reason can itself be the source of the moral law that binds us: Kant was of the opinion that man is his own law (autonomy)—that is, he binds himself under the law which he himself gives himself. Actually, in a profounder sense, this is how lawlessness or experimentation are established. This is not being rigorously earnest any more than Sancho Panza’s self-administered blows to his bottom were vigorous. (SKS23: NB15: 66 [JP1: 188])

This entry is very cryptic, and it is hard to know what lies behind it. A Kantian might object that for Kant the dictates of the moral law are ‘categorical’ and therefore absolute, anything but ‘experimental’. Why does Kierkegaard think that human reason is a poor candidate to be the ground of genuine moral obligations? We don’t think it is possible to answer this question with certainty, but we can at least speculate plausibly about why Kierkegaard finds reason an inadequate ground. First, there is the question of the authority of reason itself. Even if reason dictated that humans should behave in a certain way, we might ask, with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, why we should care so much about being rational (Dostoevsky 2005: 134–5). The

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Underground Man notoriously says that ‘man has always and everywhere—whoever he may be—preferred to do as he chose, and not in the least as his reason or advantage dictated, and one may choose to do something even if it against one’s own advantage; and sometimes one positively should (that is my idea)’ (Dostoevsky 2005: 130). The Underground Man goes on to claim that choosing what is not rational can preserve ‘what is most precious and most important to us, namely our personality and our individuality’. However, even if we do want to be rational, we must inquire about the nature of reason itself. Kant clearly believes that reason is a kind of timeless, universal faculty that all humans possess, one that delivers the same judgements for all. Kierkegaard, by contrast, seems to think that human reasoning is always the reasoning of a concrete, existing human. He is sceptical that any of us embodies ‘pure’ reason; our thinking reflects our hopes, passions, fears, and desires, and it is unlikely that universal moral principles can emerge from such thinking. Besides this problem, one may wonder whether Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, even if it is a universal principle of reason, can justify concrete action-guiding principles. It has seemed to many philosophers that Kant’s principle is too formal, too abstract, to tell actual humans what they must do. It looks as if many different and incompatible ‘maxims’ can be universalized without obvious irrationality. Contemporary Kantians, such as Korsgaard, have seen the problem here, and have attempted to give Kantian ethics more content by claiming that the moral law stems from the activity of reason when applied to a conception of oneself. For Korsgaard, the particular maxims that have authority for an individual ultimately stem from the identity of that individual, since ‘a view of what you ought to do is a view of who you are’ (Korsgaard 1996: 117). Since it is clear that people can and do conceive of their identities very differently, it follows that people who conceive of their identities in different ways will see themselves as having different obligations, and on Korsgaard’s view will actually have different obligations. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, this kind of view is not a solution but part of the problem. Real moral obligations bind or constrain the self. How I think about or conceive of myself cannot do the job, since if I find that my self-conception limits what I wish to do, I can simply go to work to change how I think about myself. A moral obligation cannot come simply from how I think of myself; it is rather something that (among other things) tells me how I should think about myself. A final alternative to God as the foundation of moral obligation is to see our duties as grounded, not in ourselves or in our reason, but in society. Initially, this seems promising, since society does seem to have some genuine independence of the individual and also seems to be something ‘higher’ or superior to the individual. Perhaps we should think of our moral obligations as rooted in a kind of social agreement humans have made. Kierkegaard considers this strategy, but finds social agreement to be a poor substitute for God as well. A key question to ask about any such agreement is whether it is supposed to be an actual agreement or merely a hypothetical one, a promise that humans would make, or

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would be rational to make, if they were in a certain situation. The problem with a hypothetical agreement is that it lacks authority. I am not obligated to give money to a charity simply by the hypothetical fact that I would have promised to give the charity money if some condition had been actual that in fact never became actual. It might be true, for example, that if I had attended a certain meeting and heard an appeal, I would have promised to give money, but how does such a hypothetical fact bind me, who did not attend the meeting or make any such promise? Perhaps, then, we should think of the agreement as actual rather than hypothetical. Advocates of such a view might claim that the agreement has been made tacitly or implicitly. Kierkegaard thinks that such a view will not work. No such agreement has been made; nor would actual individuals be able to come to such an agreement, even if they were to try to do so: Or should the determination of what is the Law’s requirement perhaps be an agreement among, a common decision by, all people, to which the individual has to submit? Splendid—that is, if it is possible to find the place and fix a date for this assembling of all people (all the living, all of them?—but what about the dead?), and if it is possible, something that is equally impossible, for all of them to agree on one thing! (SKS9: 119/WL: 115)

The lack of a foundation for the moral ought has led directly to the ethical confusions of the modern world, according to Kierkegaard, a world he describes as a ‘vortex’ in which nothing stands firm (SKS9: 119/WL: 115).

V. Divine Commands as the Foundation of Moral Obligations It is one thing to criticize candidates for the foundation of morality; it is another to provide an adequate alternative. Why does Kierkegaard think that God’s commands can provide an adequate basis for moral obligations? To answer this question, we will first list what we consider to be desiderata for a good candidate to be the foundation of moral obligation. All these derive from features of genuine moral obligations that seem to require explanation. Obviously, this account is philosophically controversial, and some may be sceptical about one or more of the features we here identify. In a more spacious context we would attempt a defence of them, but here we simply point to features of the moral life as Kierkegaard saw them, features that we also notice and that seem to fit most people’s moral experience. One important feature of moral obligations is that they are objective, the kind of thing that people can be mistaken about. The mistakes can be of various kinds. Sometimes I am obligated to do something, but fail to realize I have the obligation. Sometimes people with ‘overactive consciences’ believe they are obligated to do

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things that they have no obligation to do. And sometimes people correctly see that they have an obligation in a certain situation but are mistaken about the content of that obligation. So an adequate account of moral obligation should be able to account for this objectivity, explain how people can have true and false beliefs about their moral obligations. A second important feature of moral obligations is that they provide compelling reasons of a distinctive kind for actions. Let’s consider a simple case of obligation. Perhaps I have borrowed money from a friend. I now have the money to repay the friend and am obligated to do so. If I am morally obligated to perform an action, then not only do I have a reason to perform that action, the reason is (at least normally) an overriding one. It will not do to say that I don’t need to repay the money because I don’t want to, or because I can think of other things to do with the money. If I have a good reason for defaulting on my obligation (say, my children will starve to death if I pay back the money), then the overriding reason must itself be a moral one. An account of moral obligation should help us understand the overriding, serious character of a moral reason for performing an action. A third feature is closely related to the second. An account of moral obligation should not only explain why we have reasons to perform our moral duty; it should also explain why we should be motivated to do so. It should help us understand why we should care about morality, why moral reasons should (and often do) move us to action. Finally, an adequate account of moral obligation should help us understand the universality of morality. We do not mean that moral obligations cannot be in some way unique and tailored to the individual. But morality is universal in at least two ways. First, all are subject to the claims of morality. No one is so ‘special’ as to get a free pass to ignore those claims. Second, some of our moral obligations extend at least to all persons. (Some in fact certainly extend further than this, incorporating animals.) If some racist member of my society believes that the world would be a better place if the population were reduced, and proposes to achieve this end by killing people who are members of another race, I have an obligation to oppose this and do what I can to stop such evil, even if I do not know the people he proposes to eliminate or have any relation to them except that they are fellow humans. So part of what we want explained is why all humans are subject to moral obligations, and why we have some moral obligations that extend to how we relate to all people, including people we don’t even know, and people who cannot benefit us in any way. Before trying to show that Kierkegaard thinks of divine commands as satisfying these requirements, it is helpful first to sketch how he links God and moral obligations. To begin, he thinks that God’s commands create unconditional obligations for humans: But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison with yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your own shrewdness. All you have to do is obey in love. (SKS9: 28/WL: 20, trans. modified)

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God’s commands should be obeyed because God has absolute authority over humans. To God ‘every human being, not by birth but by creation from nothing, belongs as a bond servant, and in such a way as no bond servant has ever belonged to an earthly master, who at least admits that thoughts and feelings are free . . . ’ (SKS9: 118/WL: 115). Interestingly, Kierkegaard does not seem to think of divine authority as linked to rewards and punishments. In fact, he says that divine punishments are not really punishments, and should be welcomed and not feared. When God chastens an individual, it is for the individual’s own good, since God is completely loving (SKS8: 156–66/UDVS: 44–60). So, for Kierkegaard, God’s authority does not rest merely on God’s absolute power. Rather, the relation is grounded in the fact that God, who is completely loving, has created us out of nothing to enjoy a relation with himself. We could say that our obligations to obey God stem from the history of our relationship with God, just as many obligations to other humans are grounded in our past relations with those persons, except that our history with God goes back to our birth and does not end at death: ‘But that eternal love-history has begun much earlier; it began with your beginning, when you came into existence out of nothing, and just as surely as you do not become nothing, it does not end at a grave’ (SKS9: 151/WL: 149–50). It is important to see that in endorsing the claim that God’s commands create overriding obligations for humans, Kierkegaard is not claiming that all ethical truths depend on God’s will. God does not command it to be the case that God is good, or that love is good. Such truths rather provide part of the underpinnings of Kierkegaard’s claim that God’s commands generate obligations. A God who was not essentially good and loving would not be a God one would be obligated to obey. Here Kierkegaard’s view is similar to that of Robert Adams, who has argued that only the commands of a loving God would generate moral obligations (Adams 1999: 250). This is important because it blocks one common objection to a divine command account of moral obligation, the claim that seeing moral obligations as divine commands would make our obligations arbitrary. This objection originates in Plato’s Euthyphro. Since truths about the good are not rooted in God’s commands, there is no reason to think those commands are arbitrary. God commands what he commands because of his love for the good. It does not follow from this that truths about what is morally obligatory can be derived directly from truths about what is good. It is one thing to know that an act is good, or even that it is the best act one can do in a situation, and quite another to know that an act is obligatory. It is possible, at least for some acts, that God’s knowledge of the good and love for the good leave him no discretion with respect to what he commands. Even if this is the case, his command adds a new moral dimension to the situation. An analogy between moral and legal obligations may help here. I am only an average driver and it would not be good for me to drive in excess of 100 miles per hour on a crowded highway. On many German autobahns there are no speed limits, however. Thus, if I am driving on one of these German roads, it would be good for me to drive at a moderate speed but I have no legal obligation to do so. Similarly, many (perhaps even all) of the acts God commands would be good to perform even if God did not command

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them. However, the fact that God commands them gives them a new moral quality by virtue of God’s authority over his human creatures. Actions that God commands to be done are not just good but obligatory; actions God commands us not to do are not just bad but forbidden. It is evident, we think, that God’s commands meet the desiderata we sketched for being the foundation of moral obligations. First, if an obligation is rooted in a divine command, then there can be a fact of the matter about whether an act is morally obligatory, and people can be right or wrong in their beliefs about such facts. Thus moral obligations rooted in divine commands have the desired objectivity. It is often alleged that moral theories that view morality as consisting of objective facts fail the second test, however, because it is mysterious how the fact that an act is obligatory could be motivating, could provide a reason for acting in that way. Moral obligations that are grounded in God’s commands could clearly be motivating, however, if we suppose, as Kierkegaard does, that our greatest good lies in knowing God and having a loving relation with God. For Kierkegaard a relation with God is the greatest good a person can have, and thus anything that contributes to such a relation has incomparable value: ‘To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved’ (SKS9: 111/WL: 107, italics original). One of the ways love expresses itself is by a desire to please the person one loves; to fail to want to please the other is to have a less than ideal relationship with the person one loves. Of course love does not always satisfy the desires of the other, since the other might desire something harmful or immoral. But even in those cases the lover will feel a certain regret that he or she cannot please the lover. God, naturally, since he is supremely good, will never desire what is genuinely bad (though Kierkegaard thinks what God asks of us might not seem good to us, with our limited wisdom), so it will always be appropriate to want to satisfy God’s desires. So we can see that God’s authority not only provides a reason to obey his commands; we also have good reasons to care about doing so, for it is linked directly to our own deepest good. Because the relation to God is more important than any other, we can also understand why the obligations that are grounded in this relation would trump a person’s other reasons for action. Finally, seeing moral obligations as generated by divine commands helps us understand how morality can have universality, in both of the senses we discussed above. First, moral obligations are binding on all humans because the facts that ground the obligation apply equally to all. All humans were created by God from nothing and are made in such a way that a relation to God is the greatest possible good, and thus every human person has an overriding reason to care about God’s requirements. To see how morality can be universal in the second sense, in which some of our obligations require us to take into account the good of all persons, we need to say a bit more about the content of God’s commands as Kierkegaard understands them. God’s fundamental commands are to love God unconditionally and our neighbours as ourselves, as summarized in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It is easy to see why God should command us to love himself, since, as we have seen, God is supremely good and loving and a relation to God is the highest good possible for humans. Since God is

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supremely good, God is worthy of love, and humans find their own deepest happiness in loving him. But who is our neighbour and why should we love our neighbours as ourselves? Kierkegaard is very clear that the category of the neighbour is inclusive. Although ‘the neighbour’ is concrete in the sense that the next person you see is the neighbour, the neighbour is also ‘all people’ (SKS9: 58/WL: 52). This means that the neighbour must not be limited to those people who are like me or have something in common with me, such as family, friends, or fellow countrymen. To be sure, since the neighbour includes all people it includes spouses, children, friends, and fellow citizens. However, the person who draws a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, however that line is drawn, and thinks that moral obligations extend only to those who are ‘us’, fails to love the neighbour, however good a husband or wife or friend or citizen that individual may be. If we ask why we should love our neighbours in this sense, there are at least two different questions we may be asking. We may be asking why it is a duty to love our neighbour, but also why it is good to love our neighbour. We shall tackle the second question first. Kierkegaard clearly holds that it is good to love the neighbour, so much so that if we really understood our situation we should not even need to be commanded to love the neighbour. ‘The commandment is that you shall love, but, ah, if you will understand yourself and life, then it seems that it should not need to be commanded, because to love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living’ (SKS9: 368/WL: 375). Perhaps for the perfected saint or people who have achieved eternal life through death, there is no need to command love of the neighbour at all. This point is important, since it links Kierkegaard’s view of moral obligations to his view of the virtues, which we discuss in the next section. Moral duties have as their telos a transformation of the individual who is subject to those duties, a transformation that makes duty less important (even finally dropping out of the picture altogether) as we become the kinds of persons we were meant to be. However, most of us are not perfected saints, and Kierkegaard thinks that for actual human beings, it is good to be commanded to do what is good for us; we should not be too eager to ‘leave the school of the commandment’ (SKS9: 369/WL: 376). However, loving the neighbour is not merely good for the lover. It is good because it is a way of recognizing the intrinsic worth and value of the people who are loved. As we have seen, God himself is supremely good, but since every human shares in a ‘universal divine likeness’, Kierkegaard thinks that every person possesses an intrinsic worth and dignity as well (SKS9: 128/WL: 125). To love the neighbour is simply to recognize this special status that human persons enjoy simply as humans, regardless of what earthly station they may occupy. Kierkegaard compares human existence to a play, in which the various actors play different roles; one person plays the king while another plays a beggar (SKS9: 92–3/WL: 87–9). When the play is over, however, all the actors are simply human beings. In a similar way, despite the differences in worldly status, every human being possesses an ‘inner glory’ as a creature made in God’s image (SKS9: 93/WL: 88). People are like sheets of fine paper, in which there is different writing on each page.

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Nevertheless, if one holds the paper up to the light one sees a ‘common watermark’ (SKS9: 94/WL: 89). This watermark is the ‘inner glory’ that humans possess when they are seen as special creatures of God. We can therefore understand why God’s fundamental command to humans is this command to love the neighbour as oneself. In commanding us to love all persons, God is commanding us to imitate his own love, which is universal and impartial (SKS9: 69/WL: 62–3). However, for Kierkegaard, though neighbour love is truly good and good for us, it is also a duty, and it is good that it is a duty. For we are dominated by self-love and what Kierkegaard calls ‘preferential love’, the natural loves we have for our erotic lovers, spouses, children, friends, and those who are generally like us or can benefit us in some way. Love for God is the foundation for the neighbour love which both extends beyond these natural, preferential loves, and also transforms them. Thus, Kierkegaard says that God is the ‘middle term’ in love for the neighbour (SKS9: 111/ WL: 107). When I love the neighbour, I love him or her not merely because he or she is my friend or my family member (even if the person is a friend or family member). I love the person because of the inner glory he or she possesses as God’s creation. This not only prevents me from drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in such a way that I can ignore ‘them’; it also humanizes preferential, natural loves, by protecting against all forms of domination and oppression. Since men and women are equally children of God, a man must neither make himself a god to his wife, nor make his wife an idol to himself. If I love God, I will naturally want to obey God’s commands, including the command to imitate God in loving all those whom God has created in his own image. Our obligations to care about the good of others is thus a universal obligation; seeing our moral obligations as divine commands helps explain why we are obligated to care about the good of all.

VI. The Place of Virtues in Kierkegaard’s Thought In his Point of View for My Work as an Author, in many of his journal entries, and elsewhere in his works, Kierkegaard makes it clear that he thinks of himself as a kind of missionary to ‘Christendom’ and regards his writings as the chief vehicle of his missionary work. His mission is ‘again to introduce Christianity into Christendom’ (SKS12: 41/PC: 36) to awaken his contemporaries to a way of life to which most are notionally committed, but which in reality they have ‘forgotten’. He thinks that in his outwardly Lutheran society in nineteenth-century Denmark, little real Christianity is to be found, and he means by this that very few of his sophisticated contemporaries actually live or ‘exist’ in a way that is informed by Christian categories such as authority, obedience, love, and faith. He also thinks that the academic way of thinking about ethics and theology in his time, by removing such concepts from their living context, contributes little more than

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confusion to the discussion. These Christian concepts come across as unreal and thus undemanding: ‘ . . . science and scholarship have become fantastic (pure knowledge)’ (SKS27: Pap. 365: 3 [JP1: 649]). Accordingly, he writes about these concepts, but not in the ‘theoretical’ mode and mood that one expects from a university professor or professional theologian. (Such a mode is more likely to induce moral sleep than awakening.) Instead, he writes literary or ‘poetical’ (one could also say ‘rhetorical’) works, many of which take a point of view on living that is different, in one degree or another, from Kierkegaard’s own, but in each of which are found characters—from the aesthete ‘A’ of Either/Or I to the almost-but-not-quite Christian Johannes Climacus of Fragments and Postscript— who live intensely their points of view on life. Such works Kierkegaard attributes to various pseudonyms. Under his own name he writes a variety of other works, most of which consist in sermon-like discourses or deliberations that he often calls ‘upbuilding’ or ‘edifying’. These works are also literary or rhetorical, and the style and mood in which he writes them are essential to their upbuilding purpose. He uses pseudonyms because he is unusually attentive, as an author, to the relation between the ideals he attempts to communicate and his own person and ethical character. He comments in his journal, Patience, faith, humility, etc., in short, all the Christian virtues in non-actual dangers (for example, when a person shirks making the right decisions, refuses to take the showerbath of actuality so that he is actually scoffed at, is actually destitute, is actually hated by the world, etc.) are like heroism in peacetime. It is as if a soldier on the drill ground in a peaceful military exercise to capture a peewit-house assumed a martial air like that of Daniel Rantzau in battle. What is comical about it is the martial air—and the danger is pure nonsense, make-believe, a stage setting. Children play soldier, in peacetime men play war, and most men play at religion. (SKS20/ KJN4: NB2: 36 [JP1: 941])

If his readers are to be ‘built up’ in consequence of reading his works, the setting of the works needs to be reality, not fantasy. Accomplishing this through writing is a really tall order, but that is Kierkegaard’s project, and he strains every nerve of his enormous talent to fill it. What does he propose should be ‘built up’ by the aid of his writings? An answer is suggested by some of the concepts on which his writings focus and which they aim to clarify. The two concepts that are most widely addressed in Kierkegaard’s works, both pseudonymous and signed, are faith and love. Faith is central to Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and The Sickness Unto Death, as well as many of the upbuilding discourses. Love is central to Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way, Works of Love, and many of the discourses. Faith and love are two of the ‘theological virtues’ of medieval Christian thought (the other is of course hope). It is clear that Kierkegaard’s edifying missionary purpose is ultimately to awaken faith and love in his readers, his writings being an instrument of the work of the Holy Spirit, as he would no doubt affirm. But auxiliary to faith and love are a number of other virtues that

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are explicit foci of some of the discourses: hope,3 gratitude,4 contrition (sorrow),5 humility,6 patience,7 courage,8 honesty.9 There are also virtues that go by the names of emotions: joy,10 fear,11 and wonder,12 for example, and trademark Kierkegaardian virtues: soberness, earnestness, and primitivity (a somewhat misleading translation of a Danish term [Primitivitet] which connotes being the individual God intended a person to be). These last are ethical or spiritual attitudes or demeanours without which, according to Kierkegaard, it is not possible to exemplify the virtues that go by the more traditional names. Thus Christian virtues are at the very heart of Kierkegaard’s literary project. In making virtues central, his work is similar to that of classical philosophy from Socrates to the Hellenistic philosophers (Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics), whose purpose was the practical one of making people virtuous and wise through their conversation and writing. Speaking to the court that condemned him to death, Socrates says, . . . I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say is the greatest benefit, by trying to persuade him not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not to care for the city’s possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way. (Plato 1997: 36c, 32)

Similarly, Aristotle declares in his Nicomachean Ethics that . . . our present inquiry does not aim, as our others do, at theoria [contemplation]; for the purpose of our examination is not to know what virtue is, but to become good, since otherwise the inquiry would be of no benefit to us. (Aristotle 1926: 74; our translation)

Analogously, a major preoccupation of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics was to use philosophical reflection to transform souls in accordance with one or another ideal of character or virtue (apatheia, ataraxia), set within the context of a larger vision of reality (see Nussbaum 1994 and the essays in Seneca 1995). Pierre Hadot summarizes: ‘It is philosophy itself that the ancients thought of as a spiritual exercise’ (Hadot 1995: 126). Hadot emphasizes that this ‘ethical’ purpose of philosophy was not limited to the Hellenistic philosophers’ purely ethical writings, but that they saw all aspects of their corpus as serving this purpose. Ethics was not, for them, fenced off from metaphysics (or theology) and epistemology in the way that it may be for us, but was about an entire vision of 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

See SKS5: 15–37/EUD: 7–30; SKS5: 185–205/EUD: 205–26; SKS5: 250–69/EUD: 253–73. See SKS5: 39–56/EUD: 31–48; SKS5: 129–42/EUD: 125–58; SKS5: 361–81/EUD: 377–401. See SKS5 391–418/TDIO 7–40. See SKS5: 269–82/EUD 275–90. See SKS5: 185–205/EUD: 181–204; SKS5: 185–205/EUD: 205–26. See SKS5: 335–60/EUD: 347–76; SKS8: 413–31/UVDS: 321–41. See SKS5: 391–418/TDIO: 7–40. See SKS8: 309–431/UDVS: 213–341. See SKS5: 391–418/TDIO: 7–40. See SKS5: 391–418/TDIO: 7–40.

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properly formed human life in the universe. Thus, in his ethical reflections Kierkegaard is seeking to revive not only the Christian virtues in his reader but, in the service of these virtues, also the ancient pagan practice of reflection (or philosophy—Kierkegaard calls himself a ‘poet-dialectician’) aimed at the spiritual transformation of human lives. His thought about human existence resembles classical thought also in the way that he balances and integrates passions, emotions, feelings, interests, and enthusiasms, on the one side, with thought, reflection, deliberation, and dialectic on the other. Aristotle tells us that the moral virtues are rational dispositions with respect to both actions and passions (Aristotle 1926: 2.6, 88–97), and Kierkegaard’s persona Johannes Climacus describes the task of becoming a Christian as ‘pathetic-dialectic’ (not ‘pathetic and dialectic’)—as a matter of both thinking correctly and feeling correctly, of both conceptual clarity/propriety and proper passion (concerns and emotions (SKS7: 350–2/CUP1: 385–7)). These aspects of the task are integrated. The passions are to be shaped by the thought and the thought is to be enlivened and driven by the passions. Climacus comments that ‘in strong passions and the like, I have material enough, and therefore pain enough in forming something good out of it with the aid of reason’. Then in a footnote he says, ‘With these words I wish to call to mind Plutarch’s splendid definition of virtue: “Ethical virtue has the passions for its material, reason for its form.” See his little book on the virtues’ (SKS7: 150/CUP1: 161–2). Aristotle makes virtues dispositions to rational choice, and choice a matter of desire: . . . moral virtue is a choice-making state of character . . . choice is deliberated desire of things that are up to us . . . The origin of action is choice . . . , and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end. Hence choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect or without a moral disposition. (Aristotle 1926: 2.6, 1107a 1, 94, 3.3, 1113a 10–11, 140, 6.2, 1139a32–4, 328; our trans.)

By ‘moral disposition’ (hexis êthikê) Aristotle means a concern, care, interest, emotion disposition, or aim. So Aristotle’s idea, like the one from Plutarch that Climacus endorses, is that moral character is the rational formation of our interests, concerns, and emotion dispositions. But what does ‘rational’ mean? What is the standard of rationality? Because Kierkegaard aims to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom, he does not accept uncritically the standards for the rationality of concerns and emotions that prevail in his society. To accept those standards would be to abandon his project, which involves reintroducing standards of rationality that have been ‘forgotten’. In Two Ages, Kierkegaard says, . . . it must always be kept in mind that reflection itself is not something pernicious, that on the contrary the prerequisite for acting more intensively is the thorough kneading of reflection. Antecedent to inspired, enthusiastic action are: first of all, the immediate, spontaneous inspiration, then the period of prudence, which, because immediate inspiration does not deliberate, seems to be superior by virtue of its ingenuity in deliberation, and then finally the highest and most intensive enthusiasm which follows on the heels of prudence and therefore perceives what is the

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most prudent thing to do but rejects it and thereby gains the intensity of infinite enthusiasm. (SKS8: 105/TA: 110–11)

What Kierkegaard here calls ‘prudence’ (and which might well be translated as ‘shrewdness’) is the normative order characteristic of average everyday bourgeois practical reason: pay the least for the most, guard your reputation, avoid dangers and maximize your safety, invest for the future, don’t make yourself a laughing stock. Then, he says, when through careful reflection you have fully understood the prudent course of action, do not do that, but what is right by the standards of the eternal. Then your love for the good will be properly intense and clear-minded, because you’ll know what you’ve turned your back on. Since Kierkegaard’s ultimate aim is to foster the Christian virtues in his reader, his writings are pervaded by juxtapositions, comparisons, and contrasts, on the supposition that one understands a way of life best by seeing how it differs from other similar or not so similar ways of life. Without a clear view of the contrasting case, a person is more prone to mistake his merely ethical or even aesthetic existence for the existence of a Christian. If he is in fact not on the road toward Christian formation, a vivid presentation of his own life (the ‘stage’ he is at) in contrast with the Christian one may ‘wake him up’. Perhaps the most obvious case of contrasting juxtaposition in Kierkegaard’s writings is Either/Or which, after richly displaying ‘aesthetic’ thinking about life in the first volume, presents in the second volume explicit comparison of that way with the ‘ethical’ way of thinking, on such topics as romantic and marital love, the temporal nature of human existence, and the nature of choice. As we pointed out earlier, the notion of the ‘stages’ on life’s way provides a sort of framework for all of Kierkegaard’s writings; and it works its upbuilding purpose by explicitly juxtaposing and contrasting these virtues or ways of forming the human self. We have also remarked about Kierkegaard’s stress, in Works of Love, on the fact that Christian love is divinely commanded. Its commanded character marks a very stark contrast, according to Kierkegaard, with the character of romantic love and friendship. The latter kinds of love are ‘spontaneous’, being more or less natural responses to more or less obvious qualities in the one that is loved. By contrast, Christian love is not a reaction to the beauty, friendliness, cleverness, virtue, or other attractions of the one loved, but an obedient response to God’s order that this one should be loved—this one who may very well be ugly, surly, witless, or vicious. Nor is Christian love just the same attitude as romantic love or friendship, except in being commanded; it is a different attitude, a different orientation to the other, one in which one’s bearing towards the neighbour is at the same time a response to God. Romantic love and friendship do not necessarily involve any explicit response to God. But as we’ve also pointed out, Christian love is, after all, a response to something attractive about the neighbour who may be ugly, surly, witless, or vicious, namely the ‘inner glory’ consequent on his or her being created in God’s image. The neighbour’s inner glory is a genuine attraction, but it is visible only to the one who loves in response to God’s command and in the way that is commanded; it presupposes a special way of seeing and being attracted to the neighbour, a way that necessarily coordinates with one’s love of God. And this in turn

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presupposes a particular understanding of human nature, in light of the Jewish and Christian doctrine of creation.

VII. Conclusion We have stressed chiefly two aspects of Kierkegaard’s contribution to ethical thought. For him, first, all true ethics is grounded in theology. For him, God is the creator, lawgiver, lover, and redeemer of humankind, the most important being in the universe and thus the central focus of any well-lived human life. The highest kind of ethical life is thus also a religious life—a God-relationship—as he often calls it, which is at the same time a relationship with our fellow human beings. This relationship with God and human fellows depends on a particular formation of the human self. A person who is formed in this requisite way is disposed to take certain emotionally coloured attitudes towards God, his neighbour, and himself, in the particular situations of his life, and in conformity with those attitudes he is also disposed to make choices and perform actions. This ethico-religious formation of the human self has an array of aspects that together constitute human wholeness in the individual case. Each of these aspects supplies something that is needed for the excellence of the individual’s relationships with God and fellows. In supplying what is needed, these aspects of personality reflect the nature of God, of our human nature (both original and spoiled), and of the kinds of situations that are generic for any human life. They go by the names of the traditional biblical virtues: faith, hope, love, obedience, patience, humility, gentleness, self-control, courage, forbearance, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, contrition, joy. Kierkegaard saw the task of becoming a Christian as that of putting on these virtues, and the task of the philosophical Christian missionary to Christendom as that of highlighting their structure and their challenge in the most unavoidable possible way. Some of these virtues can be acquired only by being receptive and obedient to God’s law. So there is a link between Kierkegaard’s emphasis on divine commands and his focus on the virtues that we have explored as the second important aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought about ethics. In the end, ethics for Kierkegaard is all about personal transformation.

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Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2005). The Best Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky Including ‘Notes From the Underground’ (New York: Modern Library). Evans, C. Stephen (2009). Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Green, Ronald (1992). ‘Enough Is Enough: Fear and Trembling Is Not about Ethics’, in Journal of Religious Ethics 21, 191–209. Hadot, Pierre (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Arnold I. Davidson (Malden, MA: Blackwell). Kiekegaard Sören (2006). Fear and Trembling, eds. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Korsgaard, Christine, M. and Cohen, G. A. et al. (1996). The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Macintyre, Alsdair (1984). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Nussbaum, Martha (1994). The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Plato (1997). Apology, trans. G. M. A Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1957). Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library). Schrader, George (1972). ‘Kant and Kierkegaard on Duty and Inclination’, in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Josiah Thompson (Garden City New York: Doubleday). Seneca (1995). Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, eds. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Suggested Reading Davenport and Rudd (2001). Evans C. Stephen (2005). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——— (2009). Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gouwens David, J. (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lippitt, John (2003). Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (London: Routledge). Roberts, Robert (1995). ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of “Virtue Ethics” ’, in Merold Westphal and Martin Matustik (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 142–66. ——— (1997a). ‘Existence, Emotion and Character: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard’, in Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 177–206. Rudd, Anthony (1993). Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Westphal, Merold (1996). Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press).

chapter 12

selfhood a n d ‘spir it’ john j. davenport

I. Introduction: Kierkegaard, Existentialism, and Personalism In his major pseudonymous works and in some of his signed writings, Søren Kierkegaard develops a conception of personal selves that is closely related to his account of the three existential ‘stages’ or basic attitudes towards life (and their various sub-stages1). It is also closely related to his notions of sincerity and earnestness in agency, and to his conception of freedom. In this chapter I will approach these issues by focusing on Kierkegaard’s conceptions of self, passion, and will in general—especially in his two main psychological works, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death. I concentrate on major themes in the primary texts, with moderate attention to a few key developments in the secondary literature. First, a note on terminology. I follow Merold Westphal’s view that for Kierkegaard, as we see in the Climacus writings, ‘selfhood is the goal rather than the presupposition of my existence’ (Westphal 1996: p. ix): ‘human beings’ exist before they become ‘selves’, even though the potential for selfhood is latent within them. For, as Mark C. Taylor argues, within ‘Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of spirit’ or portrayal of different basic attitudes towards life, a human person in her default form is only a potential self ‘in the spiritlessness of immediacy’; even when reflective self-awareness begins, ‘since the person still has not become a self-determining agent, he is not yet a concrete individual’ (Taylor 2000: 234–7). To explain, a reflective aesthete like Johannes the Seducer moves and interacts with others, but not in the deeper sense of autonomous choice: he is ‘unwilling to take definitive action’ or commit to any form of ‘concrete existence’ (Taylor 2000: 238). Used this way, the ‘individual’ or ‘self ’ is virtually equivalent to ‘authentic self ’

1 On the theory of the stages or ‘existence-spheres’, see the chapter by Evans and Roberts in this volume.

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(Taylor 2000: 238). However, the full range of ontological development in Kierkegaard’s various accounts implies that there is room for a human person to have acquired a ‘self ’ without having yet become a fully authentic self in faith. While Kierkegaard and his major pseudonyms often refer to people as lacking ‘a self ’ (selv), they also frequently refer to an inauthentic ‘self ’, or to more deficient versus more adequate forms of ‘self ’.2 Similarly, commentaries often speak of ‘the self ’s development’ from initial aesthetic to ethical and religious life-views (Hannay 1982: 159); this is partly because the first major step in the will’s awakening to ethical consciousness is seen as the first acquisition of a definite and positive identity that is distinct from one’s given desires, temperament, and socially acquired habits (SKS11: 151/SUD: 34–5). Still, in their strictest formulations, Kierkegaard and his more authoritative pseudonyms refer to ‘self ’ narrowly as the authentic ideal of personhood, and I largely follow that usage below. Second, some brief historical background will help. From the point at the end of the nineteenth century when Kierkegaard’s work began to be taken seriously beyond theological circles, philosophers have recognized that both his pseudonymous and signed writings suggest that appreciating our ethical responsibilities and the importance of faith require at least an implicit recognition of what it is to be a person with the potential for ‘selfhood’ as a telos (SKS11: 149/SUD: 33). Just as a concern for self is central to the account of ‘existential tasks’ in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and a proper sort of ‘self-love’ is seen as integral to developing our capacity for agapic love of God and neighbour in Works of Love (SKS9: 30–1/WL: 22–3), much of Kierkegaard’s writings on ethical consciousness suggest that the volitional ‘movements’ involved in attaining a definite practical identity are crucial for one’s understanding the extent and nature of one’s moral obligations. In this respect, Kierkegaard’s approach is formally similar to Aristotelian eudaimonism in recognizing an essential connection between appreciating what we are and what we are meant to become—though Kierkegaard denies that we can only will happiness or that the content of ethics can be fully based on natural knowledge of human nature or the requirements of happiness in social life.3 As Alastair Hannay says, for Kierkegaard, ethics in its true ‘eternal’ form cannot be explained by pre-ethical conditions of human beings as a natural kind (Hannay 1982: 158–60). Still, Kierkegaard’s (direct and indirect) analyses of selfhood are based on practical concerns; like Kant, he recognizes the priority of the practical standpoint in philosophical anthropology and philosophical psychology. While much of the early reception of Kierkegaard focused on his novel but difficult treatment of religious faith, his critique of Hegel, and his emphasis on decision, his 2 In his signed writings, Kierkegaard often simply refers to ‘the person’ or ‘a human being’—e.g. throughout the edifying discourse ‘On the Occasion of a Confession’ (in TDIO), and in ‘Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing’ (in UDVS). 3 Kierkegaard’s rejection of eudaimonism is evident in his account of positive evil in Sickness: see SKS11: 209–11/SUD 9699. See also Davenport 2001b: 302–8; Johnson 2001; and Davenport 2007: ch. 10. Many readers also see Works of Love as rejecting eudaimonism, but it may not follow from commanded agapic love that created persons have a natural capacity to will ends unrelated to their eudaimonia. For a non-eudaimonist interpretation of Kierkegaard’s highest good, see Glen 1997.

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enormous influence on twentieth-century existential philosophy shows that thinkers such as Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre took Kierkegaard to be proposing (at least indirectly) a new conception of selfhood.4 On their view, according to Kierkegaard, the freedom that persons exercise in time—rather than as Kantian noumenal selves with an atemporal identity that is fixed like that of a Leibnizian monad—means that persons ‘exist’ in a different way than any mere object has being, since persons are always aware of future possibilities and restrictions on their options arising from their situation and their past. Many contemporary commentators rightly emphasize that Kierkegaard was not an ‘existentialist’ in any sense associated with Sartre’s conception of groundless free choice or Nietzsche’s rejection of any eternal truths. However, Kierkegaard frequently implies that the uniqueness of a self is not like the instantiation of a kind-essence in particular matter, nor is it the individuation of an ongoing mental substance: ‘an individual human being cannot be thought’ (SKS11: 230–1/SUD: 119; see Davenport 2001c: 135 on the difference between substance and the human ‘race’). Like existential thinkers who are indebted to him, Kierkegaard holds that a ‘self ’ arises through the experiences that a human being undergoes and the choices he makes in response; the personal being that is already ‘there’ at the start of this process begins as a kind of ‘dreaming spirit’ not even aware of its potential (SKS4: 354/CA: 48) and has to achieve the ‘inwardness’ or reflexive relations that constitute a self or fully personal identity. Similarly, the child begins as ‘neither good nor bad’ (SKS4: 379/CA: 76). Thus Sartre read The Concept of Anxiety and a key journal entry by Kierkegaard as teaching that, by refraining from direct control, God forces Adam to become free: ‘The Self is chosen finitude, nothingness affirmed and delimited by an act; it is determination conquered by defiance . . . ’ (Sartre 1956: 90). While this is too extreme—for Kierkegaard actually reserves ‘defiance’ for a radical stance of the will against any dependence on God—Sartre is correct that for Kierkegaard, a ‘living subject’ is distinct from any object of knowledge and involves an ‘interiority’ that is unlike that of a detached speculative knower (Sartre 1956: 80). This is not simply a result of consciousness, or even consciousness capable of explicit self-reflection, but due instead to the free volition involved in the stream of personal consciousness. However, Kierkegaard’s existential successors tended to construe his conception of the self as radically individual or even solipsistic. On the contrary, like a wider range of ‘personalist’ thinkers such as Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Emmanuel Levinas, Kierkegaard’s writings depict human selves as essentially dialogical or inextricably related to others—first of all to God, but through God to human neighbours. The capacity for love, which is the shared mark of personhood in all of us and the origin of each individual will, is oriented outwards (SKS9: 17/WL: 9), though it also enables reflexively proper self-love. Kierkegaard also depicts an intrasubjective dimension of individuality

4 Some other existential thinkers, such as Karl Jaspers, put Kierkegaard with Nietzsche as mainly challenging all forms of ‘reason’ rather than offering any new ontological insights (Jaspers 1932). Yet Jaspers’s own arguments that I discover within my freedom as ‘the source of my self-being’ that I have not absolutely created myself, that ‘where I am wholly myself I am not only myself ’ (Jaspers 1932: 95), could serve as a helpful gloss on the basic ontological thesis of The Sickness Unto Death.

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that does not simply reduce to intersubjective relations; this is part of his break with Hegel, and it still distinguishes his view from entirely social theories of selves that have developed from Hegel in contemporary pragmatism (e.g. Mead 1934), Critical Theory (e.g. Habermas 1979: ch.2; and 1987: Lecture XI), and various communitarian conceptions (e.g. Sandel 1982). For Kierkegaard, authentic community or ‘solidarity’ requires not only that each member is ‘educated to make up his own mind instead of agreeing [automatically] with the public’,5 but also that he become a ‘single individual’ or ‘someone’ with a distinct practical identity by being ‘essentially engaged’ or devoted to something noble beyond himself (SKS8: 87–8/TA: 91–3). Thus, like other major thinkers in the personalist tradition, Kierkegaard implies that alterity as an ethically significant irreducible difference between individuals is essential to selfhood.

II. The Ontology of Selfhood in the Sickness Unto Death As noted above, the idea that an ontology of selfhood can be found in Kierkegaard’s writings is implied in development of his themes by later existential authors. One of the first analytic scholars to argue that Kierkegaard was concerned to present and defend such an ontology is John Elrod,6 whose thesis is that ‘the concept of the self in the pseudonyms’ provides the basis for Kierkegaard’s ‘unified view of human existence’ (Elrod 1975: 9). Given the priority of practical import in Kierkegaard’s writings (signed and pseudonymous) and his focus on bringing readers to a deeper appreciation of what is at stake in life, his ontology of the person is not presented as a thesis in systematic metaphysics or defended by arguments of the sorts familiar from European rationalist or empiricist traditions. Rather, it is offered as a conception to which we are implicitly committed in our practical experience and defended by psychological evidence: it is a hypothesis that explains what is wrong with several attitudes towards life or forms of identity that are disclosed as inadequate both in actual human existence and in an imaginative presentation of several possible variations on stances that we find in real human characters. In other words, we receive from Kierkegaard not a metaphysics of selfidentity but a practical phenomenology, which assumes that the reader already has certain interests and experiences, and can recognize the possibility of other types of personality on this basis. In fact, the two works in which Kierkegaard is generally held to have focused most clearly on a ‘psychology’ or account of selfhood both begin with certain dogmatic assumptions from revealed Christian teachings as well, such as the reality 5 In this respect, Kierkegaard’s famous essay on ‘The Present Age’ (see SKS8: 66–106/TA: 68–112) stands in a long tradition that includes Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment’ and Mill’s On Liberty, along with influential essays on freedom of speech and press by John Milton and John Locke. 6 Though Elrod acknowledges debts both to Michael Wyschogrod and to Calvin Schrag (Elrod 1975: 7).

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of sin and creation ex nihilo. Although both these books—The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death—are attributed to pseudonyms, they offer more direct or ‘dialectical’ analyses of different ‘conscious states’ (Hannay 1982: 157); and ‘Anti-Climacus’, who is the pseudonymous author of Sickness, is meant to be an ‘extraordinarily high’ or advanced Christian author who Kierkegaard distinguishes from himself not to indicate disagreement with him but from humility (see the Hongs’ introduction, SUD, pp. xxii– xxiii). Similarly, the pseudonymous author of Anxiety, ‘Vigilius Haufniensis’, seems to be authoritative although he focuses on types of ‘anxiety’ that are psychological conditions or symptoms of sin, rather than the despair involved in the spiritual actuality of sinning.7 Sickness in particular seems to present an account of self that could rival Hegel’s or Fichte’s in its depth, and it has been widely regarded as the canonical statement of Kierkegaard’s own view. I will argue that this account is really a schematic outline in which several components have to be filled in according to conceptions of will, passion, freedom, and faith found mainly in other pseudonymous works. But given its fame and influence, it is useful to begin with Sickness, bearing in mind that Anti-Climacus’s stated purpose is to explain ‘despair’, the horrifying but free sickness of spirit (Aand) that goes unrecognized among the ills that ‘worldly’ understanding recognizes (SKS11: 124/SUD: 8). In a much-quoted and discussed passage, Anti-Climacus tells us that A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. (SKS11: 129/SUD: 13)

This is sufficiently complex that some commentators have thought it was intended as a parody of German Idealism (Hannay 1987: 23).8 Perhaps it is meant partly this way, but this self-thesis, as I will call it (‘ST’ for short), is also proposed seriously in two senses. First, it is a rejection of both Aristotelian hylomorphic and substance-dualist accounts of persons as unions or relations of body and mind, which the text calls ‘the psychical and the physical’. Dualist accounts hold that the mind, ‘soul’, or ‘psyche’ is the self (which is also contingently attached to a human body), while hylomorphic accounts hold that the self is the substantial form that is individuated by informing or making function a particular body in a certain segment of space.9 Anti-Climacus seems to regard the hylomorphic approach, or perhaps a dual aspect approach, as giving the correct account of a human being (see Morelli 1995: 18), but not of a person or self:

7 See Gregory Beabout’s helpful summary of scholarship on the relation between Sickness and Anxiety (Beabout 1996). 8 See also the discussion of this passage in Hannay’s chapter ‘Translating Kierkegaard’ in this volume. 9 For my purposes, this simple gloss suffices, though it leaves aside medieval variations that instead attribute individuation in an individual essence (haecceity) or to a unique species-form for each person. In trying to avoid equating the individuality of a person with the instantiation of a universal in particular matter, arguably these variants anticipate the need for an existential conception of the uniqueness of selves.

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A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered this way, a human being is still not a self. (SKS11: 129/SUD: 13)

Here, as many commentators have noted, pairs of binary opposites are associated with the poles of a hylomorphic synthesis—finitude, necessity, and temporality are associated with embodiment (and thus with situatedness in a time, place, and society), while infinity, possibility, and eternity are associated with soul or mind. By contrast, ‘spirit’ or the self it forms is a reflexive structure that transcends the first-order relation of hylomorphic or animal unity between these poles. Anti-Climacus distinguishes spirit/self from the ‘negative’ unity that subsists at the level of the first-order relation as the tension between its poles: ‘the relation between the psychical and the physical is a [first-order] relation. If, however, the [first] relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self ’ (SKS11: 129/SUD: 13).10 In other words, the self is a higher-order relation involving the first-order relation (or synthesis). It is not in itself a relation between this first-order relation and a distinct entity, but instead a further ‘positive’ way that the human being constituted by the first-order relation acts on or relates back to its parts or polar aspects. Yet the text immediately adds to the ST that this whole second-order complex is ‘established by another’ and relates itself to that which established the ‘entire [second-order] relation’ (SKS11: 129/SUD: 13). In other words, the self-relation’s third relation to that which grounds its existence is not simply a static ontological dependence, but a dynamic attitude towards that divine basis that varies in connection with variation in spirit’s relation to the poles of ‘soma’ and ‘psyche.’ In simplest schematic terms, we can diagram the proposal as follows:

1storder hylomorphic synthesis

Body / facticity

Soul / mind

(necessities of situation, finitude, temporality)

(possibility, infinitude, eternity)

2ndorder volitional relation

Self / Spirit God as Ground

There have been many helpful scholarly attempts to explain what this self-thesis (ST) means. In labelling the first-order relation, I follow John Glenn’s argument that when 10 The text is actually more complex, since Anti-Climacus begins this sentence by making sure the reader will not confuse the positive higher-order relation of spirit with any imagined derivative ‘relation’ between the first-order relation and its relata. I have left this complication aside.

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Anti-Climacus diagnoses several forms of despair as overemphases on one pole or the other, we see that ‘finitude’ and ‘necessity’ in human existence do not refer just to material composition in space/time, but to ‘involvement in actual situations’ of history and culture, including ‘a tendency to be absorbed into restrictive social roles’. Similarly, eternity and ‘infinitude’ do not signify ‘the possession of an immortal soul’ (Glenn 1987: 8). In the first-order relation, Kierkegaard is not repeating the traditional dualism of a mental and physical substance (Glenn 1987: 6–7), and it is the self rather than the ‘soul’ or psyche that continues in eternity after death.11 But what is ‘spirit’? As Hannay persuasively argues, Hegel uses ‘spirit’ (Geist) in a sense that goes back at least to ‘Aristotle’s pneuma, a kind of divine stuff . . . that preserves the unity of the organism’ (Hannay 1987: 27). In this sense, ‘spirit’ as the animating principle of the body is a dynamic version of ‘soul’ as its organizing form. And for Hegel, human ‘spirit’ is the ‘end-state’ of ‘soul’ or ‘consciousness’ in which it attains a rational understanding of itself in relation to world (Hannay 1987: 26). Thus, in rejecting hylomorphism by distinguishing ‘spirit’ from ‘soul’ (or mind, reason), Anti-Climacus is implying that the telos of personhood transcends that of any animal kind: spirit essentially involves an individualizing relation to God (Hannay 1987: 28). But before we can understand how spirit depends on God, we must first grasp its reflexive work on the human psychophysical relation with its polar qualities. In one of the earliest detailed English-language analyses, John Elrod says that, by insisting that ‘spirit is a positive third element which itself posits’ or establishes ‘the relation of the dialectically opposing moments’, Kierkegaard distinguishes spirit from the Hegelian sort of negative unity that is supposed to arise necessarily from the two poles (Elrod 1975: 30, 39). Still, this does not mean that spirit is a ‘higher power or faculty’ of control; instead, along Heideggerian lines, Elrod suggests that ‘spirit’ operates as ‘the structuring principle of the self ’ by determining the way that the first-order relation is lived: ‘the specific structure of each expression of the self as synthesis is determined by the manner in which spirit constitutes and unites the [first-order] relation’ (Elrod 1975: 31–2). This implies three levels of specification. While the basic fourfold dialectical polarity of body/soul, finite/infinite, temporal/eternal, and necessity/possibility is the universal ontological framework of any personal identity, these sides or aspects of the

11

This is implied when Anti-Climacus argues in the Preface that according to Christianity, despair as spiritual ‘sickness unto death’ does not end in death of the human composite (SKS11: 123–4/SUD: 7–8). It is more explicit when Anti-Climacus adds that the despairing self cannot be rid of itself in mortal demise because the divine power that established the self-relation as the ultimate gift is also an ‘eternal claim’ or ownership, and thus it ‘forces him to be the self he does not want to be’ (SKS11: 136–7/ SUD: 20–1). The implication here is that suicide committed in a despairing effort to cease being a person leads only to a damned form of personhood. A similar conception of the survival of the self is found in the famous ‘Purity of Heart’ section of Kierkegaard’s discourse, On the Occasion of a Confession, and also his discourse At a Graveside. Note that (religious) ‘eternity’ after death is implicitly distinct from (ethical) ‘eternity’ in the mental pole of the first-order relation. That ‘eternity’ of spirit is not completely identical to ‘eternity’ as one pole of the first-order relation agrees with a key distinction in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (see Davenport 2008a: 906).

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first-order relation are always balanced or imbalanced in particular (‘ontic’ or factual) modes that constitute the main types of ‘self ’. These basic forms of alignment or misalignment of the poles in the first-order relation correspond to Kierkegaard’s existential stages. At the third level, one’s ‘spirit’ determines how one lives through these adverbial modes of the first-order relation over time. In Anti-Climacus’s analogy, the structure of personhood is like that of a multi-storied house, but people choose to live on different floors, with most preferring the basement (SKS11: 158–9/SUD: 43). Thus the different forms of despair are misrelations of the first-order relation or ‘synthesis’, but ‘the synthesis is not the misrelation; it is merely the possibility’ of a spiritual misrelation (SKS11: 131/ SUD 15). So the basic structure of selfhood must be distinguished both from the existential stages or life-views that Anti-Climacus redescribes as forms of despair or faith, and from the concrete way that an individual person manifests one of these spiritual shapes during a period of time. As a dynamic process of ongoing activity, an individual spirit determines ‘how’ the first-order relation is lived in two ways according to Elrod. First, spirit provides a certain kind of ‘self-consciousness’ that is not mere reflective awareness of one’s sentience, but instead an ‘energizing force’ that brings about a productive tension between ideality and reality (mind and world)— a kind of ‘interest’ in the sides of the first-order relation (Elrod 1975: 50–1).12 It is this sort of interest, absent in speculative reflection, which makes it possible for the person to become aware of herself as a ‘self ’. Thus Elrod interprets Kierkegaardian ‘self-consciousness’ not simply as introspective but as ‘the initial effort of the self ’ to discover itself (Elrod 1975: 53). This reading is supported by AntiClimacus’s Preface where he says that ‘Christian knowing’ is ‘concerned’, and ‘Concern [Bekymringen] constitutes the relation to life, to the actuality of personality, and therefore earnestness from the Christian point of view’ (SKS11: 117/SUD 5–6). Since ‘earnestness’ is a form of volitional care with repeated dedication (see Davenport 2001b: 276–82), this passage implies that ‘self ’ is the identity that is formed by willed caring, taking an interest. As George Pattison puts it, the ‘full self-consciousness’ in which self-unity is achieved is not a ‘purely experiential understanding’ or spectation of oneself, but rather a practical self-awareness gained through ‘volitional’ resolve (Pattison 1997: 78). Spirit is an ability or power to move between possibility and necessity. Most interpretations of the ST emphasize this point, for later in Sickness, Anti-Climacus refers again to the synthesis of infinitude and finitude and says that even though this relation is ‘derived’ from the power that establishes it, it ‘relates itself to itself, which is freedom. The self is freedom’ (SKS11: 145/SUD: 29). It is evident here that the first-order hylomorphic relation is not enough for the freedom that is essential to persons and to their constitutive responsibility for the selves they acquire (which I’ll call ‘existential freedom’). In a crucial passage, Anti-Climacus says that the second-order relation or spiritual freedom results from God’s withholding control: despair or misrelation is only possible because 12 For a detailed development of this insight, see Patrick Stokes’ analysis of Kierkegaardian spirit as ‘interesse’ (Stokes 2010: esp. ch. 3).

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. . . God, who constituted man a relation, releases it from his hand, as it were—that is, inasmuch as the relation relates itself to itself. And because the relation is spirit, is the self, upon it rests the responsibility for all [its] despair. (SKS11: 132/SUD: 16, my italics)

In other words, spirit always freely assumes a posture of will; it is as if God creates the potential for self by allowing a human animal to become free in relation to its given psychological and physical features, to make of them an identity conditioned but not determined by this givenness. Though a few passages in Sickness may make it sound as if freedom belongs to one pole of the first-order relation (with possibility), in fact the kind of freedom that Anti-Climacus equates with selfhood transcends both poles (see Glenn 1987: 8); thus it cannot simply be negative liberty as the absence of necessity, or what other pseudonymous authors often refer to as ‘abstract liberium arbitrium’ (SKS4: 355/ CA: 49). Instead existential freedom is always already interested in its options because it has a telos, and those options are always qualified by its history.

III. The Existential Telos: Spirit as ‘Striving Will’ in Sickness, Anxiety, and Either/or Yet this does not explain how ‘selfhood’ that is equated with the higher-order relation or a ‘self ’ that arises from a specific free response to one human being’s first-order relation could give that being a determinate practical identity: what kind of response is it? Or in Elrod’s terms, how exactly does ‘spirit’ as free interest in the world (and in itself) give a particular instance of the first-order relation its specific content? This first-order character shaped by spirit will be historically unique but also exemplify one of the existential stages or basic stances of existence that are possible, given the four basic aspects of the hylomorphic relation. Elrod is surely correct that, for Kierkegaard, existential freedom operates within the limits of an individual’s facticity, and (contra Sartre) it either fails to operate or is held in abeyance in the earlier types of aestheticism (Elrod 1975: 58–61). But it is too Heideggerian to say that, for Kierkegaard, this freedom has no telos and its only real possibility is ‘itself ’ (Elrod 1975: 56, 64). On the contrary, Anti-Climacus says that every misrelation or imbalance that spirit brings about in the first-order relation also ‘reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that established it’ (SKS11: 130/SUD: 14)—meaning that it (at least tacitly) rebels by refusing to take the shape that it is meant to take in accordance with the basic structure13 established by its creator: 13

More technically, this means that each particular way that spirit freely relates to the two sides of its first-order object also generates an implicit stance towards the power that constituted it as free, and vice-versa: the way one wills to be oneself or not is eo ipso also a way of willing to be what God created one to be or not. This explains why the negative form of despair, ‘not to will to be oneself ’ always

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The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. (SKS11: 130/SUD: 14)

Thus the ST in Sickness includes a statement of the existential telos of mortal personhood: ‘to will to be the self that he is in truth,’ i.e. as a created spirit acknowledging its debt to its creator (SKS11: 136/SUD: 20, my italics). This is also the formula for faith: ‘the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God.’ Thus despair (as sin) includes every form of identity short of faith, as the true opposite of sin (SKS11: 196/ SUD: 82). This existential telos is not defined as eudaimonia; for happiness is not even a qualification of spirit (SKS11: 141/SUD: 25), though faith may lead to an eternal happiness. To make sense of the ST, we need to understand what ‘will’ means in these reflexive formulae, including those for the two main forms of despair—‘not to will to be oneself, to do away with oneself ’ and ‘in despair to will to be oneself ’ (SKS11: 130/SUD: 14). As we have seen, ‘will’ in these formulae, like ‘spirit’ in the ST, cannot only mean choice that exercises leeway-liberty. Soon after equating the self with freedom as ‘the dialectical aspect of the categories of possibility and necessity,’ or that which unites them, Anti-Climacus adds that selfconsciousness . . . is decisive with regard to the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self, but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also. (SKS11: 145/SUD: 29)

The gradation implied here suggests something closer to decisiveness and will-power. Similarly, when Anti-Climacus refers to unreflective aesthetes as lacking ‘spirit’, he explains this in terms of being ruled by passive motives: ‘The man of immediacy is only psychically qualified’ rather than spiritual because he understands his identity only as an adjunct to external objects. ‘The self is bound up in immediacy with the other [object] in desiring, craving, enjoying, etc.’ (SKS11: 165–6/SUD: 51). This should remind us of Judge William’s claim in the second letter of Either/Or II that those who live only for satisfaction through success in some external aim all fail to discover their selfhood and a truly unified goal that would give content to their self (SKS3: 177–9/EO2: 182–4). By contrast, the Judge describes the sort of willing on ethical grounds that generates a unified personality as an internal investment in the life chosen (SKS3: 160/EO2: 163), which involves a kind of ‘self-consciousness’ that is only possible to a mind that is ‘owned’ by a involves some positive defiance (SKS11: 130/SUD: 14) and likewise why the positive form of despair includes the ‘will to be rid of oneself ’ qua true self (SKS11: 135–6/SUD: 20). Thus ‘[n]o despair is entirely free of defiance’ (the positive form) and yet ‘even despair’s most extreme defiance is never really free of some weakness’ (the negative form) or division in the will (SKS11: 165/SUD: 49). There has been quite a bit of confusion about this in the literature, with Theunissen (2005) arguing that the negative form of despair is basic and Hannay (2002) arguing that the positive form is basic, when in fact each implies the other because each is a way of failing to attain a telos that involves all three relations in the basic self-structure—a discord in any one of which prevents the others from taking their proper form.

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will (a psyche directed by spirit).14 In his first letter, the Judge calls it ‘the energy of the will’ (SKS3: 34/EO2: 26) seen, for example, in the love filled with ‘vigorous and vital conviction’ that is essential to an authentic marriage-commitment (SKS3: 40/EO2: 32). These points all suggest that ‘spirit’ in the pseudonymous works stands for ‘willing’ in a distinctively self-motivational sense: it is a capacity for determined resolve that unites the agent’s energies. It involves alternative possibilities but also a positive control over her plans, purposes, and even final ends.15 ‘Will’ in this sense is a ‘nisus formativus’ (SKS3: 198/EO2: 206) or formative ‘striving’ (SKS8: 160/UDVS: 49) involving effort (see Hannay, 1997, 64–5). Thus Kierkegaard often uses metaphors of passion for it, but it differs from all motives (such as basic appetites and inclinations) that arise passively from our animal nature and contingent situations, including involuntary emotions. It refers not to ‘will in the sense of desire’ but rather to ‘will in the noble sense of freedom’ (SKS8: 219/UDVS: 117). Such volitional passion is at least procedurally autonomous without needing any separate endorsement (it carries the agent’s authority within it inherently). A person’s ‘spirit’ in this sense can synthesize ‘body’ and ‘soul’ in different ways, responding creatively to physical and psychical givens. By freely setting a goal and striving towards it, the movement of spirit provides the basis for all one’s more derivative attitudes and emotions towards values in actual and possible events in life, social roles, interpersonal relations, and one’s own given or acquired characteristics. In other words, spirit is motive-shaping will that has as its telos a unified stance towards life. However, most volitional commitments cannot sustain such unity. For example, if a man wills mystical transcendence of the temporal, he ‘chooses himself abstractly’ or tries to be pure freedom without accepting responsibility to make a concrete identity out of his animality (SKS3: 236–7/EO2: 247–8). Anti-Climacus describes such willing as ‘fantastic’ in a way that subtly avoids the earnest work involved in genuine spiritual devotion, which is ‘personally present and contemporary . . . in the small part of the task that can be carried out at once’ (SKS11: 147–8/SUD: 32). The fantastic agent avoids the concrete duty by bluster and grand plans rather than beginning the prosaic first steps actually required. Or she loses her ‘self ’ in superficial business with worldly matters to avoid having to consider directly its eternal task (SKS11: 147–8/SUD: 32). By contrast, spirit balances the eternal and temporal in ethically qualified willing: ‘the I chooses itself, or more correctly, receives itself ’, including the ‘esthetic’ details of one’s facticity (SKS3: 160/EO2: 177). This self-reception is not instantaneous, but repeated; through it, the agent ‘gain[s] a history’ (SKS3: 239/EO2: 250) or gives continuity to his identity as 14 It is important that human ‘will’ in Kierkegaard’s sense also aims at outward objects in the sense of goods beyond the self, but it does so with a kind of reflexivity that transcends the goal’s possible appeal to appetite or inclination. It is this dependence on the attractiveness of the end-object that makes ‘aesthetic’ motivation more passive: like Kant, Judge William sees these desires as rooted ultimately in animal self-interest. 15 This is what I have called ‘striving will’ to indicate its ongoing and effortful quality; my Heideggerinspired term ‘projective motivation’ distinguishes motives that are actively worked up and/or sustained by the agent rather than passively arising as various appetites and inclinations motivate us prior to any consent from us: see Davenport 2007. See Davenport 2001a for an argument that Kierkegaard understands willing as free projective striving in the Concept of Anxiety.

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. . . this specific individual with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this specific product of a specific environment. (SKS3: 239/EO2: 251)

These are all aspects of the first-order relation in Anti-Climacus’s account, and a human being gains a self by accepting their reality but organizing its various aspects towards deeper purposes, adjusting her first-order traits to ends formed and sustained by her striving will. There is an apparent paradox here, and the Judge plays with both sides of it: the ‘self ’ in its abstract aspect is ‘freedom’ or the leeway to respond to first-order features (the liberty that operates in the second-order relation); yet it is also the concrete ‘self ’ that results from this work, that ‘comes into existence through the choice’ of the self as ‘free spirit’ (SKS3: 206–7/EO2: 214–15; compare SKS3: 172–3/EO2: 177). Though spirit is freedom, the agent finds that ‘the self that he has chosen has a boundless multiplicity within itself in that it has a history’, including good and bad aspects (SKS3: 207/EO2: 216). So the facticity of the first-order relation, which the Judge calls the ‘immediacy’ of ‘accidental characteristics’ (SKS3: 244/EO2: 256), is a kind of material base for spirit’s operation. The self arises from the effort to put these elements in a thematic order in time, gestalting them in line with a ‘view of life in accordance with which he wants to shape his life’ (SKS8: 166/UDVS: 56). Without this volitional effort, the Judge says that the aesthetic young man only displays his talents in the moment without integrating purpose: ‘for that reason, your life disintegrates, and it is impossible for you to explain it’ (SKS3: 175/EO2: 179). Similarly, albeit without fault, a pure spirit without facticity accumulating over time cannot have a narrative development of personality: ‘therefore an angel has no history’ (SKS4: 354/CA: 49; compare SKS3: 172/EO2: 176). Thus the two levels of relation in Anti-Climacus’s account help make sense of the Judge’s apparent paradox of self-creation/reception.16 Kierkegaard’s most authoritative pseudonym is in deep agreement with Judge William that the basic function of will in the ‘spirit’ sense is passionate resolve, a freely sustained effort that works on the first-order relation(s) that make up an instance of the homo sapiens species, and the result is the practical identity of a self (as opposed to a completely non-autonomous body-psyche composite in a very young human child or of a non-human sentient animal). Thus it is through spirited willing that the person gains a ‘self ’ in the sense of a ‘character’ for which she is deeply responsible. As Hannay argues, a ‘self ’ in Anti-Climacus’s sense cannot arise merely from control of circumstances so their interaction with one factical nature produces interest; a self-forming choice must look ‘inwards’ to the whole character of one’s life and the ‘goal or telos’ of personal existence (Hannay, 1998, 336–8).This significance of ‘spirit’ is probably clearest in the contrasts we find in Either/Or, Sickness, Postscript and other pseudonymous works between the existential ‘stages’ of aesthetic detachment and ethical commitment. In discussing how different types of despair are subjectively experienced (Part I, C (b)) as opposed to their objective structure (I, C (a)), Anti-Climacus dis16 Compare the paradoxical statements about choosing and positing at EO2: 213: something (objective facticity) has to be there for me to choose it, yet something else is created by choosing (subjective appropriation).

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tinguishes two levels of ‘spiritlessness’ that both involve ignorance of being in despair: ‘the state of thoroughgoing moribundity, a merely vegetative life, or an intense, energetic life’ that is still in secret despair (SKS11: 169/SUD: 45). The first is listless disinterest, and the second is superficial busyness without any deep commitment to challenging ends or noble ideals (heroism). Similarly, the Judge says that different aesthetic stances (or substages) range from ‘total absence of spirit to the highest level of brilliance’ in use of great talent; but in all these stances, ‘spirit is not qualified as spirit’ (SKS3: 176/EO2: 180–1), since it has not deliberately made use of its power to set ends and strive for them. In such stances, a human being follows the lead of contingent features in his first-order relation, using his strengths and opportunities given by his situation, but does not work on his first-order composite for the sake of any higher unifying goal. This distinction is linked to a developmental picture. While human beings naturally begin in a form of ‘aesthetic’ ignorance that corresponds to Adam’s innocence before the fall (SKS4: 343/CA: 37), or a ‘state’ close to pure hylomorphic animality, our existential telos asserts itself in spirit’s desire to awaken—what Viktor Frankl called the ‘will to meaning’ (Frankl 1969). Because selfhood is our destiny, the Judge says, ‘There comes a moment in a person’s life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit’ (SKS3: 183/EO2: 188) At this point of pregnancy, if spirit is suppressed by an effort to remain care-free and uncommitted, it becomes distorted by a sense of meaninglessness, as we see in Nero. Though the Judge calls this ‘hysteria of the spirit’ a kind of depression (SKS3: 183/EO2: 188; compare SKS3: 180/EO2: 185), he does not mean clinical depression in our contemporary sense. He has in mind an existential version of the vice of acedia: ‘it is the sin of not willing deeply and inwardly, and this is the mother of all sins’ (SKS3: 183/EO2: 189). In other words, spirit holds back from performing its transcendent function, which is to engage striving will; it seeks escape by dispersion rather than unity of new purpose followed by patient continuity. And this repression leads to a sense of despair (SKS3: 196–7/EO2: 204). We might call this a ‘proto-vice’ because it blocks spirit from becoming deeply responsible for any definite self. This ‘hysteria’ of spirit suppressed in fear of acquiring ethical obligation through serious life-purpose may sound similar to Haufniensis’s description of ‘anxiety’ in the innocence prior to first sin (SKS4: 347/CA: 41). But the anguish of Nero or the young man ‘A’ in Either/Or I is not the default anxiety of childhood as a ‘dreaming of the spirit’; it is a deeper anxiety compounded by a spiritual stalling after spirit tries to awaken, a ‘melancholy at a much later point’ of self-enclosure (SKS4: 348/CA: 42–3, and see 43 note *). Instead, the initial anxiety of Adam or of children whose spirit is awakening to the ‘infinite possibility of being able’ to will and thus become responsible (SKS4: 350/ CA: 45) corresponds to the point where the ethical modes of existence first becomes salient as an alternative to the default aesthetic stance.17 Haufniensis equates this 17 This does not mean that the alternative rises to salience as articulated in ethical terms. Haufniensis emphasizes that such innocents do not know what they are ‘able’ to do, and so cannot conceive it as a choice ‘between good and evil’ (SKS4: 350/CA: 45). Originary anxiety is pure

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primordial anxiety with our first awareness of ‘spirit’ as something more than ‘body and soul’, something that ‘disturbs’ our given or default relationship because we are not mere animals (SKS4: 348–49/CA: 43–4). He offers right here a first draft of AntiClimacus’s ST: ‘Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical’ but their unity depends on a third, which ‘is spirit’ (SKS4: 348/CA: 43). Following the Judge, he also adds that the first-order relation ‘has persistence’ in time, but it ‘does not have endurance’ without receiving this from spirit (SKS4: 349/CA: 44). ‘Endurance’ refers to the historical or narrative continuity of a concrete identity through willed repetition of commitment to a ‘life-view’ (SKS3: 175/EO2: 179), which Climacus calls the earnestness of ‘ethical striving’ (SKS7: 129–30/CUP: 138–9). Thus the clues in Anxiety are helpful for relating the Judge’s ideas to AntiClimacus’s claim that when we are aware only of our ‘psychical-physical synthesis’ and live ‘unaware of being defined by spirit’, we are haunted by a subliminal sense that something crucial is missing, however happy we are. In this sense, ‘all immediacy is anxiety’ (SKS11: 141/SUD: 25). Similarly, when the Judge says that spirit wants to awaken and ‘to gather itself together’ out of the ‘dispersion’ of immediacy (SKS3: 183/EO2: 189), he refers to the motivational manifestation of our existential telos: we feel called to form an active second-order relation to the animal givens of our human form—a relation that transcends our natural kind. But such a self-appropriation is the Judge’s famous ‘choice’ to become a serious chooser who decides in ethical terms (SKS3: 165–6/EO2: 169). This idea of a choice that moves us from the aesthetic to the ethical stage has occasioned much controversy and confusion because it is easy to misunderstand the Judge’s claim that in this basic choice, what matters is ‘not so much to choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness, and the pathos with which one chooses’ (SKS3: 164/EO2: 167). With Haufniensis’s help, we see that this choice is not groundless but instead encouraged by existential anxiety. With AntiClimacus’s help, we see that this basic ‘choice’ refers to willing in the self-motivational sense, i.e. the power to set new ends and strive through repeated effort. The Judge is not offering a voluntarist account of ethical norms as arbitrarily selected among options, as if we deign to accept their authority in a decision not governed by any authority; on the contrary, as Pattison notes, there is an ‘aprioristic character’ in much of Kierkegaard’s comments on the content of ethics (Pattison 2005: 129). Rather, the Judge means that volitional commitment will quicken conscience18 by making salient the ethical aspects of one’s dedication to positive goals involving social life—a pursuit that reorders the elements of one’s body–soul composite apprehension of the how of existential freedom, the ability or potential of striving will. Thus it appears that the model for the Judge’s primordial ‘choice’ between the aesthetic and ethical is constructed in Either/Or II to mirror the idea of innocent agency prior to knowledge of both good and evil in Genesis: see Davenport 2001c. 18

The complex theme of ‘conscience’ is developed at length in Works of Love and several Upbuilding Discourses (e.g. see SKS8: 227–30/UDVS: 127–31 and SKS9: 137–54/WL: 135–53). On the distinction between ‘ethics as moral and social theory’ for temporal institutions versus the ‘genuine ethics’ of ‘absolute contrasts’ that furnishes the eternal basis for self-forming choice, see Malantschuck 1971: 83–6.

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towards new ends. Because such striving does not come from given aspects of the immediate first-order relation, we take active ownership of it. Anti-Climacus agrees that in choosing we become aware of ourselves, and that by ‘venturing’ in the spiritual sense, or willing something positive beyond the defaults in my first-order relations, ‘life helps me by punishing me’ if I will wrongly (SKS11: 150/SUD: 34). This clearly echoes the Judge’s thesis that sincerity of volitional resolve and effort are more likely to make me aware of eternal ethical requirements than is a life of spiritual hollowness or ‘quiet lostness’ without striving will (SKS3: 165/EO2: 167–8). However, there are limits to the Judge’s analysis. Later pseudonymous and signed works distinguish another kind of aesthetic ‘lostness’ that is not the anxiety of initial innocence, or the uncomprehending hysteria of self-repressed spirit, nor even the more reflective and ‘hardened’ distancing of the young man A (SKS3: 223/EO2: 233). Instead, human beings become aware of spirit but then try to silence it by attaching themselves to others to avoid any spiritual effort and thus to escape anxiety.19 Each loses herself in phantom camaraderie of inquisitiveness without resolve, idle ‘chatter’ and ‘garrulous confiding’ that makes them feel included in groups with no real purpose, topped with ‘snobbish self-satisfaction’ in demeaning any earnest effort as folly (SKS8: 92–4/TA: 97–9, 105–65). This attitude is a kind of cynicism that substitutes reflective ‘ambiguity and equivocation’ for willing anything (SKS8: 77/TA: 80). The will’s natural energy is not just divided but dispersed in a compounded ‘multifarious double-mindedness’ (SKS8: 173/UDVS: 64)—the self ’s identity is reduced to a mere chameleon, taking on whatever colour is most advantageous in each situation. Anti-Climacus describes this kind of despair as an immersion in ‘finitude’ in contrast with the loss of self in infinite abstraction (e.g. in mysticism): . . . another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by ‘the others.’ Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets even his own name divinely understood, does not dare believe in himself, finds it easier and safer to be like others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man. (SKS11: 149/SUD: 33–4)

This is the nadir of aestheticism, the lowest form of failing to will to be oneself. In this form, individuality is lost; the rough rock of facticity that should be shaped into a finecut gem by the will becomes ‘smooth as a rolling stone’ (SKS11: 150/SUD: 34); the higherorder relation is obscured. Anti-Climacus sums this up by saying that people may appear successful in the temporal world but ‘spiritually speaking they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self before God’ (SKS11: 151/SUD: 35). To understand this, we have to move beyond the Judge’s analysis to the religious dimension of the self as indicated in the last part of Anti-Climacus’s formula. 19

Compare Anti-Climacus’s remark that ancient paganism lacked spirit but through initial anxiety was still qualified in the direction of spirit, ‘whereas paganism in Christendom lacks spirit in departure from spirit . . . and therefore is spiritlessness in the strictest sense’ (SKS11: 162/SUD: 47). This second paganism of Christendom is very similar to shrewd multifariousness.

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IV. ‘Self’ in the Religious Sense The analysis so far suggests close agreement between Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous and signed works once we understand aestheticism as lack of spirit20 and spirit as striving will. But ethically qualified identity wrought through volitional response to the body– soul composite is not complete, in Kierkegaard’s view. Anti-Climacus is able to give a deeper explanation of the way conscience is quickened by earnest willing than Judge William can, for the model of selfhood in Sickness implies that an active self-relation will always include an implicit attitude towards the power that founded my will (SKS11: 130/SUD: 14). This is why both spirits dissolved in finitude’s multiplicity and those fleeing into abstract infinity constitute no self ‘before God’ (SKS11: 148/SUD: 32): they are not aware of the God-relation because as yet they have no positive or definite secondorder relation to their animality expressed in infinite commitment. It seems that in this sense, to exist ‘before God’ means to live in a volitional commitment that is unreserved, standing for something as defining one’s whole identity, being willing to submit this identity to eternal judgement, which finalizes us eternally as the self we have become in life (SKS11: 143–4/SUD: 27–8). Thus, as Pattison stresses, to have an identity ‘before God’ is not a cognitive relationship: it is not to know a divine entity or to understand oneself as known by divine being (Pattison 1997: 82). It is a shift in attitude that regestalts our ethical consciousness. The self-making function of spiritual willing stands out most sharply in a religious frame of reference because only in faith that affirms its debt to its creator does the self ‘rest transparently’ on its true ground and through the volitional second-order relation shape its identity in a way that accords with the transcendent ground of its being. The God-relation also explains the existential telos of a deep identity that is distinct from all other persons not just numerically, nor even because of the unique way it can work on its body–soul composite, as the Judge suggests. Kierkegaard holds that, beyond this universal imperative to acquire an ethically significant character (SKS8: 75/TA: 77–8), our existential telos is individualized: ‘at every person’s birth there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular’ (SKS8: 198/ UDVS: 93). In other words, beyond our universal ethical obligations, there is something that only you can do, a potential that is uniquely yours in the web of providence. This explains part of Anti-Climacus’s meaning when he says Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self is certainly angular, but that only means that is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth, not that it is to utterly abandon being itself out of fear of men, or . . . not to dare to be itself in its more essential contingency. (SKS11: 148/SUD: 33)

20 Note Haufniensis’s telling argument that ‘When beauty must reign . . . spirit is excluded’ and anxiety thus haunts this life-view (SKS4: 369/CA: 65).

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As we saw, the stone analogy suggests that our unique potential is nascent in our particular contingencies, our ‘angles’. Volitional shaping makes them fit together in a pattern, rather than depriving us of the unique potential in our given facticity. In this light, ‘faithfulness to oneself ’ is faithfulness to our God-given vocation. Faith that we have a distinctive purpose and humble effort to discover it is part of what it means for the self to ‘rest transparently’ in the power that established it (SKS11: 130/SUD: 14).21 For this power establishes a self as individual by giving it both its own-most singular task and the freedom to shape a self in accordance with it or not. This also sheds light on why ‘choosing to live “as if before God” is not quite the same as living by a set of principles’; it is instead to feel personally addressed by a call that is attuned to ‘each twist and turn in our moral journey’ (Pattison 2005: 131) or life narrative. The uniqueness of a self in these connected ethical and religious senses is opposed both to abstraction or flight into endless unactualized possibility and to being governed entirely by one’s facticity—for example, by letting talents and opportunity direct all one’s decisions, by uncritically following customary mores, or by mindlessly conforming to social trends. The Judge contrasts both these forms of inauthenticity with the basic choice in which a human agent first ‘chooses himself in his eternal validity’ (SKS3: 203/ EO2: 211). The basic choice in which the ‘difference between good and evil’ first emerges from latency to full significance for me is characterized by spirit breaking through to pervade my whole aesthetic identity through an ‘absolute choice of myself ’ (SKS3: 214/ EO2: 223–4); this is the fundamental affirmation of my will’s infinite value, given my potential to become a specific self.22 For the Judge, this affirmation of self that forms the self-relation is possible because in it, ‘a person links himself to an eternal power’ that makes him eternally ‘conscious of himself as the person he is’ (SKS3: 198/EO2: 206). This basis on which the self arises is the eternal ethical standard, so that spiritual self-awareness is conscience. This sense of responsibility for his identity is also an eternal basis for the self in the sense that it remains to him even if all else fails, and every outward effort is thwarted by fortune (SKS3: 241/EO2: 253). Yet for Anti-Climacus, this eternal basis is a personal God, a creator who gives each of us a unique potential latent in our first-order psychosomatic relation and life-situations. He writes that anyone who ‘does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation)’ or who is unaware that their powers have any transcendent source is in despair (SKS11: 169/SUD: 46). Recognizing that we can do nothing without God qualifies the autonomy or spiritual self-direction that the Judge describes. Our capacity for founded, moderate autonomy is established by God’s withholding direct control to give us freedom: this ‘infinite concession’ that creates us in God’s own image as free spirits is also a relation that preserves the self in its self-structure even if it refuses to affirm itself either as free or as indebted to God (SKS11: 136–7/SUD: 21). 21

For a helpful discussion of this idea and the way that individual vocation fits with universal agapic duties, see Evans 2004: 170–9. 22 Compare Heidegger’s notion of self ’s ultimate end or constitutive goal as its ‘for the sake of which’ [Worumwillen] in Heidegger 1962: 116–22.

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Thus the constitution of finite spirit necessarily includes a kind of divine appropriation of created freedom—a paradox that demands a free relation of love towards one’s origin in divine love. This is what our existential telos—to become our self—actually requires as our highest duty. How can we make sense of Anti-Climacus’s claim that this opposite of despair, which he describes as resting transparently in God, ‘is also the formula for faith’ (SKS11: 164/ SUD: 49)? In Fear and Trembling, religious faith is portrayed as a trust, based on revealed promise that the ethical ideal will be fulfilled by God even when it appears entirely beyond our mortal powers, and no rational evidence suggests that it is possible (such as Isaac still living to father a great nation despite being sacrificed by his father as commanded). Faith in this sense is staking one’s whole identity on trust in promised eschatological goods.23 As Anti-Climacus puts it in discussing the despair that lacks possibility, ‘What is decisive is that with God, everything is possible’, even in extreme circumstances where ‘humanly speaking, there is no possibility’ (SKS11: 153–4/SUD: 38). In such cases, a self without faith collapses under the weight of terrible events (SKS11: 156/SUD: 41), while the self trusting absolutely in God is upheld but in some way that transcends rational prediction: ‘unexpectedly, miraculously, divinely, help does come’ (SKS11: 155/ SUD: 39). Thus faith as eschatological trust is essential for completion of our created self, or fulfilment of our existential telos, as becomes clearer in the more advanced forms of despair. As we have seen, the lowest forms are ‘misrelations’ of the self in whom the will is not actively engaged in shaping the body–soul composite. In the more developed forms, there is a consciousness of the eternal potential for a self, and thus awareness of despair (SKS11: 162/SUD: 47). Among these, ‘weakness’ or despair as not willing to be one’s full self (SKS11: 165/SUD: 49) includes agents who can distinguish themselves from some of their ‘externalities’ and effectiveness in the world, but who cannot accept a ‘total break with immediacy’ (SKS11: 170/SUD: 55)—which Johannes de silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, called ‘infinite resignation’. Such agents thus lack the volitional precondition for faith. Beyond these, we find agents who despair consciously over their factical identities and their dependence on earthly goods, even to the point of despairing over their spiritual capacity to overcome despair, but who do not muster faith in divine assistance (SKS11: 176/SUD: 61–2). This hatred of one’s weakness that clings to a self-as-failure rather than turning to God is the state of ‘inclosing reserve’ that keeps the self locked up without help (SKS11: 177/SUD: 63), because, despite acknowledging its weakness, it is too proud to accept help from the source of miraculous possibility (see Morelli 1995: 22–3). The spiritual paralysis of inclosing reserve leads us to forms of despair in which the will is directly misrelated to the transcendent ground that makes its reflexive attitudes and efforts possible. Anti-Climacus distinguishes three types of despair in which spirit wills to be its self without God (rather than its true self), which we could call (a) Stoic autarky or absolute independence, (b) defiant self-martyrdom, and (c) spiteful hatred of 23

See Davenport 2008a and 2008b.

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God for creating us. The stoical spirit wills the ‘infinite form’ of the higher-order relation (freedom and projective willing) to be the sole basis of its self independent of its divine telos, and thus ‘wants to be master of itself or to create itself ’ by perseverance towards an ideal without integrating the given aspects of its psychophysical relation (SKS11: 182/ SUD: 68). In this form, spirit shows willpower and negative freedom but rejects any basis for its choices either in universal ethical obligation or in its facticity as a unique calling: the Stoic agent ‘does not want to see his given self as his task’ (SKS11: 182/SUD: 68). But since human willing cannot by itself ‘bestow infinite interest and significance upon his enterprises,’ his choices become arbitrary and must lack the staying power of ‘earnestness’ (SKS11: 182–3/SUD: 69). In short, this form of the self fails because spirit attempts to achieve absolute autonomy, rather than the modest founded autonomy that the structure of human selfhood implies. In the case of self-martyrdom (my label), the rejection of faith is more direct. Having discovered some factical flaw that is an obstacle to her planned identity, the agent resigns herself to it but is ‘unwilling to hope in the possibility that an earthly need, a temporal cross, can come to an end’ (SKS11: 184/SUD: 70). This attitude is similar to despair in weakness due to lacking possibility, and to inclosing reserve, but it is worse because the agent is so offended at needing aid that he explicitly rebels against divine grace, preferring to identify wholly with his flaw: ‘Hope . . . especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible—no, that he does not want. . . . he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell’ (SKS11: 185/SUD: 71). Whereas the merely enclosed agent is unable to accept her need for grace, the self-martyr recognizes this need and defiantly rejects the eschatological promise, willing instead to be a wronged victim of God (SKS11: 185–6/SUD: 72). Similarly, the spirit that wills to be his flawed self to spite God does not simply ‘want to tear itself loose from the power that established it’, but instead focuses on God in order to hate God’s creation, to use himself as evidence against God (SKS11: 187/SUD: 73). This final kind of religious despair is thus a sort of absolute rebellion against the selfstructure in two of its main respects—its facticity (including flaws) and its dependence on God. The frighteningly convincing description of these more advanced types of despair helps Anti-Climacus show that the freedom and willpower of spirit are not enough by themselves to make a fully stable and meaningful self that is able to affirm its reality in a secure way over time. To achieve this—or to avoid despair—requires affirming and integrating through spiritual work the full structure of created personhood. This includes the power of the second-order relation to transcend and reshape (to some extent) the factical givens of the physical-psychical synthesis. But this power that distinguishes persons from mere animals does not live by and from itself alone. Instead, it is an intermediary. On the one side, it must invest itself in the temporal manifold of life as a human social animal; and on the other side, it must strive towards a distinctive concrete identity that fulfils its potential by drawing on the eternal Spirit that is the source of all created spirit. For only this source enables the commitment or ‘infinite boundedness’ that makes choice significant, or makes positive freedom possible (SKS9: 150/WL: 149). This power, which I have characterized formally as striving will gifted with libertarian freedom, is according to Kierkegaard manifested most purely in types of agapic love,

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which saves from despair (SKS9: 47/WL: 40). He holds that all human love springs from a hidden divine source within us, ‘a place in a person’s innermost being’ that we cannot see or master (SKS9: 16–17/WL: 8–9). This is the ethical meaning of the divine ground of the self-structure: in loving our neighbour, we are resting transparently on the ultimate ground that is absolute Love. This connection is often overlooked because AntiClimacus’s self-formula is so abstract compared to the specific expressions of love that Kierkegaard explores in his own name. But in fact, they affirm the same thing: authentic relation to self (or proper self-love) depends on authentic relation to God (or proper love of God through faith), which are both expressed in willed love of our neighbours.

References Beabout, Gregory (1996). Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press). Davenport, John (2001a). ‘Kierkegaard, Anxiety, and the Will’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, vol. 6, eds. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and Jon Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), 158–81. ——– (2001b). ‘Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre’, in Davenport and Rudd (eds.), Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.), 265–324. ——– (2001c). ‘Entangled Freedom: Ethical Authority, Original Sin, and Choice in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety’, Kierkegaardiana 21, 131–51. ——– (2007). Will as Commitment and Resolve: An Existential Account of Creativity, Love, Virtue, and Happiness (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press). ——– (2008a). ‘Kierkegaard’s Postscript in Light of Fear and Trembling’, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 64: 2–4, 879–908. ——– (2008b). ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling’, in Edward Mooney (ed.), Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Engagement (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 196–233, endnotes 265–74. Elrod, John W. (1975). Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Evans C. Stephen (2004). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love. (New York: Oxford University Press). Frankl, Viktor E. (1988 [1969]). The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy, repr. (New York: New American Library/Penguin Books). Glenn, John D., Jr (1997). ‘ “A Highest Good . . . An Eternal Happiness”: The Human Telos in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 12: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 247–62. ——– (1987). ‘The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard’s Work, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 19: The Sickness Unto Death (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 5–21. Habermas, Jürgen (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas MacCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press). ——– (1987). The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Boston: MIT Press).

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Hannay, Alastair (1991 [1982]). Kierkegaard, pb. (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul). ——– (1987). ‘Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 19: The Sickness Unto Death (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 23–38. ——– (1997). ‘Kierkegaardian Despair and the Irascible Soul’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1997, eds. N. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (Berlin: de Gruyter), 50–69. ——– (1998). ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. A. Hannay and G. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 329–48. ——– (2002). ‘Basic Despair’in Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge), 76–88. Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row). Jaspers, Karl (1932). Philosophie, vol. ii, trans. Edith Ehrlich, Leonard Ehrlich, and George Pepper. Redacted in Karl Jaspers (1986). Basic Philosophical Writings: Selections, ed. and trans. E. Ehrlich, L. Ehrlich, and G. Pepper (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press). Johnson, Richard (2001). ‘Neither Aristotle Nor Nietzsche’, in Davenport and Rudd (eds.), Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co.), 151–72. Malantschuck, Gregor (1971). Kierkegaard’s Thought, eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Mead, George Herbert (1934). Mind, Self, and Society, ed. Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Morelli, Elizabeth (1995). ‘The Existence of the Self Before God in Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death’, in The Heythrop Journal 36, 15–29. Pattison, George (1997). ‘ “Before God” as a Regulative Concept’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1997, eds. N. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (Berlin: de Gruyter), 70–84. ——– (2005). The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press). Sandel, Michael J. (1982). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956). Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press/Philosophical Library). Stokes, Patrick (2010). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision (New York and Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan). Taylor, Mark C. (2000). Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press). Originally published by University of California Press, 1980. Theunissen, Michael (2005). Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Originally published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993. Westphal, Merold (1996). Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press).

Suggested Reading Aiken, David (1996). ‘Kierkegaard’s ‘Three Stages’: A Pilgrim’s Regress?’, in Faith and Philosophy, (July) 13: 3, 352–67.

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Angier, Tom P. S. (2006). Either Kierkegaard/Or Nietzsche: Moral Philosophy in a New Key (Aldershot: Ashgate). Connell, George B. (1985). To Be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Davenport, John J. (2012). Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality (New York: Routledge). Dreyfus, Herbert L. ‘Kierkegaard on the Self ’, in Edward Mooney (ed.), Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: A Philosophical Engagement (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 11–23, endnotes 246–47. Evans, C. Stephen (1983). Kierkegaard’s ‘Fragments’ and ‘Postscript’ (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press), esp. ch. 5. ——– (2006). Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press), esp. Pt. 5. Giles, James, ed. (2000). Kierkegaard and Freedom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Gouwens, David J. (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), esp. ch. 3. Gregor, Brian (2005). ‘Selfhood and the Three R’s: Reference, Repetition, and Refiguration’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58, 63–94. Grøn, Arne (2008). The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Originally published by Gyldendal, 1994. Kosch, Michelle (2006). Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press), esp. ch. 6, § III. Mahn, Jason (2011). Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin (New York: Oxford University Press), esp. ch. 3. Mehl, Peter K. (2005). Thinking Through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World (Chicago: University of Illinois Press), esp. ch. 3. Mooney, Edward (1996). Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral Psychology from Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death (New York: Routledge), esp. ch. 8. ——– (2007). On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), esp. ch. 9. Pattison, George (1997). Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge), esp. ch. 6. Roberts, David (2006). Kierkegaard’s Analysis of Radical Evil (London: Continuum). Rudd, Anthony (1993). Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——– (2008). ‘Reason in Ethics Revisited: Either/Or, “Criterionless Choice” and Narrative Unity’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2008, eds. N. Cappelørn, H. Deuser and K. B. Söderquist (Berlin: de Gruyter), 179–99. Walsh, Sylvia (2005). Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: Penn State University Press), esp. ch. 1.

chapter 13

for m ation a n d the cr itiqu e of cu lt u r e joakim g arff1

It is striking that there has been a long tradition of inattention to the theme of culture, although this is a pervasive and deeply-rooted problem in Kierkegaard’s authorship, both pseudonymous and upbuilding, and this authorship itself originated precisely in the period that saw the flowering of culture in its specific modern sense.2 Naturally, the extent to which Kierkegaard can be classified as a theorist of culture will to some extent depend on how one defines culture, but what this chapter hopes to show is that his essential concerns cannot be separated from a twofold relation to the religious and ideological self-understanding of culture, namely, that of a polemical outsider and that of one who is productively involved in it. The range of references in Kierkegaard’s texts to the question of culture is indicated in a preliminary way by the Dictionary of the Danish Language, where Kierkegaard is given pride of place in no fewer than twelve of the references to Dannelse and its related verbal forms.3 In Kierkegaard’s own texts the word Dannelse is found in such combinations as ‘erotic formation’ (SKS2: 370/EO1: 381), ‘theological formation’ (SKS3: 236/EO2: 247), ‘philological formation’ (SKS14: 51/COR: 16), ‘aesthetic formation’ (SKS14: 94/COR: 17), ‘intellectual formation’ (SKS16: 45/PV: 64), as well as in several others. These demonstrate that the Kierkegaardian notion of culture and formation has a broad range of

1

Translated by George Pattison. The Danish term Dannelse is translated here by ‘culture’, ‘formation’, and ‘education’, according to context. Broadly speaking, the Danish term corresponds to the German Bildung and its cognate forms. The English ‘culture’ is used essentially in the sense given it by Matthew Arnold, himself strongly influenced by the German notion of Bildung. However, the German Bildungsroman is more often translated as a ‘novel of education’ or ‘a novel of formation’ than ‘a novel of culture’, so no English term exactly fits the range of connotations of either the Danish or German. 3 Ordbog over Det danske Sprog, Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, vol. 3 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1921), cols. 492–5. 2

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meanings that stretch from the common idea of a certain moral teaching and intellectual training to the much more specialized sense of formation as involving an existential selfrelationship. It is the last of these that, in a combination of terms not used by Kierkegaard himself, I shall refer to as the ‘formation of identity’. The idea of such a formation of identity presupposes that human beings are not from the outset what they have the capacity to be but that in order to be able to be themselves they have to make their identity their own: to become, to choose, or to receive themselves. In other words, identity is a word for something that is simply present as a possibility and that only becomes actual when it receives the addition of some shape, is endowed with form, or is given some Gestalt, and this occurs in and by means of the formation that the individual undergoes. Consequently, the formation of identity is not just a term for the end result of the process but also for this process itself. The formation of identity presupposes a sustained exchange between individualization and socialization in the life of the individual. One never becomes one’s self only by oneself or only through others. One becomes oneself only through the dynamic interinvolvement of the social and the individual. It is this inter-involvement that is depicted in the novel of formation that typically shows the process that occurs when the main character (usually a young, male intellectual) realizes his own inner disposition and gradually brings himself into an appropriate relation to his world. This may involve a painful metamorphosis that brings about disillusionment as the hero’s fantasized understanding of himself and his world is modified through experience until it is gradually brought together in the formation of an identity in which individualization and socialization serve as extreme points of balance. As the reader turns to the final page the hero has come to himself and arrived in the world (in the word’s most inclusive sense) and can therefore look back and get an ‘overview of the plan governing his life’ (Kondrup 1982: 86). This plan may well be represented by means of the phases home— homeless—home, as in the titles of the three-part novel of formation, Homeless, by M. A. Goldschmidt, which appeared between 1853 and 1857 and which has subsequently achieved canonical status with regard to the progression that occurs in a novel of formation seeking to described a transformative return to the place of origin. As Aage Laerke Hansen has laconically remarked, ‘The fallen Adam becomes Adam restored— this is the basic theme of the idea of formation and of the novel of formation’ (Hansen 1968: 26). Kierkegaard did not write novels of formation. Indeed, it is questionable whether any of the many works he left behind could properly be called a novel. It is, however, beyond doubt that he thought and wrote in types and populates his expositions with textual figures that he either took from the enormous literary stock he had at his disposal or that he himself conjured up from his inkpot’s magical depths, giving them complexly contrived pseudonymous names. But to a greater or lesser extent all these figures follow in the wake of the narrative that, in the event, plays such a dominant role in Kierkegaard’s authorship that it cannot be reduced to a mere pedagogical device but is deeply and indissolubly connected to Kierkegaard’s inner disposition and so to his idea of what an authentic self-relationship actually is. According to

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Kierkegaard, the formation of identity does not merely involve us in relating ourselves to ourselves in some more or less well-realized self-relationship but further requires that in this self-relationship we relate to ourselves as to a more or less fully actualized narrative possibility. In other words, the human being is interpreted as a being that, through its involvement in some narrative—whether this is that of myth, Greek tragedy, or the Bible—receives what one may call a narrative identity. In a theological perspective, the training in self-cultivation that Kierkegaard’s authorship offers is aimed at actualizing the self- or God-relationship that is presented in the basic narrative of Christian faith in the life of the individual person. Christian identity is formed when we allow our identity to be shaped by letting our innate narrative possibilities be at the disposal of the God whose word is spoken in Jesus of Nazareth and who determined his fate. This Kierkegaardian training in formation involves both a what and a how. Although the narrative by which one is formed is determinative for the formation of one’s identity, how one relates to it is equally decisive. Kierkegaard makes many, and great, efforts to help his reader get the relationship or modality right, since without the right kind of disposition no one can fulfil the course of self-formation. One must have a disposition or aptitude for being formed so that one has the necessary presuppositions that enable one to make oneself receptive. One therefore becomes susceptible to being formed gradually—it is not something one simply is but is rather a kind of art that may well take a whole lifetime of practice really to learn. In order to specify Kierkegaard’s concept of the formation of identity more closely and to examine its various modalities, I may appeal back to some lines from his Master’s dissertation On the Concept of Irony (1841), in the second part of which these modalities are chiastically and elegantly introduced in a ‘poetic’ manner: ‘It is one thing to poetize oneself and another to let oneself be poetized. The Christian lets himself be poetized and in this regard a simple Christian lives much more poetically than many a much-endowed head’ (SKS1: 316/CI: 280–1). These lines may well be read as a programmatic statement of the basic terms of the training in formation that Kierkegaard will unfold in his collected writings. In this context the words ‘poetize’ and ‘form’ are synonymous. To poetize oneself is the same as to form or to cultivate oneself and to let oneself be poetized is the same as to let oneself be formed. Kierkegaard’s programme is therefore triadic: 1) to form oneself; 2) to let oneself be formed; and 3) to let oneself be formed as a Christian. This is particularly interesting because it can be connected to or placed alongside the so-called theory of the stages, which, in the perspective of a theory of formation, can be stated in the following way: the modality of self-formation corresponds to the aesthetic stage; the modality of letting oneself be formed corresponds to the ethical stage; whilst the religious stage is matched by the modality of letting oneself be formed but, note, specifically as a Christian. What differentiates the aesthetic and the ethical stages is a matter of one’s being disposed to let oneself be formed. This unites the ethical and religious stages, although these then differ with regard to what narrative they relate themselves to.

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I. Self-Formation In the Romantic era, modernity’s quest for freedom reached a paradoxical culmination in which humanity pronounced God to be dead and, assuming power in God’s place, discovered its own abyssal powerlessness. Following on the intoxication of liberation came a dizzying ambiguity that was called by many names, among which irony emerged as the best, something that Kierkegaard had, in genial fashion, early on intuited: ‘Total irony may well be thought of as precisely characteristic of modernity’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB3:20). One outcome of this ‘total irony’ is the self-directing manner in which ‘we moderns’ act in the world and understand ourselves. The ironist, as portrayed by Kierkegaard in the second part of his dissertation, appears to the reader as a tumultuous personage, always pressing against the limits—which is how it must be if all that irony can aim at or if its highest value is itself. Such an ironist has a relativistic attitude, changing masks merely in order to conceal the fact that he has no face; he is a desperate actor, compelled to grasp at ever more histrionic means in order to feel himself to be alive, but lacking a deeper continuity in existence and therefore coming to live as a nomad, always taking leave of himself. ‘Now he is en route to the monastery, but on the way he visits the Venusberg; now he is en route to the Venusberg, but on the way he calls in at the monastery to pray’ (SKS1: 320/CI: 285). Kierkegaard’s ironist is a nightmare figure for any novel of formation, since he makes it a principle to excuse himself from any obligation to be formed and, accordingly, dramatizes himself in a paradoxical manner. It is paradoxical because the self he thus stages is precisely not a self but the opposite: it is merely a gesturing, raging nothing—an illusion. Distancing himself both from a petit bourgeois way of life and from Romanticism’s false idyllic forms, he has to that extent begun the process of individuation that is a precondition for being able to distinguish himself from the crowd, leave the herd, and become conscious of his own individuality. But this individuation is not balanced by any corresponding socialization and therefore turns into an uncontrollable individualism that brings him to 70,000 fathoms beyond good and evil. The ironist, perhaps better known in Kierkegaardian circles as ‘the aesthete’, lives on in hiding in the remainder of the authorship and becomes, so to speak, its ‘modern voice’. The indifferent and sometimes cynical comportment he displays and, presumably, gets away with, provides a recurrent temptation to recidivism on the part of Kierkegaard’s more sober-minded spokesmen who attempt to call the rebel to order, ethically and religiously. The first attempt of this kind is found in Either/Or.

Letting Oneself be Formed—Ethically Either/Or might well seem to set off in the manner of a novel of formation. The dialogue that unfolds between the young aesthete A and his older friend, the ethicist B (whose authoritative responses to A’s errors and false moves indicate the decisive moments of a

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proper process of identity formation), evoke the impression of a progression from A to B (See de Mylius 1981: 250ff.; Tøjner, Garff and Dehs 1995: 127–67, esp. 133–41). This impression is strengthened by the way in which, in his Introduction, the pseudonymous publisher, Victor Eremita, tells how, as he was working on putting the papers of A and B into order he was suddenly struck by the idea ‘that one could get to see them in a new aspect by viewing them as belonging to a single person’ (SKS2: 20f./EO1: 13). Victor Eremita immediately acknowledges the improbability of this notion, but he was clearly unable to let it go entirely. This gives more than a mere indication that the work is not to be read as irreconcilably opposing two entirely different and incompatible forms of life but, at the deepest level, depicts a life marked by change and development, that is, a life in the course of formation. For if B has a history corresponding to or even identical with that of A, then the work’s second part could be read as clarifying and fulfilling the fragmentary first part. Thus the narrative of identity that unfolds in it could be interpreted both descriptively and normatively in accordance with a law of motion such that A is situated where B has already been and that B is situated where A will come to be. That it is even possible to consider whether it might be a novel of formation is not because of its (non-existent) epic qualities, but, rather the didacticism it shares with the novels of formation. This didacticism is manifested in a sequence of elements typical of the culture of formation, such as duty, responsibility, and various others. The ethicist tries to get the aesthete to grasp the significance of these for the ‘development of the personality’ with all the means available to him, so that A can reorder his existential praxis. In what can almost be read as a kind of mini-manifesto for his ideas about formation, the ethicist Wilhelm also asserts that it behoves the aesthete ‘to order, form, temper, incite, withdraw, and, in short, to bring about a balance in the soul, a harmony, that is the fruit of being a person committed to their duty’ (SKS3: 250/EO2: 262). According to Wilhelm, the factor par excellence in the process of formation is, however, marriage, a subject on which he is capable of holding forth without wearying—as the reader becomes only too aware! That his motivation for becoming the imposing defender of this institution’s rights is, in particular, the formative dimension in marriage, as becomes clear when, on his own and perhaps also on his wife’s account, Wilhelm asserts as obvious that One of the apparently most respectable answers that can be given to the question of the ‘why’ of marriage is that marriage is a school for character, that one marries in order to dignify and educate one’s character . . . Marriage is formative, that is, if one does not insist on being superior to it but, as always when it is a matter of being educated, subjects oneself to that by which one is to be educated and formed. (SKS3: 69/EO2: 64)

By emphasizing the importance of subjecting oneself ‘to that by which one is to be educated and formed’, Wilhelm lets it be known that a process of formation always presupposes the individual’s willingness to come to it with the necessary receptivity. In other words, Wilhelm knows that, existentially, one can only be formed by that which one does not have at one’s own disposal, that is, by that which is not one’s self. That is to say,

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formation presupposes a dialectical exchange between the I and the not-I, a sustained reciprocal action with the world in a broad sense, for it is only by virtue of a detour that one can be led to one’s own life, a point that Wilhelm compresses into the following formula: ‘In this way, his movement is from himself, through the world, to himself ’ (SKS3: 261/EO2: 274). Wilhelm is thus conscious of being embedded in the world and recognizes the significance of familial and interpersonal relationships and he knows that his life is unthinkable apart from these. His difference from petit bourgeois or other types of banal conformists who merely go along with the agenda of the day is not all that obvious, but this is because it is a difference of an invisible kind. Yet Wilhelm is happy to share with his readers his insights into the structures that, according to his way of thinking, undergird the self: When everything has become quiet around one, solemn as a clear, starry night and when the soul becomes one with the entire world, then what appears before it is not a distinguished person but the eternal power itself: it is as if the heavens parted and the I chooses itself or, more accurately, receives itself . . . He does not become another person than he was before, but he becomes himself. (SKS3: 172f./EO2: 177)

To choose oneself is thus indissolubly connected with being able to receive one’s self. The subject is not to produce itself by means of titanic exertions but to receive itself and is thus equally productive and receptive. Indeed, according to Wilhelm’s self-correction, it is the latter more than the former. Nevertheless, it would be to oversimplify or, more precisely, to falsify the situation if one portrayed Wilhelm simply and solely as a representative of the receptive modality. For the subject that Wilhelm portrays is active, involved in projects, and seeking to manage its life. It wills and acts in order to establish itself as a personality and to that extent its project is self-formation. This furthermore indicates that the one who tells Wilhelm’s story—Wilhelm’s narrator—is in all essentials Wilhelm himself. This is apparent from, among other things, the images of conception and birth that Wilhelm uses to press home what he has to say: If I wanted to be witty, I could at this point say that the individual knows itself in a manner comparable to that in which, in the Old Testament, it is said that Adam knew Eve. By means of the individual’s association with himself he is impregnated with himself and gives birth to himself (. . .) It is only in himself that the individual can find enlightenment about himself. (SKS3: 246f./EO2: 259)

Wilhelm is not just being witty, however—he is acknowledging with pedagogical exactness the source of his impulse to form his own identity, namely, ‘himself ’. That the individual is the primary source for the formation of identity is further documented in a grandiose scenario in which Wilhelm’s philosophy of personality is brought to birth amid violent labour pains. As he tells his aesthetic friend: You are like a woman giving birth and yet you are constantly holding back for a moment longer and are constantly in pain. If, when her time came, a woman got the idea that it might be a monster she was about to give birth to or began to wonder

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what it really was she was about to give birth to, she would have a certain similarity to you. Her attempt to stop the course of nature would be fruitless, but in your case it is indeed possible. For what a person gives birth to in a spiritual sense is the will’s nisus formativus and this stands within a person’s own power. What, then, are you afraid of? You are not to give birth to somebody else—you are simply to give birth to yourself. (SKS3: 198/EO2: 206)

In contrast to the woman giving birth, who, sooner or later must let nature have its way so that a new life can come into the world, the aesthete is succeeding in holding back his true self. And it is against such holding back that Wilhelm objects that a person’s selfliberation presupposes a will, the peculiar nature of which he characterizes with the term nisus formativus, that is, a force or instinct that seeks form, a formative drive.4 When the aesthete opposes the individuating forces that are at work in him, he thus offends against a formative drive that nature itself has placed within him. For nature demands individuation as it desires to take shape in individual forms. As Wilhelm elsewhere puts it in a remarkable ‘familial’ analogy, ‘The chief thing, the one thing that makes for blessedness, is always whether a man, in relation to his own life, is his uncle or his father’ (SKS3: 253/EO2: 266). The idea that by practicing a kind of Socratic association with himself a person can impregnate and liberate himself and thus by his own formative volition enable an authentic version of himself to be brought into the world is determinative for Wilhelm’s idea of identity formation. In whatever way one imagines the God to which Wilhelm occasionally refers, it is not a being that requires any profound revision or rewriting of Wilhelm’s story about himself. Rather, God functions as the ultimate possibility of and legitimation for Wilhelm’s appropriation of the narrative in which he was already inscribed. Consequently, there is a perfect logic in the fact that, in a subsequently rather well-known formulation, Wilhelm chooses to characterize himself as his own ‘responsible editor’—a metaphor that gives a great deal of freedom and wide-ranging powers. But it also involves various obligations, since it is now the case that the individual is ‘responsible for himself in a personal sense, insofar as what he chooses will have a decisive impact on himself; he is responsible in relation to how the world in which he lives is ordered; and he is responsible as standing before God’ (SKS3: 248/EO2: 260). Wilhelm’s identity is not a narrative identity in the strict sense since it is not decisively entwined with any other narrative (see Garff 1995), but he is essentially defined by his social and cultural context and duly equipped with civic values. This is emphasized almost to excess in the long monologue with which he sums up and concludes his second letter: I carry out my task as a court Assessor, I am happy in my calling ( . . . ). I love my wife, am fortunate in my home; I hear my wife’s cradle song ( . . . ). I hear the little one cry and to my ears it is not discordant, I see his older brother grow and progress

4 I am grateful to my colleagues Finn Gredal Jensen and Niels W. Bruun for their expert explanation of the term ‘nisus formativus’.

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( . . . ). My task means something to me and I believe that to a certain extent it also means something to others ( . . . ). I love the land of my birth ( . . . ). I love my mother tongue ( . . . ). In this way I love existence, because it is beautiful, and I hope for one yet more beautiful.—Here you have my testimony and deposition. (SKS3: 305f./ EO2: 323f.)

It is uncertain what effect Wilhelm’s ‘deposition’ and heartfelt letters as a whole make on the aesthete A. We do not get to hear from him, and there may be many good reasons for this. But his silence could perhaps be due to the fact that he has had some difficulty in recognizing himself in the portrait that his ethical mentor has drawn: an immediate, light-minded, non-reflective type—by which he might justifiably feel piqued. The first volume of Either/Or, the so-called aesthetic volume, consists of a sequence of pieces of writing that are so varied, with regard to both subject matter and form, that the reader may well feel obliged to imagine several aesthetes or to divide and categorize the aesthetic into various sub-types. The need to do this may be all the more keenly felt if one reads ‘The Reflection of Ancient Tragedy in Modern Tragedy’, which, in my opinion, Wilhelm ought to have used a couple of free evenings to study. If he had done so he would have been able to recognize that the question about identity is a modern problem that is not overcome by the individual assuming responsibility for himself nor by any number of happy marriages. ‘Our age’, as the essay characteristically puts it, ‘has lost all the substantial attributes of family, state, race and must entirely leave the individual to himself, so that, in the strictest sense, he becomes his own creator’ (SKS2: 148/EO1: 149). These lines can be read as A’s negative educational programme or as his attempt to dismantle any such programme and thus as his indirect answer to the well-meaning Wilhelm. Precisely because modernity has lost its most fundamental determinants, including the religious foundation that had previously been conceived as given, we are condemned to be our own creators or (which comes to much the same thing) assigned to the task of inventing ourselves poetically or forming ourselves. In this perspective, Wilhelm’s frequent demand that we should choose ourselves appears as compensating for the loss of the meaning that, in the pre-modern narrative, was revealed in the moment when it became clear that the individual was not his own poet but was handed over to a much greater narrator who was able to bring the individual’s life to a terrifying or marvellous point. It is such a narrator that A desires, a narrator who can compose his life poetically and thereby bestow on him a narrative identity; a narrator who can send him deep into a drama whose logic he cannot himself control but to which he is completely subordinated. In short, A does not want to be his own life’s ‘responsible editor’ but instead wants the editorship to be given over to another, to the true ‘editor’ whose name is God—and who is well known not to be a friend of comfortable bourgeois values or everyday rationality but has always shown a heightened sympathy for the marginalized, the outcast, and the misfits. It is thanks to this refusal to be reconciled that A lives on in the authorship, in which he undergoes a religious metamorphosis and ends up as a martyr who clings to his homelessness in this world as the only theologically legitimate position.

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II. The Context of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Formation and Culture With its 838 pages, Either/Or was a literary achievement with which Kierkegaard effectively asserted his presence in the Danish Golden Age and quite justifiably awaited its applause. With somewhat bated breath he was especially keen to know what Johan Ludvig Heiberg would think about his big (in every sense) debut book. For a young intellectual to be acknowledged by Heiberg was a kind of passepartout to the Copenhagen Parnassus, since Heiberg was not just a poet, critic, translator, journal editor, playwright, and later director of the Theatre Royal, nor was he just the exponent of everything elegant and witty, of irony and urbanity, good manners and spiritual aristocratism (in both its best and worst forms)—he was an institution, an aesthetic supreme court, whose judgement was perhaps not always just but irresistible and therefore fateful. Moreover, he was married to Johanne Luise Pätges, who had once been the object of his distinguished erotic longings and was now Denmark’s undisputed Prima Donna, whom everybody worshipped, adored, and was in love with—some with such noisy passion as to fall into deep depression or even to kill themselves in the tragic manner of the time (see especially Fenger 1976 and Fenger 1992: 89–91; also the chapters by Kirmmse, Pattison, and McDonald in this volume). Kierkegaard never communicated much about his attendance in the Heiberg circle but the contrast between the Pietistic frugality of the paternal home and the Heibergs’ light, sparkling society was presumably so forceful as to demand a more than usual mental effort in order to survive a soirée there. The young theological student was present at one of these soirées on 4th June 1836 on the occasion of the Heibergs’ departure on a foreign trip and, about that time, he left a journal entry that in an especially extended manner reveals his situation and mood after a too exalted evening: I have just come from a party where I was the life and soul. Witticisms streamed from my mouth, everybody laughed and marvelled at me—but I went and, yes, the dash should be as long as the earth’s radius

away and wanted to shoot myself. (Pap. I A 161 [JP1: 5141])

Fortunately this idea didn’t get any further than a dash and Kierkegaard had a better idea: to shoot someone else instead. This would turn out to be Hans Christian Andersen, and the sentence was carried out in 1838 in From the Papers of One Still Living. This was a sparkling piece of undergraduate writing but also a formidable analysis of Andersen as a novelist with particular reference to his third and partially autobiographical novel, Only a Fiddler, which had appeared the previous year. One among other motives for taking a shot at Andersen (who, as he himself said, got quite a shock from it and noted in his diary that he had to take ‘cooling powders’ (Lauridsen and Weber 1990: 24)) was pre-

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sumably to please Heiberg, who was incapable of seeing Andersen’s genius and couldn’t endure his success. The analysis of Andersen had originally been planned for Heiberg’s prestigious periodical Perseus, but for reasons that are not entirely clear was found not to be suitable for this organ, with the result that Kierkegaard had to finance its publication out of his own pocket. This rejection did not, however, hinder him from continuing to gesture in Heiberg’s direction and, in his Master’s dissertation, he places Heiberg alongside Goethe and emphasizes their shared and exceptional talent for mastering irony and using it productively in their artistic work (SKS1: 353f./CI: 325f.). Kierkegaard is no less favourably inclined in Either/Or, where Heiberg and the whole Heiberg dynasty are treated with extreme courtesy, as in the comprehensive analysis dedicated to the comedy The First Love by the French dramatist Augustine Eugène Scribe, translated by Heiberg, whose own adaptation of Molière’s Don Juan is preferred to Molière’s own version, indeed, the comic element is ‘more unadulterated than in Molière’ (SKS2: 115/EO1: 112). This would please Heiberg and Kierkegaard could surely rely on his support— Heiberg wouldn’t disappoint him. Nevertheless, this was exactly what Heiberg did, and to an indescribable degree. On 1st March 1843, just ten days after the publication of Either/Or, he dedicated a preliminary discussion to the new book in one of his Intelligensblade (‘Intelligencer’), in an article entitled ‘Literary Winter Seed’ in which he discusses books that had appeared since New Year. So, he continues Furthermore, like a lightning-bolt from heaven, a monster of a book has in these days suddenly struck down into our reading world ( . . . ). It is therefore in the first instance with regard to its volume that the book must be called a monster, since its sheer mass is already rather imposing even before one gets to know anything about the spirit that dwells in it and I do not doubt that if the author wanted to earn money from having it displayed he would get as much as from putting it out to be read. This sheer mass is a preliminary unpleasantness that one has to get past. ( . . . ) One feels marvellously gripped by the very title in that one applies it to one’s own relation to the book and asks oneself ‘Shall I either read it or let it alone?’. (Heiberg 1843: 288)

Heiberg nevertheless managed to overcome his hesitations and leapt into the book’s first part, which he clearly didn’t care for. The reader may well be presented with ‘many piquant reflections’ but the ‘cleverness, learning, and stylistic competence’ that the author discloses is not ‘united to an organizational ability that would let the idea leap forth in plastic form. Everything seems dreamy, indeterminate, and evanescent’ (Heiberg 1843: 289–90). Notwithstanding this, Heiberg made an effort to read the analysis of Scribe’s comedy, but not even this impressed him: ‘He has sought to make a masterpiece out of a pretty little bagatelle and ascribes to it an intention that is just about the opposite of that which Scribe publicly avows’ (Heiberg 1843: 290). With growing impatience Heiberg hurries on to the last piece of the first part, ‘The Diary of the Seducer’, but his expectations are not fulfilled. On the contrary, ‘one is sickened, nauseated, disturbed’. Nor does Heiberg neglect to take satisfaction from the furore and trouble that this

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demonically seductive diary will occasion when it runs into a Philistine public of ‘prudes, quibblers, and stubborn moralists’, who all (unlike Heiberg himself) ‘could get a great deal of good out of it’ (Heiberg 1843: 291). Despite all his assurances to the contrary, Heiberg has found no sustenance in the first part and begins to read the second—which grips him in quite another way. Here he encounters ‘Flashes of thought that suddenly illuminate whole spheres of existence’, just as he also finds the ‘organizing power’ he vainly sought in the first part. Mention is made of a ‘rare and highly endowed spirit, that from its deeply speculative treasure-store brings forth the most beautiful ethical views’ and that ‘interlaces its discourse with a stream of the most piquant wit and humour’. The matter of speculation was rather significant for the Hegelian Heiberg, who was also able to declare that he had not really grasped what the book was about: ‘The second volume is absolute. There can be no discussion of any Either/Or here’ (Heiberg 1843: 291–2). Heiberg possessed to a perfect degree the art of delivering a literary death blow in elegant style and Kierkegaard was furious over Heiberg’s ‘foppish review’ (SKS19/KJN3; NB 16) and patronizing ‘pat on the head’ (Pap. X6 B 171 [JP6: 6748]), although it scarcely compares with the perfidy and personal needling that Kierkegaard himself had indulged in when attacking Andersen. Four days after Heiberg’s bad Winter Seed, Victor Eremita inserted a so-called ‘Thank You to Hr. Professor Heiberg’, in which Heiberg is thanked with heavy irony for so thoroughly showing how ‘one’ reads Either/Or and has so cleverly ‘helped Either/Or to a fortunate downfall and uprising in literature’ (SKS14: 57/COR: 20). Heiberg only made things worse when, later that year, he reviewed Repetition in such critical terms that Kierkegaard felt compelled to respond with a so-called ‘Missive’ in which Heiberg is taken to task point by point to the extent that the proportion of Kierkegaard’s reply to what Heiberg had originally written is fifty to one. Even Kierkegaard finally saw that this was somewhat disproportionate and consequently put all his splendid material into a packet with the note ‘I shouldn’t be wasting my time’ (Pap. IV B: 109/R: 283). And he was right. No matter how much Kierkegaard’s vanity was wounded by Heiberg’s reviews they also liberated him from any further obligations to the cultural paradigms of the age and from literary expectations (See Garff 2000: 61ff., 190ff.; 2005: 67ff., 218ff.). How, and how quickly, this realization occurred can be seen in some plaintive lines that Kierkegaard let fall in summer 1843: Being an author has gradually become utterly pointless. On the whole one has to appear like the gardener in a box in The Advertiser—hat in hand, bowing and scraping, promoting oneself with one’s excellent recommendations ( . . . )—Or one has to learn how to become a sly pickpocket, who knows how to lead the public by the nose.—I don’t want to do that, no I don’t want to, no, no, damn it all! I’ll write as I want to and this is where the thing stops, so everybody else can do what they want, and give up buying, reading, and reviewing, etc. (SKS19/KJN3: Not7:3)

One could not really call this a literary manifesto but it might count as an idiosyncratic statement of intent on the part of a writer who is resolved on making his name as an immortal author and creating a literature within literature, reckoning less on his

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contemporary readers and more on those to come. To put it in a nutshell: if Heiberg had praised Kierkegaard to the skies, Kierkegaard would scarcely ever have become the Kierkegaard he became, so that his ‘Thank You to Professor Heiberg’ is to that extent much more appropriate than he could have imagined. With the clarity of a thoroughgoing bitterness Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: ‘God bless your coming hither, Hr Prof Heiberg! What concerns your going hence is something I will certainly take care of ’ (Pap. IV B 56). The manoeuvre succeeded beyond all expectation—Kierkegaard long since marginalized the institution that, in its time, sought to marginalize him and established himself as an institution!

III. Marginal Heroes and Deconstructive Novels of Formation Of course, we cannot regard everything that Kierkegaard produced from Either/Or up to and including Concluding Unscientific Postscript as merely a bitter protest against Heiberg’s lack of recognition. But it is remarkable that in the course of these works he steadily distances himself more and more provocatively from Goethe and Hegel and therefore also quite publicly offends the highest authority within the world of culture. The harmonious figure of Either/Or’s Wilhelm is dissolved into a sequence of marginal figures, exceptional personages like Abraham, Job, and Socrates whose lives are so dark, discontinuous, and conflicted that they can only be stabilized by virtue of some external factor and thus, on the whole, they succeed only by virtue of the absurd. Kierkegaard does not write novels of formation but novels of anti-formation or deformation, that deconstruct a sequence of cultural, ethical and trivially religious norms, facing the individual with the possibility of a new, narrative identity. This fits a work such as Repetition, which repeats the narrative structure of the novel of formation—home/homelessness/home—albeit as a parodic or face-pulling repetition on a number of levels. For a start, Repetition develops a critique of highbrow culture by opposing the loosely structured theatrical experience of farce to more established theatrical mores. In the kind of farce he described, physical and improvisatory elements play a leading part. Next, Repetition plays about with the individuating and didactic ideas of the novel of formation by upsetting one formative element after another: The journey that Constantin Constantius makes to Berlin is precisely not an educational journey but a dubious experiment that seems to have sprung from an epistemological interest in the possibility of repetition but gradually reveals itself to have far less exalted motives and finally falls apart in patent absurdity. And then, when Constantin Constantius returns disconsolately home from his experience of homelessness in Berlin, it is not to find any greater illumination but only to a house that is in a state of external chaos corresponding to his own psychological condition. In the full, existential sense of the word, he therefore never comes home. The second main character in the book, ‘the

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young man’, is similarly in a state of flight, head over heels to Stockholm—but to what extent he ever comes home again, we do not know. The conflicts and disillusioned energies that help the hero to reconcile himself to his circumstances in the novel of formation do not here contribute to greater socialization but only to intensify the main characters’ social isolation. And last but not least, the relationship between Constantin Constantius and the young man is exposed to so many twists, ruptures, and repairs, that the problem of identity is much greater at the end than it was at the beginning. Everything seems to have been dissolved into accidental scenarios and unplanned episodes. All these oddities are not just oddities for no reason. Its fragmentary form enables Repetition to state a profound dialectic at work in Kierkegaard’s anthropology, epitomized in Sickness unto Death, where he writes: ‘The self must be broken in order to become a self ’ (SKS11: 179/SUD: 65). For Kierkegaard proposes a far more radical view of the rupture involved in the journey towards selfhood than do the standard novels of formation, and, in his view, it is only by a radical break that person can relate itself to itself and in this self-relationship relate itself to God and so find a narrative identity. If a work such as Repetition deconstructs the novel of formation, this happens in order to break down and remould the autonomy of the self, in short: to deconstruct the self. This process is to enable the development of receptivity and to send the subject in two directions at the same time: outwards towards narrativity and downwards towards the passion that can give coherence to this narrativity. This occurs in the book’s second part, where the young man introduces a passionate interpretation of the Old Testament Book of Job, whose nameless sufferings and unendurable fate release some deep epistemological landslides that become decisive for his quest for identity. The course of the narrative makes it possible for him to become himself in a new way, to repeat himself or, more exactly, to receive himself on the far side of the crisis occasioned by a story of unhappy love. The extent to which his striving for identity is tied up with narrative can be seen in his final letter to Constantin Constantius: I am myself again. This ‘self ’, that no one else would even be bothered to pick up if they found it on a country road, is once more mine. The split that was in my being has been resolved. I pull myself together again. ( . . . ) Is this then not a repetition? Did I not get everything twice over? Did I not get myself again, and precisely in such a way that I had to feel what it meant twice as much? And what is a repetition of earthly goods that are indifferent to what is involved in being Spirit, in comparison with such a repetition? (SKS4: 87f./R: 220)

This breaking of the self is taken further in Fear and Trembling, in which the story of how Abraham journeyed to Mount Moriah in order to sacrifice his son Isaac becomes the gateway into a wide-ranging assemblage of ethical-religious narratives of conflict, full to bursting with heroes and heroines whose marginality in history’s great texts testifies that there are exceptions that, disturbingly, can be indisputably justified. By taking up the theme of sacrifice and the connected question of the possibility of a legitimate dispensation from the ethical, Fear and Trembling not only announces a model of individuation that is not socialized, but also takes up a provocative position at the extreme limit of the culture of

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formation. It is also from this extreme limit that criticism of the notion of culture itself is introduced, when, more or less at its mid-point, the book comes to a stop and asks: ‘What then is formation? I believed it was a course that the individual had to run in order to obtain his self and that whoever was not willing to run this course would not be helped even if they were to be born in the most enlightened times’ (SKS4: 140/FT: 46). This is an essential but also a difficult saying that we need to consider closely. To be formed is to become one’s self. But to become one’s self is to become other than one was before one began to become one’s self. This paradoxical logic generates the necessity of ‘obtaining’ one’s self. Thus, existential formation is to be contemporary with one’s self and in order to attain such a state I have to seek back within myself and get clear about who I was before I felt the requirement of formation getting a deep and broad hold on me. The peculiar formulation ‘to gathering one’s self up’ implies that existential formation does not consist in assuming the values and norms made available by the surrounding culture but in repeating or receiving one’s self as who one is prior to these values and norms. To have to obtain oneself is therefore, in a certain sense, to start over with one’s self, which is also to say that I am to open myself up to what is elementary and truly meaningful in myself and push forwards to the presuppositions that are given to me prior to my enculturation. Kierkegaard also refers to these presuppositions by the term ‘primitivity’ (Pap. VIII2 B 86: 187 [JP1 654]), which suggests what is basic and prior, what is not domesticated and not instrumentalizable, reason’s dark obverse, the world of instincts and passions. Arne Grøn puts it like this: ‘As genuine upbringing, formation requires that what is decisive does not in the first instance come about through formation but is outwith formation. Primitivity concerns this “outwith” as the condition for formation’ (Grøn 1994: 34). On the one hand are the synthetic cultural productions valued by ‘Prof Heiberg and his consorts’, who just sit around patching monstrous philosophical systems together and who are therefore incapable of ‘a single primitive thought’ (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:165). On the other is the primitivity that Kierkegaard insists has a decisive place in his own existential thinking, something that is precisely not derived from borrowings from the philosophical tradition but is, so to speak, fetched up from Kierkegaard’s own uncorrupted depths: My service to literature will forever be to have set forth the entire range of decisive existential determinants as dialectically sharply and as primitively as I at least believe not to have been done in any literature and I have certainly not been advised or guided by any other writings. (SKS20/KJN4: NB34[a])

IV. To Let Oneself be Formed—As A Christian Taking the word in its special Kierkegaardian sense, one is exposed to a great deal of ‘primitivity’ in the upbuilding discourses. For these take the shape of a continual reminder about what one could call the indispensability of what cannot be instrumentalized, which

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comprises such phenomena as confidence, devotion, consolation, faith, hope, and love, each of which and all together are as useless as they are indispensible in every human life. For one cannot and should not instrumentalize one’s concern or compassion in the same way that one uses a hammer, a compass, or a pistol. The indispensability of what cannot be made use of is thus a collective designation for those phenomena that human beings do not themselves have at their disposal but can only receive, that can only be given as a gift or experienced—such as joy: What is joy or what is being joyful? In truth, it is to be present to oneself. But to be present to oneself in truth, that is this ‘today’: it is this—to be today, in truth to be today. And to the same degree that it is true that you are today, and in the same degree that you are entirely present to yourself in being today, in that same degree will misfortune’s ‘next day’ not exist for you. Joy is the present time, where the entire stress lies on the present time. That is why God is blessed, for in all eternity He says, ‘Today’—He who is eternally and infinitely present to Himself in being today. And that is why the lily and the bird are joy, because silently and obediently they are entirely present to themselves in being today. (SKS11: 42/WA: 39)

While the pseudonymous works use psychological and existential analyses to uncover defects and malfunctions in the individual’s self-understanding, the upbuilding discourses take it upon themselves to bring about the opposite movement. Their task is to re-build and to that extent to re-form the self-understanding that the pseudonyms have so zealously broken down. Testimony to this task is the long list of verbs that have the prefix ‘up’, verbs such as ‘bring up’, ‘lead up’, ‘lift up’, ‘cheer up’, ‘stand up’ and, of course, especially ‘build up’, the literal and spiritual meaning of which is discussed for several pages in Works of Love. Here Kierkegaard emphasizes that a person’s being reformed or rebuilt has to happen ‘from the ground up’ (SKS9: 219/WL: 216). To build up is a theological expression for formation and, in this sense, the upbuilding discourses can be read as a comprehensive exercise in the formation of Christian identity. As we may recall, Wilhelm wrote to the young aesthete that ‘You are not to give birth to somebody else—you are simply to give birth to yourself ’. That was intended to soothe him, but, unintentionally or not, Wilhelm’s metaphor might direct our gaze and our thoughts in a quite different direction. For the difference between having to give birth to oneself and having to give birth to another corresponds in a broader perspective to the difference between the Socratically human task of self-liberation and the Christian model of liberation. For the Christian can precisely not give birth to himself but must let himself be reborn in order to become a new creature, God’s creature. Only so can one, Christianly speaking, become one’s self. The re-formation that occurs in the upbuilding discourses is therefore not a simple reconstruction of the individual who had been broken down but a re-formation of the individual in a comprehensive religious space defined by Christianity. The re-formation of the individual is thus basically a trans-formation, a marvellous change, in which the individual practises ‘receptivity with regard to the divine’ (SKS9: 131/WL: 129, trans.

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adjusted) and correspondingly learns to renounce his more or less illusory sovereignty that is, his ideas about autonomy and being himself. What is at issue in the upbuilding discourses is that the reader is directed to a narrator who stands outside the narratives with which we are familiar by virtue of our life in the world. This is the narrator who speaks to us in Jesus of Nazareth. More or less indirectly, the upbuilding discourses thus also contribute to the critique of the norms and values of the culture of formation. For example, at one point in Works of Love Kierkegaard is discussing the relationship between formation and love of neighbour, which gives him occasion to say the following, speaking directly to the reader: Are you, my reader, perhaps one of those said to be cultured? Well, I too am cultured; but ( . . . ) do you believe that anybody’s enthusiasm for acquiring culture teaches him how to love the neighbour? Ah, alas, is it not much more the case that culture and the enthusiasm with which it is pursued leads to a new kind of difference, the difference between the cultured and the uncultured? ( . . . .) Indeed, a certain liveliness of manner, a courtesy towards all, a friendly condescension to those who are lower down, a frank comportment in relation to the powerful ( . . . ): yes, this is culture—but do you think that it is also loving the neighbour? (SKS9: 65f./ WL: 59–60, trans. adjusted)

It is scarcely necessary to add that the question is rhetorical. Kierkegaard is opposing the idea of human relations held by the cultured with Christianity’s requirement that we love our neighbour and he has a clear sense for the social inequality between the culture and the uncultured that a merely human process of formation can occasion and, in the worst case, increase. Christianity sets limits to human beings’ self-formation and proposes to all who have ears to hear that another human being stands at this boundary, someone whose mere existence places them inside the educative process that Christianity offers and urges every single person to follow. Consequently, there is always a more or less visible struggle between Christianity and culture concerning who has the right to form others, that is, who has the right to speak on behalf of true culture. The self-dramatizations and pathetic quest for identity of the Kierkegaardian ironist and aesthete had already demonstrated to excess how modernity had tricked God out of his erstwhile privilege in this regard. The later Kierkegaard now seeks to, so to speak, give God back this privilege and thus once more install him as the true narrator, the transcendent narrator, who can endow human beings with an identity that is categorically different from the identity constituted by the narrative on which the culture of formation rests and on which it takes its stand. The criticism of the clergy that Kierkegaard begins to develop more systematically from the mid-1840s onwards and that he continues with in ever stronger terms right up to his death in 1855, is due not least to the fact that they do not maintain the distance between a merely human and a Christian process of identity formation, but have let the human notion of formation parasitically drain the idea of Christian identity that is left to sicken and die, quietly and unnoticed. Where the clergy ought to be expressing the asymmetrical relationship between Christianity and the world by letting the contradiction of

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being in the world but not of the world become manifest in their own person, they have instead conformed themselves to the culture of formation and its human values, to which they have given their unqualified blessing. Kierkegaard’s violent assault on the triumvirate of Mynster, Martensen, and Heiberg is not just down to their Mafia-like concordat but also and especially the fatal circumstance that they have submitted to the philosophical and metaphysical paradigms of the culture of formation that Christianity has been robbed of its radical and scandalous character—which, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, is its alpha and omega. The most corrupt member of this alliance is the Church’s Primate, the smoothly polished Bishop J. P. Mynster. In entry after entry of his journals, Kierkegaard draws up the list of Mynster’s sins, such as in this entry from 1848: Bishop M’s service to Christendom is basically that by means of his significant personality, his culture, his superiority amongst the refined and most refined circles has contributed to the fashionable view or solemn compact that Christianity is something that no deeper or more serious person (how flattering for those concerned!), no cultured person (how specially pleasant) could avoid acquiring. (SKS19/KJN4: NB5:79)

In Practice in Christianity (written in 1848 and published in 1850) Kierkegaard confirms that he does not wish to be welcomed into the culture of the clique around Mynster or anything similar and that like his marginal heroes he too is an outsider. This is a radical and bold work, which is sometimes satirical to the point of being blasphemous. AntiClimacus (its pseudonymous author) not only sets in motion a crude critique of the constant ‘Sunday waffle’ (SKS12: 49/PC: 35) that he sees as better suited to ending ‘with Hurrah rather than with Amen’ (SKS12: 115/PC: 107), he also writes about Christ, as he himself puts it, ‘entirely without embarrassment’ (SKS12: 53/PC: 40). And that he does. He lets a succession of the leading exponents of the culture of formation have their say about this solitary man Jesus, who, for page after page, is accompanied by blasé and blasphemous comments. He is spoken of as Jesus the obvious misfit, the idiot God, who, if nothing else, can bear witness to ‘how right the poets of our time have been, when they always let goodness and truth be represented by a half-baked person, or by someone who is so stupid that one can use him as a battering-ram’ (SKS12: 58/PC: 45). The prudent burgher expresses scepticism concerning Jesus’s miracles, the philosopher cannot see the system or systematic principle in anything he says, the priest is unable to give this religious weirdo his blessing, the politician is in doubt as to where he stands ideologically, and a straightforward scoffer gets a laugh out of the fact that ‘someone so badly dressed, who can almost ( . . . ) be counted amongst the poor—is God’ (SKS12: 64/PC: 52). And, to cap it all, a pharisaical chancer worriedly asks about what the future holds for him: His life is quite simply a piece of fantasy ( . . . ). One can live like that for a couple of years at the most when one is young. But he is already more than 30. And he has literally nothing. What has he done to ensure his future? Nothing. Has he any secure employment? No. What prospects does he have? None. What will this simpleton do, how will he pass the time when he is older, on the long winter evenings? What will he fill them with when he can’t even play cards? (SKS12: 56/PC: 43)

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Anti-Climacus is not the Anti-Christ, but when it comes to satire, one has to say that the Anti-Christ could scarcely do it better. Or, if one prefers, worse. Mynster, to whom Kierkegaard gave an elegant dedicatory copy of the work, thought it amounted to a ‘sacrilegious game with holy things’ (SKS24: NB21:121). This could only strengthen Kierkegaard’s view that Mynster had just not grasped that the aim of the seemingly blasphemous passages in Practice in Christianity was to emphasize how the scandalous and disturbing elements of Christianity had been systematically toned down in the course of time and, in modern Culture-Protestantism, as good as forgotten. Practice in Christianity was so far from being a sacrilegious game with holy things as to be a profound theological corrective to the association between culture and Christianity to the neglect of the latter’s sublimity and majesty. As Kierkegaard states in an entry from the year in which Practice in Christianity was published: What Mynster thinks (and this is just typical of modernity) is more or less that Christianity is culture. But this idea of culture or formation is as such is utterly inappropriate and perhaps even entirely opposed to Christianity, since it turns into pleasure, refinement, purely human formation. If what is Christian was formation then this would have to be the formation of character or formation in being character. (SKS19/KJ N3: NB5:79)

The hypothetical and subjunctive form of these reflections more than indicates how sceptical Kierkegaard was with regard to the legitimacy of linking culture and Christianity, and only in such a form can the hybrid expression ‘formation of character’ be tolerated. Note that such a ‘formation of character’ does not emerge out of a lifelong process of refining the human element in a person. It presupposes neither effective educational nor religious institutions and does not have Bildung zur Humanität as its great ideal. On the contrary. The Christian ‘formation of character’ (SKS24: NB25:110) designates the transformation of character that takes place when one follows Christ with as little modification as possible, when the self submits to an imitatio Christi and voluntarily exposes itself to martyrdom. And martyrdom is no metaphor, but a dramatic manifestation in which the Christian steps forth in character and gives shape to his distinctive difference from the world, thereby completing his Christian formation in the most proper sense. If, as Johannes Sløk argued (Sløk 1978), the early Kierkegaard was ‘humanism’s thinker’, the late Kierkegaard undeniably resembles more an anti-humanistic theologian. In 1854, the year before his death, Kierkegaard reflects on the concept of ‘Distinctiveness’, under the heading ‘Human Formation’, that is, on what it is that makes an individual individual, what is specific to the individual or, in theological parlance, its createdness. Governance has bestowed some distinctiveness on every person. The meaning of life should then be to carry this distinctiveness through and to be strengthened and matured in the collisions that it must bring about in its environment. Human formation, on the other hand, is demoralizing, calculated to teach people the art of not having an attitude, not using any word, not doing the least thing without the guarantee that many others have conducted themselves similarly before him.

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( . . . ) The entirety of a person’s salvation consists in becoming personality—but nothing is further away from personality than such a cultured person ( . . . ) he is at the most fundamental level demoralized, a non-person, an abortion; he has in a sense ceased to be one of God’s creatures and has become a creature—how repulsive!—whose creator is the human race. ( . . . ) Only God can create in such a way as to endow with what is peculiar, but if human beings try to do this artificially what they achieve is to take the peculiarity away. Such a cultured one has been transformed into a human creation ( . . . ) and even the very lowest of the animals is indeed of more worth than such a being. (SKS26 NB34:36))

This irreconcilable defection from the culture of formation effectively signals the ‘attack on Christendom’ that would dominate the last year of Kierkegaard’s life, but which had long been in preparation both in the journals and in the published works. The basic outlines of this polemical attack are already found in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where Kierkegaard, loosely disguised as Johannes Climacus, proclaims the following ultra-radical maxim: ‘the more culture and knowledge—the harder it is to become a Christian’ (SKS7: 349/CUP1: 383). But interpreting education as threatening the formation of true identity not only puts Kierkegaard the theologian into a somewhat tense relation to enlightened humanism and its values, it also points towards a paradox in Kierkegaard’s own personality. For it was only by virtue of his own excellent education that he was in a position to criticize the culture of formation in the way that he did and to develop an authentic alternative. Nor is it entirely without irony that he, the master of irony, should develop a critique of culture that in the long run inadvertently contributed to restricting the already relatively modest group of those who had the capacity to take an interest in his project, including his critique of culture! But against the grain of his irony and despite the paradoxes involved, Kierkegaard succeeded in provocatively and genially (if one-sidedly) accomplishing the formation of an identity that was not only uncompromisingly distinctive in his own time but also constituted an abiding protest against the superficial instant-fix programmes of more recent times that entice followers with easy pathways to self-realization.

V. Postscript: The Authorship of the Author’s Involuntary Novel of Formation In the same way that one never becomes oneself on one’s own but always and only via others and via the world, Kierkegaard only became Kierkegaard thanks to his authorship. During the period when he was writing The Point of View the journals frequently touch on the peculiar circumstance that his ‘work as an author’ has been his own ‘upbringing’ and ‘development’ (SKS23: NB25:110). It is not a matter of any one work in particular having especially great significance for his self-understanding, nor is it a mat-

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ter of how he worked on representing his own life circumstances. Rather, it is the total output, the authorship as a whole that, in retrospect, seems to him to have been a kind of novel of education or a story of formation that has formed and created its writer— astonishingly enough unnoticed by the writer himself. Thinking more closely about this, Kierkegaard was understandably rather perturbed by this excess of meaning, since it undermined his own ideas about himself, threatened his authority as author and, indeed, reduced him to being a mere co-author and thus took away his entitlement to speak about what the authorship really meant—‘and yet I am the one who has carried it out and taken each step to the accompaniment of reflection’ (SKS16: 56/PV: 77). Kierkegaard probably shares this sense of wonder and perturbation with other authors who have similarly experienced that their material contained forces that went in another direction from that which they intended. It is as if writing contains artistic possibilities that find ways of pushing to the fore in the process of writing itself. Such an excess of meaning may perhaps derive from language itself, which, in a certain sense, is always greater than the one who writes it. The power of grammar is already sufficient to restrict the writer to particular paths and perhaps even to direct what is written in a particular direction. Equally plausibly, the writing process itself may activate unconscious and to that extent alien powers in the writer who thus ends up writing something different and something more than she or he had been immediately aware of. Is this perhaps what happened to Kierkegaard? In his journals he certainly noted ‘an inexplicable something that indicates that it is as if I have been helped by another, [so] that I got to bring to effect and say something the full meaning of which I myself sometimes only understood afterwards’ (Pap. X 5 B: 168, 362). Such an ‘inexplicable something’ is well suited to being interpreted in terms of the activity of the unconscious in the text. Kierkegaard, however, did not interpret this experience in either text-theoretical terms or psychologically, but theologically. That is to say, he characterized the alien player in the authorship as ‘the part played by governance’.5 Making divine governance the co-author of Kierkegaard’s writings may at first seem like undiluted megalomania on Kierkegaard’s part, but seen in the right perspective it is the opposite: it is a way of recognizing the limits of his autonomy. Kierkegaard understood that an author does not only do something with his work but also has something done to him by the powers at work in the work. A writer is not just a writer but is also one who is written. Kierkegaard thus explains that it is ‘governance’ that ‘as categorically determined as possible ( . . . ) has brought me up, an upbringing reflected in the process of productivity’ (SKS16: 56/PV: 77). The overpowering circumstance that Kierkegaard was not only the originator of his authorship but that the authorship was also his originator understandably unsettled Kierkegaard’s self-understanding as an author and perhaps contributed to his finally putting The Point of View to one side to await posthumous publication. As it is stated with painstakingly pregnant wording in a marginal note in the journals: The difficulty in publishing what I have written about the authorship is and remains that I have nevertheless really been used without myself properly knowing or entirely 5

On governance, see the chapter by Markus Kleinert in this volume.

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knowing it; and now, for the first time, I understand and have an overview of the whole—but then I cannot say: I. (SKS22/KJN6: NB13:21)

Kierkegaard was governed by his writing or led by his writings—he himself says ‘used’. Thus, in addition to its many other riches, the authorship became a personal process of coming into existence, a kind of novel of formation in which the writing itself has a fructifying and liberating, maieutic, relation to its writer. He is now able to look back on his authorial activity as his own ‘upbringing’ and ‘development’, to use two of the most emblematic terms from the tradition of novels of formation. Kierkegaard was not just a child of his time, as is so often asserted. He is also, I suggest, a child of his writings, in so far as he himself—the greatest critic of the Golden Age’s culture of formation—was formed by them.

References Dehs, Jørgen (1995). ‘Den tabte verden’ in P. E. Tøjner, J. Garff, and J. Dehs (eds.), Kierkegaards æstetik (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Fenger, Henning (1976). Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder (Odense: Odense University Press). —— — (1992). Familjen Heiberg (Copenhagen: Heiberg-Selskabet). Garff, J. (1995). ‘Den Søvnløse’. Kierkegaard lest aestetisk/biografisk (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). —— — (2000). SAK. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. En biografi (Copenhagen: Gad). —— — (2005). Søren Kierkegaard. A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Grøn, A. (1994). ‘Dannelse og karakter’, Kritisk forum for praktisk teologi, vol. 58 (Århus: Anis), 19–35. Hansen, Aage Lærke (1968). ‘Fra dannelsesroman til udviklingsroman’, in A. Henriksen and J. F. Jensen (eds.), Kritik, vol. 5 (Copenhagen: Fremad), 19–45. Heiberg, J. L. (1843). Intelligensblade, nr. 24 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel), 285–92. Kondrup, J. (1982). Levned og tolkninger. Studier i nordisk selvbiografi (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag). Lauridsen, Helga Vang and Weber, Kirsten (1990). H. C. Andersens Almanakker 1833–1873 (Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab: G. E. C. Gads forlag). Mylius, Johan de (1981). Myte og roman. H.C. Andersens romaner mellem romantik og realisme (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Sløk, J. (1978). Kierkegaard—humanismens tænker (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel).

chapter 14

time a n d history a rne g røn

‘The heaviest burden laid upon a person (because he himself laid the burden of sin upon himself) is in a certain sense time—indeed do we not say that it can be deathly long!’ (SKS9: 136/WL: 133) ‘. . . the history of spirit (and it is precisely the secret of spirit that it has history) . . .’ (SKS5370/CA: 66)

I. Prelude Time and history do not figure prominently in the literature on Kierkegaard. They are not seen as key concepts in the same way as, for example, existence, selfhood, the ethical, or Christianity. One may even ask whether time and history are direct themes at all in his writings. Kierkegaard does write about time and history, and in some passages he outlines an account of what time is, but this seems only to serve as a background to other topics. History appears to figure mainly in a sort of negative mode: ethics is to be understood in contrast to ‘world history’; Christianity is to be not only distinguished, but also separated from ‘its’ history; faith is about becoming contemporaneous, overcoming the time of history. Thus, Kierkegaard’s writings appear not only to downplay or to ignore the significance of history; as readers, we are also encouraged to think ‘against’ history. But thinking against history implicitly places a weight upon time and history. It indicates that time constitutes a danger. This suggests that time and history concern humans in what they are: existing beings relating to themselves in leading a life. If so, the task set by time and history goes into the key issues: what it means to be a human being, and what it is to become a Christian. The aim of this chapter is to show that the implications of Kierkegaard’s key concepts can only be unfolded through the questions of time and history. The claim is that time

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and history are of critical importance for understanding what is at issue in Kierkegaard’s key concepts as, for example, selfhood, existence, the ethical, faith, and love. My approach will be to move through these concepts in order to show how time and history come into play, and to distinguish between different notions of time and history. Kierkegaard accentuates the moment (Øieblikket) in which a decision—even when it is a decision ‘against’ history—takes place. But what is decided in the moment if not the existence that is ‘in becoming’, between birth and death, carrying the burden of time? This suggests that we should take our point of departure in ways of experiencing time. In Kierkegaard’s texts there is a rich layer of descriptions of phenomena, which are human ways of being exposed to and relating to time and history. This layer is basic in the sense that it shows what is implied in the key notions to be discussed later.

II. Experiencing Time, Taking Time It is primarily in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses that human ways of experiencing time are described. Edification can only be understood in response to the problems which time presents for human beings. ‘The person who is expecting something is occupied with the future’, the first of the upbuilding discourses from 1843, ‘The Expectancy of Faith’, notes (SKS5: 26/EUD: 17). The ability to be occupied with the future is ‘a sign of the nobility of human beings’: ‘if there were no future, there would be no past, either, and if there were neither future nor past, then a human being would be in bondage like an animal, his head bowed to the earth, his soul captive to the service of the moment’. But the sign of nobility turns out to be ambiguous: ‘where should we place the limit; how much do we dare to be occupied with the future? The answer is not difficult: only when we have conquered it, only when we are able to return to the present, only then do our lives find meaning in it’ (SKS5: 26/EUD: 17). Thus, Kierkegaard’s first upbuilding discourse already outlines the problem in dealing with the future, the time which is to come to us (det Tilkommende): how do we return to the present (det Nærværende)? The—perhaps surprising—answer is: only by struggling with oneself. Why? Because the future borrows its power from the one who battles with the future. ‘When a person struggles with the future, he learns that however strong he is otherwise, there is one enemy that is stronger—himself, there is one enemy he cannot conquer by himself, and that is himself ’ (SKS5: 27/EUD: 18). The fact that returning to the present is problematic indicates human beings’ temporality. We are ‘in’ the present and yet the question is how we are present in it. In relating to the future one relates to oneself, without having first chosen to do so. ‘. . . the future is indeed light and elusive and more pliable than any clay, and consequently everyone forms it entirely as he himself is formed’ (SKS5: 29/EUD: 20). The open question then is whether it is possible, in dealing with the time to come, to encounter something other than oneself. The discourse answers by pointing to the expectancy of faith:

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When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars . . . By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed. (SKS5: 28/EUD: 19)

Anticipation belongs together with memory. Both pose the problem of returning to the present. One of Kierkegaard’s discourses from 1844, ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’, deals with the past hunting Paul. We may think that time can help a human being to forget the past, but this ‘help’ requires that the one seeking to forget ‘lets time go its way’. This means that ‘time as such will not help a person to forget the past, even though it mitigates the impression’ (SKS5: 327/EUD: 338). But if we decide to let the past behind, we are once again battling with ourselves: will we be free as we decide? In time there is no security; if one is running in time, ‘one does not run past time.’ What is left behind ‘will come again as the future with new terror’ (SKS5: 331/EUD: 343). Expecting and remembering are ways of dealing with time that apparently move in opposite directions and yet they are intertwined. This indicates that they are ways of being human. In dealing with the time to come, but also with the past, we face the question: how are we to live our lives? As humans, we are concerned beings. We are expecting and remembering because something matters to us. Concern (Bekymring) is a key notion in Kierkegaard’s approach to what it means to be human. The upbuilding discourses have as their addressee a reader who is concerned. But concern is human in that it displays ambiguity: it can turn into worry. This is the motif of one of the Christian Discourses from 1848: ‘The Care of Self-Torment’. This discourse indicates the inherent relation of selfhood and temporality in concern or care: ‘All earthly and worldly care [Bekymring] is basically for the next day. The earthly and worldly care was made possible precisely by this, that the human being was compounded of the temporal and the eternal, became a self, but in his becoming a self, the next day came into existence for him. And basically this is where the battle is fought’ (SKS10: 80/ CD: 71). A human being is not first a self and then relates to time, but becomes a self in relating to time. In order to understand how a human being as a self is a temporal being, we must take into account another key notion in Kierkegaard: courage. Again, the upbuilding discourses provide the clue. Humans need to be edified because they can lose courage in carrying the burden of time—the courage to be oneself and to live one’s life. The burden of time implies the task to carry oneself. This means that ‘time itself is the task’ (SKS7: 152/CUP: 164). How to comport oneself in time is addressed in another 1844 discourse, ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’. Since life is uncertain, one desires to preserve what one is concerned about. There is ‘danger to life and land, to health, honor, to welfare and property’ (SKS5: 187/EUD: 183f.). Such dangers may lead us to ignore a danger, which tends to hide in ‘earthly dangers’: the danger of losing one’s soul. This ‘eternal’ danger concerns how we deal with our human condition in terms of ‘the shortness of life and the certainty of death’ (SKS5: 187/EUD: 184). We carry the danger with us. Therefore, there is only one

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means to preserve one’s soul and ‘this means is patience’. ‘Patience’ (Taalmodighed) means the courage (Modet) to endure or to bear (til at taale). To preserve oneself in patience is to endure time and to bear oneself in time. The point in speaking of preserving ‘one’s soul’ is that one is to preserve oneself in time also against oneself: as the one who can give oneself up. This insight implied in ‘preserving one’s soul in patience’ is crucial in order to understand why concern and courage, understood as ways of ‘taking time’, are key concepts in Kierkegaard’s approach to the question: what it means to be a human being. But in order to understand how time plays into selfhood, we need one more step in reconstructing the analysis of temporal phenomena, taking anxiety as self-disclosure into the account.

III. Self, Time, and History The Concept of Anxiety from 1844 re-examines the question as to what it means to be a human being. Why then is it a book about anxiety? Obviously, anxiety concerns the future, but what do we relate to in anxiety? In contrast to fear, anxiety relates to ‘nothing’. While fear is directed towards the object which causes fear, anxiety reflects the one who is anxious: ‘Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom . . .’ (SKS4: 365/CA: 61). In relating to the future we encounter ourselves. We anticipate, expect, and fear, but what we relate to is not yet. It may turn out to be our own ideas, expectations, worries and fears. We are not simply concerned, but may subject ourselves to worries—as the discourse on the care of selftorment in Christian Discourses notes: ‘What is anxiety? It is the next day’ (SKS10: 87/ CD: 78). What is reflected in anxiety is the fact that we relate to ourselves in dealing with the time coming to us. Anxiety is self-disclosure in an eminent sense: disclosure of what it means to be a self. This is only disclosed as an experience of oneself in—relating to—time. How is the temporality of selfhood brought out in Kierkegaard’s text? The concept of anxiety leads to the definition of what a human being is: ‘That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit’ (SKS4: 349/CA: 43). Spirit is not a third constituent, but the fact that a human being relates to herself as soul and as body. As it stands, it is not evident how time is involved in this definition, but Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonymous author, adds a second definition: ‘Man, then, is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal’ (SKS4: 388/CA: 85). Here, time appears to be one element of the composite, as the definitional counterpart of eternity. This may suggest that we, as humans, stand between time and eternity as between two worlds. What is misleadingly expressed in terms of two ‘worlds’

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is the idea that time and eternity are radically heterogeneous. This means that, being a synthesis, human beings individually face the task of holding themselves together. But if we look at the definition itself it is striking that time occurs in two places: in the synthesis as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, and in the synthesis as a synthesis. As a synthesis, a human being is distended in time. She is not only a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, but also a synthesis in time; she is the first only in terms of the second. Defining being human as a synthesis thus points to the finitude of human existence. ‘What, then, is the temporal?’ Haufniensis asks. Apparently, time may be defined in two ways: as an infinite succession, or as the time of different time dimensions: present, past, and future. But how do we get from the first to the second? The distinction between different time dimensions is not implicit in time itself. This would require that a ‘foothold’ could be found in time as such, but then time would not be infinite succession. The distinction in time between different dimensions appears only, Haufniensis claims, ‘through the relation of time to eternity and through the reflection of eternity in time’ (SKS4: 388/CA: 85). But if eternity is ‘the present’, as annulled succession, how is it reflected in time? The decisive move taken by Haufniensis reads: If ‘time and eternity touch each other, then it must be in time, and now we have come to the moment’ (SKS4: 390/CA: 87, emphasis mine). ‘The moment [Øieblikket]’, he notes, ‘is a figurative expression’: ‘Nothing is as swift as a glance of the eye [Øiets Blik], and yet it is commensurable with the content of the eternal . . . A glance [Blik] is therefore a designation of time, but mark well, of time in the fateful conflict when it is touched by eternity’ (SKS4: 390f./CA: 87). Haufniensis concludes: ‘The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time. As a result, the above-mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time’ (SKS4: 392/CA: 89). Again, time occurs in two places: first as counterpart to eternity (time as infinite succession—eternity as the present as annulled succession), second as the time in which time and eternity touch each other. Temporality appears not only as one element in the composite of the temporal and the eternal, but also as temporality, the concept of which is first posited with the synthesis itself. In the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, where is the ‘third’ (‘spirit’)? Haufniensis answers: ‘The synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is not another synthesis but is the expression for the first synthesis, according to which man is a synthesis of psyche and body that is sustained by spirit. As soon as the spirit is posited, the moment is present’ (SKS4: 392/CA: 88). This implies that an account of the concept of spirit, the ‘third’, must take the form of an account of time and history, focusing on the moment. The secret of spirit is that it has a history. Therefore, it becomes a sort of formula in The Concept of Anxiety, that ‘only with the moment does history begin’ (SKS4: 392/CA: 89). What is implied in this? In the second part of Either/Or from 1843, ‘time is turned to account for the ethically existing individual, and the possibility of gaining a history is continuity’s ethical victory

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over hiddenness, depression, illusory passion, and despair’ (SKS7: 230/CUP: 254). According to the ethicist in Either/Or, one gains continuity in and through choosing oneself as the ethical subject. The Concept of Anxiety is also a book about what it means to acquire a history, but this is not secured by one’s choice of oneself; rather, the selfchoice turns out to be problematic in terms of one’s history. The individual receives a history in facing herself as a task. The key notion in Haufniensis’s account is sin. He insists that sin only enters the world through the individual who fails, and each time sin comes into the world it is something new. This is not to deny that humans have failed before. On the contrary, ethical faults committed by humans accumulate in the history humans share. But this is the history of sinfulness. The distinction between sin and sinfulness has deep implications in terms of history. ‘Each individual begins in a historical nexus’, Haufniensis notes (SKS4: 376/CA: 73). The historical character of being human, however, is not exhausted by the observation that we grow up having ‘an historical environment’ (SKS4: 377/CA: 73). The pivotal point is beginning. In the ‘Epilogue’ of Fear and Trembling, which came out in 1843 after Either/Or, the notion of a primitive beginning is invoked: Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively, has no task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further, insofar as the previous generations did not betray the task and deceive themselves. The essentially human is passion, in which one generation perfectly understand another and understands itself. For example, no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task than the previous one. . . . (SKS4: 208/FT: 121)

To begin primitively means to begin on one’s own, but we only begin ourselves if we begin with ourselves. In The Concept of Anxiety the primitive beginning is both situated and accentuated. Each individual is born into a historical context, but is also to begin on her own. Let us unfold this, step by step. Firstly, the distinction between sinfulness and sin implies a double notion of history— the history of the ‘race’ (Slægten) and the history of the individual. It is essential to human existence ‘that man is individuum and as such simultaneously himself and the whole race’ (SKS4: 335/CA: 28). When the individual begins herself, she gains her own history, but she begins in a history already begun, a history which she shares with others. Secondly, it is possible to get this essential relation between one’s own history and a shared human history wrong. This is the case when the individual ‘forthwith confounds himself with the race and its history’ (SKS4: 377/CA: 73). As humans we share ‘the presupposition of sinfulness’, but this is a presupposition to be appropriated by separating oneself from others. Beginning one’s own history, one is to account for oneself. Thirdly, how then does one gain a history? The decisive moment is when one discovers oneself as guilty. One cannot explain oneself from the historical surrounding, and

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yet one is ‘under influence’, affected by what happens to oneself. This is where anxiety as self-disclosure comes into the picture. Let us once again look at the passage comparing anxiety with dizziness. After the quote given above Haufniensis continues: Hence 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. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment 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. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. (SKS4: 365/CA: 61)

What is the decisive moment here? Remarkably, Haufniensis points to what happens between the moment of succumbing and the moment of rising. One fails in anxiety, succumbing to the dizziness of freedom which emerges when looking down into one’s own possibility. Do the possibilities we see come from the future or from our own ‘eyes’? Haufniensis claims: ‘he who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent, for it was not he himself but anxiety, a foreign power, that laid hold of him, a power that he did not love but about which he was anxious. And yet he is guilty, for he sank in anxiety, which he nevertheless loved even as he feared it. There is nothing in the world more ambiguous’ (SKS4: 349/CA: 43). Both the moment before and the moment after concern time as reflected in the act of seeing: succumbing in looking down into the abyss of one’s possibility (future) and rising, seeing that one is guilty. What comes in between is the leap which ‘stands outside of all ambiguity’ (SKS4: 349/CA: 43). One stands out as the one having failed. Whether others have also failed is in that moment not one’s concern. The one who is becoming guilty is oneself—and no other. This is not just part of a common history (of sinfulness), but marks the beginning of one’s own history. Therefore, there is a moment of decision to follow: the decision of assuming oneself as having become guilty. This opens up a history, one’s own, in which the decision is to be carried through from moment to moment. What is at issue in selfhood is continuity in the strong sense of preserving oneself as a matter of patience. This task testifies to the deep temporality of selfhood, but also to the history of freedom. Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety and the ethicist in Either/Or share the problem: how is it possible to gain continuity with oneself in a history in which one is situated? But while the ethicist argues that this history can be appropriated, Haufniensis accentuates the problematic character of the history which is supposed to be one’s own. It is a history in which freedom can not only be lost, but lose itself. The ambiguity of anxiety points not only to selfhood as temporal synthesis, but also to the character of the history of freedom implied in being spirit. Time and history are written into the account of what a human being is. As humans, we face the task of becoming ourselves. What does this mean? The Sickness unto Death (1849) answers: ‘To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to

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become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the progress of becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process’ (SKS11: 146/SUD: 30). Dealing with time in becoming oneself is a double, infinitizing movement which is already implied in the notion of returning to the present in relating to the future and carrying the past in facing the time to come. How does this ‘repetition’ relate to the moment? Repetition takes place in the moment, but in repetition there is also a ‘take’ on ‘the whole’ of one’s history. What is decided in the moment of decision, then, is the character of one’s history as a history of becoming oneself. Conversely, the moment of decision takes a history that is opened in the moment. This leads us to the concept of existence.

IV. Existence Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) coins the notion of existence as human existence which later philosophies of existence draw upon. How is existence defined? First, human existence is ‘in becoming’: ‘to exist is to become’ (SKS7: 183/CUP1: 199). This does not mean that being is translated into becoming. What we are, is not just a matter of what we become, as if we were either the outcome of a process or ourselves defining what we are. Rather, human existence is being in becoming. This raises the question as to whether we, in becoming, become ourselves and this then leads to the second feature of existence: self-relation. These two features of human existence—being in becoming and self-relation—go together: subjectivity implies the task of becoming subjective. What then does the notion of existence add to the concept of selfhood in terms of time and history? There is a difference in context. Human existence is in two senses an existence ‘in between’. First, a human being exists ‘between’ the finite and the infinite, ‘situated in time [bestedt i Tiden]’ (SKS7: 202/CUP1: 221, emphasis mine). This remarkable accentuation of time has implications for how a human being is placed in relation to truth. Situated in a world of change, like a sailor on the ocean, we look for points of orientation. But these must have something to do with the problems facing us in the midst of life’s changes. Of what help is it to explain how the eternal truth is to be understood eternally when the one to use the explanation is prevented from understanding it in this way because he is existing and is merely a fantast if he fancies himself to be sub specie aeterni, consequently when he must avail himself precisely of the explanation of how the eternal truth is to be understood in the category of time by someone who by existing is himself in time. (SKS7: 176/CUP1: 192)

Suppose that the paradox of Christianity places the existing human being ‘more decisively than any judge can place the accused, between time and eternity in time, between heaven and hell in the time of salvation’ (SKS7: 197/CUP1: 215, emphasis mine). Being

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situated in time affects the condition for understanding the question of the eternal truth: ‘. . . whether it will be manifest when everything is settled in eternity that the most insignificant circumstance was absolutely important—I do not decide. I can truthfully say that time does not allow me to do that—simply because I am in time’ (SKS7: 374/ CUP1: 411). This indicates the second sense of existence ‘in between’. We exist between birth and death, which means that we cannot place ourselves at the point of beginning (birth) or at the point of ending (death). Being on one’s way, one can anticipate and remember, but only while living; we may even come to live a life in anticipation or in memory. The context of existence is this double sense of being ‘in between’: being oneself finite and infinite, and being ‘caught’ between birth and death. Thus, the concept of existence accentuates the relation of selfhood and temporality. Each human being comes into existence as this individual, has her own life to live, and dies her own death. The critical point is that existence means to be situated ‘in time’. Existing ‘in between’ and ‘in becoming’ excludes a concluding panoramic view on human existence. Humans cannot place themselves in God’s ‘point of view’; they can only imagine what such a point of view would mean for their existence. The implication is radical: to be situated ‘in time’ is to be ‘lodged in existence’ in such a way that it is impossible to take oneself back into eternity (SKS7: 191/CUP1: 208). But this means that transcendence as a human movement beyond time is broken off. If we are looking for orientation in the eternal like a sailor looking at the stars, we are still ‘on the ocean’. Eternity offers no retreat out of time—retreating would still take place ‘in time’. But this does not mean that human existence is enclosed upon itself. ‘At a Graveside’, the last of Kierkegaard’s Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions from 1845, addresses the question: how do humans deal with death as both part of and the end to human existence? The discourse is about thinking in earnestness. The thought of death changes the relation to time. It reminds us about the time we have taken for granted and questions what we use time for. ‘. . . with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth’ (SKS5: 453/TDIO: 84). Thinking the thought of death, then, is a countermove against forgetting existence. ‘My main thought was that, because of the copiousness of knowledge, people in our day have forgotten what it means to exist’, Climacus declares (SKS7: 226/CUP1: 249). This is implied in forgetting to ask what it means to die. We forget because of our ways of knowing, and we forget in and through our ways of talking: the orator ‘forgets to think the uncertainty into what he is saying about uncertainty when he, moved, speaks harrowingly about the uncertainty of death and ends by urging a purpose for the whole of life’ (SKS7: 154/CUP1: 166). Thinking ourselves into world history is to forget the temporal character of our human existence. It is also to forget the ethical. In dealing with the time to come we encounter ourselves, anticipating the future. The question is not only whether we, in dealing with time, encounter something other than ourselves, but also whether we, in becoming, become ourselves. These two questions: time as relation to oneself and time as relation to the other, go together in the issue of ethics and time.

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V. Ethics, Time, and History The ethicist’s account of the ethical in Either/Or turns on the relationship between ethics and time. Ethical choice requires a moment of decision. What is decisive in the moment is how we place ourselves in the next moment. The moment of decision now is itself ‘the next moment’ for a previous moment. It is already situated in a history which involves the one making the choice. Before beginning in the moment of decision one has already begun. Although indicated in Either/Or, this becomes a critical point in the revision of ethics after Either/Or. Let me quote the Postscript: In existence, the individual is a concretion, time is concrete, and even while the individual deliberates he is ethically responsible for the use of time. Existence is not an abstract rush job but a striving and an unremitting ‘in the meantime.’ Even at the moment the task is assigned, something is already wasted, because there is an ‘in the meantime’ and the beginning is not promptly made. This is how it goes backwards . . . And just as the beginning is about to be made here, it is discovered that, since meanwhile time has been passing, a bad beginning has been made and that the beginning must be made by becoming guilty, and from that moment the total guilt, which is decisive, practices usury with new guilt. (SKS7: 478/CUP1: 526)

Ethics accentuates existence, but this does not leave ethics as it is. Already in the ethicist’s account of the ethical, there is a tension. Obviously, the ethical concerns the future, but the past too becomes a matter of ethics. It is not simply a past to be left behind. Rather, choosing oneself becomes a matter of ‘repenting oneself back’ into one’s history, thereby ‘repenting oneself ’. ‘The moment of choice’ is not only the moment we choose, but also the moment that comes to us: ‘the moment comes when what really matters is beginning to live’ and in this moment ‘it is a dangerous thing to have split oneself up in such a way as to make it difficult to gather oneself together’ (SKS3: 308f./EO2: 327). But when one has the courage to choose oneself ‘in one’s history’, by repenting, one’s ‘personhood forms a closure’. Thereby one gains sovereignty over oneself: Only when one has taken oneself over in the choice, has put on one’s self, has totally penetrated oneself in such a way that every movement is accompanied by the consciousness of responsibility for oneself—only then has one chosen oneself ethically, only then has one assumed oneself in repentance, only then is one concrete, only then, totally isolated, is one in absolute continuity with the reality to which one belongs. (SKS3: 237/EO2: 248)

The ethicist concludes that the temporal exists for the sake of human beings and is the greatest of all gifts of grace. For the eternal dignity of a human being consists in the ability to acquire a history, and the divine element in human beings lies in their ability to make this history coherent, if they wish to; for it is not just the sum-total of all that has happened or occurred to

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me that give my life coherence, but it only acquires this through my own action, in such a way that what has happened to me is transformed and translated by me from necessity to freedom. (SKS3: 239/EO2: 250–1)

On the ethicist’s account, then, history is a challenge to ethics, but the one choosing can find an answer. Repentance becomes a sort of instrument for gaining continuity with oneself. But upon closer reflection the very temporality of repentance presents a problem. Repentance means ‘taking the past upon oneself ’ in order to open the future. It appears to be a way of dealing with time which can let the past be past; in repenting, one seeks to ‘redeem’ oneself. Yet repentance cannot make oneself free. It always comes ‘a moment too late’ (SKS4: 417/CA: 115). Furthermore, repentance itself takes time. While repenting, time has been passing, and one is in danger of absorbing oneself in a selfencircling movement which diverts from the ethical task. This means that ‘repentance is the highest ethical contradiction’ (SKS4: 419/CA: 117). The question of ethics and time is intensified: how do we use time? The introduction to The Concept of Anxiety draws the conclusion: ‘Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked with the aid of repentance’ (SKS4: 324/CA: 17). It then introduces a distinction between ‘first’ and ‘second’ ethics: the first ethics is ethics shipwrecking upon the concept of sin, the second taking its point of departure in this shipwrecking and the possibility of a new beginning. This second ethics is what we find in Works of Love. For the ethicist, the eternal is to be seen in the trace of the historical. In particular in the Postscript, the relation of ethics and history is more complicated: ‘The objection is this: If one posits only the development of the generation or the race or at least posits it as the highest, how does one explain the divine squandering that uses the endless host of individuals of one generation after the other in order to set the world-historical development in motion?’ (SKS4: 147/CUP1: 158) According to Climacus, the only answer to this objection is the ethical understood in terms of ‘becoming subjective’. But what is the objection? It targets a panoramic view on world history. For such a contemplating view history has ended: it is not a drama that is ethical in nature.

VI. Faith, Time, and History The underlying question is: what does it mean to be a human being? But Kierkegaard’s authorship also poses a second question: what does it mean to be a Christian? Obviously, one cannot be a Christian in the same way that one is a human being. In the second question ‘becoming’ is accentuated: how does a human being become a Christian? Furthermore, it is not a question to be asked in general, but in person: how do I become a Christian? Yet the second question relates to the first. This comes to the fore in the way existence is accentuated by the paradox of Christianity. This paradox ‘continually uses time and the historical in relation to the eternal’ (SKS7: 94/CUP1: 95). But what does the paradox do to the understanding of time and the historical?

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The Postscript sees the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal in human existence as paradoxical in structure: a human being is ‘an existing infinite spirit’. This ‘prodigious contradiction that the eternal becomes, that it comes into existence’ (SKS7: 81/CUP1: 82), is reflected in the paradox. But the paradox of Christianity both ‘fits’ human existence and contradicts our ‘take on’ human existence. What is important for us here is how the paradox complicates the relation of time and eternity. That is in a sense the whole point. The Socratic paradox that the eternal truth relates to an existing human being brings together what does not match: eternal truth and existence in time. But the paradox of Christianity brings eternity and existence together in the truth itself, claiming that ‘the eternal truth has come into existence in time’ (SKS7: 191/CUP1: 209). What is accentuated by the paradox is the how in terms of ‘the relation of the existing person, in his very existence, to what is said,’ and this ‘how’ is ‘dialectical also with regard to time’ (SKS7: 185f./CUP1: 202f.). This is to be seen in the temporality of faith: ‘. . . when the retreat out of existence into eternity by way of recollection has been made impossible, then, with the truth facing one as the paradox, in the anxiety of sin and its pain, with the tremendous risk of objectivity, there is no stronger expression for inwardness than— to have faith’ (SKS7: 192/CUP1: 209f.). What then is the relation of faith and history? The problem addressed by Philosophical Fragments is, to quote the Postscript to the Fragments: ‘How can something historical be decisive for an eternal happiness?’ (SKS7: 92f./CUP1: 94) The eternal is not simply to be contrasted to the historical. Rather, the question is how can a historical point of departure ‘be of more than historical interest’ (SKS4: 213/PF: 1)? Firstly, faith does not follow from history. Historical truths are as such contingent. By contrast, faith implies a decision which is a matter of ‘an infinite concern’. Contemplating history distracts us from this concern and may distort or even pervert the question of faith. This is the case when one lets one’s faith—one’s ultimate decision—depend on whether others have faith. This indicates that the first move—contrasting faith and history—implies a second in return: faith concerns one’s history in terms of one’s existence. Linking faith to ‘an infinite concern’, Climacus invokes the notion that humans are concerned beings. But what does ‘infinite’ mean? It points to what is at stake in the decision of faith: the single individual’s ‘eternal happiness’. This does not lead us outside existence. ‘Infinite’ means that the individual herself, her life as a whole, is concerned, but ‘eternal’ also means that the final answer is not given by finite human judgements, neither by oneself, nor by others. Secondly, what or who is contradicted in ‘the dialectical contradiction’ of the paradox? The contradiction concerns our expectations in terms of how we orient ourselves in the world and what we maintain as important for us. These are expectations, in which we ‘have ourselves’. They show how we take ourselves as humans. We are, then, ourselves contradicted in terms of our human self-understanding. Along this line of interpretation we can understand the contradiction of the paradox in terms of vision. The reformulation of the paradox in Practice in Christianity (1850) is remarkable. At a first glance, the claim appears to be that faith has nothing to do with history. The history which has come in between, the ‘intervening period’, ‘which at this

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time is about eighteen hundred years’ (SKS12: 39/PC: 24), must be bracketed. To become a Christian means to become transformed ‘into the likeness with God’ in becoming contemporary with Christ (SKS12: 75/PC: 63). The one being addressed must place herself in ‘the situation of contemporaneity’. But this is not to transport oneself back into a historical situation in the past. What is decisive is the opposite movement back to the situation of the addressee. What is emphasized, then, is both the situation of the paradox, as ‘a historically actual situation’, and the historical situation of the one being addressed. The historical character of the first is only to be understood in terms of the historicity of the second. It is in this sense that to be contemporaneous with Christ is faith. If we take history as the past which we can approach in terms of knowledge or contemplation, Christ as the paradox is ‘an extremely unhistorical person’ (SKS12: 75/PC: 63). ‘Becoming contemporaneous’ converts the attitude of the one approaching. It is about the figure in which the believer sees Christ: the form [Skikkelse] of abasement (SKS12: 17/PC: 9). This is the figure in which the believer is to see herself. Becoming contemporary is how one is to go one’s own way: as ‘imitator [Efterfølger]’ (SKS12: 230ff./PC: 237ff.). What is to be disclosed is one’s heart. ‘In relation to the absolute, there is only one time, the present; for the person who is not contemporary with the absolute, it does not exist at all’ (SKS12: 75/PC: 63). ‘That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality—for you’ (SKS12: 76/PC: 64). What does this imply in terms of history? Practice in Christianity opposes world history and sacred history, but how does the second relate to the first? The answer appears to be straightforward: ‘. . . for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history’ (SKS12: 76/PC: 64). And yet, the sacred history has as ‘its counterpart’ ‘the profane history [den vanhellige Historie]’ (SKS12: 68/PC: 56). It is not just beyond or outside world history, but rather contradicts history as humans tend to see it. The history of suffering and abasement is hidden in, or by, world history. The figure of the servant is incognito, unrecognizable, but this tells something critical about human history. If the sacred history were simply external to world history it would be impossible to account for the contradiction. The paradox as ‘a sign of contradiction’ is to be read in and through situated existence. It ‘draws attention to itself and then it presents a contradiction. There is something that makes it impossible not to look—and look, as one is looking one sees as in a mirror, one comes to see oneself, or he who is the sign of contradiction looks straight into one’s heart while one is staring into the contradiction’ (SKS12: 131/PC: 126f.). This means that faith is a way of seeing—as the one being seen while staring into the contradiction. The implication is that faith has something to do with history as lived by humans and even with world history. It concerns a new beginning in a historical situation, which can be turned into a situation of contemporaneity. Faith sees ‘in conversion’, against world history. It is not historical in the sense that it would depend on history providing some sort of proof in order to be faith but rather the converse is the case: it is faith in a sacred history, which contradicts how history ‘works’ as the history of the victorious, and it concerns human history ‘in situation’, taking place in the moment.

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VII. Love, Time, and History Both the ethical and the religious concern what humans share as humans and both address the single individual as the one concerned. In Works of Love (1847), time in relation to oneself and time in relation to the other are brought together. The issue of love and time leads us back to where we started: time and edification. In order to understand love we must reflect on how time is experienced. This does not mean that love follows from how we experience time. Rather, the claim is that it is only in love that we can preserve ourselves in time, and this requires that we carry the burden of time and even counteract the force of time. What is the power of time? Time is not only passing (as noted in The Concept of Anxiety), but also changing—to the point of changing us. It is important to bear in mind that the possibility of changing is crucial in order to stay human. In Sickness unto Death it is noted that we ‘breathe’ through possibility. What is first brought into focus in Works of Love, however, is the possibility that love changes. Love can change within itself, and it can change from itself (SKS9: 41ff./WL: 34ff.). When love is changed into its opposite, hate, it is changed ‘within itself ’. Although it has perished (gaaet til Grunde), ‘down in the ground’ (nede i Grunden) love is still aflame. But love can also be changed ‘over the years’ and lose ‘its ardour, its joy, its desire, its originality, its freshness’. As time goes by, love is dissipated in the ‘indifference of habit’. Love is here changed ‘from itself ’, but this is difficult to see, since habit is ‘cunning enough never to let itself be seen’ (SKS9: 43/WL: 36). This indicates that it is difficult to ‘read’ the phenomena of love. They may be ambiguous, and the ambiguity may pertain to the way love shows itself: it may hide what it shows. ‘However joyous, however happy, however indescribably confident instinctive and inclinational love, spontaneous love, can be itself, precisely in its most beautiful moment it still feels a need to bind itself, if possible, even more securely. Therefore, the two swear an oath, swear fidelity and friendship to each other’ (SKS9: 37/WL: 29.) Why? If love is as it claims to be, there should be no need to bind itself more securely and no need to make a test of love. The need to secure itself indicates that there is still ‘an anxiety about the possibility of change’ (SKS9: 40/WL: 32f.). This anxiety is known by the burning craving that hides it. Experiences of love are accompanied by the question, maybe unspoken, but disturbing: does love last or remain? Love’s change does not follow from the fact that time is changing—even when we take into account that we are changed in time. Rather, time changing constitutes the test of love. When love changes, it ‘falls away’ from itself. It fails as love. But if this is all there is to be said, there would be no edification. In love, however, concern and courage are at issue in an intensified manner. This comes to the fore in the opening discourse of Works of Love which deals with seeing love and strikes a note of reflection that resounds in the entire book. If it were so ‘that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up

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believing in love’ (SKS9: 13/WL: 5). Believing in love one runs the risk of being deceived. But—the discourse asks—‘which deception is the more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of the one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see?’ It answers: ‘To defraud oneself of [bedrage sig selv for] love is the most terrible, is an eternal loss, for which there is no compensation either in time or in eternity’ (SKS9: 14/WL: 5f.). Can one believe in love? The ‘natural’ way of finding an answer is to go out in the world in order to see whether love is to be found. But taking the question in this way we have already begun; we are already seeing in a certain way. The more radical question to be asked, then, is whether there is love in the way we see when looking for love. The almost paradoxical claim of the discourse is that love is to see love. The discourse thus performs a reversal of perspective. Being exposed to time’s change, our attention is drawn to the possibility that we are being deceived. As a countermove, the discourse redirects our attention to the possibility of an eternal loss, that of deceiving or defrauding oneself. This does not mean that the possibility of being deceived is not a matter of concern. Rather, precisely because being deceived by others would affect us in our ways of finding ourselves in the world, it is all the more important to point to the danger hidden in this: that of despairing or giving up oneself. When we lose a loved one, it is still imperative that love remains. Therefore, Kierkegaard contrasts sorrow and despair: I do not have the right to become insensitive to life’s pain, because I shall sorrow; but neither do I have the right to despair, because I shall sorrow; and neither do I have the right to stop sorrowing, because I shall sorrow. So it is with love. You do not have the right to become insensitive to this feeling, because you shall love; but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, because you shall love; and just as little do you have the right to warp this feeling in you, because you shall love. You shall preserve love, and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love. (SKS9: 50/WL: 43)

In despair, one’s concern is diverted: although one is brought to despair by the loss of another, one’s concern encloses upon oneself, as the one bereaved. As indicated in The Sickness unto Death: we can suffer a loss that brings us to despair, and yet we despair. That is, despair does not simply follow from what happens to us, and yet the possibility of despair shows how we are situated beings, exposed to what happens to us. In contrast to the position taken by the ethicist in Either/Or, continuity in time is no longer secured by self-choice but remaining true to oneself is at stake in relating to the other. The relation to the other has broken into the continuity with oneself—not only in terms of the possibility to suffer a loss, or to be deceived, but also as the possibility of oneself failing. The radical danger in being thus exposed to time and the other is to deceive oneself and to give oneself up. The point is ethical: both in terms of being addressed as the one to love the neighbour and in terms of the duty to love oneself. Where then is the answer to the problem of time? Should we find the answer in eternity—like a sailor who looks up into the heaven in order to find his point of orienta-

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tion in the stars? Let us see how the distinction between time and eternity plays into love. After the first discourse performing a reversal of perspective (love is to see love), the second discourse in Works of Love accentuates the duty in the commandment: You shall love your neighbour as yourself (Matt 22:39). By becoming a duty, love undergoes ‘the change of eternity’ and thereby gains ‘enduring continuance’ (SKS9: 39/WL: 32). What does this mean? The change of eternity is a change against the change which time seems to induce, but how is this second change possible? It implies that the contrast between time and eternity is complicated. Eternity is not just beyond time; rather eternity’s change takes place in time, as a change of time. But this requires that time is not one thing; rather, temporality ‘divides within itself ’: ‘Only the eternal can be and become and remain contemporary with every age; in contrast, temporality divides within itself, and the present cannot become contemporary with the future, or the future with the past, or the past with the present’ (SKS9: 39/WL: 31f.). The eternal is not seen against the background of time as infinite succession, as in The Concept of Anxiety, but in contrast to time being divided into irreducible time dimensions: ‘The temporal has three periods [Tider] and therefore does not ever actually exist completely or exist completely in any of them; the eternal is’ (SKS9: 278/WL: 280). The eternal is present in a sense in which time is not, but this presence of the eternal is explained in terms of the temporal: ‘Only the eternal can be and become and remain contemporary with every age’. What this implies is then explained in terms of what it means to be a self in time: A temporal object can have many various characteristics, in a certain sense can be said to have them simultaneously insofar as it is what it is in these specific characteristics. But a temporal object never has redoubling [Fordoblelse] in itself; just as the temporal vanishes in time, so also it is only in its characteristics. When, however, the eternal is in a human being, this eternal redoubles in him in such a way that every moment it is in him, it is in him in a double mode: in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself, but in such a way that this is one and the same, since otherwise it is not redoubling. (SKS9: 278/WL: 280)

Eternity’s change concerns love in time; the critical insight is repeated that time and eternity touch each other—in time. But what does it imply that it is the duty to love one’s neighbour that constitutes ‘the change of eternity’? Love as ‘eternity’s bond’ testifies to the fact that a human being is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. The duty to love as eternity’s change still bears witness to the fact that temporality and eternity are ‘heterogeneous’ (SKS9: 14/WL: 6). If eternity is about continuity in time, in contrast to the temporal vanishing in time, what does it mean that, in love, the eternal ‘redoubles’ in a human being? Let us first clarify what the duty to love one’s neighbour means. Firstly, that it is a duty prohibits one from letting time slip by. Asking questions about what love is and who one’s neighbour is, takes time and is already a matter of ethics: we are to account for the time used. Opening up an interval, a spare moment, ‘a concession is made to curiosity and idleness and selfishness’ (SKS9: 102/WL: 97). A key passage reads: ‘When the Pharisee, “in order to justify himself ”, asked, “Who is my neighbour?” he presumably

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thought that this might develop into a very protracted inquiry, so that it would perhaps take a very long time and then perhaps end with the admission that it was impossible to define the concept “neighbour” with absolute accuracy—for this very reason he asked the question, to find an escape, to waste time, and to justify himself ’ (SKS9: 101/WL: 96f.). Being addressed by the commandment to love one’s neighbour, one does not begin in a free moment, but in a history where some time is already lost. The moment one is to begin already carries a history of time wasted: ‘God is an eternity ahead—that is how far the human being is behind. So it is with every one of eternity’s tasks. When a person at long last starts to begin, how infinitely much was wasted beforehand, even if for a moment we would forget all the deficiencies, all the imperfections of the effort that at long last had its beginning!’ (SKS9: 106/WL: 102). Secondly, the duty of love is ‘eternity’s change’ in that it transforms the way we see the other. We are to see the other beyond ‘the world’ of differences and changes by which humans can judge each other. This is the world of ‘temporality’, but in what sense? If it simply prevents us from seeing the other, we could not be addressed to see the other differently. ‘The world’ of temporality is what humans tend to make out of temporality. The duty of love counteracts this tendency by addressing humans as situated beings who can be caught in their ways of already seeing each other. The duty of love turns the addressee towards herself: as the one to fulfil the commandment. This is ‘infinity’s change’ which ‘is not in the external, not in the apparent’ (SKS9: 137/WL: 135), but concerns our approach to the world of time and history—and to the other who is not just part of this world. Thirdly, the duty to love is also the duty ‘to remain in love’s debt to one another’ (SKS9: 175ff./WL: 175ff.). It holds love on to itself. That love remains or ‘abides’ (SKS9: 298ff./ WL: 300ff.) could be read as love ‘overcoming’ time, but it is only possible to remain faithful in dealing with time, not using time to evade, and in acknowledging that we only begin within a history which has already begun. How does this become a duty to remain in debt? Here, the relation of ethics, time and history is once again intensified. Love only remains love if it remains in love’s debt. This means that a ‘bookkeeping arrangement [Regnskabs-Forhold]’ is excluded (SKS9: 178/WL: 178). The attempt to settle an account means that one steps out of love. If we think we can rid ourselves of the debt of love, we place ourselves in a wrong position in relation to the other. Again, the motif of beginning turns out to be pivotal. It has two aspects: we have already begun, and we are to begin ourselves. When we plan to make a beginning, we have already spent some time. The ethical demand questions us before the beginning we want to be the one counting. The two aspects concern how we are ourselves in time (we have already begun and are to begin ourselves). We only begin ourselves if we appropriate ourselves and acknowledge our failed beginnings. This acknowledgement goes together with the insight that ‘settling an account’ is excluded in love. Both are implied in the duty to remain in love’s debt. What more is said here compared to The Concept of Anxiety? Being human is still seen as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal—a synthesis that implies the task of becoming oneself. Love not only testifies to, but also fulfils the synthesis. Yet, the problem

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inherent in the synthesis is intensified. What is at issue in love is the relation of self and the other. This intensifies the heterogeneous character of human existence and the task implied in the synthesis as a synthesis. In love, a human being is exposed to the change of time in ways that affect her relation to the world. As a countermove, the duty to love one’s neighbour is ‘infinity’s change’ which implies a ‘redoubling’. What does this mean? In the perspective of Works of Love, edification is concern for the other: it is to give courage to the other as a concerned being who can despair. Courage here means the courage to stand by oneself in leading one’s life, and not to give in to despair. Works of Love does not follow two separable tracks, one leading to the other as the neighbour, the other to oneself. It is a book about love that builds up the other. Yet it is also a book about the self-relation of the one obligated to love the neighbour. What makes us fail in seeing and edifying the other is first and foremost a concern, which makes us use for ourselves what we do for the other. This already indicates that the motif of self-relation is not a subordinate one in the book. Rather, a clue to understanding edification is the sentence following the distinction between sorrow and despair: ‘You shall preserve love, and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love’ (SKS9: 50/ WL: 43). The question of the other leads us to the claim that ‘the greatest beneficence’ is ‘in love to help someone toward that, to become himself, free, independent, his own master [sin Egen], to help him stand alone’ (SKS9: 272/WL: 274). This brings us back to the question of becoming oneself, but in terms of the other becoming herself. The second question—becoming oneself—leads us to the just quoted claim: one only preserves oneself in preserving love. This implies the duty to love the other. Thus, there is no symmetry between the two questions. Both lead to edification in terms of the other. Yet Works of Love is also a book about the burden of time implied in edification. The burden is to carry the weight of oneself in time, not giving up oneself. The task of ‘becoming oneself ’ implies preserving oneself against oneself. Why is this only possible in love? The answer is the ‘redoubling’: the eternal is in a human being in a double mode, ‘in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself, but in such a way that this is one and the same’. The discourse continues: ‘So also with love. What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does—at one and the same moment. At the same moment it goes out of itself (the outward direction), it is in itself (the inward direction)’ (SKS9: 278/WL: 280). The redoubling reformulates the double movement: the other has already broken into the movement of going out of oneself and returning to oneself. In doing the work of love one is absolved from oneself. But being absolved from one’s self-concern (in moving beyond oneself) is also receiving oneself (returning to oneself). In the outward direction of love one is preserved. The inward direction is how one is changed in doing the works of love. In this ‘doing’ time is received as a gift. The motif of death as a detour to life is consequently reformulated in terms of memory as a work of love, returning to the present: ‘Yes, go out to the dead once again, in order there to take an aim at life’ (SKS9: 339/WL: 345). Time receives infinite worth.

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Suggested Reading Eriksen, N. Nymann (2000). Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Grøn, A. (2000). ‘Temporality in Kierkegaard’s Edifying Discourses’ in N.-J. Cappelørn et al. (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2000, 191–204. ——– (2001). ‘Spirit and Temporality in The Concept of Anxiety’, in N.-J. Cappelørn et al. (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2001, 128–40. ——– (2008). The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Mulhall, S. (2001). Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pattison, G. (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses. Philosophy, Literature, Theology (London: Routledge). ——– (2005). The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Chesham: Acumen). Pieper, A. (1968). Geschichte und Ewigkeit bei Søren Kierkegaard. Das Leitproblem der pseudonymen Schriften (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain). Theunissen, M. (2005). Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——– (2006). ‘The Upbuilding in the Thought of Death: Traditional Elements, Innovative Ideas, and Unexhausted Possibilities, in Kierkegaard’s “At a Graveside” ’ trans. G. Pattison, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, Vols. 9 & 10: Prefaces and Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Thonhauser, G. (2011). Über das Konzept der Zeitlichkeit bei Søren Kierkegaard mit ständigen Hinblik auf Martin Heidegger (Freiburg/München: Alber). Welz, C. (2008). Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Westphal, M. (1996). Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press).

chapter 15

K ier k ega a r d’s Theology s ylvia walsh

A theologian is generally considered to be a scholar who authoritatively articulates in a didactic, objective, systematic manner the basic doctrines of a particular religion. By that measure, Kierkegaard was not a theologian nor did he claim to be one, although he was trained in the theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark to which he belonged. Writing in a poetic, subjective, unsystematic style, he clearly does not fit the mold of the typical theologian yet is regarded as ‘a consummate theologian’, albeit of an unconventional kind (Gouwens 1996: 12; Come 1997: 3–57; Barrett 2010: 4; Law 2010b: 219). Describing himself as ‘a Christian poet and thinker’, Kierkegaard claimed to know ‘with uncommon clarity and definiteness what Christianity is, what can be required of the Christian, what it means to be a Christian’ and to possess ‘to an unusual degree’ the qualifications to depict these ideals, which he regarded as his duty to do even though he was not an ordained minister or teacher of the church and thus wrote ‘without authority’ (Pap. X 5 B 107/AN: 138; SKS12: 281/WA: 165; SKS21/KJN5: NB10:200 [JP6: 6391]; SKS22/ KJN6: NB13:40 [JP6: 6511]). Gifted in imagination, exceptionally skilled in dialectic, and passionately committed to Christianity as a truth for which he was willing to live and die, Kierkegaard was indeed well equipped for this task although he did not claim to be an exceptional Christian, still less an apostle or a truth-witness like the Christian martyrs of the past. Acutely aware of his failure to embody the Christian ideals in his own life, Kierkegaard described himself as ‘religiously and personally a penitent’ and ‘a poet who flies to grace’ inasmuch as ‘the one who presents this picture must himself first and foremost humble himself under it, confess that he, even though he himself is struggling within himself to approach this picture, is very far from being that’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB9:56 [JP6: 6317]; Pap. X 6 B 215; Pap. X 5 B 107/AN: 133). As a Christian poet and thinker Kierkegaard sought to provide a clarification of the essential qualifications for becoming and continuing to be a Christian in contrast to the common understanding and practice of Christianity in the church and speculative theology of his time, which in his estimation had ‘severely compromised, confused,

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changed, and virtually abolished true Christianity’ (Walsh 2009: 26). His theological project, therefore, was ‘neither more nor less’ than the reintroduction of Christianity into Christendom or the ecclesiastical-sociopolitical established order (SKS16: 24/PV: 42). At the heart of his theological critique and corrective of Christendom was the claim that Christianity is not a doctrine but an ‘existence communication’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB6:56 [JP1: 484]). What he meant by this claim is explained in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, where the pseudonymous ‘author’ Johannes Climacus maintains that Christianity is not a philosophical doctrine to which one relates in a cognitive manner as an objective truth that can be known and comprehended through mediation or a rational explanation of its paradoxical elements (SKS7: 345–6/CUP1: 379–80). Rather, it is a subjective truth that is to be actualized in existence with the object of existing in it through faith, which is not a form of knowledge but a leap or decision whereby something historical, namely the eternal in time, is passionately embraced as decisive for one’s eternal happiness. Accordingly, Climacus defines Christianity as spirit, inwardness, subjectivity, which ‘at its maximum’ is ‘an infinite, personally interested passion for one’s eternal happiness’ (SKS7: 39/CUP1: 33/Kierkegaard 2009: 29). To say that Christianity is not a doctrine, however, is not to deny that it has doctrines but only to insist that it is not to be identified with them or with an objective understanding of them. In so far as Christianity can be called a doctrine, Climacus contends, it is one in which the role of the understanding is ‘to understand that it is to be existed in, to understand how difficult existing in it is, what an enormous existence-task this doctrine sets the learner’ (SKS7: 345/CUP1: 379/Kierkegaard 2009: 318–19; trans. modified). As Climacus sees it, there is a huge difference between a philosophical doctrine and a doctrine of this sort. Whereas knowing what Christianity is and being a Christian are equivalent in the former, they are not in the latter, which requires a reduplication of the Christian ideals in one’s own life, not merely an intellectual grasp of Christianity’s various doctrines. For Climacus, and presumably for Kierkegaard also, one can know what Christianity is without being a Christian, but one cannot be a Christian without knowing what Christianity is (SKS7: 337–40/CUP1: 371–4).1 This statement has important implications for how one goes about engaging in theological reflection and communicating Christianity to others. First of all, it calls into question the validity of theology as an objective enterprise with respect to being a Christian, which for Climacus is determined first and foremost by ‘how’ one is related to Christianity rather than ‘what’ is believed or known (SKS7: 182, 185/CUP1: 199, 202). Yet Climacus also maintains that if one is a Christian one must know what Christianity is and be able to say what it is by comparing it with one’s earlier life when one was not a Christian (SKS7: 338–9/CUP1: 372). There is, then, a legitimate place for theology in a subjective understanding of Christianity, but the way one goes about it in this mode of theological reflection is to 1 While Kierkegaard insists that the views expressed in his pseudonymous writings should be attributed only to them, there is considerable overlap between the understanding of Christianity in his signed writings and personal journals and those of Johannes Climacus, who does not profess to be a Christian but is interested in how to become one, and Anti-Climacus, the Christian pseudonym through whom the essentially Christian in the strictest sense is presented in Kierkegaard’s later writings.

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become a ‘subjective thinker’ rather than an objective theologian, reflecting on what Christianity is ‘with an eye towards its meaning for one’s own existence’ in the interest of becoming and continuing to be a Christian (Walsh 2009: 26). Kierkegaard’s theology is a prime example of this way of thinking theologically inasmuch as he regarded his whole authorship as his own upbringing and development in what it means to become a Christian (SKS13: 19/PV: 12). The communication of Christianity to others in this mode, however, also requires a different form of presentation, namely an indirect rather than a direct form of communication—a Socratic or maieutic art Kierkegaard practiced with great originality and subtlety in his writings. Whereas direct communication is appropriate for imparting objective knowledge or information about something, Kierkegaard claims that subjective or ethical-religious knowledge cannot be communicated in this manner inasmuch as what the communicator seeks to communicate is not information but an inward capability for existing in it, which every human being may be assumed potentially to have (SKS27: Pap. 365/SKS27: Pap. 371: 2/1-24/JP1: 649; JP1: 657). Consequently, the communication must be made in such a way as to elicit in the recipient a ‘double reflection’ in which the content of the communication is related to his/her own existence (SKS7: 73–7/CUP 1: 73–6). Given the revelatory origin of Christianity, however, some preliminary information about what Christianity is must be imparted in Christian communication, making it ‘direct-indirect’ in character, but the goal of all indirect communication is to set the recipient free ‘to go his own way’ with respect to entering into a subjective relation to ethical-religious truth and appropriating it inwardly (SKS27: Pap. 371:2/JP1: 657; SKS7: 251/CUP 1: 277). Claiming the upbuilding as ‘his’ category as a poetic writer, Kierkegaard cast his theological reflections mostly in various types of upbuilding discourses addressed to ‘that single individual’, which every human being ‘is, can be, yes, should be’ before God (SKS13: 17/PV: 10). Assigning portrayal of the most rigorous Christian qualifications to Anti-Climacus while generally writing in his own voice ‘in a more lenient tone’ until his final attack on Christendom, Kierkegaard drew upon literary, biblical, theological, philosophical, and psychological resources to present and clarify the Christian ideals for the edification of his readers in the indirect manner described above (SKS12: 155/PC: 151; see also Possen 2004). His theology is also distinguished by an ‘inverse dialectic’ (omvendt Dialektik) which he sees as characterizing the religious sphere in general and Christianity in particular whereby the positive is always recognized through the negative, which is its essential form (SKS23: NB16:78a [JP4: 4782], trans. modified; see also Walsh 2005: 7–14). For Kierkegaard, every Christian qualification is expressed and known in this inverse manner, as will become evident below.

I. God With these preliminary observations in hand, let us now look briefly at four theological topics that were of primary concern to Kierkegaard, namely God, Christ, sin, and the Christian life, beginning with the way he goes about thinking and speaking about God.

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In Christian Discourses and Works of Love Kierkegaard reminds us that all language about God is human language and all human language about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical in character (SKS10: 313/CD: 291; SKS9: 212/WL: 209). Thus there is no direct knowledge of God and whatever we say about God is based on human criteria, which are woefully inadequate, even if the purest, noblest, most loving human being were used as a basis for comparison with and speech about the divine. Although God is Spirit and human beings are created in the image of God as derived or finite spirits, they do not resemble each other directly but only inversely: ‘You do not reach the possibility of comparison by the ladder of direct likeness: great, greater, greatest; it is possible only inversely. Neither does a human being come closer and closer to God by lifting up his head higher and higher, but inversely by casting himself down ever more deeply in worship’ (SKS10: 314/CD: 292). Worship is the maximum expression for a human being’s inverse relation and likeness to the divine because there is an eternal, infinite, absolute, qualitative difference between them, due in part to the temporal, finite status of a human being vis-à-vis God’s eternality and infinity but primarily because of human sin, which according to Anti-Climacus is ‘the one and only predication about a human being that in no way, either via negationis [by denial] or via eminentiæ [by affirmation], can be stated of God’ (SKS7: 199, 375/CUP1: 217, 413; SKS11: 233/SUD: 122). The recognition of this infinite qualitative difference between God and a human being is a signature feature of Kierkegaard’s theology, although it is by no means original to him. But it also includes another insight that is often overlooked, namely that ‘God is separated from the human being by the same chasmal qualitative abyss when he forgives sins’, with the result that ‘there is one way in which the human being could never in all eternity come to be like God: in forgiving sins’ (SKS11: 233/SUD: 122, trans. modified; see also Podmore 2011: pp. xi, 181–92).2 It is particularly this greatness of God that should be spoken about ‘in the holy places’, Kierkegaard contends, ‘because here we do indeed know God in a different way, more intimately, if one may say so, than out there [in nature], where he surely is manifest, is known in his works, whereas here he is known as he has revealed himself as he wants to be known by the Christian’ (SKS10: 312–3/CD: 290–1). As Kierkegaard sees it, a true conception of God is required in order to have a true conception of life and oneself, but one cannot have a true conception of God without also having a corresponding true conception of life and oneself (SKS5: 437/TDIO: 63). The way to go about forming a true conception of God, then, is by turning inward, where one comes to know God not as an external object but ‘more intimately’ or personally as a transcendent subject to whom one must be related in absolute devotion or else not at all (SKS7: 183/CUP1: 200; SKS11: 194/SUD: 80; SKS23: NB17:70 [JP2: 1405]). From Kierkegaard’s standpoint, therefore, it is ridiculous and even fraudulent to try to demonstrate God’s existence, personality, and various perfections as an objective being, for

2 This statement should not be taken to preclude interpersonal forgiveness, as for Kierkegaard forgiveness from God requires forgiveness of others by the recipient as commanded by Christ in Matthew 6:12, 14–15.

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God does not exist ‘in the imaginative medium of abstraction’ but is or can be present only for an existing person in faith (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:202 [JP 2: 1334]; SKS27: Pap. 340: 10 [JP2: 1347]; SKS26: NB34:34 [JP2: 1452]). Strictly speaking, God does not ‘exist’ at all, as he is eternal and therefore does not come into or go out of existence but simply is, whereas existence is a finite, temporal category that applies only to created beings (SKS7: 303/CUP1: 332). While affirming the traditional attributes and triune nature of God, Kierkegaard concluded early on as a theological student that the only substantive qualification of God is love, which constitutes the very essence of the divine, and that remained his basic view of God, as the last discourse he published was on the changelessness of God’s love (SKS18/KJN2: EE:62 [JP 2: 1319]; SKS13: 319–39/TM: 263–81). But just as the existence of God cannot be proved, neither can the claim that God is love, and even if it could, Kierkegaard reminds us, ‘it does not at all follow that you believe that God is love, or that you love him’ (SKS10: 201/CD: 191). The best way to alleviate doubt on this score, then, is simply to believe that God is love, for ‘when you believe that God is love, or . . . when you love God (for if you believe that God is love, then you also love him), then all this serves you for good’ (SKS10: 206/CD: 197). Accordingly, in Kierkegaard’s early upbuilding discourses, God is envisioned as the loving Father ‘from whom comes every good and perfect gift’ (James 1:17), which like every other statement about God is metaphorical from an external point of view, but to the inner person, Kierkegaard contends, it ‘is not metaphorical, imperfect, but the truest and most literal expression, because God gives not only the gifts but himself with them in a way beyond the capacity of any human being’ (SKS5: 104–5/EUD: 98–9). As the Creator of all things ‘out of nothing’, God manifests his omnipotence in creation but an even greater omnipotence in the love with which he seeks to enter into a reciprocal relationship with human beings, through which they become ‘something’ in relation to him and have as their invisible glory a resemblance to God that nature does not have, although it does bear witness to God as his handiwork (SKS10: 138/CD: 127; SKS8: 289/UDVS: 192). Humorously comparing and contrasting the human being with the lily and the bird, his favourite representatives of the natural order, Kierkegaard observes that ‘there is nothing eternal in the bird’, which lives only in the moment and is totally dependent on God’s sustaining care and will as a matter of necessity, whereas a human being possesses consciousness, which enables him/her to relate to the future and to the possibility of the eternal in freedom—the greatest good that can be bestowed upon a finite being (SKS8: 258, 292, 300–1/UDVS: 157, 195, 205–6; SKS20/KJN4: NB69 [JP2: 1251]). The gift of freedom to human beings, however, brings with it both a requirement and responsibility, namely to choose between God and the world, since ‘no one can have two masters’ (Matt. 6:24), and then, having chosen God in unconditional obedience to his will, to let him rule, which for Kierkegaard is the sum and substance of all our knowledge and wisdom concerning God: ‘Everything that a human being knows about the eternal is contained primarily in this: it is God who rules, because whatever more a person comes to know pertains to how God has ruled or rules or will rule’ (SKS8: 355/ UDVS: 258).

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It is precisely the failure ‘to let God rule’ in the recognition of an infinite qualitative difference between God and human beings that fuels Kierkegaard’s quarrel with the speculative theology and philosophy of his time concerning the nature of the divine. Speaking in the voice of Johannes Climacus in the Postscript, Kierkegaard protests the pantheistic propensity of both ancient and modern philosophy and theology to identify God with nature and/or the world-historical process (see Rose 2001: 125–7; Walsh 2009: 58–62). Although God is omnipresent in an invisible, hidden manner that can be discerned by turning inward in a personal relation to him, the deity is not directly present in his works nor is he the moving spirit in an immanent world-historical process where he ‘does not play the role of the Lord’ but is ‘laced in a half-metaphysical, half-esthetic-dramatic conventional corset’, which for Climacus is ‘the devil of a way to be God’ since it compromises the divine freedom, which in his view will ‘never in all eternity . . . become immanence’ (SKS7: 145/CUP1: 156–7; see also Kierkegaard 2009: 131). Far from being constrained in a world-historical corset, God is the infinite ground of all possibility for Kierkegaard, even that which from a purely human perspective is clearly impossible. Indeed, the belief that all things are possible for God (Matthew 19:26) undergirds his understanding of the incarnation, salvation, faith, selfhood, and even the divine itself, which is virtually identified with possibility in The Sickness unto Death: ‘since everything is possible for God, then God is this—that everything is possible’ and ‘the being of God means that everything is possible, or that everything is possible means the being of God’ (SKS11: 155–6/SUD: 40).

II. Christ For Kierkegaard, the ultimate and seemingly impossible way God gives himself in love is by taking on human form in the incarnation of himself in Jesus Christ as a way of annulling the absolute difference between himself and human beings by assuming an absolute equality with them. The portrayal of Christ in Kierkegaard’s authorship is centered in three images of him as the absolute paradox, redeemer, and prototype of humankind. While Kierkegaard’s primary objective is to clarify the significance of Christ’s life and death for the single individual, he clearly upholds the orthodox view of Christ as truly human and truly divine in opposition to the speculative and rationalist Christologies of the modern age, which in his view had done away with the absolute paradox of the incarnation by mediating it in abstract thought and by making the teachings rather than the person of Christ ‘the principal thing’ (SKS12: 128/PC: 123; see also Barrett 2005; Walsh 2009: 113; Law 2010a: 129–34; Rae 2010: 58). The figure of Christ is introduced by Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments in an anonymous and hypothetical manner through a metaphorical thought-project highlighting the radical difference between Christianity and all forms of natural theology, both ancient and modern, as represented in the Socratic doctrine of recollection, which assumes an essential unity of the human and the divine and thus an immanent

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relation to eternal truth. As the unnamed teacher (the god)3 who enters into time at a decisive moment (the fullness of time), Christ brings both the truth (the eternal) and the condition for learning it (faith) to the learner (humankind), who has entirely lost it by his own free act (sin) and therefore must be transformed (reborn), which only the god can do (SKS4: 222–7/PF: 13–22). A poetic analogy or parable about a king who loved a lowly maiden is then introduced to illustrate the eternal resolve of the god to bring about a reunion or reconciliation with humankind out of love by establishing equality between them. The only way this can be accomplished, the king/god decides, is by a descent on his part rather than an ascent or exaltation of the maiden/humankind, which would only be a deceptive change of costume. In order to become the equal of every human being, even the lowliest of persons, the god must appear in the form of a servant, which according to Climacus is not ‘something put on’ but ‘his true form’, and for that reason he ‘must suffer all things, endure all things, be tried in all things’ (SKS4: 238/PF: 31–2). Clearly rejecting a docetic view of Christ in alluding to the biblical account of the incarnation in Philippians 2:5–8, Climacus/Kierkegaard is viewed by some commentators as espousing a kenotic (‘self-emptying’) Christology (see Law 1993: 183–6; Barrett 2005: 272; Evans 2006: 204–5). For Climacus, however, the incarnation is an absolute paradox that cannot be rationally explained or comprehended. Indeed, in his view the absolute paradox presents itself to the human understanding as that which is inconceivable inasmuch as it ‘specifically unites the contradictories, is the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal’, which is clearly impossible or absurd from a merely human point of view because ‘it contains the contradiction that something that can become historical only in direct opposition to all human understanding has become historical’ (SKS4: 263/PF: 61; SKS7: 194/CUP1: 211). When confronted by the absolute paradox, therefore, the understanding must either will its own downfall in an acceptance of the absolute paradox as such in faith or else reject it in offence. This claim has generated a great deal of scholarly debate on whether the absolute paradox is against or above reason, whether it constitutes a logical or apparent contradiction, and whether Kierkegaard should be regarded as an irrational fideist as a result (see Evans 1992: 89, 97–109; Rae 1997: 62; Evans 1998: 78–113; Rose 2001: 55–61). It should be noted, however, that Climacus views the incarnation from the standpoint of how it appears to a person outside of faith, whereas for the believer it is not impossible or absurd, since all things are possible for God (Pap. X 6 B 68 [JP6: 6598]; Pap. X 6 B 79 [JP1: 10]). In Practice in Christianity, however, Anti-Climacus makes it quite clear that the kind of contradiction Christ exemplifies is a qualitative contradiction, not a logical or apparent contradiction, which applies only in the realm of thought, whereas Christ combines qualitative opposites in existence, which cannot be annulled or mediated by thought (SKS12: 130/PC: 125). Setting himself squarely against the speculative theology of the time, namely that of Hegel, Martensen, and especially the Left Hegelians Strauss and Feuerbach, Anti-Climacus maintains that Christ is not the union of God and humanity 3 The Danish text translates the Greek word for god with the definite article, a standard practice of that time.

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but of God and an individual human being, which is the greatest possible contradiction, whereas there is no contradiction at all in the speculative unity of God and humanity (SKS12: 92, 130/PC: 82, 125; see also Walsh 2009: 124–7; Law 2010a: 138–41). The qualitative contradiction of Christ consists in the fact that he combines both lowliness and loftiness in his person, which presents the possibility of offence first of all in relation to his loftiness or divinity in that ‘an individual human being speaks and acts as if he were God’, and then in relation to his lowliness or humanity in that this person passing himself off as God is a ‘lowly, poor, suffering, and finally powerless human being’ (SKS12: 103, 111/PC: 94, 102; see also Cappelørn 2004: 112–17; Walsh 2009: 127–8). Neither loftiness nor lowliness is offensive in itself but only when united in Christ so as to make him ‘a sign of contradiction’ that is not directly recognizable as God but can only be seen as such indirectly in and through the incognito of his lowliness and abasement (SKS12: 131/ PC: 125). According to Anti-Climacus, then, there is no way of directly knowing or demonstrating that Christ is God. As the absolute paradox, Christ is the object of faith and can be seen as divine only by faith. Nothing can be known about him from history, or more precisely, what can be known about the historical Jesus does not tell us anything about whether he was God but only that he was ‘a great man, perhaps the greatest of all’ (SKS12: 41/PC: 27). The so-called demonstrations of Christ’s divinity in the Scriptures, such as his miracles, resurrection, and ascension, are only for faith, which is to say that they are not demonstrations at all, nor do they demonstrate that the incarnation is in harmony with reason but conversely that it conflicts with reason. To Anti-Climacus, then, it is intellectually inadmissible and even blasphemous to conclude on the basis of historical knowledge that Jesus was God. The only way Christ can be known is in a transhistorical situation of spiritual contemporaneity with him wherein he becomes an actuality in and for one’s own life. Moreover, in line with Luther’s theology of the cross, Anti-Climacus maintains that it is only Christ in his state of lowliness, not in his loftiness or glory, that one comes to know him (SKS12: 175/PC: 172; see also Hinkson 2001). As the redeemer of humankind, Christ issues the invitation to all those who labour and are heavy laden with sin to come to him for rest in the only way that rest is truly possible for sinners, namely through the forgiveness of sin, and on the only basis there is for a sinner: ‘that satisfaction has been made’ (SKS10: 282/CD: 265/Kierkegaard 2011: 52). For Kierkegaard, Christ’s redeeming activity is consummated in and through his death as a sacrifice that atones or makes satisfaction for the sins of humankind. Among the several theories of atonement in the Christian tradition, a variant of the Latin or legal theory of Anselm is clearly dominant in Kierkegaard’s theology (see Walsh 2009: 132–3). For Kierkegaard, the death of Christ is not ‘a past event that is over and done with’ but a present event for which the whole human race is responsible (SKS10: 297/CD: 278/Kierkegaard 2011: 65). Thus we are all accomplices in the crucifixion of Christ and stand in need of an atoner for his death as well as for our other many sins. Moreover, in Kierkegaard’s view Christ’s sacrifice is not for human beings in general but for each one individually. What is impressed upon the reader, therefore, is the significance of Christ’s atonement for him/her personally. Inasmuch as we are capable of doing ‘nothing at all’

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or ‘less than nothing’ towards making satisfaction for our sins, Christ must do everything in this regard (SKS10: 323–4/CD: 298–9/Kierkegaard 2011: 85–6). Portraying Christ as the High Priest of Hebrews who is able not only to sympathize with our weaknesses but also to put himself entirely in our place in every respect except sin, Kierkegaard views him as our deputy or substitute in the atonement, suffering death on the cross as the punishment for our sin so that we may live and be reconciled with God in and through him. Another way Kierkegaard describes the atonement is to say that Christ hides a multitude of sins by his death. Applying the biblical passage, ‘love will hide a multitude of sins’ (1 Peter 4:8), to Christ’s atoning love, he maintains that Christ quite literally hides our sin with his holy body so that it cannot be seen, thereby giving himself as a hiding place that cannot be taken away (SKS12: 295–302/WA: 181–8/Kierkegaard 2011: 136–43). The pledge of reconciliation with God is received at the altar in Holy Communion in and through the visible sign of Christ’s invisible yet real presence as understood in the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation (see Kolb and Wengert 2000: 599). Although ‘the Atonement and grace are and remain definitive’ for Kierkegaard, it is Christ as the prototype for human beings that is stressed in his later writings, in part to counter the notion of Christianity as a doctrine but mainly because in his view the imitation of Christ had been completely abolished in Christendom, thus taking grace in vain (SKS24: NB25:67[JP 2: 1909]; SKS23/KJN6: NB15: 32 [JP 2: 1862]; SKS16: 253-4/JFY: 209). Properly understood, Kierkegaard claims, the category of the prototype ‘encompasses everything’ inasmuch as the roles of Christ as prototype and redeemer are interrelated, each requiring and supporting the other: ‘when we are striving, then he is the prototype; and when we stumble, lose courage, etc., then he is the love which helps us up, and then he is the prototype again’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB10:198 [JP1: 334]). As the prototype or pattern of essential human perfection, Christ constitutes the criterion and goal for what it means to be a human being made in the image of God. But he does not function altogether literally or directly as a prototype as believed in medieval monasticism and asceticism, which in Kierkegaard’s view merely copied Christ rather than imitated him in the naïve belief that they could actually achieve the ideal of resembling Christ by engaging in such practices as poverty, fasting, and flagellation (SKS25: NB27:86 [JP2: 1921]; Pap. X 5 A 88 [JP2: 1922]; SKS24: NB22:151 [JP2: 1893]; SKS24: NB24:114 [JP2: 1905]). For Kierkegaard, imitation (Efterfølgelse) means to follow the prototype by witnessing ‘for the truth and against untruth’, which inevitably involves suffering and sacrifice (SKS24: NB2:114 [JP2: 1905]). As he expresses it elsewhere, ‘to follow Christ means to take up one’s cross or . . . to carry one’s cross’ in self-denial and to ‘walk the same road Christ walked in the lowly form of a servant, indigent, forsaken, mocked, not loving the world and not loved by it’ (SKS8: 322–4/UDVS: 221, 223). Yet there are limits to the self-sacrifice required in following Christ, as Kierkegaard later concludes that a Christian does not have the right to let him/herself be put to death for the truth, although martyrdom remains a possibility for a true Christian in his thought (SKS11: 57–93/WA: 51–89; SKS12: 221/PC: 224–7; see also Barrett 2006; Walsh 2009: 171–2, 193). The more one becomes aware of the infinite ideality of Christ as the prototype, however, the more difficult

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imitation becomes and the more one must flee to grace. In conformity with the second use of the law in Lutheran theology, therefore, the chief function of Christ as the prototype for Kierkegaard is ‘to teach us how infinitely far away we are from resembling the ideal’ and thus ‘how greatly we need grace’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB10: 19 [JP1: 334]; Pap. X 5 A 88 [JP2: 1922]; see also Barrett 2002: 82–91).

III. Sin The psychological analysis of original sin by Vigilius Haufniensis (‘the Watchman of Copenhagen’) in The Concept of Anxiety and of sin as despair by Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death constitute Kierkegaard’s most original contributions to Christian thought. Highly critical of the concept of original or hereditary sin (Arvesynd) in the Augustinian-Lutheran dogmatic tradition, Vigilius views sin as having its origin in a qualitative leap by every human being that takes place in freedom. He thus does away with the distinction between Adam’s first sin and that of later generations, which in the traditional view is inherited from Adam through genetic propagation, thereby compromising individual freedom and responsibility for sin (see Barrett 1985: 51–3; Walsh 2009: 83–90) Cappelørn 2010: 132, 136–41;. Yet Vigilius ‘does not deny the propagation of sinfulness through generation’, inasmuch as in his view every human being ‘begins in an historical nexus, and the consequences of nature still hold true’ (SKS4: 352/CA: 47). Thus sinfulness or the continuation of sin after the Fall increases quantitatively in the history of the race through generation, although sin itself continues to occur individually through a qualitative leap. With the positing of sin, however, sexuality also becomes sinful, creating a predisposition to sin through generation yet without causing one’s progeny to sin or compromising individual responsibility for sin. Although Vigilius contends that no ‘science’ or scholarly discipline, including dogmatics, can explain why sin occurs, how it comes into existence can be explained psychologically through the concept of anxiety. Viewing anxiety as a qualification of the unconscious or ‘dreaming spirit’ in the human psyche that lays hold of us in the stage of innocence as a foreign power, Vigilius defines anxiety ambiguously as ‘a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’ in which one both desires and fears the possibility of freedom in the vague presentiment of being able to do something, although at this stage one has no conception of what that might be (SKS4: 348, 350/CA: 42, 44). Gripped by this simultaneous attraction and repulsion as it looks down ‘into the yawning abyss’ of the possibility of freedom, the human psyche becomes ‘dizzy’, as it were, and succumbs to sin in the failure to posit itself as spirit (SKS4: 365/CA: 61). ‘Further than this’, Vigilius contends, ‘psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment 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’ as all science ‘lies either in a logical immanence [abstract thought] or in an immanence within a transcendence that it is unable to explain’, namely sin

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(SKS4: 365–6, 355/CA: 61, 50). As the psychological precondition of sin, anxiety cannot be said to cause sin, but by becoming entangled in itself through anxiety, freedom, or spirit (they are identical for Kierkegaard) becomes ambiguously guilty, that is, both innocent and guilty, since ‘the fall into sin always takes place in weakness’ or impotence (SKS4: 366, 377/CA: 61, 73). Kierkegaard defines sin variously as disobedience or self-wilfulness against God, as a break with, falling away from, or loss of the eternal, and as intensified despair before God and offence at Christ (SKS11: 39/WA: 35; SKS11: 195/SUD: 81; SKS10: 146–7/CD: 136–7; SKS11: 191, 235, 240/SUD: 77, 124, 129). In the Postscript sin is viewed as ‘the crucial point of departure’ for religious existence in the strictest sense, namely Christianity, in that it signifies a total break with the eternal or an immanent relation to God and thus ‘the greatest possible’ and ‘most painful distance from the truth’ (SKS7: 243–4/CUP1: 268–9). It is the psychological exposition of sin as despair and offence in The Sickness unto Death, however, that constitutes the deepest and most original analysis of sin in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Defining a human being as spirit or a self that relates itself to itself as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, finitude and infinitude, possibility (freedom) and necessity (limitation), Anti-Climacus identifies despair as a misrelation to oneself and to God that results from a person’s unwillingness to become a self, which can be achieved only by a relation to God, who establishes the self. As Anti-Climacus sees it, despair is a universal sickness of humankind that manifests itself in two basic forms, namely despair in weakness in not willing to be oneself and despair in defiance in willing to be oneself independently of God. Despair is analysed first of all in terms of the disparity that occurs between the factors that make up the synthesis of the self when one factor is emphasized to the neglect of the other, and then in terms of the gradual intensification of despair in the movement from unconscious despair to increasingly higher levels of conscious despair. Conscious despair is further intensified and identified as sin by virtue of existing before God or with the conception of God as the qualitative criterion and goal of the self by which it gains an infinite reality as ‘a theological self ’ or self before God (SKS11: 193/ SUD: 79). Before God, then, sin may be defined as the conscious and willful disobedience of God after having come to know what sin is via a revelation from God. For Anti-Climacus, therefore, sin is a matter of not willing to do the good rather than, as Socrates thought, not knowing the good. He further agrees with orthodoxy that sin does not consist in ‘something merely negative’ such as weakness, sensuousness, finitude, or ignorance but is posited in existence by the individual and therefore cannot be nullified by abstract thought (SKS11: 209/SUD: 96). Indeed, as Anti-Climacus sees it, sin cannot be thought at all because it is not a concept but an actuality that resides in the individual, which also cannot be thought because the particular is always subsumed under the universal in thought. The appropriate way of dealing with sin, therefore, is by gaining a consciousness of one’s own sinfulness before God and then by seeking the forgiveness of sin from Christ, before whom sin or despair is further intensified so as to become offence by refusing to admit that one is a sinner (defiance) or by believing oneself to be irredeemably a sinner (weakness) and ultimately by the outright denial of Christ as the incarnate

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God. For Anti-Climacus, however, despair, sin, and the consciousness of sin are dialectical in character, as they constitute both an advantage and disadvantage to a person. On the one hand, by becoming aware of being in despair, one is dialectically closer to being cured of it; on the other hand, ‘it is the most dangerous of illnesses’ and perdition if one does not want to be cured (SKS11: 142/SUD: 26). In order for one to be cured of despair the consciousness of sin must be further qualified so as to become a contrite consciousness of sin or what Luther called ‘the anguished conscience’ in the expression of sorrow over sin in repentance and confession (SKS20/ KJN4: NB79 [JP3: 2461]; SKS21/KJN5: NB10: 55 [JP4: 4018]; SKS9: 199/WL: 201). It is primarily in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding and communion discourses that this form of the consciousness of sin is emphasized. Anticipating the analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard points out in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ that both a unifying of the will that does away with the double-mindedness of despair in a total commitment to the good and an inversion of vision that sees everything conversely from the world are needed for true repentance and confession to occur (SKS8: 144, 234/UDVS: 20, 135). Employing the biblical figures of the tax collector (Luke 18:13) and the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7:47) as models for the confession of sin in his communion discourses, Kierkegaard suggests that it was precisely by their self-accusatory actions before God and Christ that they came close to God and were forgiven and justified (SKS11: 268, 274/ WA: 132, 138/Kierkegaard 2011: 106, 109). But just as the woman who was a sinner was forgiven her many sins because she loved Christ much, the one who loves little is forgiven little. This does not mean that forgiveness is merited by love on our part, as it remains a gift of grace and love from God that places us in infinite debt to him. But it does reflect what Kierkegaard elsewhere identifies as the Christian ‘like for like’ implied in Matthew 6:14 with respect to forgiveness: ‘God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you’ (SKS9: 373/WL: 380). In other words, God’s ‘forgiveness is forgiveness’, as Kierkegaard regards it as delusory to believe in one’s own forgiveness when one is unwilling to forgive others, ‘for how could a person truly believe in forgiveness,’ he asks, ‘if his own life is an objection against the existence of forgiveness’ (SKS9: 373/WL: 380)!

IV. The Christian Life What does it mean to become and continue to be a Christian? This is the basic question of Kierkegaard’s theology, one that was imperative for him to address given the confused, superficial, lenient, merely positive conception of what it meant to be a Christian in Christendom, where virtually everyone was considered to be a Christian as a matter of course with little or no idea that anything was required of one beyond being born a Dane, baptized, confirmed, and enrolled in the State Church as a taxpaying member. According to the inverse dialectic that informs Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, however, the positive qualities of the Christian life such as faith, hope, love,

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and joy are always known and expressed through negative qualifications such as the consciousness of sin, the possibility of offence, dying to the world in self-denial, and suffering (see Walsh 2005). Kierkegaard thus sought to ‘jack up the price’ of being a Christian by bringing the negative qualifications that make up the ‘minor premise’ of Lutheran theology to bear upon the question of what it means to be a Christian (SKS13: 52/FSE: 24). We have already seen how the possibility of offence at Christ as the absolute paradox and the consciousness of sin in the form of an anguished conscience are crucial factors in becoming and continuing to be a Christian. As expressed in and through these negative qualifications, faith is to believe against the understanding, and more specifically to believe that with God all things are possible, even the possibility of being ‘reborn’ as a qualitatively different person or self through the forgiveness of sin and the gift of faith from Christ. Ideally defined, faith is the opposite of sin and despair in constituting that condition of the self wherein it rests transparently in God ‘in being itself and in willing to be itself ’ (SKS11: 196/SUD: 82). In existence, however, one is always in the process of striving towards selfhood and being a Christian, and the more one strives, the harder it gets and the less one seems to make any progress in the imitation of Christ, which for Kierkegaard is ‘the only true way to be a Christian’ (SKS16: 252/JFY: 207). The principle that holds with regard to imitation is: ‘As the prototype was, so also ought the follower to be’ (SKS8: 340/UDVS: 240). Thus one ‘can become and be a Christian only as or in the capacity of a lowly person’, in whom lowliness, like that of Christ, is inversely a sign of loftiness (SKS10: 63/CD: 53). This does not mean that ‘literally to be a lowly person is synonymous with being a Christian’ or that one automatically becomes a Christian by becoming lowly, but the person who does not divest himself of worldly advantages ‘must watch himself all the more scrupulously’ to make sure he is not blinded by them so as to be unable to reconcile himself to lowliness (SKS10: 64–5/CD: 54–5). What is essentially required is spiritually to ‘die to’ selfishness and worldliness, which for Kierkegaard go hand in hand, as ‘it is only through your selfishness that the world has power over you’ and ‘if you are dead to your selfishness, you are also dead to the world’ (SKS13: 99/FSE: 77). The Holy Spirit gives new life and brings with it faith, hope, and love, but only on the other side of death, after one has given up all confidence in oneself and the world and has died to the understanding as well. Dying to selfishness and worldliness is thus equivalent to self-denial in requiring the Christian striver to ‘give up everything in which the natural person has his life, his pleasures, his diversion’—and to do so voluntarily in order to follow Christ, which for Kierkegaard is what defines the essentially Christian conception of worldly loss in contrast to paganism and Judaism (SKS10: 183/CD: 171–2, translation modified). Although Kierkegaard concedes that giving up everything ‘is not unconditionally required of everyone’ since it is ‘entrusted to freedom’, honesty is unconditionally required of all as dishonesty before God is ‘one sin that makes grace impossible’ (SKS10: 196–7/CD: 186–7). The dialectical relation between Christian self-denial and love is spelled out in Works of Love, where Christian love is described as ‘self-denial’s love’ in the self-sacrificing unselfishness and boundlessness with which it gives itself to others without excluding

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anyone and without demanding love in return (SKS9: 59/WL: 52; see also Ferreira 2001: 129–33 on the limits of self-sacrifice in love). Viewing the biblical commandment to love the neighbour as oneself as the basis of the Christian doctrine of love, Kierkegaard understands Christianity as seeking to bring about ‘the change of eternity’ in us by making it a duty to love, thereby wresting away selfish self-love and teaching us to love ourselves, others, and God in the right way (SKS9: 45/WL: 38). Defining love as a giving of oneself without selfishly seeking one’s own and maintaining that all human love has its ground and only true object in divine love, Kierkegaard envisions God as exercising an eternal equality and impartiality in loving all persons (SKS9: 110–11, 124, 263–4/WL: 107, 121, 265–6). Since a human being can only love God and be like God by loving as God loves, this means that we must love all persons, including our spouses, family, friends, and enemies, first and foremost as fellow human beings or neighbours by making God the ‘middle term’ in every relationship so as to love rather than seek to be loved in and through them (SKS9: 69–70, 143/WL: 62–3, 141). Anyone who ventures to express love in this self-denying manner, however, will inevitably encounter ‘double danger’ in the form of internal suffering in the constant struggle to develop a Christian disposition of love within oneself and external suffering as a result of opposition from the world, which understands love in an entirely different manner and thus stands in an essential, not merely accidental, relation of opposition to Christianity (SKS9: 191/WL: 192; SKS21/KJN5: NB8: 39 [JP1: 493]). As Kierkegaard sees it, the relationship to God always involves suffering and testing in the form of spiritual trials to strengthen the believer in faith and love (see Walsh 2005: 113–48; Dalrymple 2010; Podmore 2011: 120–50). Over against the general tendency of people to believe that everything will go well for them as a result of becoming a Christian, Kierkegaard views suffering as an inverse sign of God’s grace and love, which is just as rigorous as it is lenient in dealing with those who are willing to venture all by entering into an absolute relationship with the divine (SKS22/KJN6: NB13:61 [JP2: 1447]; see also Possen 2004). The paradigm for Christian suffering, of course, is Christ, whose ‘entire life was the heaviest suffering, heavier than any mortal being’s can ever be, heavier than any human being can imagine, heavier than any language can express’ and therefore superhuman as well as human (SKS8: 353, 377/UDVS: 255, 281). Just as Christ learned obedience from what he suffered, so too his followers must be educated in ‘the school of sufferings’, where they are weaned from the world and trained for eternity by learning ‘faith’s obedience in sufferings’, which has as its object the removal of all egotism and selfishness in order to let God rule in everything (SKS8: 349, 356/UDVS: 250, 259). For Kierkegaard, therefore, suffering is voluntary, essential, beneficial, continual, and unmitigated in the Christian life, as the more one succeeds in becoming and continuing to be a Christian the worse it will go for one in the world and the more one will suffer as a result. But there is also joy to be had in following Christ, the supreme joy being that one is ‘able to become the highest’, which ‘every human being can do’ (SKS8: 327/UDVS: 226). Kierkegaard also finds numerous occasions for joy in knowing what suffering signifies, namely that one is on the right road, which is the road of hardship, that it is ‘passable and

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practicable, not superhuman’, that it leads to perfection and eternal happiness, and that before God one always suffers as guilty, making it ‘eternally certain that God is love’ (SKS8: 394, 378, 386/UDVS: 300 (trans. modified), 282, 291–2). The joys of the Christian life continue to be sounded out in the various inversions that characterize it: that one suffers only once temporally (as temporality is only a moment in eternity) but is victorious eternally; that suffering does not take away hope but recruits it; that the poorer one becomes, the richer one makes others and oneself; that the weaker one becomes, the stronger God is in one; that to lose temporally is to gain eternally; that ‘to gain everything’ in faith is to lose nothing at all; and that adversity is prosperity (SKS10: 107–66/CD: 95–159; see also Walsh 2005: 123–6). It is with some justification, then, that Kierkegaard’s thought has been characterized as ‘a philosophy of joy’ (Nelson 2007: 119). In Works of Love, however, Kierkegaard concludes in words hypothetically ascribed to the Apostle John that ‘ “to love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living. Moreover, to love people is the only blessed comfort both here and in the next world; and to love people is the only true sign that you are a Christian”—truly, a profession of faith is not enough’ (SKS9: 368/WL: 375). Ultimately, then, Kierkegaard’s theology may be described as a theology of love inasmuch as for him God is love, Christ is the atoning and redeeming love that forgives sin, and a Christian is one who loves all persons as neighbours.

References Barrett, Lee C. III (1985). ‘Kierkegaard’s “Anxiety” and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety (Macon: Mercer University Press), 35–61. ——– (2002). ‘Faith, Works, and the Uses of the Law: Kierkegaard’s Appropriation of Lutheran Doctrine’, in Robert l. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: For SelfExamination and Judge for Yourself! (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 77–109. ——– (2005). ‘The Joy in the Cross: Kierkegaard’s Appropriation of Lutheran Christology in “The Gospel of Sufferings” ’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 257–85. ——– (2006). ‘Kierkegaard on the Problem of Witnessing While Yet Being a Sinner’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 147–75. ——– (2010). Kierkegaard (Nashville, TN: Abingdon). Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen (2004). ‘The Movements of Offense Toward, Away From, and Within Faith: “Blessed Is He Who Is Not Offended at Me” ’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 95–124. ——– (2010). ‘The Interpretation of Hereditary Sin in The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard’s Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 72, 131–46. Come, Arnold B. (1997). Kierkegaard as Theologian (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press).

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Dalrymple, Timothy (2010). ‘The Ladder of Sufferings and the Attack Upon Christendom’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2010: Kierkegaard’s Late Writings (Berlin: de Gruyter), 325–52. Evans, C. Stephen (1992). Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (1998). Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans). ——– (2006). ‘Kenotic Christology and the Nature of God’, in C. Stephen Evans (ed.), Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 190–217. Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s ‘Works of Love’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gouwens, David (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hinkson, Craig (2001). ‘Luther and Kierkegaard: Theologians of the Cross’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, 27–45. Kierkegaard, Søren (2009). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (2011). Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Kolb, Robert and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.) (2000). The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress). Law, David R. (1993). Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon). ——– (2010a). ‘The Existential Chalcedonian Christology of Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2010: Kierkegaard’s Late Writings (Berlin: de Gruyter), 129–51. ——– (2010b). ‘Making Christianity Difficult: The “Existentialist Theology” of Kierkegaard’s Postscript’, in Rick Anthony Furtak (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 219–46. Nelson, Christopher A. P. (2007). ‘The Joy of It’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 119–41. Podmore, Simon D. (2011). Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Possen, David D. (2004). ‘The Voice of Rigor’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 161–85. Rae, Murray A. (1997). Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation (Oxford: Clarendon). ——– (2010). Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T & T Clark). Rose, Tim (2001). Kierkegaard’s Christocentric Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate). Walsh, Sylvia (2005). Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press). ——– (2009). Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Suggested Reading Evans, C. Stephen (2004). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands & Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Grøn, Arne (2008). The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology (London: Routledge). Podmore (2011). Rae (2010). Theunissen, Michael (2005). Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Walsh (2005, 2009).

chapter 16

societ y, politics, a n d moder n it y m erold w estphal

‘Wretched contentment’. This is perhaps Nietzsche’s most succinct summary of his critique of his society and, more generally, of modernity. He gives this verdict once at the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, once at the end, and once in between (Nietzsche 1966: 13, 40, 287). If Søren Kierkegaard had been able to read Zarathustra, he would have felt a deep kinship with Nietzsche in spite of their deep differences. He goes one better than Nietzsche, for in a sense he renders the same verdict four times over. Kierkegaard can be, has been, and should be read in at least four ways: 1) as a founding father, along with Nietzsche, of existentialism; 2) as a founding father, along with Nietzsche, of a postmodernism that is more than a little nervous about both foundations and fathers; 3) as a Christian thinker for whom the deepest challenge is to become a Christian while living in Christendom; and 4) as a practitioner of ideology critique. In each of these modes his verdict on his society and, more generally, of modernity is ‘wretched contentment’. The last of these four ways of reading Kierkegaard will be the focus of this essay, but not surprisingly it will engage the other three. ‘Ideology critique’ is a term primarily associated with the Marxist tradition. It is a special case of the hermeneutics of suspicion, which has been defined as ‘the deliberate attempt to expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actual operative motives from ourselves, individually or collectively, in order not to notice how and how much our behaviour and our beliefs are shaped by values we profess to disown’ (Westphal 1998a: 13). What suspicion suspects is that while we describe ourselves, both as individuals and as societies, in honorific language, this serves as a mask by which we hide from ourselves what is really going on. Thus, to use a Nietzschean example, we say ‘justice’ where suspicion suspects resentment and revenge (ugly motives). Or, to use a Marxian example, we say ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ where suspicion claims to detect exploitation and oppression (ugly practices). To say, as Marx does, that religion and political economy (what we call the discipline of economics) are ideologies is to comment on how they function to legitimate prevailing practices. They are the languages that give to our language games or forms of life the appearance of justification. They are not the product of divine revelation or of pure, universal reason

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(as an increasingly secular modernity would prefer to have it), but of unacknowledged self-interest (Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s wish-fulfilment, Marx’s class interest). Paul Ricoeur describes Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the ‘masters’ of the ‘school of suspicion’ (Ricoeur 1970: 32). He should have included Kierkegaard, who also presents a ‘critique of reason and society’ (Westphal 1987). He acknowledges that so far as religion is concerned, the upshot of suspicion can be a ‘faith purified of idolatry’ and that the ‘question remains open for every man whether the destruction of idols is without remainder’ (Ricoeur 1970: 230, 235). So he does not cede the whole territory of suspicion to secular thought. But he does not seem to notice that religious faith, in its struggle with idolatry, can be the initiating motive for a hermeneutics of suspicion. In this respect Kierkegaard continues a tradition that reaches back through Luther, Augustine, Paul, and Jesus to such Hebrew prophets as Isaiah and Amos (Westphal 1987: chs. 1–2). Just as the initial linking of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche above reminds us that there can be both religious and secular versions of existentialism and postmodernism, so here we need to note that ideology critique can arise out of faith as well as out of unbelief. In this case what needs to be hidden in motivated self-deception is sin in its various manifestations. Augustine gives an especially vivid picture at the individual level of the motivated self-deception that suspicion seeks to supplant. He writes, But you, Lord . . . were turning me around so that I could see myself; you took me from behind my own back, which was where I had put myself during the time when I did not want to be observed by myself, and you set me in front of my own face so that I could see how foul a sight I was . . . you were setting me in front of myself, forcing me to look into my own face, so that I might see my sin and hate it. I did know it, but I pretended that I did not. I had been pushing the whole idea from me and forgetting it. (Augustine 1963: VIII, 7)

In the Pine-Coffin translation instead of ‘pushing the whole idea from me and forgetting it’ we read ‘I had turned a blind eye and forgotten it’. One of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms will speak less picturesquely but just as pointedly about ‘a person’s efforts to obscure his knowing’ (SKS11: 89/SUD: 88) and of those who ‘work gradually at eclipsing their ethical and ethical-religious comprehension, which would lead them out into decisions and conclusions that their lower nature does not much care for’ (SKS11: 95/SUD: 94).

I. The Concept of Irony We could begin a review of Kierkegaard’s thought as ideology critique with his dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841). His writings are filled with admiration for Socrates, and for at least two reasons: Socratic ignorance and Socratic irony. In attempting to understand what the oracle at Delphi meant when saying that there was no one wiser than he, Socrates solved the puzzle this way: ‘I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he

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knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know’ (Plato, Apology 21d). This is Socratic ignorance, and he employs Socratic irony in presenting it. ‘What has caused my reputation is none other than a certain kind of wisdom. What kind of wisdom? Human wisdom, perhaps [note the ignorance implicit in this ‘perhaps’]. It may be that I really possess this, while those whom I mentioned just now [well-known pundits of the day, Sophists such as Gorgias] are wise with a wisdom more than human; else I cannot explain it, for I certainly do not possess it, and whoever says I do is lying and speaks to slander me’ (Plato, Apology 20 d–e). Socratic irony always has this form. He immediately concedes a superior wisdom to his interlocutors and others, whether they be the traditionalists on the right or the radicals on the left (in this case the Sophists). Then, when a particular, substantive issue is at stake, he shows them to be confused and incoherent. In this manner he deconstructs the best and the brightest that Athens has to offer. Socratic ignorance is not a pose; nor is Socratic irony a game of scoring points on an opponent. Each by itself and especially the two together are the practice of ideology critique. They attack the ‘wretched contentment’ of Athenian society by challenging the theoretical foundations put forward for it by some special interest group, ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’, whose self-interests are mirrored, if disguised, by that ‘wisdom’. Socrates’ prophetic protest against the language-game each party would like Athens to be is the double-barrelled attack on that language that is his famous ignorance/irony. As with Marx, the assault on society’s theories is an indirect assault on the practices legitimized by the ‘wisdom’ of the ‘experts’. Plato will offer a third, alternative kind of wisdom, grounded in speculative metaphysics rather than social and cultural tradition or rhetorical manipulation. Had Socrates lived to see the use to which Plato would put him, he would doubtless have directed his ignorance and irony against his most famous admirer, who seems to have missed his point. He would have appreciated Hegel’s claim that ‘even Plato’s Republic, which passes proverbially as an empty ideal, is in essence nothing but an interpretation of the nature of Greek ethical life’ (Hegel 1962: 10). In other words, instead of seeing Plato’s metaphysics as the transcendent, natural law foundation of a rational society (see Wild 1953), Hegel sees it as more nearly a legitimizing mirror of Athenian values and practices. Had Socrates lived even longer, he would have been grateful for the use to which Kierkegaard put him especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, as a serious critic of Hegel’s own speculative system as ideology.

II. Either/OR Kierkegaard’s official ‘authorship’ begins with the publication of Either/Or in 1843, the same year, ironically, in which Marx bursts on to the literary scene with two essays that lay the foundations for his own ideology critique, ‘On the Jewish Question’ and ‘Towards

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a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction’ (Marx 2000: 46–82). Already in Either/Or we see both Kierkegaard’s theory of the three stages on life’s way or existencespheres and his critique of his own society with the Hegelian system and ‘Christendom’ as its twin targets. The former represents the speculative philosophical foundation of the prevailing language game, the latter its theological foundation. In both cases the charge will be that theory represents the ideological, self-congratulatory self-legitimization of the status quo rather than the expression of either reason or revelation as an independent norm. The theory of the three stages, around which much, if not all, of Kierkegaard’s writing revolves, is best understood as the presentation of three answers to the question: what is the highest norm for my life, the ultimate criterion for what rightly counts as the good life? Put simply: for the aesthetic stage the answer is ‘I myself ’; for the ethical stage it is ‘We ourselves’; and for the religious stage it is ‘The God who is not reducible to either the self or the social order’. The ‘I myself ’ that defines the aesthetic existence sphere signifies that my own immediate desires and inclinations are the source of normativity for my life, unconstrained by notions of good and evil, right and wrong. It is a sphere beyond, or perhaps before, good and evil. So when Judge William pleads with the young aesthete to become ethical, he writes, ‘Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules them out. Here the question is under what qualifications one will view all existence and personally live’ (SKS3: 165/EO2: 169). The question is whether moral categories count, whether one lives, successfully or unsuccessfully, in a world of moral values. Aesthetic values are not restricted to those related to the fine arts. These are included, to be sure, but along with erotic pleasure and even the merely interesting, for example. What these values have in common is that a good day or a good life can be defined without reference to good and evil or right and wrong. They represent an amoral mode of being-in-the-world, which from the ethical point of view is ipso facto immoral even when its particular expressions are not. In Either/Or a debate is staged, as it were, between a young aesthete, known only as A, and Judge William, an older representative of the ethical stage. Volume One is the manifesto of the former in a series of fragments and essays, while Volume Two is the attempt to defend the ethical stage and encourage A to repent and convert from the aesthetic to the ethical. Together they re-enact the debate between the sophists and the Athenian traditionalists. The latter appeal neither to a transcendent reason nor a transcendent revelation but to the laws and customs immanent to the social order in which they (all too) comfortably reside. Hegel’s name for the ethical in this sense is Sittlichkeit, normally translated as ‘ethical life’ but more fully expressed as ‘the laws and customs of one’s people’. ‘Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts’ (Hegel 1962: 11) In other words, ethical norms are not the product of an ahistorical, universal reason, as Plato or Kant would have it, but of an historically particular society and its culture. The theories of that culture could be the True and the practices of that society the Good only if that historical constellation were the final

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fulfilment of the inner, rational telos of history and the human spirit, such that its particular mode (say monarchist, capitalist, Protestant) had become Absolute Spirit and Absolute Knowing (Westphal 1998b). The ethical stage, represented by Judge William, is very Hegelian in character, not because he is a philosopher but because that philosophy mirrors so nicely his bourgeois respectability. The categories of good and evil, right and wrong are utterly fundamental to human flourishing, to be sure, but what gives the distinctively Hegelian tone to the ethical sphere is that the moral life is defined, not with reference to some transcendent rational intuition of the Good, as with Plato, or with some transcendental highest principle of the moral life as with Kant and his categorical imperative, but with the laws and customs of the present social order. Since the good Judge is especially worried about the sexual implications of A’s amoral aestheticism, he represents the ethical stage primarily in terms of a particular social practice: marriage. So where is the Socratic/Kierkegaardian moment in this remake of the old Athenian debate between the traditionalists and the sophists? It comes in a sermon from an old friend of Judge William that he appends to his own two long letters to A, not noticing, as Kierkegaard expects the reader to notice, that it puts the Judge in question every bit as much as the young aesthete. Everything important about it in this context appears in the title: ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We are Always in the Wrong’ (SKS3: 320–32/EO2: 339–54). The converse implication is that if we feel we are always in the right, we are not in relation to God. The thought, which would be upbuilding, would teach us wisdom if it actually occurred to us, but it does not arise in either the aesthetic or the ethical sphere, as we see this in their concrete enactments by A and the good Judge. It does not occur to the young aesthete because he is a practical atheist. He neither argues against the reality of God nor pronounces himself an agnostic. The question of God never even arises in his world, which is defined by his immediate desires and inclinations. The notion that these should be subordinated to any notions of good and evil or right and wrong he dismisses as ‘boring’, since for him the dichotomy between the boring and the interesting is utterly fundamental (SKS2: 271–89/EO1: 281–300). Even in the famous ‘Seducer’s Diary’ the goal of the seducer, who may be A, is not so much sexual gratification as an interesting performance. He staves off boredom by watching himself manipulate the girl and her aunt (SKS2: 291–432/EO1: 301–445). Once the seduction is completed he discards the girl, but his last words in the diary raise the question whether it would have been possible to end the relationship with the girl thinking she was the one who was ‘bored’ with it. ‘It could be a very interesting epilogue, which in and by itself could have psychological interest and besides that furnish one with many erotic observations’ (SKS2: 432/EO1: 445, emphasis added). Nor does the potentially upbuilding thought occur in the ethical sphere. Of course, Judge William is no atheist but gives every appearance of being a devout Lutheran. He talks a great deal about God. But God and the social order at whose pinnacle the judge sits so comfortably and complacently are so deeply intertwined in his mind that the possibility of a discrepancy between God and Christendom is rather an impossibility. By

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being a respectable and religious Danish citizen, the Judge is convinced he is simply in the right. So far as it relates to the aesthete, the ‘we’ in the sermon title signifies each one of us individually; so far as it relates to the judge, it signifies ourselves collectively as the established order. In suggesting that God represents a source of normativity higher than either the merely human individual or the merely human community, however religious, the sermon points beyond the aesthetic and ethical spheres to the religious. That it is in relation to God that we are always in the wrong indicates that what suspicion in general and ideology critique in particular need to unmask is sin. The implicit critique here suggests that there is not as much difference between the aesthetic and the ethical as our two antagonists suppose. Each assumes, one as individual, the other as society and culture, that they are always already innocent, that there is no higher criterion of good and evil, right and wrong, to which they are responsible and from which they have always already fallen short. Wretched contentment!

III. Fear and Trembling In two long letters from the Judge to A, Volume Two of Either/Or contains a critique of the aesthetic stage from the point of view of the ethical that lasts more than three hundred pages. The brief sermon is the hint of a critique of the ethical from the point of view of the religious. To elaborate on that hint is the task of Fear and Trembling. Once again a stage or existence sphere is presented concretely in an individual representative, in this case Abraham. His faith, especially as exhibited in the Genesis 22 story of the near sacrifice of Isaac, represents a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’. In other words, biblical faith is irreducible to the ethical, to conformity with the laws and customs of one’s people. The voice of the people is not necessarily the voice of God. There are two mistakes to be avoided in exploring this text. The first is to think that Fear and Trembling represents Kierkegaard’s ethics. For that we would need to turn to Works of Love and other works of his so-called ‘second-authorship’. What is at issue is the ethical stage or sphere, regardless of its particular content, rules, virtues, etc. The second mistake to avoid is to think that the ethical is to be understood along generally Platonic or Kantian lines. It is easy to fall into this trap since Johannes de silentio (the pseudonymous author) calls the ethical the universal. This all too easily suggests the world of Plato’s forms or Kant’s highest principle, the categorical imperative, and thereby an existence sphere grounded in pure reason, historically and socially unsituated. But Silentio goes out of his way to make it clear three times over that the ethical is to be understood along Hegelian lines, just as it was in Either/Or. The universal is some concrete community, not some abstract principle. In the first place, the three problems that make up most of the text, all begin in the same way: if the universal is the highest, then Hegel is right, but Abraham is lost (SKS4: 148–9, 160–1, 172–3/FT: 54–5, 68–6, 82). Abraham represents the suspension of the Hegelian universal. Secondly, Silentio uses the Danish phrase that is equivalent to

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Hegel’s Sittlichkeit (det sædelige, Sædelighed [SKS4: 149/FT: 55, n.7]). Thirdly, he gives five examples of the ethical universal: the nation, the state, society, the church, and the sect (SKS4: 153, 155, 166, 170/FT: 59, 62, 74, 79). In Hegelian fashion, the ethical is the universal not by being a form or principle one might discover and follow but by being a community to which the individual belongs as a member. This means that the universal is not quite universal, since there are as many different universals as there are different societies and cultures. Only the historically integrated totality of these mini-universals is genuinely universal. The ethical stage is that mode of being-in-the-world that effectively takes the laws and customs of one’s own people (paradoxically a particular universal) to be the highest criterion for one’s life. ‘We’ are immune to critique because ‘we’ are the norm of the Good, the Right, and the True. When this is the case socialization is equivalent to one’s eternal salvation, for it is the means by which one is rightly related to the divine. This means that ‘no categories are needed but those of Greek philosophy’ since ‘paganism did not have faith’ (SKS4: 149/ FT: 55) as the relation to a God irreducible to the ethical order and against whom we are always in the wrong. ‘Paganism does not know such a relationship to the divine . . . but the ethical is the divine’ (SKS4: 153/FT: 60). The point is not that Christendom is superior to paganism, but that it simply is paganism in so far as with Judge William and Hegel it treats the ethical sphere as ultimate (Westphal 2007). Biblical faith, à la Abraham, is a relation to the divine as a source of normativity to which not only the individual but the social order as well is responsible. For an individual such as Abraham and for any community that would be the people of God (for example, Christendom), it consists most essentially not in creedal affirmation but in trust in God’s promises and obedience to God’s commands. Silentio is most interested in Abraham’s obedience to the command to sacrifice his son, Isaac, his acted out willingness to do so until his hand is stayed at the last moment. But he also calls our attention to the promise side of Abraham’s covenantal relation with God. He refers us to the early promises of a land and of a blessing for all peoples through his seed (SKS4: 114/FT: 17); and by contrasting Abraham as the knight of faith with the knight of infinite resignation, he calls attention to Abraham’s trust in these promises to the degree that be believes that even if he eventually has to go through with the sacrifice of Isaac, he will get him back in this life. ‘He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life, but that he would be blessed here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed . . . [since] for God all things are possible’ (SKS4: 131/FT: 36). The very personal God who is capable of such speech acts as promises and commands and of such acts as resurrection is distinctly different from the God or gods who are the halo by which the ethical order divinizes and thus legitimizes itself. This comes to light in the contrast between Abraham as the knight of faith and the tragic hero, such as Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus. Each of these three actually went through with the killing of one of their own children. But the crucial difference is not that they actually did it; it is rather that their act was fully justified by the ethical order in which they lived. The claims of the family, and thus of a father to protect his child, were trumped by the claims of the larger community, the ‘State’. The Sittlichkeit they shared with their family,

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friends, and neighbours provided full justification for their acts in the eyes of all, painful as it might be. Abraham has no such luxury. There is no prevailing social need to justify the act he sets out to perform. This means that he can be justified and the father of the faithful in the ‘Abrahamic’ monotheisms that honour him as such, namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, only if there is a ‘teleological suspension’ of the ethical, if the universal is not the highest. We understand this notion of teleological suspension best if we see it as equivalent to Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung. X is aufgehoben in Y whenever X, which sees itself or is seen as self-sufficient in its autonomous and atomic completeness, comes to see itself or be seen as a legitimate, but subsidiary part or aspect of a larger whole (Y) of which it is not the essential principle. Hegel, and following him, Judge William, see sex as standing in this relation to marriage (Hegel 1962: 111–16; Westphal 1992), and in general the Judge sees the aesthetic sphere as standing in this relation to the ethical. That this is the structure Silentio has in mind is clear in two ways. First, for faith, and thus for the religious sphere, the ethical is not abolished but relativized. Substituting ‘society’ for ‘the universal’ and ‘God’ for ‘the absolute’, we read this account of the religious sphere: The paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than society, that the single individual . . . determines his relation to society by his relation to God, not his relation to God by his relation to society. The paradox may also be expressed in this way: that there is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself absolutely to God. (SKS4: 162/FT: 70)

Silentio immediately adds that this does not mean ‘that the ethical should be invalidated’ but rather than ‘the ethical is reduced to the relative’. The ethical has a real but not absolute binding force. After the teleological suspension or Aufhebung of the aesthetic in the ethical, we now get the teleological suspension or Aufhebung of the ethical in the religious. A second way in which the ethical as the laws and customs of one’s people is given a real but subordinate authority comes through the key word ‘after’. The religious individual is higher than the universal, but only ‘after having been in the universal’ (SKS4: 149; cf.150, 162/FT: 55; cf. 56, 69). Neither the aesthete nor the knight of faith recognizes the social order as the highest norm for their life. But the former cedes no authority to the ethical, while the latter recognizes that its claims are prima facie legitimate. ‘After’ having accepted socialization into the laws and customs of one’s people, the knight of faith learns to acknowledge a higher authority that can trump the former. That this ‘after’ does not signify the simple abandonment of the ethical is clear from repeated references to the anxiety and distress experienced by Abraham (SKS4: 156, 158, 165–7, 201/FT: 63, 65, 74–5, 113). Abraham is torn between the ethical values according to which he would be a murderer and the religious values, the command of God, according to which he would be offering a sacrifice pleasing to God. The ethical has been internalized and is part of his identity. This remains the case even when he finds that its prima facie authority must be teleologically suspended in a higher authority.

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So how are Silentio’s meditations on Abraham an instance of ideology critique? They are, in the first instance, a critique of the established order for the arrogant complacency with which it takes itself to be the ultimate embodiment of the Right and the Good. In the second instance, it finds a theory, in this case Hegel’s system, that purports to be the ultimate embodiment of the True and which sanctions the claims of the ethical universal to be the highest norm for human life. We have here a kind of Wizard of Oz phenomenon. ‘Reason’, which purports to be the voice of universal truth, turns out to be something less grand, the self-congratulatory mirror image of a particular social and cultural order. It is important to recognize the perspectival character of this critique. It is from the standpoint of biblical religion. While Silentio is obviously in awe of Abraham for the courage and humility required by his faith, he makes no attempt to justify that faith, either by proving that there is a God who makes promises and gives commands or by showing that such a God made these promises and this command to Abraham. He is content to show that the ethical and the religious are different (Westphal 1994). One implication is that his account can just as easily be read as a critique of the religious from the standpoint of the ethical. Silentio is fully aware of this and regularly describes the faith of Abraham as paradoxical, absurd, and madness. For whom? For those ensconced in the ethical and for whom the theories that legitimize its ultimacy go under the name of Reason. By suggesting that what goes under the name of Reason is actually the ideology of the established order, Silentio/Kierkegaard seeks to undermine the self-evidence of that order and of the theories that purport to render it absolute. Baptizing themselves in the name of ‘Reason’ is not an argument for their ultimacy but a claim in need of justification. We are presented with another Either/Or, this time between the ethical and the religious. We have to choose for ourselves since there is no neutral, universal Reason to make the choice for us. This is the structure of Kierkegaard’s critique of reason and society throughout his writings (Westphal 1987). It is a version of what Lyotard describes as the transition from modernity to postmodernity (Lyotard 1984). Modernity legitimizes itself with the help of metanarratives, the big stories or philosophies of history it tells itself and which make it, in some version, the culmination and fulfilment of the historical process. The Hegelian and Marxian metanarratives are important instances, but there are others, such as the story of the triumph of the natural sciences over superstition and mere opinion and the triumph of science and technology over nature. Postmodernity is the loss of confidence and trust in any of these metanarratives. The particular version of modernity targeted by Kierkegaard has been called ‘Golden Age Denmark’ (see Kirmmse 1990). Kierkegaard casts doubt on its ultimacy by suggesting that a major metanarrative support for that ultimacy claim, the Hegelian philosophy, is ideology rather than pure reason. There is an implicit critique of modernity in general here in so far as one learns to ask of all its metanarratives whether they can withstand similar scrutiny. To call attention, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche do, to the socially situated particularity of various versions of ‘Reason’ is to suggest that what claims to be comprehensive is

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merely perspectival. But, it may be replied, is not Kierkegaard’s own writing equally perspectival? Does it not rest on another (Christian) metanarrative that is always implicit if explicit only in bits and pieces? Kierkegaard’s reply, which applies not only to Fear and Trembling but to his corpus as a whole, whether pseudonymous or not, is twofold. Yes, the biblical and often specifically Christian perspective from which he operates is one among many interpretations of reality. To be sure, it claims to be more nearly adequate to the real than its rivals. But this claim is not accompanied by the claim, typical of modernity, that there is a neutral, non-perspectival ‘Reason’ that can justify the first claim. We have to make our decisions and commitments for ourselves, aware of the risk involved in the absence of the guarantees we would like to have. There is no universal algorithm that can do this for us. Secondly, yes there is another metanarrative that gives substance to the perspective from which Kierkegaard writes. But its origins are not modern but pre-modern and given the prophetic strand of biblical religion in which it is rooted (Westphal 1987) it functions to delegitimize, to challenge rather than to confirm every society’s tendency to absolutize itself. ‘In relation to God we are always in the wrong.’

IV. Two Ages In Fear and Trembling Johannes de Silentio repeatedly insists that faith is a passion. As such it lives on the boundary between the volitional and the affective; it involves but cannot be reduced to a mode of cognition. In several corollaries Silentio makes this claim more determinate. First, to call faith a passion is not to discredit it, nor to give a reason to reject it, because passion is the ‘essentially human’ (SKS4: 208/FT: 121). Some passions are doubtless inhuman, but a passionless life is ipso facto sub-human. Second, faith is not just any old passion, but a ‘prodigious’ passion and, in fact, the ‘highest’ passion (SKS4: 208/FT: 121). This is because our passions indicate what we care about deeply and, the religious sphere is the claim that nothing deserves our concern as fully as our God-relationship. Third, whereas it is easy enough to find philosophies in which passions, for better and often for worse, arise out of our desires, for Silentio this passion arises out of our tasks. Faith, he insists, is a task, indeed, the task of a lifetime, one we have never finished (SKS4: 159, 208–10/FT: 67, 121–3). We are called to faith, and if we choose faith it is because we have already been chosen and assigned. The faith of Abraham might also be expressed in the later words of Mary: ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word’ (Luke 1: 38). Finally, faith is a tension, not the relaxation of wretched contentment. This is no doubt due to the fact that it involves the relation of our finite temporality to God’s infinite eternity and to the fact that it is not a function of our natural desires, as the story of Abraham makes clear enough. But most importantly it is the tension of being alone before God without the comforting support of the ethical. It is the tension involved in being committed both to the ethical (society, relatively) and to the religious (God, absolutely). A subsequent

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pseudonym will define the task this way: ‘Simultaneously to Relate Oneself Absolutely to One’s Absolute τέλος and Relatively to Relative Ends’ (SKS7: 352/CUP1: 387; cf. 407, 414, 422, 431). Here we have another dimension of ideology critique. For Hegel and for Christendom, faith is not a tension and the task of a lifetime but something everyone more or less automatically has. ‘In Christendom he is a Christian (in the very same sense as in paganism he would be a pagan and in Holland a Hollander)’ (SKS11: 171/SUD: 56). The task for Hegelian philosophy is to ‘go further’ from faith to knowledge, from religion to philosophy, since it’s all about cognition, and faith is an inferior form of knowledge that needs to be supplanted by Hegel’s system (Westphal 1998b: chs. 7–8). Thus Silentio finds himself living ‘in an age that has crossed out passion in order to serve science’ (SKS4: 103/FT: 7). Five immediately preceding references to the system make it clear that ‘science’ does not signify the physical sciences but Hegel’s philosophy, for which he (Hegel) claims the status of science; knowledge in its highest form. ‘The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science . . . that is what I have set myself to do. The inner necessity that knowing should be Science lies in its nature, and only the systematic exposition of philosophy itself provides it.’ (Hegel 1977: 3; Westphal 1998b: ch. 2) Another way to say that the present age has sacrificed passion for science is to say, ‘What our generation lacks is not reflection but passion’ (SKS4: 137n./FT: 42n.). The religious sphere in the mode of faith is a passionate, prophetic challenge to the ultimacy and absolute authority of the laws and customs of any society and culture. Pistis, the New Testament word for faith, also occurs in Plato’s Republic where it is properly translated as ‘opinion’. It occurs in the cave and on the lower half of the divided line as a failed attempt at true knowledge. Hegel treats religious faith as an inferior mode of cognition which we must ‘go beyond’ to dispassionate reflection and science. At the level of content, the system functions as ideology by making the universal the highest. Here, at the level of form, it neutralizes passion, an essential aspect of the authentic religious life and the energy required for any religious critique of the established order. The system aids and abets wretched contentment by distracting individuals from their highest task. The infinite task of trusting God and obeying God’s commands is supplanted by the quest for certainty. Once we have ‘got it right’, whether in the form of a philosophical system or a theological orthodoxy, we can relax. This contrast between passion and reflection in Fear and Trembling points forward to a long book review Kierkegaard published under his own name with the title A Literary Review. Today it is known as Two Ages, the title of the novel under review. Prior to its complete translation in English the portion that concerns us most directly was translated under the title The Present Age. The review appeared just a month after the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was authored by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Along with Fear and Trembling, Postscript provides important context for Two Ages. Postscript has two parts. Part One is about objectivity and takes up about thirty-four pages. Part Two is about subjectivity and takes up over five hundred pages. These

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correspond rather closely to reflection and passion. It doesn’t take Climacus long to say that while the objective approach to truth is legitimate, neither historical nor philosophical knowledge can be more than an approximation. Here Climacus stands between Socratic ignorance and Nietzschean perspectivism. The point about subjectivity is not that we can therefore turn the quest for truth over to our interests, our desires, and our passions and believe whatever best suits our fancy. It’s not about the ‘what’ of essential knowledge, that is, ethical and religious knowledge; it is rather about the ‘how’. ‘If only the how of this relation [to the object of belief] is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth’ (SKS7: 182/CUP1: 199). In other words, the question of subjectivity concerns one’s appropriation of what one takes to be the truth. Is there a conformity or rather a performative contradiction between what one says and believes about God, and the Good, and the Right and how one lives one’s life? The possibility of true religion occurs only within the sphere of subjectivity; where objectivity has supplanted subjectivity genuine faith, so far from being the automatic possession of all good citizens, has been precluded a priori. Consider Socrates in relation to belief in immorality. Objectively speaking there are no definitive proofs either way. The most one can say is ‘if there is an immortality’. But Socrates ‘stakes his whole life on this “if ”; he dares to die, and with the passion of the infinite he has so ordered his whole life that it might be acceptable—if there is an immortality’ (SKS7: 184; cf. 158–64/CUP1: 201; cf. 171–7). This is the leap of faith, serious commitment without guarantees. Although his ‘what’ involves a risky decision, Socrates devotes his life with the passion of the infinite to bringing his how into fullest conformity with it. So Climacus offers this definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing individual . . . But the definition of truth stated above is a paraphrasing of faith. Without risk, no faith. Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and objective uncertainty. (SKS7: 186–7/CUP1: 203–4)

Faith is here not merely a passion but a double passion, the passion of the infinite and the passion of inwardness, thus ‘the infinite passion of inwardness’. Our passions indicate what we care about most deeply, and to call faith the passion of the infinite is to say that it is directed towards what we (should) care about above all, the Eternal, the Infinite, God. As Climacus has put it above, faith is to relate absolutely to the Absolute. The subjectivity should be appropriate to the intentional object, an unconditional commitment to the Unconditioned. Remember Abraham. To call faith the passion of inwardness is to recall its social significance. Outwardness is one’s successful socialization, one’s observable conformity with the laws and customs of one’s people. Faith is an inwardness because one’s absolute relation to the Absolute is not on display. It cannot be observed in civic respectability or churchly piety. Socrates’ faith was an inwardness precisely because he was attempting to live out a loyalty to something higher than the laws and customs of Athens, including its religious cult; and Athens was entirely right to recognize this faith as a critique of its own claims to spiritual

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ultimacy. Its wisdom sanctified the established order in that neither the right-wing traditionalists nor the left-wing radicals envisaged a higher reality by which their practices and their wisdom could be judged. Plato recognized the force of Socrates’ critique of these two factions within Athens. But like a later modernity from Descartes to Hegel, he turned to reflection rather than to passion. He sought to eliminate the uncertainty through speculative reason rather than to live out the paradox of personal responsibility and objective uncertainty. Having been exposed to Socratic passion, with its ignorance and irony, Plato turned to reflection in hopes of transcending both. One might say he is the father of modernity. Kierkegaard presents us with an either/or choice between Socratic passion and Platonic reflection. In Two Ages the revolutionary age is the age of passion and the present age, half a century later, is the age of reflection. Passion is not infallible. In the absence of an essential passion (a passion for something truly worthwhile) human sociality will necessarily be ‘crude’ and, as Nietzsche will later repeat, it will make of humanity a mere ‘herd’. Over against this possibility, Kierkegaard gives in extremely abstract terms, his own concept of an ideal society, whether it be the State or the Church. When individuals (each one individually) are essentially [this is a matter of their identity] and passionately related to an idea [their highest task and its transcendent source] and together are essentially related to the same idea, the relation is optimal and normative. Individually the relation separates them (each one has himself for himself), and ideally it unites them. (SKS8: 61/TA: 62)

Kierkegaard immediately adds an interesting qualifier that can be read as an endorsement of political liberalism or religious ecumenism. Remembering, as it were, Socratic ignorance and irony, he speaks of a ‘decent modesty between man and man that prevents crude aggressiveness [read: vitriolic partisanship]; in the relation of unanimity to the idea [liberty and justice for all, Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour] there is the elevation that again in consideration of the whole forgets the accidentality of details’ (SKS8: 61/ TA: 62). But while passion is necessary it is not sufficient. For ‘if individuals relate to an idea merely en masse (consequently without the individual separation of inwardness), we get violence, anarchy, riotousness. . . . Remove the relation to one-self [the personal responsibility of appropriation], and we have the tumultuous self-relating of the mass to an idea’ (SKS8: 61/TA: 63). If you are on astro-turf, you can’t play ice hockey at all, even if you are wearing skates. If you are on ice in a hockey rink you can play hockey; but there is no guarantee that you will play it well. Similarly, if you live in a world where objectivity and reflection have supplanted subjectivity and passion, you have no chance to be truly human or, a fortiori, truly Christian. If you live in a world where subjectivity and passion are seen as essentially human, there is at least the possibility of being authentically human or authentically Christian; but subjectivity and passion are not in themselves any guarantee of this result. But Kierkegaard is more interested in the present age as the age of reflection. The concept of reflection has two quite distinct meanings, related to distinct Danish terms.

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Reflex (reflexion in the Hongs’ translation) is the mirroring of something in something else. In the novel the different spirits of the two ages are reflected in this sense in ordinary, everyday life. If one is a skilful writer and knows how to look, one can show this reflexion in utterly mundane daily domestic life. By contrast, Reflexion (reflection in translation) is the characteristic that separates the present age from the revolutionary age (TA: p. ix). It signifies ‘deliberation’ or ‘calculating prudence or procrastinating indecision lacking in the passion of engagement’ (TA: p. ix). ‘The present age is essentially a sensible, reflecting age, devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence. . . . The single individual . . . has not fomented enough passion in himself to tear himself out of the web of reflection and the seductive ambiguity of reflection’ (SKS8: 66–7/TA: 68–9). There is thought in the present age, but not the kind that springs from and reinforces any deep, demanding commitments on the part of the individual. We are not talking about philosophers here, at least not directly. As ‘superficial, shortlived enthusiasm’ the present age reflects the aesthetic stage, but only as merged with the ethical and its ‘relaxing in indolence’ or complacency. The aesthete calculates in the attempt to sustain the interesting, while the ethical individual calculates the prudential way of fitting in so as to rise within the established order without upsetting it in any way. In either case their highest norms are thought to be found in ‘the demands of the times’, especially as expressed by the young. For ‘the young man makes the demand and does not understand himself as implied . . . it makes one think that an intoxicated divinity is speaking, least of all an individual human being’ (SKS8: 13/TA: 9). Ironically, in other words, the demands of the time don’t really make any demands on the individual, and set no serious tasks. The demands of the time are the languages of its various language games or practices calling participants to do what they are already doing. Conformity is cheap and easy, mostly a matter of saying the right things, being politically correct from the standpoint of the cultural left or the cultural right. From the aesthetic side the demands may be for cultural flourishing, support for and renewal of the arts; or they may degenerate into the demand for mindless entertainment and more sophisticated video games and smart phones. From the ethical side, the demands may be for moral and religious renewal, for religion, too, can be a demand of the time, as long as it remains within the limits of self-congratulation. But for decisive religious categories to become the demand of the times is eo ipso a contradiction . . . ‘The times’ is too abstract a category to be able as claimant to demand the decisive religious categories that belong specifically to individuality and particularity; loud, collective demands en masse for what can be shared only by the single individual in particularity, in solitariness, in silence, cannot be made . . . The spiritual jolting of an individuality is eo ipso the indication of decisive religious categories; therefore spirit must not be considered identical with talent and genius, by no means, but identical with resolution in passion. (SKS8: 24–5/TA: 21–2)

Here Kierkegaard echoes what Climacus wrote in Postscript just a month before in an almost Nietzschean tone of voice. ‘Just as in the desert individuals must travel in large

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caravans out of fear of robbers and wild animals, so individuals today have a horror of existence because it is godforsaken; they dare to live only in great herds and cling together en masse in order to be at least something’ (SKS7: 325/CUP1: 356). This applies to society as Christendom and not just its secular dimensions. It is out of fear of the wild, untamed God of Abraham that individuals become religious ‘herds’ and ‘cling together en masse’. In this way Christianity is supplanted by Christendom. Kierkegaard fears there is a lot of self-deception involved. Zealousness to learn from life is seldom found, but all the more frequently a desire, inclination, and reciprocal haste to be deceived by life. Undaunted, people do not seem to have a Socratic fear of being deceived, for the voice of God is always a whisper, while the demand of the age is a thousand-tongued rumor . . . Even less do people seem to have above all a Socratic fear of being deceived by themselves. (SKS8: 14/TA: 10)

The reference to Socrates and to God introduces a familiar theme. What is lacking in all the talk about the demand of the times ‘is still the demand of the power that is superior to the demand of the times, for it is eternity’s demand; if it is not the demand of men, it is the demand of God; if it is not the demand of the young, it is the demand of the Ancient of Days’ (SKS8: 15/TA: 11). This latter name of God comes from the apocalyptic genre of the Bible (Daniel and Revelation) whose message is always that the established orders of the world are not the Kingdom of God but stand under the judgement of God. Ideology critique always seeks to unmask self-deception. In this case the self-deception is the motivated confusion of the voices of society’s contemporary agenda with the voice of God, a not too subtle form of self-deification. The reader is reminded of (or directed to) Jacques Ellul’s argument that the most widespread and powerful propaganda comes not from a conspiracy at the Propaganda Ministry but from the ways in which a society propagandizes itself (Ellul 1965). On Kierkegaard’s analysis the demands of the age are the propaganda by which a society, or perhaps the various factions within a society, persuade themselves that they are essentially immune to critique, thus practicing atheism whether their appearance is secular or religious. Who tells us what the demands of the time are? Interestingly, Kierkegaard does not zero in on the politicians but throughout his writings points to three other primary sources of ideological thinking: the press, the clergy, and the academy. His critique of the press as the spiritless co-conspirator with the present age and its ideological reinforcement is found primarily in his writings relating to The Corsair Affair. His responses to the attacks on him by this scandalous scandal sheet are not just of biographical interest, for they apply to one particular voice of the present age his more general critique of his own society and of modernity more generally. A full treatment of Kierkegaard’s social thought would have to deal substantially with these writings. Kierkegaard’s critique of the clergy as another spiritless co-conspirator with the present age and its ideological reinforcement runs throughout his writings, and he often satirizes their preaching for the spiritual complacency it induces. But it comes to its culmination in the late pamphlets and articles, which contain a sustained attack on the Danish Church and its bishops and which were originally translated under the title

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Attack Upon Christendom (although that attack can be seen to begin at least as early as 1843 with Either/Or and Fear and Trembling). Kierkegaard’s critique of the academy as another spiritless co-conspirator with the present age and its ideological reinforcement focuses primarily on Hegel (and his Danish followers). There is an irony here since Hegel’s system culminates in a philosophy of spirit. That critique is quite conspicuous in a number of texts, especially Fear and Trembling and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In the first two parts of Two Ages Kierkegaard analyses the way in which the novel shows the reflection (Reflex) of the spirit of the age as an age of reflection (Reflexion) in ordinary, everyday life. In the third part (The Present Age), he gives a more abstract analysis of the spirit of the age in which Hegel and the system are not as conspicuous as in those earlier texts. Yet he remains a target, along with the press and the preachers. Nowhere is this clearer than in a passage that summarizes Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of religion without naming him. A passionate, tumultuous age wants to overthrow everything, set aside everything [including religion and especially the Church]. An age that is revolutionary but also reflecting and devoid of passion changes the expression of power into a dialectical tour de force [Aufhebung, perhaps]: it lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it . . . (SKS8: 74/TA: 77) We do not want to abolish the monarchy, by no means, but if little by little we could get it transformed into make-believe, we would gladly shout ‘Hurrah for the King!’ . . . In the same way we are willing to keep Christian terminology but privately know that nothing decisive is supposed to be meant by it. (SKS8: 76–7/TA: 80–1)

This is exactly what Hegel does with religion in general and Christianity in particular. He insists repeatedly that religion and philosophy have the same content and that Christianity is the ultimate religion. But religion is an inferior mode of knowing that does not meet the requirements of modernity; so it must be reinterpreted so as to be brought into conformity with the system. The content needs a new form (Westphal 1998b; chs. 7–8). In Kierkegaard’s view this is to transform Christianity beyond recognition. In the language of Two Ages, it is to relocate it from the sphere of passion to that of reflection. Here reflection is not the calculating indolence of aesthetic and ethical complacency described above. But it is their first cousin. The dominant philosophy serves with the press and the preachers as the flatterers by which the present age is soothed into wretched contentment.

V. Practice in Christianity: A Trial as Epilogue Just as in a symphony a composer develops an ‘argument’ both within each movement and throughout the course of the movements, so Kierkegaard develops his argument against Golden Age Denmark and modernity in general within a number of specific

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works and throughout the course of their unfolding. In one of his latest works, Training in Christianity, we find a nice summary of that argument in the form of a trial. Although the work is that of the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, I shall speak of Kierkegaard as author in order to put the work in the context of his other works, whether pseudonymous or not. For in either case, the ideas contained are presented by Kierkegaard to his readers, who now include us, for their serious consideration. Kierkegaard gives a double context for the trial. First comes ‘The Invitation’, a brief meditation on Matthew 11:28, ‘COME HERE TO ME, ALL YOU WHO LABOR AND ARE BURDENED, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST’ (SKS12: 19–33/PC: 11–22). Then comes ‘The Halt’, in which he notes that Jesus’s contemporaries overwhelmingly, in the last analysis, rejected the invitation (SKS12: 35–78/PC: 23–68). The trial is staged in this section. Kierkegaard brings forward ten imagined contemporaries of Jesus to give a verdict whether he is the Expected One (SKS12: 55–66/PC: 42–54). Five are designated and ‘sagacious and sensible’ persons. The others are a clergyman, a philosopher, a statesman, a solid citizen, and a scoffer. It is given to the clergyman to let the cat out of the bag, giving explicit expression to the spirit that runs through all ten negative judgments: The authentic expected one . . . will come as the most glorious flowering and the highest unfolding of the established order . . . he will recognize the established order as the authority, will summon all the clergy to a convention, present to it his achievements, together with his credentials—and then if in the balloting he has the majority he will be accepted and hailed as the extraordinary that he is: the expected one. But . . . he is too much of a judge; it seems as if he simultaneously wants to be the judge who judges the established order and yet also the expected one himself. (SKS12: 60/PC: 47)

The verdict is easy and unanimous: Jesus cannot be the Expected One because he does not recognize the Established Order as ultimate. His words and deeds, while in harmony with each other, are quite out of tune with the theories and practices making up the prevailing language game. This musical metaphor is milder than the harsh language of the jurors, who frequently refer to Jesus as mad, not just a bit odd but having lost his reason. At this point Kierkegaard reminds us that Fear and Trembling is not just about personal faith. Every human being is to live in fear and trembling, and likewise no established order is to be exempted from fear and trembling . . . And fear and trembling signify that there is a God–something every human being and every established order ought not to forget. (SKS12: 97/PC: 88) The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything. With regard to secular matters, the established order may be entirely right: one should join the established order, be satisfied with that relativity, etc. But ultimately the relationship with God is also secularized. . . . (SKS12: 99/PC: 91)

This essay alludes to Nietzsche (wretched contentment) and Marx (ideology critique). They are militant atheists, while Kierkegaard is a passionate Christian. But his writings

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show that the resources of the hermeneutics of suspicion for social critique are available to all. No doubt their use is always motivated by passion, but that can be a passionate faith as easily as a passionate unbelief.

References Augustine (1963). The Confessions of St. Augustine (New York: New American Library). Ellul, Jacques (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Random House). Hegel, G. W. F. (1962). Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——– (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kirmmse, Bruce H. (1990). Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Marx, Karl (2000). Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Nietzche, Friedrich (1966). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York: Viking). Ricoeur, Paul (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press). Westphal, Merold (1987). Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). ——– (1992). ‘Hegel’s Radical Idealism: Family and State as Ethical Communities’, in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). ——– (1994). ‘Johannes and Johannes: Kierkegaard and Difference’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). ——– (1998a). Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press). ——– (1998b). History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology, 3rd edn. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (2007). ‘Paganism in Christendom, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Wild, John (1953). Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago: Chicago University Press).

Suggested Reading All the volumes in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: *.*, where *.* stands for the title of one of the volumes in the Kierkegaard University Press series, Kierkegaard’s Writings. Each Perkins volume is a collection of essays by various authors on the cited Princeton volume. Davenport, John J. and Anthony Rudd, (eds.) (2001). Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Chicago: Open Court). Evans, C. Stephen (2004). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Mooney, Edward F. (ed.) (2008). Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, and literature (London: Routledge). Podmore, Simon D. (2011). Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

chapter 17

l ov e m . j amie f erreira

I. Introduction ‘To love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living’ (SKS9: 368/WL: 375). It may surprise some people to learn that this passionate exclamation comes out of the mouth of Søren Kierkegaard, since he is not well known for talking about love—at least not about love between human beings. It could be argued that to understand Kierkegaard’s view of human love we should turn to the mature work in which this passionate exclamation is found, namely, Works of Love, published in 1847—and in fact it has been claimed that Works of Love ‘is the capstone of Kierkegaard’s entire philosophy of love’ (Green and Ellis 1999: 339, 367). This text, a series of fifteen deliberations on the Judeo-Christian commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself, through its detailed analyses and plethora of concrete examples, does provide the richest and fullest account of love Kierkegaard left us, but it is also true that his entire authorship, from beginning to end, including both pseudonymous and signed works, presents stories of love that repeatedly ask us: What is love? What is it to love? What is it to love rightly and well? In exploring love of others in Kierkegaard’s thought, then, I will draw heavily on Works of Love, but I first want to highlight episodes of the story of human love of other humans found in some earlier works—namely, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, and two religious discourses. I suggest that the bulk of Kierkegaard’s authorship provokes us to ask ourselves ‘Am I loving rightly and well?’ precisely because he complicates the story of love. The figure of the lover winds its way throughout his authorship, clothed in aesthetic, ethical, and religious categories. Obviously the concept of ‘love’ is not used univocally throughout the authorship—sometimes we are presented with an aesthetic picture of aesthetic love or an ethical picture of aesthetic love; at other times we see an ethical picture of ethical love or an aesthetic or ethical perspective on religious love, or a religious perspective on aesthetic or ethical or religious love. My goal is to show that Kierkegaard’s philosophical, literary, and theological explorations reveal not only that love is genuine even when it

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wants to be loved, but also that love is filled with paradox: love is one yet many, gift yet need, need yet task, gift yet debt, faithful yet free, and it values sameness yet appreciatively attends to difference. Moreover, the subject of love is a fruitful entrée into Kierkegaard’s thought because, in insisting on both the unity of love and suggesting its infinite variations, Kierkegaard illustrates some of his most important themes—for example, the relation and tension between the ‘how’ and the ‘what,’ between the inner and the outer, between quantitative and qualitative transitions, and between earnestness and jest.

II. The Paradigm of Love (1). Either/Or to Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard’s own understanding of human love is derived from the most general commitment underlying all his writing about love—namely, that God is Love. He writes in his journal in 1847 that ‘We should learn from God what love is. He is indeed the one who first loved us’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB199 [JP3: 2407]); moreover, ‘What a person knows truly about love he must learn from God’ (Pap. VIII2B 59:20 [JP3: 3743]). This does not mean that Kierkegaard thinks we can have unmediated access to this example of love; rather we can only learn about God’s love by looking at examples of love in other people—either other humans or the God-Man Jesus Christ. Kierkegaard announces his method: ‘I scrape together all the best thoughts I can muster of what a loving person is and say to myself: This is what God is every moment’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB2:105 [JP5: 6032]). His conclusion is quite remarkable—‘God . . . is such pure passion and pathos that he has only one pathos: to love, to be love, and out of love wanting to be loved’ (SKS26: NB31:76 [JP3: 2447]). Although in what follows I will focus on Kierkegaard’s contribution to an appreciation of our love of human others, the story of God’s love for us and our love for others is tied together for Kierkegaard.

Either/Or (1843) Kierkegaard’s commitment that love is one yet many is expressed in his first major work, Either/Or, and continues to find expression all the way up to Works of Love. The first volume of this two-volume collection edited by Victor Eremita begins with the papers of ‘A,’ which offer a variety of pictures of love: love as immediate passion, love without reflection, as well as love that is reflective for purposes of seduction. We see in these papers pictures of self-love as well as pictures of romantic or erotic love that seem to reduce to selfishness; ‘First Love’ and ‘The Diary of a Seducer’ also show how jest can be in the service of earnestness, as superficial and deceptive forms of love are revealed as such. In the second volume, the papers of ‘B’ (Judge William) put the variety of loves into the perspective of unity by categorizing these pictures as ‘aesthetic’ love while introducing the notion

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of a ‘richer and fuller aesthetic ideal’, one which assumes that ‘sensuous love has but one transfiguration, in which it is equally aesthetic, religious, and ethical—and that is love’ (SKS3: 70/EO2: 65). That is, although William has serious criticisms of forms of ‘aesthetic’ love, he does not turn away from ‘aesthetic’ love. He embraces the norm of a unity of love and a diversity of expressions: a ‘harmonious unison of different spheres: it is the same subject, only expressed aesthetically, religiously, or ethically’ (SKS3: 65/EO2: 60). The ‘unity of the different manifestations’ (SKS3: 145/EO2: 147) is accounted for by Judge William’s fundamental commitment—namely, that ‘God . . . has loved me first’ (SKS3: 208/EO2: 216). What love means to us is found first in William’s appreciation of a generic Creation ex nihilo, a Creator as Lover. God’s love for us is revealed in the Creation—God loved us forth. With respect to its source, then, love is one—there is only one kind of love, the love that is God, the Creator, found in the Creation. When William asks ‘What is a human being without love?’ (SKS3: 207/EO2: 216) he is not referring only to God’s love of us—he is referring to infinite variations of human love for and from other humans. His letters to his young friend ‘A’ present the possibility that love can be preserved and transfigured without reducing all love to a simple identity. William insists that the ethical ‘does not want to destroy the aesthetic but to transfigure it’ (SKS3: 241/EO2: 253); this is possible because ‘in the ethical, the personality is brought into a focus in itself; consequently, the aesthetic is absolutely excluded or it is excluded as the absolute, but relatively it is continually present’ (SKS3: 173/EO2: 177).The harmony of different spheres, or expressions, is a harmony involving a dialectical tension. There is qualitative difference without absolute discontinuity. Simply aesthetic love is qualitatively different from an aesthetically-informed ethical love. Genuine ethical love transfigures the aesthetic that it preserves. For example, William claims that ‘the real constituting element, the substance [of marriage] is love [Kjerlighed]—or, if you want to give it more specific emphasis, erotic love [Elskov]’ (SKS3: 40/EO2: 32). The implication is that Elskov is a ‘specific’ form of Kjerlighed—namely, a restriction of Kjerlighed (caring) to a preferred person. Kjerlighed as such is unrestricted caring, while Kjerlighed that is restricted to one we are attracted to or joined to in marriage is romantic love or erotic love. In other words, the love placed in us by God [Kjerlighed] is the energy for erotic love [Elskov]. What will become clearer later in Works of Love is already implied here: namely, God’s love [Kjerlighed] is the source of all our potential, and ultimately everything we do is a possibility of such love. God’s love [Kjerlighed] for us is the energy through which we love; it is the substance of love in any form. Ironically, William repeatedly challenges the ‘either—or’ of the book’s title—he challenges the claim that one must love either aesthetically or ethically, the claim that there is either love or duty, that there is either erotic love or marital love. Genuine marital love transfigures the aesthetic that it preserves. It is interesting that here we have an echo of an earlier letter to another ‘William’—namely, a letter to Wilhelm from the namesake of The Sorrows of Young Werther. In that letter we find a similar challenge to an ‘either—or’: ‘Only remember one thing: in this world it is seldom a question of “either . . . or.” There are as many shadings of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline

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nose and a flat one. Thus, you mustn’t think ill of me if I concede your entire argument and still contrive to a find a way somewhere between the “either . . . or” ’ (Goethe 1988: 30). In the process of presenting the possibility that love can be preserved and transfigured without reducing all love to a simple identity, William’s letters address the questions ‘What is love?’ and ‘how to love rightly and well?’ in a variety of ways. First, William suggests the role history plays in love, revealing what the aesthetic ‘in existence’ looks like: ‘Love should have a history’ (SKS3: 100/EO2: 98) because developing an appreciation of embodied beauty (beauty in existence) involves an exploration in depth and this requires time. Marital love, faithful love, has more depth than merely immediate love because marital love contains the possibility of renunciation—that is, it is ‘able to relinquish itself ’ (SKS3: 99/EO2: 97) for the sake of the beloved. He explains the tension: in marriage, ‘the true holding on is the power that was capable of relinquishing and now expresses itself in holding on, and only in this lies the true freedom in holding on’ (SKS3: 99100/EO2: 97). In other words, normatively ‘love should have a history’ because it needs time for reflection on its immediacy, time to acknowledge the striving and the expectation of victory, time to acknowledge the possibility of relinquishing itself for the sake of the beloved if required, time to exercise the ‘holding on’. William also looks at the role choice plays in love, and along with it the relevance of appreciating the concrete. Just as it is the ‘total esthetic self that is chosen ethically’, so it is aesthetic love which is chosen ethically. The person who loves ethically ‘chooses himself concretely as this specific individual . . . with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu. . . . But as he becomes aware of all this, he takes upon himself responsibility for it all’ (SKS3: 239/EO2: 250–1). The ethical choice of aesthetic love requires both an awareness and appropriation of one’s concrete self and responsibility for one’s loving. Finally, William’s letters raise the question how one can show that one loves another without belying the (inwardness of the) love at issue. William suggests that the qualitative difference lies in the way something is done; he writes that ‘The question is always— how does he do it?’ (SKS3: 282/EO2: 298). Because the ‘how’ is crucial, all the dichotomies of inner/outer, inside/outside, and internal/external, need to be reassessed in that light. For example, he challenges the simple notion that ethical love is inner and aesthetic love is outer (or vice-versa) by introducing the ethical goal of transparency. In sum, the whole of Either/Or particularizes the universal perplexity of the question ‘Do I love rightly and well?’ It begins the story of love that Kierkegaard tells with the message of love’s unity and diversity of expressions (that is, its ability to be preserved and transfigured), as well as the paradoxes attending the relation and tension between inner and outer, how and what, and earnestness and jest.

Fear and Trembling (1843) Fear and Trembling, authored by Johannes de Silentio, provides another episode in the story of love that Kierkegaard unendingly tells because the message about the

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paradoxicality of ‘faith’ is at the same time a message about the paradoxicality of love. Fear and Trembling retrieves and revisions Judge William’s insight about the importance of love as being ‘able to relinquish itself ’ (SKS3: 99/EO2: 97) if necessary as well as to love’s ‘holding on’ (SKS3: 100/EO2: 97). In this portrait of love, Silentio’s attempt to describe the double movement of faith traces the double movement of love—a moment of resignation and a moment of joy in receiving the finite back again (SKS9: 54–6/WL: 47–9; Mooney 1991: 45–61; Lippitt 2003: 49–50). As Silentio portrays it, love is both a ‘having’ and ‘a giving up’ (SKS4: 141/FT: 47). The focus here is on the notion of a second immediacy—a ‘later immediacy’ (SKS4: 172/FT: 82), a ‘new interiority’ (SKS4: 161/FT: 69). It is an attempt to show how love can have a ‘completely different expression, a paradoxical expression,’ of the ethical (SKS4: 162/FT: 70). The book’s early presentation of the four scenarios of Abraham’s journey with Isaac to Mount Moriah ends each scenario with a refrain about the process of weaning a child. By showing how something that is in truth loving can appear unloving, Silentio in effect returns to William’s theme of the complexity of the relation between inner and outer, and the theme of the importance of the ‘how.’ As a story of faith, Fear and Trembling is also a story of two different models of love for God—the knight of resignation has an abstract relation to a God who requires the suffering of renouncing the finite, while the knight of faith has a ‘private relation’ (SKS4: 153/FT: 60) to a God who is ‘commensurable with actuality’ and so allows a joyful receiving back of the resigned finite. This latter love of God—or faith—is all about ‘temporality’ and ‘finitude’ (SKS4: 143/FT: 49). These models of love for God reveal corresponding models of what love for other humans can mean. In the first model, love for others is a love that expresses only renunciation; in the second, love for others involves both resignation and a joyful receiving back. Silentio graphically illustrates what such love of others means in the process of exegeting the story found in Luke, 14:26 as an example of God’s demand of ‘absolute love’, which is an ‘absolute duty’ to God. The passage, a well-known and controversial one, is as follows: Christ says that ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’ Silentio insists that this ‘hate’ must be taken ‘literally’. Yet at the same time, he insists that this does not mean that God requires that a person’s love for God be ‘demonstrated by his becoming indifferent to what he otherwise cherished’ (SKS4: 165/FT: 73). This is, indeed, a paradoxical expression of love—one that is epitomized in Silentio’s remark that ‘this having is also a giving up’ (SKS4: 141/FT: 47). God’s demand of absolute love involves our willingness to relinquish any love for another that interferes with either our relation to God or the other’s relation to God, but it also involves continuing to ‘cherish’ that other. Thus, Fear and Trembling, it could be argued, is a book about the supremacy of love. God’s command to Abraham does not—indeed, could not—require Abraham to stop loving Isaac (SKS4: 165/FT: 74). The absolute love that God asks for is a continual cherishing of the other—wife, mother, child, brother—which has the ‘paradoxical’ expression of a willingness to relinquish the other if the other hinders our ‘private’ (SKS4: 153/

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FT: 60) relation to God (or, presumably, if our love for them or their love for us hinders their private relation to God). This is, ironically, a story of a ‘private relationship’ with a God who is ‘commensurable with actuality’—a God who asks us to continue to ‘cherish’ instances of the finite which we might need to give up. The implication is that genuine human love for others is not incompatible or at odds with love for God. In this respect one could either argue that Fear and Trembling anticipates the story of love found in Works of Love, or alternatively, that the model of faith in ‘two movements’ found in Fear and Trembling is a necessary corrective to the model of love later found in Works of Love (Krishek 2009: 15, 144–5).

‘Love will hide a Multitude of Sins’ (1843) On the same day as Fear and Trembling was published, Kierkegaard published a volume of Three Upbuilding Discourses. These discourses were pieces signed in his own name, focusing on a scriptural theme—they exemplified a different genre in Kierkegaard’s writing, one which was paired from the beginning with the progression of pseudonymous works. Two of the three discourses in this volume were entitled ‘Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins’. By developing an interpretation of the passage found in the first letter from Peter 4:7–12, they tell a story of love from a religious perspective. Although they were not called Christian discourses, they did bear on Christian scriptural passages. In fact, Kierkegaard’s discourses looked so much like traditional sermons that he felt the need to deny that they were sermons (by denying that he had any authority to preach sermons). The first of these discourses repeats the word ‘love’ in every sentence of its first (and lengthy) paragraph—like a waterfall of love cascading down the page. Love is comforting, unchanging, undemanding, forgiving, never deceived (SKS5: 65/EUD: 55). This is equivalent to saying that love is ‘upbuilding’—it hides the multitude of sin by refusing to go searching for it, or by giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, or by forgiving it. Such hiding has a crucial social dimension—a loving vision minimizes ‘quarrelling, malice, anger, litigation, discord, factionalism’ (SKS5: 71/EUD: 61). The second of these discourses on how love will hide sin develops both the ‘admonition’ and the ‘comfort’ found in the scriptural verse, tying love to forgiveness through the story of the sinful woman who came to the Pharisees’ house and anointed the feet of Jesus. As Kierkegaard tells it, Jesus ‘made the love in her even more powerful to hide a multitude of sins, the love that was already there, because “her many sins were forgiven her, because she loved much” ’ (SKS5: 86/EUD: 77).

Philosophical Fragments (Crumbs) (1844) It might seem that this new work by Johannes Climacus would teach us very little about love because it serves mainly to contrast a religion of reason with a religion of revelation,

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and then to refine a notion of revealed ‘faith’ in terms of the categories of passion, offence, and the historical. There is, nevertheless, an important addition to the story of love here. This is because the Teacher in the non-Socratic ‘thought experiment’ of the first chapter becomes a Loving Teacher in the second chapter, and the needs of love require him to be an Incarnate Loving Teacher. That God is Love assumes here a qualitatively new meaning—one which gives us new insight into human love. Climacus explores revealed faith in terms of an analogy with human love. He does this first, and at length, in chapter two, ‘A Poetical Venture’, where he introduces the analogy between a king’s love for a maiden and God’s love for us. Although he concedes that ‘no human situation can provide a valid analogy’, he does allow that the story of ‘a king who loved a maiden of lowly station in life’ can ‘awaken the mind to an understanding of the divine’ (SKS4: 233/PF: 26). We learn that God’s love is gratuitous (God is ‘not moved by need’ (SKS4: 232/PF: 24)) and that God’s ‘omnipotence’ is ‘capable’ of what the king cannot do without ‘deceit’ (SK4: 238/PF: 32)—so there is significant disanalogy. Nevertheless, although the focus is on God’s example of love in becoming Incarnate, we learn something important about human love. For example, we learn that ‘only in love is the different made equal, and only in equality or in unity is there understanding’ (SKS4: 232/PF: 25); it is ‘the boundlessness of love, that in earnestness and truth and not in jest it wills to be the equal of the beloved’ (SKS4: 238/PF: 32). The story of the king’s attempt to have an understanding with the maiden reveals the extreme importance of sensitivity to the feelings of the other—the point is that the maiden must remain a genuine other with her dignity intact and not simply an extension of the king. God’s example of love shows that love ‘suffers’ and ‘gives all’; it shows that ‘love does not change the beloved but changes itself ’ (SKS4: 239/PF: 33). Climacus suggests the humility that is found in genuine love when he writes: ‘What wonderful self-denial to ask in concern, even though the learner is the lowliest of persons: Do you really love me?’ (SKS4: 239/PF: 33). The sorrow peculiar to the love of the Incarnate God for us is that it bears ‘the possibility of the offense of the human race when out of love one becomes its savior!’ (SKS4: 239/PF: 32) and thus is ‘obliged to fear for everyone’s perdition’ (SKS4: 238/PF: 32). But one can extrapolate to human love—indeed, it is not hard to think of Kierkegaard’s situation with Regine when one reads the poignant expression of how the one who loves must bear all the tearful pleading of the beloved to express his love differently (SKS4: 239/PF: 33). In this way we learn that our love for others can also be the occasion for ‘offence’, without ceasing to be love. Chapter three, which is about ‘paradoxical passion’ (SKS4: 244/PF: 39) and looks on the surface like a simple epistemological consideration of faith, explores the ‘paradox of love’ (SKS4: 244/PF: 39). In particular, Climacus asks us to consider ‘the condition of erotic love [Elskov], even though it is an imperfect metaphor’ (SKS4: 252/PF: 47–8)— that is, ‘Self-love lies at the basis of love [Kjerlighed], but at its peak its paradoxical passion wills its own downfall’ (SKS4: 252/PF: 48). In other words, the passion of selflove reaches outwards in erotic love of another (for my sake) yet in so doing invokes its own downfall (when the other becomes more important than my own self).

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Moreover, the way in which faith is described in terms of the mutually correcting terms, ‘passion’ (SKS4: 252, 257, 261, 263/PF: 48, 54, 59, 61) and ‘leap’ (SKS4: 248/PF: 43), reveals something more, analogically, about love—namely, that love is neither a ‘knowledge’ nor an act of (unconditioned) ‘will’ (SKS4: 264/PF: 62), but a ‘passion’ which transcends the traditional dichotomy between intellect and will, between passive and active. In all these ways, then, the Fragments’ ‘thought experiment’ adds to the story of human love, which Kierkegaard tells by exploring the analogy between the passion of revealed faith and the passion of love as well as between the paradox of revealed faith and the paradox of love.

III. The Paradigm of Love (2): Works of Love (1847) Perhaps the richest episode in Kierkegaard’s story of love is his series of fifteen deliberations on the love commandment (to love the neighbour as oneself); it is entitled Works of Love [Kjerlihedens Gjerninger] and occupies a unique place in Kierkegaard’s authorship, signalled by its unusual subtitle—namely, ‘Deliberations in the Form of Discourses’. This work is signed by Kierkegaard in his own name and elaborates Christian scriptural texts, yet he does not put it in the same category as the Christian ‘discourses’, or even the upbuilding ‘discourses’, which he also signed and thus distinguished from his pseudonymous writings. Although these ‘deliberations’ are ‘in the form of discourses’, Kierkegaard suggests that they are decidedly different—‘deliberations’, he notes, are meant to turn things ‘topsy-turvy’, whereas ‘discourses’ assume that people basically already have the right idea and need to be motivated (SKS20/KJN4: NB2:176 [JP1 641]). In Works of Love Kierkegaard faces head-on the issue of the status of interpersonal relationships (intersubjectivity) and human needs. This is not the story of a ‘private relationship’ with God (like that found in Fear and Trembling). Nor is it the story of the solitariness of the ethical subject (like that found in Concluding Unscientific Postscript)—here we find Kierkegaard’s mature attempt to explore what we learn about human love from what in his journals at this time he insists is the kind of God who loves and wants to be loved. If we look back at Either/Or as an exploration of the suggestion that to live rightly is to love rightly and well, we can see Works of Love as coming full circle. Here we find Kierkegaard’s mature attempt to show that love is normatively ethical and religious at the same time—that genuine ethical love is preserved and transfigured in religious love. If we look back at Fear and Trembling as an inquiry into the relation between love of God and love of those human beings who are especially important to us, we will find in Works of Love a place for the dialectical development of this theme, and if we look back at Concluding Unscientific Postscript as suggesting ‘the less externality, the more inwardness’ (SKS7: 348/CUP 1: 382), then we will find in Works of Love a qualification of, or even challenge to this in the new emphasis on ‘fruits’ of love.

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Love is one yet many We have in Works of Love the fullest development of the paradox that love is one yet many. Indeed, Kierkegaard insists both on the unity of love and on its varied expressions. On the one hand, our ability to love is an incomparable ‘gift of God’, which ‘he implanted in our hearts’ (SKS9: 163/WL: 163): ‘it is God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, he who himself is Love [Kjerlighed]’ (SKS9: 219/WL: 216). The fact that our ability to love at all is God’s gift of Kjerlighed accounts for the unity of love. If God is Love [Kjerlighed], then the love through which we humans love is the actualization of the potential (the energy) of Kjerlighed. On the other hand, Kierkegaard (in the three-part theoretical analysis, which he once thought of putting as an appendix to the work) makes distinctions between (1) erotic love [Elskov], (2) friendship [Venskab], and (3) a kind of love, which is commanded and for which the only appropriate word is the same word used to refer to God’s love—that is, love for neighbour [Kjerlighed til Naeste]. Kjerlighed is the immediate love by which we are loved by God and which enables us to love others—that is, Kierkegaard uses the same Danish word [Kjerlighed] to refer to God as Love, to the love placed in us by God, as well as to the love for neighbour we are commanded to express. Kjerlighed is thus prior to any distinction between erotic love and non-erotic love. So if erotic love, friendship, and neighbour love are kinds of caring that we humans experience, and there is only one source of love in us, then love is one yet many. To make this point in another way, we should note that the most basic distinction Kierkegaard makes is between Kjerlighed and Forkjerlighed—that is, between non-preferential love and ‘preferential’ love (SKS9: 59/WL: 52). The common core of the two words is crucial in revealing the unity of love—Kjerlighed is, one could say, the (linguistic) substance of Forkjerlighed, but in Forkjerlighed the caring is qualified, focused, directed, centred on specific others with qualities we like. The prefix restricts or limits the caring to preferential caring. Here we can recall Judge William’s claim that ‘the real constituting element, the substance [of marriage] is love [Kjerlighed]—or, if you want to give it more specific emphasis, erotic love [Elskov]’ (SKS3: 40/EO2: 32). Kierkegaard is in good philosophical company. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Kierkegaard puts erotic love and friendship in the same category of self-love (or preference) (Aristotle 1954: IX, 4; Aquinas 1964: 91), and like them, Kierkegaard distinguishes between ‘proper self-love’ and ‘selfish self-love’ (SKS9: 26, 152/WL: 18, 151). Like Immanuel Kant, Kierkegaard insists that the love commanded by the love commandment is not feeling, affection, or attraction—yet is still appropriately called a kind of ‘love’. In Kant we find in tandem with his claim that love as ‘inclination’ [Liebe als Neigung] cannot be commanded (Kant 1996: 401; Kant 1997a: 16; Kant 1997b: 71), the claim that we have a duty of love for our neighbour [Pflict der Nächstenliebe; Liebespflict] (Kant 1996: 199). More recently, Emmanuel Lévinas has also denied that the commandment concerns feeling or attraction, and despite his early reservations about ‘the compromised word “love” ’ and his preference for the word ‘responsibility’ (Lévinas 1985: 52),

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Lévinas in his later years spoke of ‘love of one’s neighbour’, which he defined as ‘love without Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect, love without concupiscence’; the unconditionality of the command leads Lévinas to what he calls ‘a grave view of Agape in terms of responsibility for the other’ (Lévinas 1998: 103, 113). Kierkegaard contrasts preference with a love that is not restricted by preference at all—we are commanded to love with a love that is unconditional in scope and bindingness. Everyone is my neighbour because all are equally God’s children and that equality is construed by Kierkegaard in terms of ‘kinship’—the ‘kinship of all human beings’ (SKS9: 76, 80, 90/WL: 69, 74, 75, 85). No one can be excluded from my obligation to care for them with a caring respect for their dignity as equals—the Good Samaritan need not have been affectionate to fulfil the command, but he did need to be sensitive and caring. It is worth noting here that Kierkegaard’s view of love in Works of Love has often been criticized. It has been claimed that he proposes a hierarchy of loves, in which nonpreferential love for neighbour is at the top because he thinks that ‘all natural affection involves culpable self-interest’ (Hannay 1991: 247) or because Kierkegaard lacks a broad enough notion of proper self-love to include preferential loves (Krishek 2009: 116; Walsh 1988: 248). Others might read this as meaning that there is no question of hierarchy, but only at the price of reducing all genuine love to non-preferential love. I have been suggesting, on the contrary, that the paradox that love, for Kierkegaard, is one yet many precludes both the notion of hierarchy as well as a reduction of all loves to a single one. Kierkegaard explicitly rejects the view that Christian love (that is, love for neighbour) is a ‘higher’ love and that erotic love and friendship are a lower ‘grade of good’ (SKS9: 52/ WL: 45). He insists that Christian love for neighbour ‘can lie at the base of and be present in every other expression of love’ (SKS9: 147–8/WL: 146). Erotic love and friendship are not in competition with love for neighbour; in fact, he formulates the goal as follows: ‘in erotic love and friendship, preserve love for the neighbor’ (SKS9: 69/WL: 62). Erotic love and friendship must be maintained as erotic love and friendship if this injunction is to make any sense (Ferreira 2008: 101–2). Thus, he writes: ‘love the beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let love for the neighbor be the sanctifying element in your union’s covenant with God’ (SKS9: 69/WL: 62). Kierkegaard assumes that a husband must love his wife ‘in particular’—what he calls to our attention is that one must never love her ‘in such a way that she is an exception to being the neighbor that every human being is’ (SKS9: 143/WL: 141–2). I take this to be Kierkegaard’s way of reminding us that we can no more take advantage of our wife (or child, or friend) than of anyone else just because we have a preferential relation to them; we cannot emotionally or physically abuse them, we cannot take them for granted—because however intimate and special the relationship is, each remains a neighbour, an equal before God. In sum, preferential love can be sharply contrasted conceptually with non-preferential love—preferential love is, by definition, not non-preferential. This has led some to see a dilemma for (or confusion in) Kierkegaard: they ask, ‘how can I love my romantic beloved (assuming that this is a love that is by definition preferential) by virtue of a love which is essentially and decisively non-preferential’ (Krishek 2009: 124). However, if

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Kierkegaard’s goal is to ‘preserve’ neighbour love ‘in erotic love and friendship’, then it has to be the case that he thinks they can coincide materially, and that the two are not mutually exclusive in lived experience. Incidentally, in the light of Kierkegaard’s affirmation of the possibility of ‘proper selflove’ (SKS9: 26/WL: 18), which he shares with Aristotle and Aquinas, it seems appropriate that the few places where Kierkegaard seems to disparage ‘all self-love’ (SKS9: 61, 63/ WL: 55, 56) be read in the light of Aristotle’s assumption that in general the term ‘selflove’ ‘takes it meanings from the prevailing type of self-love, which is a bad one’ (Aristotle 1954: IX, 8). That is, given the affirmation of ‘proper self-love,’ and the unfortunate prevalence of the ‘selfishness in self-love’ (SKS9: 29/WL: 21), there may often be an implicit ‘selfish’ modifying Kierkegaard’s comments about it.

Love’s other paradoxes Works of Love also reveals some of love’s other paradoxical dimensions. Love is paradoxical because it is both a gift and a need. In addressing the concrete duty we have to ‘love the people we see’ (SKS9: 155/WL: 154), which implies ‘seeing’ the people we love, Kierkegaard begins with an impassioned description of love as ‘need’. Although he thinks that our ability to love is a ‘gift’, the connection is that God’s gift of love to us is a gift that includes within itself a need to express itself. Kierkegaard speaks passionately about human need: our ‘innate need for companionship’, (SKS9: 155/WL: 154); ‘How deeply the need of love is rooted in human nature!’; ‘the first remark . . . made about humanity’ is God’s judgement that ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ (SKS9: 155/WL: 154). This need FOR love is, however, also a need TO love— we have a deep need ‘to love and be loved’ (SKS9: 156/WL: 155); even Christ ‘humanly felt this need to love and be loved by an individual human being’ (SKS9: 156/WL: 155). Kierkegaard teaches us about the need of love to love when he compares the love placed in us by God with a plant, which needs (presses forward, craves) to express itself or it will wither and die—’to be able to be known by its fruits is a need in love’ (SKS9: 18/WL: 10). His conclusion that ‘to love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living’ shows the real ‘paradoxicalness’ of a commandment to love (SKS9: 368/WL: 375). If it is love’s need to love, then to love is the most natural thing to do—in this sense, love as such does not need to be commanded. This does not of course preclude the role for a commandment to direct love unselfishly, a commandment to guide our love, and this is explicitly what Kierkegaard says: ‘eternity’s shall binds and guides this great need so that it shall not go astray’ (SKS9: 74/WL: 67). The commandment guides the energy of love’s need to express itself. The commandment does not tell us to love; rather, it guides ‘how’ we love. In creating us, God implanted love in our hearts, and the command presupposes that love. God’s gift of love was the gift of a need, and the command requires us not to restrict that need preferentially. Love, moreover, is paradoxically at the same time a gift to us, a need we have, and a task for us. If God is Love (Gud er Kjerlighed), then the love at issue in the love

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commandment (Kjerlighed) is God’s gift to us, at the same time that it is a task for us to accomplish. The ‘shall’ of the love commandment (You shall love your neighbour as yourself) is both indicative and imperative. Love is also paradoxical in that it is a gift as well as an infinite debt we owe others. Here the notion of ‘gift’ is double-sided—love is God’s gift to us but it is also something we must do as a hidden giver. One of the most striking motifs of Works of Love is Kierkegaard’s provocative notion of love as an infinite debt we owe others—a debt that cannot be paid off, nor should we wish to even if we could. Kierkegaard follows Luther here, who likewise sees the debt to love one another as ‘a debt which is never paid, but rather must continue to be paid forever’ (Luther 1972: 111). Our duty to love those we see is ‘an outstanding debt to which God obligates you’ (SKS9: 164/WL: 163). More precisely, ‘To give a person one’s love is, as has been said, the highest a person can give—and yet by giving it he runs into an infinite debt. Therefore we can say that this is the distinctive characteristic of love: that the one who loves by giving, infinitely, runs into infinite debt’ (SKS9: 177/WL: 177). What’s more, it is ‘our duty to remain in love’s debt to one another’ (SKS9: 177/WL: 177). What is at stake in this radical notion of ‘infinite’ debt is that we remain always in debt, and always in an ‘unlessening’ debt—the one who loves can never say ‘enough’. Love, for Kierkegaard, means wanting to remain in the debt of love, wanting never to get out of such debt. Resistance to the idea that our debt to another is infinite implies that we want to give with the unspoken addition ‘See, now I have paid my debt’ or at least made an ‘installment payment’ on it (SKS9: 178/WL: 178). In fact, though it may seem counterintuitive at first, ‘for his own sake the lover wishes to remain in debt; he does not wish exemption from any sacrifice, far from it’ (SKS9: 178/WL: 178). Kierkegaard’s point is that the striving must be both unending—we can never stop, or say we have done enough—and active: ‘When it is a duty to remain in the debt of love to one another, then to remain in debt is not a fanatical expression, is not an idea about love, but is action’ (SKS9: 187/WL: 187). Love is practical—we owe others their welfare. Kierkegaard sees human welfare as follows: ‘to become one’s own master is the highest— and in love to help someone toward that, to become himself, free, independent, his own master, to help him stand alone—that is the greatest beneficence’ (SKS9: 272/WL: 274). He repeats: ‘Insofar as the loving one is able, he seeks to encourage a person to become himself, to become his own master’ (SKS9: 276/WL: 278). Another dimension of the gift of love is brought to the fore when Kierkegaard tells us that ‘love gives in such a way that the gift looks as if it were the recipient’s property’ (SKS9: 272/WL: 274). He recommends the hiddenness of the giver—namely, that we should keep attention away from ourselves and act out of concern for the other’s selfrespect. We owe people help if they need it, and we owe it to them not to give it to them in ways that humiliate them or will cause even greater problems for them. We should try to be as hidden as possible—i.e. not call attention to our giving. Kierkegaard assumes that fulfilment of the love command is something ‘of which everyone is capable’ (SKS27: Pap. 507/JP2: 1939). But can I ever fulfil an infinite task? That depends on what we mean by ‘fulfil’. I can never finish the task, but that does not mean that I can never fulfil the task. This distinction between a fulfilable task and a

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completeable task is important (Ferreira 2009: 125–6). One can distinguish between a work that achieves a certain quality and a work that is completed. Kierkegaard’s answer is that I can fulfil the love commandment whenever I act in the appropriate way. For Kierkegaard, there is always another work to be performed lovingly, yet I can perform genuine works of love. Kierkegaard says that love can be shown ‘in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice’ (SKS9: 181/WL: 181), and even if the task is never finished, we can express genuine love at a given time, whether it is helping the wounded person in the ditch as the Good Samaritan did, or opening the door lovingly for another person, or forgiving someone without humiliating them. Another way to understand how the commandment can be fulfilled even if it is infinite is to make a distinction between ‘helping everyone’ and ‘not excluding anyone’. The commandment is unconditional in scope—no one is excluded. But, the commandment cannot oblige us to help ‘everyone’ ‘everywhere’ since this is an impossible task—we cannot affect everyone, we cannot be everywhere, and for each one we help there is another we cannot help at the same time or with the same resources. Moreover, love as an infinite debt does not entail, for Kierkegaard, that we ought to love another more than ourselves: to love someone more than yourself would mean to accede to their wishes in adoring obedience—but, Kierkegaard says, ‘you expressly have no right to do this’ (SKS9: 28/WL: 20). The ‘as yourself ’ of the commandment is an important clarification of what it means to love others: ‘if the commandment is properly understood it also says the opposite: You shall love yourself in the right way. Therefore, if anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either’ (SKS9: 30/WL: 22). Another dimension of commanded love’s paradoxicality is that Kjerlighed til Naeste is faithful yet free. It is faithful because it is a matter of unconditional obligation; it is free because it is not bound to or based in variable feelings. He presents the unconditionality of the bindingness of duty as intending to guarantee both unchangingness and freedom: ‘Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence’ (SKS9: 36/WL: 29). Genuine love does not helplessly and automatically go up and down depending on whether the other loves us (SKS9: 42, 46/WL: 34, 39). The claim that ‘love abides’ is another version of the requirement that love not vary directly with changes in the one loved—‘Such a love stands and does not fall with the contingency of its object . . . it never falls’ (SKS9: 46/WL: 39). If I have committed myself to someone, or if someone is dependent on me, I cannot, in the event that person ceases to love me, exclude them from the category of ‘neighbour’ to which they belong whether or not they please me or love me. We are responsible for the children we have, bound not to exclude them from our obligation to love, even if or when we dislike them or lose our preferential inclination for them. Kierkegaard ties the concept of unchangeablness to that of independence (SKS9: 44–6/WL: 37–9); in other words, I do not have to respond with tit-for-tat (‘If you will not love me, then I will hate you’)—I am free. Finally, love is paradoxical because it appreciates both sameness and difference, both the absolute equality of others and their radical concrete distinctiveness. Here the

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concern with the relation and tension between inner and outer, which informs the entire authorship is construed in terms of visibility and hiddenness, vision and blindness. The love that can be commanded, and is commanded in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, is a caring responsibility for the dignity of others. In order not to be a begrudging fulfilment of responsibility, it must be a caring one, a compassionate one— though such care does not always express itself in the same way. One’s love for one’s family and friends should preserve love for them as equals, even while it involves intimacy and affection. One’s love for the stranger lying injured in the ditch will not require the same intimacy and affection, but it will require the compassion due a child of God. In other words, love is paradoxical because while it respects the absolute equality of all people, it attends to the concrete distinctiveness of each person. How do we know that Kierkegaard is committed to our maintaining what is distinctive about erotic love? He tells us so explicitly. Supporting his claim that ‘erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness and friendship the greatest temporal good’ (SKS9: 266/WL: 267) he tells us that husband and wife inhabit a particular kind of relationship: ‘that she is your wife is then a more precise specification of your particular relationship to each other’ (SKS9: 143/WL: 141). Normatively love is attentive to the people ‘we see’ (love is vision) and love is blind to all that seems to hide our kinship. Precisely because love is a caring for the people ‘we see’, it should express itself in works of love, which Kierkegaard calls love’s ‘fruits’—‘to be able to be known by its fruits is a need in love’ (SKS9: 18/WL: 10). Expressions of love can be genuine even if they fail to accomplish what they set out to—love is both inner and necessarily has fruits. In sum, Works of Love presents a nuanced picture of love. It distinguishes love that is a feeling of attraction or inclination from love that is best construed as a kind of responsibility for compassionate caring. Such responsibility is at the same time a debt to others that should be offered to them as a gift directed to their welfare. Moreover, Kierkegaard reveals an incredible sensitivity to the ways in which we express our compassionate caring, claiming that the way to love is to give the gift as if it were the recipient’s own property. The focus in Works of Love is not on loves based on inclination and attraction— though, as noted above, Kierkegaard appreciates the richness of such loves (cf. also Green and Ellis 1999: 354–67; Walsh 1995: 173). His claim that ‘To love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love you are not really living’ (SKS9: 368/WL: 375) includes preferential love, as is shown by Kierkegaard’s canonization of such love in Christ’s ‘craving to hear’ that Peter loved him ‘more than these’ (SKS9: 156/WL: 155) and his insistence that ‘to love humanly is to love an individual human being and to wish to be that individual human being’s best beloved’ (SKS9: 157/WL: 156). The point of Works of Love is to shock us into realizing two things. First, the point is to shock us into realizing that even when we have no inclination or attraction at all to someone, and even if they hate us, or resist or reject our love, we must preserve the love that respects the dignity and equality of each individual. Second, the point is to shock us into realizing that even in erotic love and friendship we must preserve the love that respects the dignity and equality of each individual.

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IV. Conclusion Kierkegaard’s authorship thus contributes to an understanding of love, and the foregoing has provided a taste of that in selected works. Whatever form love takes, however, is for Kierkegaard ultimately possible only because we have been loved infinitely. One example Kierkegaard likes to use to indicate both that we can love and why we can love is from his journals: ‘It is like a child’s giving his parents a present, purchased, however, with what the child has received from his parents’ (SKS20/KJN4: NB:133 [JP 2: 1121]). This theistic view is, admittedly, optimistic about the possibilities of genuine human love for others, whether preferential (‘erotic love and earthly love are the joy of life’ and issue in ‘delight’ (SKS9: 151/WL: 150)) or love for neighbour. But his view is also a tragic one in that preferential loves are fragile (they blossom and die with our selfishness and our mortality) and the task of caring for the dignity and equality of others is a difficult one. Sometimes the problems in our preferential love relationships are not our fault and could not be remedied by our treating the other with greater respect. But Kierkegaard’s ethic is not meant to prevent tragedy (Ferreira 2008: 105). On the other hand, there may well be cases in which the failure to honour the other as an equal is part of the problem, and invoking neighbour-love can help in that respect.

References Aristotle (1954). The Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Sir David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Aquinas (1964). Summa Theologiae 1a2ae, Q.28.1. (Blackfriars, NY: McGraw Hill Book Co.). Ferreira, M. Jamie (1991). Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Oxford University, Clarendon Press). ——– (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——– (2008). ‘The Problematic Agapeistic Ideal—Again’, in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward Mooney (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 93–110. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1988). The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Victor Lange and Judith Ryan, ed. David Wellbery (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers). Green, Ronald and Theresa Ellis (1999). ‘Erotic Love in the Religious Existence-Sphere’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: 16: Works of Love, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Hannay, Alastair (1982 [1991]). Kierkegaard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Kant, Immanuel (1996). The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (1997a). The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (1997b). The Critique of Practical Reason (1787), trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). These will be covered by our abbreviations

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Krishek, Sharon (2009). Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lévinas, Emmanuel (1985). Ethics and Infinity (1982), trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). ——– (1998). ‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love’ (1982) in Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press), 103–21. Lippitt, John (2003). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling (London: Routledge). Luther, Martin (1972). ‘Lectures on Romans’ (1515–16), in Luther’s Works, vol. 25, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House). Mooney, Edward F. (1991). Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press). Walsh, Sylvia I. (1988). ‘Forming the Heart: The Role of Love in Kierkegaard’s Thought’, in The Grammar of the Heart, ed. Richard H. Bell (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 234–56. ——– (1995). ‘Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Love’, in The Nature and Pursuit of Love, ed. David Goicoechea (New York: Prometheus Books), 167–79.

Suggested Reading Evans, C. Stephen (2004). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ferreira, M. Jamie (2009). Kierkegaard. Blackwell Great Minds Series (Chichester: WileyBlackwell). Furtak, Rick Anthony (2005). Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press). Hall, Amy Laura (2002). The Treachery of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mooney, Edward F. (2008). Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Pattison, George and Stephen Shakespeare (eds.) (1998). Kierkegaard: The Self in Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Perkins, Robert L. (ed.) (1999). International Kierkegaard Commentary 16: Works of Love (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Walsh, Sylvia (1994). Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press).

chapter 18

iron y k . b rian s öderquist

Irony shows up in Søren Kierkegaard’s authorship from one end to the other: It was the explicit theme of his thesis at the University of Copenhagen, On the Concept of Irony, which traces the history of irony from its origins in ancient Greece to its appearance in the fashionable literature of the German Romantics. We find it in his early works where disillusioned pseudonyms embody the ironic lifestyle of these Romantic artists and authors; in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the so-called ironic sphere of existence is given as much emphasis as the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres. And throughout his works—both pseudonymous and edifying—we find appreciative discussions about the irony of his lifelong interlocutor, the man he calls the greatest of all human thinkers: Socrates. Kierkegaard doesn’t just write about irony, of course; most of his readers also agree that he employs it—in one way or another—in the way he writes. His dissertation committee, for example, saw ironic witticisms scattered throughout it and complained that it disrupted and perhaps undermined the serious world of academics. Other readers see the chatty, facetious writing style of his pseudonymous works as another example of the way irony can disturb the clarity philosophy strives to achieve: while a reader might expect or demand a clear, conceptual argument, his irony hinders that approach. Moreover, the fact that his authorship offers a plurality of voices via pseudonyms—few of whom declare their intentions unambiguously—is often viewed as a form of ironic indirection. Like all irony, Kierkegaard’s is slippery, and it is not immediately apparent how these different forms of irony are related. What do such diverse phenomena as Socratic interrogation, Romantic imagination, witty speech, and literary indirection have in common? Taking Kierkegaard’s own discussion about irony as the starting point, it is tempting to give his answer: ‘nothing’. Or, to say it a bit less playfully, there is no positive ‘something’ these ironies aim to bring about. Rather, they all function ‘negatively’: Indirectly, irony says ‘that is not what I mean’; ‘this is not who I am’; ‘that is not true’; ‘that is not authentic’. Irony is negativity, even ‘infinite absolute negativity’, as he puts it in On the Concept of Irony (SKS1: 65/CI: 6).

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This negativity is also what makes the concept irony central to Kierkegaard’s authorial project: Regardless of what question he asks, his first response is negative, i.e. ‘It’s not what you think it is’; the historically-mediated answers are not sufficient. Irony is thus associated with ignorance about answers to the great questions and, for him, is a condition for any search for truth. As he writes in On the Concept of Irony, ‘[irony] is not the truth, but the way’ (SKS1: 356/CI: 327). The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the different forms of irony in Kierkegaard’s work and to examine how the pervasive negativity of irony plays different roles in different contexts. This overview will be broken down into several interrelated discussions. First, we begin with the most obvious question: How does Kierkegaard understand irony as a rhetorical tool, and how does he employ it throughout his authorship? Second, we turn to irony as we see it idealized in the figure of Kierkegaard’s Socrates, who remains, for him, the greatest human thinker precisely because of his insistent negativity. His form of irony dispels illusion, and as it does so it opens up a newfound sense of freedom. Third, we look at the other side of that same ironic freedom, articulated by the early German Romantics, and examine the challenges it poses to the modern individual. With this, we find one of the most pernicious problems in Kierkegaard’s entire authorship: how to deal with the freedom not to be oneself.

I. Kierkegaard’s Rhetorical Irony It’s Not What You Say, It’s How You Say It The natural starting point for any discussion of Kierkegaard’s understanding of irony is his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard’s aim in this impressive but often overlooked work is to give an account of the different forms of irony that were already being discussed by academics in his time, including Socratic irony and the irony present in contemporary German literature (SKS1: 282–3/CI: 243). When Kierkegaard begins his general definition of irony, however, he finds no better place to start than with the most familiar kind of irony, namely, a statement that expresses the opposite of what one means: a seeming compliment that is really an acrimonious critique, a playful amorous innuendo that is meant in earnest, a triviality that is expressed in a deadly serious tone, or something painful spoken of as if it didn’t matter at all. You say one thing, but mean another (SKS1: 285/CI: 246). In all such cases, he says, what is uttered and what is meant are in tension. He writes: In orations, a figure [of speech] bearing the name ‘irony’ makes frequent appearances and it is characterized like this: it says the opposite of what it means. Already here we have a feature found in every form of irony, namely, that the phenomenon is not the essence but is opposite the essence. (SKS1: 286/CI: 247; Kierkegaard’s italics, trans. modified)

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Here Kierkegaard calls attention to the disparity between the meaning the ironic speaker would like to convey indirectly—the essence—and the literal words he or she presents to the world outside—the phenomenon. Note that this is the beginning of a negative definition: the phenomenon, he says, is not the essence; what you see—or hear—is not what you get, at least not immediately. When a person ironically praises the sideburns of someone who considers them to be ‘particularly handsome’ (SKS1: 288/CI: 250), the speaker literally uses flattering words, but the real intent is to convey just the opposite. And even if this kind of ironic statement ultimately ‘wants to be understood’ (SKS1: 286–7/CI: 248), it is still different from directly saying what is meant and it still momentarily hinders immediate, straightforward communication. Kierkegaard points to a similar disruption of communication observed in more persistent forms of irony. When irony is not merely used in isolated comments here and there, but is employed more methodically—as we see in Socratic dialogues, for example, or an entire book written in an ironic tone—immediate comprehension is impeded. And decoding the irony is not a simple matter. The intended meaning of the dialogue as a whole becomes ambiguous. As is the case with discrete ironic statements, this kind of irony functions negatively: what Socrates says is not what he means—and it is precisely what has not been said that is so important. This implies that irony is not only a device that complicates direct communication, but also a tool to communicate in an indirect, ambiguous manner. Univocal meaning is disrupted, but intelligibility is not thereby eliminated (cf. Agacinski 1988: 19). In On the Concept of Irony, he makes this point by comparing Socratic speech to an optical illusion he had once seen in an etching: There is an engraving that portrays the grave of Napoleon. Two large trees overshadow it. There is nothing else to see in the picture, and the immediate spectator will see no more. Between these two trees, however, is an empty space, and as the eye traces its contours Napoleon himself suddenly appears out of the nothingness . . . It is the same with Socrates’ replies. As one sees the trees, so one hears his discourse; as the trees are trees, so also do his words mean exactly what they literally mean. There is not a single syllable to give any hint of another interpretation, just as there is not a single brush stroke to suggest Napoleon. Yet it is this empty space, this nothingness, that conceals what is most important. (SKS1: 80–1/ CI: 19; trans. modified)1

Note again the negative here: it is not what Socrates reveals that matters most, but rather what is concealed. And note too that this also implies that irony doesn’t eliminate seriousness. As Kierkegaard puts it in Postscript, ‘the presence of irony doesn’t necessarily mean that earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that’ (SKS7: 253n./CUP1: 277n.). Kierkegaard’s discussion of irony naturally leads to questions about how he uses it in his authorship. After all, it is easy to suspect that an author who devoted an entire academic thesis to irony is playing with it in one way or another in the works he later

1

Cf. Lee Capel’s translation: Kierkegaard 1966.

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produced. Even in his own lifetime, he was sometimes called the master of irony by Copenhagen’s journalists. But what forms of irony show up in Kierkegaard’s authorship? And to what ends? It turns out that questions like these have been asked from the moment On the Concept of Irony was delivered to his dissertation committee at the University of Copenhagen—and a steady stream of answers has continued ever since. On the playful end of the spectrum, we find readers calling attention to an irreverent irony aimed at academia; others see a playful irony in the fact that Kierkegaard doesn’t just speak directly with a single message but uses pseudonyms to express various world views; and at the more serious end of the spectrum, we find those who see irony as Kierkegaard’s way of dealing with the limits of language itself.

Playful Negativity and the Trial of Laughter Some of the first readers to sense irony in Kierkegaard’s works were the members of his dissertation committee. Kierkegaard had received permission from the king to write his dissertation in Danish rather than the conventional Latin after explaining that it would simply be impossible to treat a theme like irony in an academic language—and when he submitted the dissertation, it was obvious he took advantage of his freedom. The committee members were almost universally annoyed by the sarcastic witticisms scattered throughout the ostensibly scholarly document. One assessment reads, ‘The exposition suffers from a self-satisfied pursuit of the piquant and the witty, which not infrequently lapses into the purely vulgar and tasteless’ (SKSK1: 135/Kirmmse 1996: 31), while another reader adds, ‘various excesses in the sarcastic and mocking sort’ should be removed since they are ‘inappropriate in a piece of academic writing’ (SKSK1: 136/ Kirmmse 1996: 32). The committee obviously wasn’t impressed by the irony. As they saw it, the jocularity detracted from the serious mission of scholarship—and Kierkegaard knew it. In a journal entry written before the evaluation was complete, he records a pre-emptive response to their critique: ‘The ease of the style will be censured. . . . And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, also that I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work’ (Pap. III B 2–3/CI: 441). But Kierkegaard also seems to suggest that the ironic style was more than a diversion from his labours. In a public response to a review of the dissertation (SKS14: 41–6/COR: 3–12),2 he taunts the reviewer for his failure to see that its style is just as important as its arguments. After offering several tongue-in-cheek explanations for why the review 2

Kierkegaard’s ‘Public Confession’ appeared in Fædrelandet, vol. 3, no. 904, 12 June 1842 (reprinted in SKS14: 41–6/COR: 3–12) as a response to the review by Frederik Andreas Beck, a young scholar who studied alongside Kierkegaard, and remained an attentive reader of Kierkegaard throughout his lifetime.

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misunderstands the book even though it offers an accurate account of the content, he sarcastically concludes that the reviewer displays a ‘laudable naiveté’ (SKS14: 45/COR: 9–10) because he missed the irony. But was this irony more than a slapstick critique of academics who take themselves or their projects too seriously? Some scholars have suggested that his ironic tone doesn’t have to be viewed as mere flippancy. When he ironically smirks at the academic world, which in his time was more ceremonious about its mission, he compels his reader to think about the authority of academia and other such institutions in general. His irony asks whether it is confident enough about its legitimacy that it can withstand an ‘equivocal smile’ (SKS1: 285/CI: 246). The same goes for irony directed at religious or political institutions. Can the claims of Church or Crown survive levity? Are the cultural customs, norms, beliefs, habits, and traditions embodied in institutions strong enough without the assistance of imposed reverence? As one observer puts it, ‘Kierkegaard didn’t often write with an appropriate scholarly seriousness, yet that very lack of seriousness can itself be seen as an instrument of critically subverting discourses, and of inviting readers to reflect on whether a given philosophical or religious position is indeed strong enough to stand up to the trial of laughter’ (Pattison 2006: 116).

Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Polyphony of Voices3 The ironic opposition between what Kierkegaard says and what he means has been identified at other levels of the authorship as well. His use of pseudonyms, for example, especially in his earliest pieces, sets his work apart from that of many canonized philosophers and theologians. Among other things, the pseudonymous structure makes it difficult to simply attribute the positions presented in these works to Kierkegaard. One can’t read early works like Either/Or, Repetition, or Stages on Life’s Way, all of which contain pieces penned by different pseudonymous authors, as straightforward expressions of Kierkegaard’s own views; and there is no indication in the works themselves that we ought to try to attribute one of the positions to Kierkegaard himself. The genre is obviously closer to fiction than metaphysics. Whatever else is going on, it is safe to say that the author behind this gallery of characters is not simply and directly saying what he means, and the intent of the author—if we assume that it makes sense to insist on discovering it—remains hidden. Likewise, even in less polyphonic works like Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the positions presented cannot be attributed to the historical Kierkegaard without running into complications. These pseudonyms appear as characters in their own works, speaking in first person about fictional events, situations, and world views. Moreover, these pseudonyms obviously don’t agree with each other: Johannes de silentio writes things Johannes Climacus wouldn’t

3

For more on Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms, see the chapter by Edward F. Mooney in this volume.

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recognize or accept, and Climacus writes things that Kierkegaard, the author of edifying discourses, would consider inappropriate in a faithful setting as an address to faithful individuals. Kierkegaard famously asked, in his own name, that the perspectives of the pseudonyms not be attributed to him (SKS7: 569–73/CUP1: 625–30), but even if he hadn’t, it would be necessary to refrain from so doing. If we take each pseudonymous work individually, we will have difficulty finding an unambiguous message of the sort we expect in academic works; and it is hard to imagine how we could hope for one from works that use so many devices from the sphere of fiction. Readers such as Jean-Paul Sartre take Kierkegaard’s ironic use of pseudonymity to be essential to his project as a whole. When we read Kierkegaard, he writes, we are constantly aware that the ideas presented to us are not necessarily to be taken at face value, and we are haunted by our own knowledge of the polyphony of the authorship—even those works signed ‘Søren Kierkegaard’. By employing pseudonyms, he can advocate a particular position and retract it as soon as he speaks in another voice. We no longer have a consistent philosophical position, and we no longer have a consistent author behind the authorship. With Kierkegaard’s use of irony, he revealed himself and concealed himself at the same time. He did not refuse to communicate, but simply held on to his secrecy in the act of communication. His mania for pseudonyms was a systematic disqualification of proper names: even to assign him as an individual before the tribunal of others, a welter of mutually contradictory appellations was necessary . . . he ceaselessly fabricated himself by writing. (Sartre 1972: 147–8)

This polyphony naturally leads to interpretive debates about which of these voices ought to be prioritized, and the degree to which his authorship is unified in aim and purpose. One is compelled to ask if his various voices really lead the reader in a single direction, towards a goal determined by a grand author standing behind it all—as he himself tried to argue. Or does the polyphony in these works imply a plurality of aims and a host of different interpretive directions, as Sartre claims? Better still, is it laughable to attempt to decode the irony and thereby gain an inside track on understanding these ambiguous works? Regardless of how one is inclined to answer questions like these, we have to admit that a univocal message in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works isn’t forthcoming. His indirection forces the reader to deal with the fact that there is no author directly speaking his mind, and this fact more obviously pushes interpretive responsibility back to the reader. Even for those who are optimistic about the possibility of locating something like an authorial intent, the ironic use of pseudonymous masks compels one to check one’s interpretive confidence. Such is irony. You can never be sure you’ve found the real voice or the primary message. This implies that we are faced with a regression of voices that cannot be stopped by markers within the texts themselves. With this negative spiral in mind, Wayne Booth writes: In this way we rediscover, in our practical task of reading ironies, why Kierkegaard, in his theoretical task of understanding the concept of irony, should have defined

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k. brian söderquist it finally as ‘absolute infinite negativity’. Irony itself opens up doubts as soon as its possibility enters into our heads, and there is no inherent reason for discontinuing the process of doubt at any point short of infinity . . . Pursued to the end, an ironic temper can dissolve everything in an infinite chain of solvents. It is not irony but the desire to understand irony that brings such a chain to a stop. (Booth 1974: 59n.)

Once again we see signs of a negative, ironic project. Søren Kierkegaard is not the author of these works, he presents no univocal, unambiguous position, and in the end, the reader becomes responsible for deciding when and where to stop, i.e. deciding on what voices to privilege and what messages to see in the authorship.

Irony as an Expression of the Inexpressible Most scholars agree that the playful forms of rhetorical irony noted above are found throughout the pseudonymous authorship, and for the most part, it isn’t difficult to identify when Kierkegaard is writing in a chatty, unscholarly tone. And it isn’t difficult to see that this use of pseudonyms causes problems for those who would like to know what the author really means. There are, however, other forms of Kierkegaardian irony that are more difficult to target. Booth notes that [s]cholars have difficulty, for example, deciding which parts of Kierkegaard’s book, The Concept of Irony, are themselves ironic. Some sections are ‘unquestionably’ so. . . . But there are a vast number of passages in this, as in any other book by Kierkegaard, about which even experts are in disagreement, though they are never in disagreement about whether Kierkegaard intended vast numbers of . . . ironies. (Booth 1974: 47)

Part of this has to do with the tricky nature of irony itself. As noted above, the most profound forms of irony are not limited to an isolated statement or passage, but seem to pervade the entire text, as is the case with Socratic dialogue or, in Kierkegaard’s case, entire books. Irony disrupts a straightforward interpretation, and compels the reader to read between the lines, as it were, rather than simply translating the statements into logical form. What isn’t said is as important as what is said. This aspect of Kierkegaard’s use of irony is not only difficult to identify, it might even be impossible—because of the way ironic discourse works. Irony affirms even as it refutes; it makes a claim and retracts the claim at one and the same time. Irony is a tool used to express something without expressing it (cf. e.g. SKS7: 65–92/CUP1: 64–93), or to say something without saying anything (SKS4: 206/FT: 118). Irony is one of those forms of indirect communication that refuses univocal interpretation. This aspect of Kierkegaard’s theory of irony is in part informed by a larger discussion of irony going on during his time. One of the thinkers Kierkegaard resembles most closely in this context is the German Romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel, whom he

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studied closely while writing his dissertation (SKSK2–3: 88).4 Unlike his colleagues at Jena—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—Schlegel doubted that the discourse of systematic philosophy could give an account of a stable, metaphysically guaranteed truth. For him, modern philosophy could no longer hope to find universal human purposes, as if we still believed, like the Greeks, in an orderly cosmos. And he sought a discourse committed to recognizing that fact. This discourse must reflect the inconsistencies and tensions of modernity; it must be capable of holding contradictory thoughts together, while acknowledging that the contradiction cannot be eliminated; it must consciously express what it means and, at the same time, the opposite of what it means. This paradoxical discourse is, of course, ‘irony’. Kierkegaard’s use of irony and related forms of indirect language suggests that he shares many of the intuitions articulated by Schlegel. Indeed, for a host of twentiethcentury readers of of Kierkegaard, the most vital aspect of his writing has to do with his sensitivity to the philosophical limitations of clear and distinct discourse and, alternatively, the possibilities opened by his poetic discourse. Sartre, for example, is especially impressed by the way Kierkegaard uses ironic discourse to mine the tension between the universality of language and the particularity of individual experience. As Sartre sees it, Kierkegaard’s fundamental insight is that the interiority of the subject, a singular individual, can never be reduced to history, that subjective life itself is not identical with what we can say of subjective life, that subjectivity cannot be captured, preserved, or sublated by the linguistic attempts to articulate and conceptualize that life. Philosophy, understood as an articulation of the ideas that structure our world and thus as a repository of knowledge shared by anyone and everyone, fails to account for the only concrete instantiations of this knowledge, namely, particular individuals, the absolutely unique and particular configurations of that general spiritual repository. Political ideologies or religious dogmas are never manifest in pure form but only in the complicated configurations of particular persons. The most rigorous form of Hegelian thinking would suggest that the subjective particular manifestation of a concept is of little importance to scholarship precisely because the goal of scholarship is to articulate general rules, principles, patterns, trends, tendencies, movements, etc. The way a given concept or idea is distorted in a given subject is not of scholarly interest. For Sartre, Kierkegaard’s project suggests the opposite: Scholarly abstractions are the distortion (Sartre 1972: 141–56). Jacques Derrida is similarly attentive to the way Kierkegaard’s irony points towards the paradox inherent in language. Whether the object of discourse is the wholly other— a ‘secret, hidden, separate, absent, or mysterious God’ (Derrida 2008: 58)—or the ethical demands made on us every day by the human other, the language of universality is ultimately insufficient (Derrida 2008: 60–1). Derrida sees other results as well. With 4

In addition to Lucinde, which Kierkegaard explores in detail in his dissertation, he seems to have studied Schlegel’s most important early study on modern discourse, On the Study of Greek Poetry [Ueber das Studium der griechischen Poesie] (1795–7), in Fr. Schlegel’s Sämmtliche Werke, vols. 1–10, Vienna, 1822–5. See also the chapter by William McDonald in this volume for further discussion of Romanticism.

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irony, Kierkegaard avoids a didactic or admonishing tone, precisely because he makes no claims. His irony compels the reader to make and refute those claims him- or herself: Speaking in order not to say anything or to say something other than what one thinks, speaking in such a way as to intrigue, disconcert, question, to have someone or something else speak . . . means speaking ironically. Irony, in particular Socratic irony, consists in not saying anything, in not stating any knowledge, but means doing that in order to interrogate, to have someone or something speak or think. (Derrida 2008: 76–7)

Note that for Derrida, when irony is used as a tool to make another think, it is a form of Socratic irony: ‘not saying anything’, i.e. ‘not stating any knowledge’. This is indeed one of the traits Kierkegaard sees in Socratic irony as well. We turn now to a closer examination of Kierkegaard’s Socrates to see how he interprets the world’s original ironist.

II. Kierkegaard’s Negative Socrates Negativity and Nothingness There is little question that Socrates is one of the most important figures in Kierkegaard’s authorship (cf. Lippitt 2000; Howland 2006; Muench 2003, 2009; Furtak 2010a, 2010b; Possen 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). In addition to the in-depth treatment of him in On the Concept of Irony, one finds him referred to again and again in other works. Socrates plays a leading role in books such as Philosophical Fragments and Postscript, and figures prominently in The Sickness unto Death; but he plays supportive roles in the religious writings, too, where Kierkegaard often refers to him fondly as the ‘simple wise man of old’ (see e.g. SKS9: 233, 274/WL: 232, 276; SKS8: 200–1/UDVS: 96–7; SKS10: 247–8/CD: 241). The figure of Socrates is also significant for Kierkegaard in less public ways. In a journal passage from near the end of his life, for example, he describes Socrates as a ‘man with whom I have had an inexplicable rapport from my earliest days, even before I began a serious study of Plato’ (SKS25/KJN9: NB28:15; trans. modified). And strikingly, as Kierkegaard evaluated his life project just months before his death, only the life of Socrates seemed a suitable comparison. There was literally no one in eighteen hundred years of Christian history whose burden was similar to his: ‘The only analogy I have before me is Socrates; my mission is a Socratic mission’ (SKS13: 404–5/M: 340–1, trans. modified). In order to understand how Kierkegaard—who at this point in his life understood his entire authorship in terms of Christianity—considered his life project to be more closely related to that of a pagan ironist than that of a Christian martyr or mystic, it is necessary to look at Kierkegaard’s unique and perhaps surprising interpretation of Socrates as a thoroughly negative character. As he sees it, Socrates is best described as ‘an ironist’, whose interrogations result in the destruction of illusion for those who think they know something. And unlike what we might expect, Kierkegaard’s Socrates does not secretly

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possess the truth—he is genuinely ignorant, and thus can offer nothing to replace the illusions he dispels. This is the figure he celebrates and with whom he compares himself.

Who is Kierkegaard’s Socrates? The starting point for understanding Kierkegaard’s negative Socrates figure is On the Concept of Irony, where we find the longest and most detailed discussion of Socrates in the entire authorship. It is this figure that is presupposed, with some changes in emphasis, whenever Socrates is mentioned (cf. SKS7: 456/CUP1: 503).5 We are introduced there to a figure that differs from the one most of us are accustomed to. Traditional interpretations, Kierkegaard writes, portray Socrates as a hybrid figure who both confuses the arguments of his interlocutors with irony and who works as a midwife to help others find the previously unseen ground of truth that he possesses. That is, Socrates’ strategy for reaching the truth is said to be both destructive and constructive: Negatively, he dissolves sophistic claims to knowledge as he feigns ignorance of generally accepted truths, asking ingenuously to be taught more fully about them. Positively, Socrates engages in a maieutic dialectic that seeks to derive universal concepts from particular instantiations, and by doing so, he assists others in discovering the truth for themselves (cf. Hegel 1995: 399–406). It is this positive aspect of Socrates’ mission that Kierkegaard questions. While he agrees that Socrates uses irony to dismantle illusory knowledge, he denies that Socrates has a positive, constructive side. He is a critic without a solution: he refutes the Athenian understanding of the good life, without knowing what the good life is. Important especially is Kierkegaard’s claim that Socrates doesn’t ironically feign ignorance as he engages his interlocutors. Socrates is ignorant. Or, more accurately, his knowledge is strictly negative: ‘When Socrates declared that he was ignorant, he nevertheless did know something, for he knew about his ignorance; on the other hand, however, this knowledge was not a knowledge of something, that is, did not have a positive content, and to that extent his knowledge is ironic’ (SKS1: 306/CI: 269; cf. SKS7: 187–9/CUP1: 204–6). Kierkegaard’s Socrates is surely hiding something, but he’s not hiding something positive. As Alexander Nehamas puts it: Often, irony consists in letting your audience know that something is taking place inside you that they simply are not allowed to see. But it also, more radically, leaves open the question whether you are seeing it yourself . . . Irony often communicates the fact that the audience is not getting the whole picture; but it does not necessarily imply that the speaker has the picture or that, indeed, there is a whole picture to be

5 In the Postscript, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus accuses ‘Magister Kierkegaard’ of ‘consciously or unconsciously’ emphasizing ‘only the one side’ of Socratic irony, presumably satisfaction with ignorance, while he downplays the inward passion with which Socrates wants to discover what is required of him ethically (SKS7: 456/CUP1: 503). In the dissertation, Socrates is generally at peace with his ignorance.

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k. brian söderquist understood in the first place . . . Irony constructs a mask. It leaves open the question what, if anything, is masked. (Nehamas 1999: 103; cf. Lippitt 2000: 135–57)

It is this radical form of irony that Kierkegaard sees in Socrates. His manner of speech doesn’t conceal knowledge of the truth, nor does it present knowledge in the form of a riddle. Rather, Socrates is really as much a riddle to himself as he is to others. It is tempting to call Kierkegaard’s Socrates a kind of nihilist: he removes the crumbling foundation of established values without erecting a new foundation to stand in its place. He is content to watch everything come crashing down. Kierkegaard finds evidence of this negativity everywhere in the historical record. The reason Plato’s Socratic dialogues inevitably end in aporia, for example—or as he puts in, in ‘nothing’— is precisely because nothing positive can arise when Socrates’ mode of operation is strictly negative: ‘Socrates does not peel off the husk in order to get to the kernel, but hollows out the kernel’ (SKS1: 106/CI: 45, trans. modified). Kierkegaard doesn’t gloss over the fact that the movement from positive to negative leaves Socrates and his disciples in an existentially difficult position: his irony deprives them of the comfort of immediate ethical guidelines and goals—and he stops right there, leaving them all directionless. He moves them beyond finitude to infinitude—and leaves them there in the ether. At times, Socrates is described as floating between two poles he never quite reaches. At one end stands the world of custom from which he has escaped. At the other end is the richness of metaphysical ideas, which he has not yet reached. Socrates moves uncertainly between the two because he can neither return to immediate ethical life nor take comfort in a metaphysically-guaranteed truth.6 The movement from positivity to negativity hurts. Like Socrates’ disciple Alcibiades, one bitten by irony ‘is like one bitten by a snake—indeed, he is bitten by something more painful and in the most painful place, namely in the heart or soul’ (SKS1: 109/CI: 48). Irony takes a meaningful world, full of promise, and hands back a colourless, empty world without orienting landmarks.

Irony as a Border Region Other images of Socrates are helpful as well. In the dissertation, Kierkegaard likens the ironic position to the hovering weightlessness of the coffin of Mohammed. It is first invoked in his interpretation of Plato’s Symposium to illustrate the effect of Socrates’ ironic questioning on others: ‘The ironist raises the individual out of immediate existence, and this is his emancipating function; but thereafter he lets him hover like the coffin of Mohammed, which, according to legend, is suspended between two magnets— attraction and repulsion’ (SKS1: 109n./CI: 48n.). Kierkegaard suggests that Socrates’ 6

He changes the metaphor from floating to wandering in the Postscript, where irony is said to be a ‘border region’ between immediacy and ethics, i.e. between the state in which one uncritically follows inherited ethical guidelines and a state in which one reflectively takes responsibility for directing one’s own actions (SKS7: 455, 457/CUP1: 501–2, 504).

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disciples were ‘emancipated’ from the bondage of an unexamined life. Once they were freed, they naturally looked to him to replace what they had lost. Yet as Kierkegaard sees it, Socrates had no way of replacing their loss—and he didn’t try to, either. Socrates disappointed them because he didn’t engage in a rich exchange of ideas. He gave them nothing but longing. He turned them into ‘lovers’ in the sense that they desired something they did not possess (SKS1: 109–10/CI: 48–4). To put it differently, Socrates seduced them.7 The lover initially felt liberated and broadened, opening himself to the seducer— but since nothing came in return, the lover remained trapped in the seducer’s power. The fleeting instant of understanding was continually replaced by the anxiety of misunderstanding. Speaking of Socrates, Kierkegaard writes: ‘The ironist is the vampire who has sucked the blood of the lover and while doing so, has fanned him cool, lulled him to sleep, and tormented him with troubled dreams’ (SKS1: 109–10/CI: 49). For Socrates’ students, their newfound nihilistic insight became torture: what looked so attractive in the beginning ended with nightmares. They were not ironists, Kierkegaard suggests— they were victimized by an ironist. The story is different, however, when we look at Socrates himself. Socrates was drawn even more powerfully into a vacuum than his disciples were. As he examined his own ignorance, he discovered the ‘absolute in the form of nothing’. His infatuation with this discovery sealed him off from every other concern: he had discovered an otherworldly, infinite space. Kierkegaard returns to the floating coffin in his treatment of Aristophanes’ Clouds—the text he thinks comes closest to capturing the real Socrates. Here, the floating coffin becomes a description of the position or standpoint of Socrates’ himself. Kierkegaard writes: Whether he is in a basket suspended from a ceiling or staring into himself and thereby in a way freeing himself from earthly gravity, in both cases he is hovering. But it is precisely this hovering that is so very significant; it is the attempted ascension that is accomplished only when the whole realm of the ideal opens up, when this staring into oneself allows the self to expand into the universal self, pure thought with its contents. This ironist, to be sure, is lighter than the world; like Mohammed’s coffin, he is suspended between two magnets. (SKS1: 201–2/CI: 152)

As Kierkegaard sees it, Aristophanes has correctly understood that Socrates’ position or ‘standpoint’ is not at all a ‘point on which to stand’. Socrates merely floats between the world of practical concerns and the world of ideas.

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This understanding of seduction—the seduction of the ironist who robs his lover of immediacy— is critical for understanding Kierkegaard’s most elaborate seduction narrative, ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ from Either/Or. There, Johannes seduces Cordelia by first robbing her of her immediate world and enticing her look to him as a replacement for what she lacks. He leaves her in the end, allowing her to take flight on her own (SKS2: 425/EO1: 348). In so far as Cordelia’s movement out of immediacy is an ‘emancipation’ from unreflective life, in one important sense Johannes has brought her closer to finding herself. Of course, like Socrates, Johannes does not care about whether she finds it or not. But unlike Socrates, Johannes intentionally robs her of substantiality and takes a delight in seeing that movement. Socrates was so inwardly focused that he could not delight in the weightlessness of others.

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Irony Is Not the Truth, But the Way Given the fact that Socratic irony seems to lead to nothing but existential emptiness, it may appear counterintuitive that Kierkegaard claims that it has an important place in human life. In fact, he insists it has a necessary place. He writes: ‘Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life, deserving of being called human, begins with irony’ (SKS1: 65/CI: 5–6). And, playing on a passage in the Gospel of John, Kierkegaard argues that the path to selfhood goes through irony: ‘[irony] is not the truth, but the way’ (SKS1, 356/CI: 327). In what sense, though, is irony the beginning of an authentic human life? The answer, according to Kierkegaard, is freedom or, more precisely, ‘negative freedom’ (SKS1: 286/ CI: 247). As he sees it, the initial result of an ironic consciousness is a new sense of liberation. Irony frees the individual from the unwarranted authority of inherited laws, customs, habits, beliefs, and norms. It creates an open space, unencumbered by the demands of human tradition, and the individual is at least initially forced back into him- or herself. As noted above, Socrates enjoys ‘staring into himself ’, fascinated by the infinite. This inwardness is so important to Kierkegaard that, later in his authorship, it is even described as a form of ‘religiousness’ (cf. SKS7: 505–18/CUP1: 555–61). One might say that the ironic annihilation of the given liberates the individual to seek life purposes that are not immediately prescribed by one’s culture. In other words, irony is one mode of gaining a personal distance from bourgeois everydayness and thus constitutes one form of Kierkegaard’s well-documented critique of living in immediacy. Kierkegaard’s investigation of Socrates’ ironic world view can be viewed, then, as an attempt to work out the existential movements of isolating oneself from one’s cultural surroundings. As Kierkegaard puts it: the Socratic ‘phrase “know yourself ” means: separate yourself from the other’ (SKS1: 225/CI: 177). This puts us in a position to return to a question asked above: What does Kierkegaard mean when he says his life’s mission is a Socratic mission? In what sense is it Socratic? Ironic negativity is the key. In the last issue of The Moment, ready for publication when Kierkegaard died, he explains that in order to understand his project, the reader must keep in mind that he has never professed to be a Christian. He is not a Christian; he does not live up to the demands of Christianity (SKS13: 404/M: 340). Analogous to Socrates, who did not possess the truth that was at the centre of all his conversations, Kierkegaard does not live the faithful life described in his works. Socrates had yet to find the truth; Kierkegaard had yet to become Christian. And yet Kierkegaard suggests that these respective unrealized positions are more advanced existentially than those held by people who uncritically live under illusion. Perhaps even more important, however, are their shared ironic methods. Socrates’ irony functioned to deliver listeners from the unexamined life as he questioned their seemingly unassailable convictions; the result was dispelled illusions—and nothing more. Irony cannot provide a truth, but can merely put the other in position to seek it for him- or herself. Kierkegaard suggests that his authorship can likewise be read as a critique of the unexamined life. Like Socrates, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms try to

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bring about a dialogue with their readers. They avoid making unambiguous, positive claims about the truth; nor do they claim to own the truth; quite often, they profess just the opposite. But they do want to compel the individual to take responsibility for an inward, passionate search for a meaningful life. And they can do no more. As Kierkegaard sees it, this is the greatest service one can do for another human being. Speaking of the great master of irony, ‘the simple man of ancient times’, he writes in Works of Love: That noble rogue had profoundly understood that the highest one human being can do for another is to make him free, to help him stand alone—and he also understood that . . . if this is to be accomplished, the helper must be able to conceal himself in magnanimously willing his own destruction. (SKS9: 274/WL: 276)

For Kierkegaard, to free another and help him stand alone is indeed the beneficial negative result of irony. He recognizes, though, that this negative freedom can also be overwhelming. It can feel like too much freedom. As we saw with Socrates’ disciples, negative freedom can be a painful discovery. The subject who has become disentangled from finite restrictions— and all orienting guideposts—is in a precarious position, for no one can make meaningful choices without some kind of reasons for so doing, and without some sort of purpose. Without a divine logos or a tradition to point the way, the individual is left without direction. And yet the nature of human existence, in time, forces decision. The last major form of irony treated in Kierkegaard’s authorship has to do with what he sees as a troubling reaction to the dilemma posed by negative freedom. Once the individual stands alone, so to speak, he or she wields the power of self-determination. But his power of self-determination can be overwhelming; misguiding oneself is a real possibility. For him, the literature of the Germans Romantics is a perplexing example of what happens to the reflective, artistic mind when it cultivates ironic negative freedom, and insists on playing with the possibilities of endless freedom.

III. Romantic Irony and the Challenge of Negative Freedom Too Much Freedom Kierkegaard’s formal treatment of the literary and cultural movement known as both ‘irony’ and ‘Romanticism’8 is concentrated in a relatively short, dense chapter in On the

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Here Kierkegaard identifies ‘irony’ with ‘Romanticism’. He writes: ‘Throughout this whole discussion I use the terms “irony” and “ironist”. I could have just as well say “romanticism” and “romanticist”. Both terms say essentially the same thing; the one is more reminiscent of the name which the faction itself christened itself, the other the name which Hegel christened it’ (SKS1: 312/CI: 275).

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Concept of Irony. This discussion is often overlooked in assessments of Kierkegaardian irony, presumably because explicit references to Romanticism and Romantic irony essentially disappear from his works after his dissertation. The thoughts that were provoked by Kierkegaard’s early study of Romantic irony, however, end up returning throughout his authorship in a central way. One might even argue that Kierkegaard’s struggle with Romantic thought is just a central as his struggle with Hegelian philosophy. For while it might not be initially apparent, the ‘Romantic ironist’ is in fact the eminent model for a position Kierkegaard considers to be one of the most pernicious threats to selfhood: the modern ‘poetic’ consciousness. And though his polemic against specific Romantic authors vanishes from his authorship, his own poetically inclined pseudonyms fit his description of ‘Romantic ironist’ far better than do any of the authors he targets in his dissertation. For Kierkegaard, Romantic literature is troubling precisely because it is such an attractive reaction to the nihilistic insight of irony. Because the categories that formerly served as guidelines for the development of the self have become fragmented, Romantic authors take it for granted that an individual has no choice but to ‘create’ those existential guidelines him- or herself. Or as pseudonym A puts it in Either/Or, because ‘our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred, it must turn the single individual over to himself in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator’ (SKS2: 148/EO1: 149). The Romantics also assume that the creation of fiction is the human activity that comes closest to divine creation, and that narrating one’s own life, one’s own identity, and one’s own ultimate purposes is the highest of all spiritual callings. For Kierkegaard the question is not whether it is possible to take over the role of creator, at least with regard to the self, but whether that move is ultimately tenable. Can one really take one’s own self-fashioned truth seriously? Is it really possible to believe in purposes and goals one knows one has fabricated? Kierkegaard suggests that it isn’t.

Authoring a Self Without identifying which particular texts he is thinking of, Kierkegaard asserts in his dissertation that Romantic authors have blurred the lines that separate fiction from lived experience. Kierkegaard claims that authors like Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck have mistakenly assumed that the power of the imagination used in the creation of fictional works is not different from the epistemological role of the imagination described by German Idealists, like Kant and Fichte. The Romantic ironists are said to presume that the power to ‘create’ a fictional work can be employed in the creation of an actual self (SKS1: 311/CI: 274). What intrigues him is the fact that Romantic literature has been bold enough to celebrate the obvious similarities between the activity of authoring a fictional work— complete with characters, dramatic situations, plots, and resolutions—and the activity of interpreting oneself and the world. Kierkegaard’s aim here is to make clear why it

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is ultimately untenable to try to control one’s self-interpretation in the same way one controls a fictional text, even if the project seems attractive to the reflective, imaginative soul. The problem, as he sees it, with the Romantic project is not the fact that it celebrates autobiography as a mode of understanding the self, but rather that it cultivates an awareness that one can continually reinterpret that autobiography: the Romantics know that they can ‘start over’ again with a new story, and they know it as they tell a story. The problem, for Kierkegaard, is the self-conscious appropriation of the power of cutting the strings and starting over—or as Schlegel himself would put it, the power to ‘destroy and create’ one’s own narratives (Schelegel 1971: 57–8). Once Romantic irony is aware of the power to interpret and reinterpret the past, it is in a position to start over any time it likes: ‘If it posited something, it knew it had the authority to annul it, knew it at the very same moment it posited it. It knew that in general it had the absolute power to bind and to unbind’ (SKS1: 312/CI: 275–6). Instead of feeling obligated to the consequences of the past, the Romantic consciousness knows it has ‘the power to start all over again if it so pleases, nothing that happened before is binding . . . it enjoys a divine freedom that knows no bonds, no chains’ (SKS1: 315/CI: 279). The individual’s understanding of his or her present situation is affected by this insight. The Romantic is aware that if he can start over at any time, this means he can start over right now. Even a script unfolding right now, in the present, can be viewed as hypothetical. Life itself becomes staged, and events happening in present tense are viewed through the lenses of an observer. Here we find the individual consciously playing the role of author, narrator, and character all at the same time. Kierkegaard writes that for the Romantic ironist, life is a drama, and what absorbs him is ingenious complication of this drama. He himself is a spectator, even while he is the one acting. . . . He is inspired by sacrificial virtue just as a spectator is inspired by it in a theatre; he is a severe critic who knows very well when this virtue becomes insipid and inauthentic. . . . As the ironist composes himself and his environment with the greatest possible poetic license, as he lives in this totally hypothetical and subjunctive way, his life loses all continuity. (SKS1: 319/CI: 283–4, trans. modified)

As Kierkegaard sees it, the downfall of this poetic consciousness is its own awareness that the story can be staged differently. The setting and characters become possibility rather than actuality. And for Kierkegaard, this hypothetical self is tantamount to no self at all, i.e. it is nothing: ‘the ironic individual has played through a multitude of destinies, usually in the form of possibility, has fictively identified himself with these destinies, before it ends in nothingness’ (SKS1: 317/CI: 281–2). It is this aspect of the poetic consciousness—a cultivated understanding that it has the power to reinterpret the self endlessly—that is provocative to Kierkegaard. And for the most part, Kierkegaard is content to offer a negative critique. He expends a great deal of energy making a case that a self that lacks narrative continuity is not a self at all. The artist might ‘enjoy’ the fictional process and the fictions themselves, but he asserts that ‘the

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person who enjoys poetically nevertheless lacks one enjoyment, for he does not enjoy himself ’ (SKS1: 330–1/CI: 297). But what does Kierkegaard suggest can be done to overcome the freedom opened by irony in the first place? Interestingly, he seems to suggest that the creativity of an authorial consciousness cannot be limited—not by the authorial consciousness itself. If the subject is the sole storyteller, the sole author, there is no resistance to endless interpretation and endless discontinuity. If it is true that I can consciously create an interpretation, it is also true that I can consciously question my own creation. An isolated subject cannot save himself from his own insight. For Kierkegaard, the key to finding an authentic interpretation of oneself and one’s own history requires a consciousness of the divine other. For him, this seems to be the only principle that can authoritatively limit the constant reinterpretation of self. Living an authentic life, he says, is not matter of artistic genius, but is rather made possible by what he calls ‘the religious’. In fact, it is said to be possible only for the religious individual (SKS1: 330–2/CI: 297–9). One should note that in this context, Kierkegaard doesn’t use ‘religious’ in a dogmatic Christian context, and doesn’t provide an obvious definition. He does write, however, that the religious consciousness is aware of the ‘infinite validity’ of the self (SKS1: 331/CI: 297–8), and suggests that the religious individual is concerned about something within the self that transcends the narratives one tells, the roles one plays, and the costumes one wears. That is, here the term ‘religious’ is used as it is in his description of the religiosity of Socrates: passionate inwardness. While the Romantic ironist is said to look ‘outside’ himself ‘at something else’—i.e. a self understood as a character in a dramatic setting— the religious individual is said to look ‘inward’ (SKS1: 331/CI: 297). While the Romantic author tries to become ‘reconciled’ with the past by independently reworking his own autobiography, Kierkegaard implies that the religious individual becomes reconciled with the past in an internal dialogue with something divine. One might say that the Romantic position employs human ‘genius’ as the highest form of self-consciousness or spirit. Kierkegaard’s religious position presupposes another kind of spirit, a kind that cannot be realized by human talent alone, but requires divine assistance. The critical distinction here has to do with what these two consciences ultimately want: the Romantic self wants to maintain full authorial control over the meaningfulness of its own projects (see Feger 2000: 109–31). It is said not to be serious about the past because it knows it is not accountable to anything but itself. It can be proud of its own accomplishments, or it can punish itself for its own crimes; but it is not ‘earnest’ enough to allow the ‘threatening shapes’ of the past to ‘pass judgement’(SKS1: 329/CI: 295). In short, it wants to create and save itself. Conversely, the religious self wants to be co-authored by something else, thus relinquishing some of that control. It wants a different source of continuity and thus ‘listens silently and quietly to the voice of what is unique in individuality’ (SKS1: 316/CI: 280–1). It is earnest about the past; it wants to take seriously the idea of a past that one can be proud of or haunted by (see SKS1: 306–7, 316, 323/CI: 270, 280, 288). It wants to be created by and saved by something greater than itself.

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Kierkegaard’s Ironic Poets This being said, even if Kierkegaard’s tone is confident in On the Concept of Irony, the pseudonymous authors who begin to write shortly afterwards show how complicated it is to construct a believable story about the past and how ambiguous religious interiority is. Indeed, the religious territory alluded to in On the Concept of Irony continues to be explored throughout the rest of his authorship. The problem is especially troubling for pseudonyms who explicitly define themselves as poets.9 And these authors are not happy Schlegelian ironists who are pleased with the success of their poetic projects—for the most part they are troubled, jaded, and disappointed by the existential challenges that plague their artistic minds; they are especially aware of the possibility of constructing a story about themselves, and thus, of constructing a kind of self-identity. But inevitably, they are too conscious of their own power of self-interpretation to believe it themselves. They end up admitting that the story about the self is really ‘nothing’; it is a ‘myth’ about the self (SKS2: 431/EO1: 444) or, as Wilhelm Afham laments, it is ‘almost less than nothing’ (SKS6: 84/SLW: 86). They understand the problem too well—just as well as the author of On the Concept of Irony, in fact; but unlike him, the pseudonyms describe the confusion from the inside, so to speak. The poetically inclined pseudonyms are familiar with the critique of irony, but that they are uninterested in Kierkegaard’s religious solution. They want to remain where they are, and Kierkegaard doesn’t force them to move. Even a pseudonym from the later authorship, who is seemingly far from being a poet, addresses the problem. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s Romantic ironist makes an appearance at centre stage, still struggling with an interpretation of self. AntiClimacus describes a character who is introspective enough to want to be a self and who is self-centred enough to ‘enjoy’ his own consciousness of self. This reflective character knows that it can shape its own self-identity, but as Anti-Climacus sees it, this construction of self comes at a price: the author of this self is haunted by the possibility of starting all over again with a new interpretation. The self wants in despair to savour the full satisfaction of making itself into itself, of developing itself, of being itself; it wants to take credit for this fictional [digteriske, i.e. ‘poetic’], masterly project, its own way of understanding itself. And yet what it understands itself to be is in the final instance a riddle; just when it seems on the point of having the building finished, at a whim it can dissolve the whole thing into nothing. (SKS11: 183/SUD: 69-70; trans. modified)

Anti-Climacus’ poetic character is also said to enjoy self creation; he wants to maintain control over himself. The defiant self ‘exerts the loosening as much as the binding power; it can, at any moment, start quite arbitrarily all over again . . . The self is its own master,

9 The most obvious examples are authors like A and Johannes in Either/Or, Constantin in Repetition, Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling, and Wilhelm Afham and Quidam in Stages on Life’s Way. The grand author of it all, Kierkegaard himself, might fit here too, of course.

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absolutely (as one says) its own master; and exactly this is the despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure and joy’ (SKS11: 183/SUD: 69; trans. modified). In On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard implies that the ironist enjoys watching himself from the ‘outside’, while the religious individual turns inward and allows himself to be watched. And as Kierkegaard sees it, because the ironist is ultimately obligated only to himself and can always reinterpret his own demands, he can’t take himself seriously. Anti-Climacus describes these two positions, this time explicitly invoking the notion of being watched. He writes that the despairing self recognizes no power greater than itself and thus, in the final end, it lacks seriousness and can only conjure up an appearance of seriousness when it, itself, grants utmost attention to its own experimentation. This is seriousness won by deceit. Like the fire Prometheus stole from the gods, it steals from God the notion that God is watching you [Gud seer paa En]—which is seriousness. Instead, the despairing self is content to be its own witness [at see paa sig selv], which is meant to grant its activities infinite interest and significance—though it is this very thing that makes them experimental. Even if this self doesn’t go so far in despair as to become an experimental God, it is still the case that a derived self can never endow itself with more that it is by becoming its own witness [at see paa sig selv]. From first to last, it remains the self; the mirroring of self makes it neither more nor less than self. Insofar as the self despairingly strives to be itself, it works itself directly into its opposite: it becomes no self. (SKS11: 182–3/SUD: 69; trans. modified)

The idea that the attempt to author a self will lead to discontinuity, and a self that is indeed ‘nothing’, is repeated yet again. Even here, in 1849, when the formal discussion of Romantic irony seems to have been long forgotten, we see evidence of irony’s negative power. And so it is with Kierkegaardian irony in general. Regardless of the form, be it rhetorical irony, Socratic irony, or Romantic irony, the result is the same: ‘nothing’. And, for Kierkegaard, that result is one of the most important of all.

References Agacinski. Sylviane (1988). Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. and introd. Kevin Newmark (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press). Booth, Wayne (1974). A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Capel, Lee (1966). ‘Introduction’ to The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee Capel (London: Collins Press). Derrida, Jacques (2008). The Gift of Death, trans. Davis Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Feger, Hans (2000). ‘Philosophy as Hubris’, The Harvard Review of Philosophy 8, Spring. Furtak, Rick Anthony (2010a). ‘Kierkegaard and Platonic Eros’, in Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato (Burlington: Ashgate). Hegel, G. W. F. (1995). Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vols. 1–3, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).

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Howland, Jacob (2006). Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kierkegaard, Søren (1966). The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee Capel (London: Collins). Kirmmse, Bruce (1996). Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by his Contemporaries. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Lippitt, John (2000). Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Muench, Paul (2003). ‘The Socratic Method of Kierkegaard’s Pseudonym Johannes Climacus: Indirect Communication and the Art of “Taking Away” ’, in Poul Houe and Gordon Marino (eds.), Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s). Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels). ——– (2009). ‘Kierkegaard’s Socratic Point of View’, in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.) A Companion to Socrates (Oxford: Blackwell). Nehamas, Alexander (1999). Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Pattison, George (2006). ‘Bakhtin’s Category of Carnival in the Interpretation of the Writings of Søren Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook. Possen, David (2010a). ‘Meno: Kierkegaard and the Doctrine of Recollection’, in Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato (Burlington: Ashgate). ——– (2010b). ‘Phaedrus: Kierkegaard on Socrates’ Self-Knowledge—and Sin’, in Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato (Burlington: Ashgate). ——– (2010c). ‘Protagoras and Republic: Kierkegaard on Socratic Irony’, in Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun (eds.), Kierkegaard and the Greek World, I: Socrates and Plato (Burlington: Ashgate). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1972). ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’, in Between Existentialism and Marxism (London: Verso Press).

Suggested Reading Bøggild, Jacob (2002). Ironiens tænker—tænkningens ironi: Kierkegaard læst retorisk (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press). Furtak, Rick Anthony (2005). Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Garff, Joakim (1995). Den Søvnløse. Kierkegaard læst æstetisk/biografisk (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Gouwens, David (1989). Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of the Imagination (New York: Peter Lang Publishing). Harries, Karsten (2010). Between Nihilism and Faith: A Commentary on Either/Or (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Holmgaard, Jan (2003). En ironisk historia (Stockholm: Aiolos Förlag). Kirmmse, Bruce (2001). ‘Socrates in the Fast Lane: Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony on the University’s Velocifère’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Irony (Macon: Mercer University Press). Lear, Jonathan (2011). A Case for Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

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McCarthy Vincent (1978). The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). Mackey, Louis (1971). Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Man, Paul de (1996). Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Poole, Roger (1993). Kierkegaard. The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press). Stewart, Jon (2003). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press).

chapter 19

DEATH Patrick S tokes

I. Death and the Philosopher If anyone should be able to tell us about death, it is Søren Kierkegaard. Born into a family whose very name means ‘churchyard’—even today kirkegård is the standard Danish word for ‘cemetery’—Kierkegaard saw more of death before his thirtieth birthday than most people see in a lifetime. Of the seven children born to Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Ane Sørensdatter Lund, all but two died before them. A morbid family mythology arose, according to which God was punishing the old man for some unspoken sin, perhaps his cursing God as a shepherd boy on the moors of Jutland: the country-boy-made-good would live to see all his children die, and none would live past thirty-three, the age at which Jesus died (Garff 2005: 136–7). Michael’s death in 1837 put the mythology to rest, yet Søren still expresses (perhaps somewhat affected) astonishment at reaching his thirty-fourth birthday (SKS20/KJN4: NB210[JP5: 5999]); Hans Brøchner would later claim that Kierkegaard had even checked the parish records to make sure his birth date had been recorded correctly! (Kirmmse 1996: 240) Perhaps that shadow of death hanging over Kierkegaard’s life is why he never made serious long-term plans. At the end of his life he had almost no money left, little income, and, in light of his spectacular bridge-burning with the Danish Church, no prospects. On admission to Frederik’s Hospital in October 1855, he insisted that he would not—and indeed, for the sake of his religious mission must not—come out alive (Garff 2005: 782–3). ‘[D]eath is also a denouement, and then it is over, one is buried’ (SKS9: 251/ WL: 252), but ‘[t]hat a life is over is one thing; it is something else that a life is finished by gaining its conclusion’, and all too many people ‘go on until death comes and puts an end to life, yet without, in the sense of a conclusion, bringing the end with it’ (SKS15: 93). Kierkegaard seemed determined not to meet that fate. His death would be no mere demise, but a definite conclusion, a denouement—a martyrdom. After he had gone, disposing of Kierkegaard’s organic, material and literary remains presented its own set of unique problems. The family and authorities grappled with how to bury such a vocal

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opponent of the Established Church, and his crowded, somewhat chaotic funeral culminated in a graveside protest from his nephew, Henrik Lund (Garff 2005: 796, pp. xvii– xix). Decades later, scholars would pour over Kierkegaard’s remains at second hand—his medical records, the sale list from the auction of his books, and of course his writings— in hopes of deepening their understanding of his physical, psychological, and intellectual constitution. Kierkegaard has Johannes Climacus speak of the ‘autopsy of faith’1, in the sense of autos + optos, ‘seeing for oneself ’ (SKS4: 299/PF: 102); today, two centuries after his birth, the autopsy of Kierkegaard carries on unabated. There are also important historical reasons why death might have featured with especial prominence in the work of a writer concerned with the parlous state (as he saw it) of post-Hegelian Christianity. In the years after Hegel was carried off by the cholera epidemic of 1831, a rift opened up between the Left and Right Hegelians, centred initially on the question of whether the Hegelian system had made belief in personal immortality— and with it, the very core of Christian soteriology and eschatology—untenable. When Hans Lassen Martensen visited Tübingen in 1835, the theologian David Friedrich Strauss declared that Hegel had completely disabused him of his faith in personal immortality: ‘I had scarcely finished reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,’ he told Martensen, ‘before that belief fell away from me like a withered leaf ’ (Martensen 1882: 131). By the following year Martensen too had concluded that attempts by Right Hegelians such as Göschel to reconcile Hegel’s philosophy with ‘any doctrine of positive religion’ were futile, pointing to a need to go ‘beyond’ Hegel (Stewart 2007: 542). As early as 1834, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, perhaps the most aggressively partisan Hegelian in Denmark, had been telling students at the Royal Military College that salvation was not to be conceived of as a world ‘to come’ but as something to be achieved in the present (Horn 2007: 104). Heiberg’s poems and plays, as well as Johanne Louise Heiberg’s recollections of her husband’s discussions with Martensen, suggest he seems to have favoured a Hegelian understanding of the afterlife as the sublation of the individual into the unity of spirit (Stewart 2007: 222–7, 548). So in Kierkegaard’s context, the soteriological dimensions of the question of death were caught up in a strange sort of cognitive dissonance: the age still spoke the language of resurrection and faith in a life to come, but the idea of posthumous personal survival appeared increasingly quaint and indefensible to the cultural elite. Kierkegaard’s favourite teacher, Poul Martin Møller (1837) laments the difficulty of finding a language in which to speak meaningfully of personal immortality under these conditions.2 Møller’s response, which rejected objective demonstrations of immortality in favour of an understanding of the concept which proceeds from an irreducibly subjective concern, would have a decisive influence on Kierkegaard’s view of death and immortality. Kierkegaard, then, is well acquainted with ‘the stock themes dealt with at funerals’ (SKS7: 153/CUP1: 165–6) as well as the philosophical controversy over Hegelianism and immortality. Not surprisingly then, death stalks Kierkegaard’s authorship from the very 1 2

On the topic of autopsy in Kierkegaard, see Mjaaland 2008. See also Stewart 2007: 37–53; Czakó 2008.

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outset, beginning with his extended review of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel Only a Fiddler entitled ‘From the Papers of One Still Living’ (a play on the convention of publishing works under the byline ‘from the papers of one now dead’). In Either/Or we encounter a ‘fellowship of the dead’ before whom it is declared that ‘the unhappiest one was the one who could not die’ (SKS2: 214/EO1: 220). For Self-Examination exhorts its reader to attain a state of ‘dying to the world’,3 while Works of Love praises the remembrance of the dead as the purest, freest and most unselfish act of love.4 The Sickness Unto Death furnishes us with discussions of such themes as illness, living death,5 and suicide.6 For Kierkegaard, death is an invaluable aid for understanding life; ‘No thinker grasps life as death does’ (SKS9: 339/WL: 345) and only death can provide, as Charles Taylor puts it, ‘the privileged site from which the meaning of life can be grasped’, ‘a vantage point, beyond the confusion and dispersal of living’ (Taylor 2007: 723). Yet Kierkegaard is, in an important sense, curiously reluctant to talk about death at all. In his major discussions of the topic, Kierkegaard again and again refuses to clothe death with any kind of significant conceptual content. He insists on death’s ‘indefinability’; it is a sort of riddle, but one that we must not spend time trying to solve. Death is, for Kierkegaard, a deeply instructive and indeed upbuilding concept—provided, paradoxically, that we do not waste time thinking about what death is and what comes after it. Death is ‘the schoolmaster of earnestness’ (SKS5: 446/TDIO: 75–6), but instead of teaching us about itself, it teaches us about who and what we are, and which questions we don’t have time to ask.

II. Death in the Postscript Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard’s most overtly ‘philosophical’ pseudonym, provides a relatively short discussion of death, yet one that arguably exerts a significant influence on Heidegger’s Being and Time and subsequent major strands of twentieth-century thought. In the course of the chapter of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript entitled ‘Becoming Subjective’, Climacus gives four ‘examples of thinking oriented to becoming subjective’ (SKS7: 121/CUP1: 129): thinking about what it means to die, to be immortal, to thank God, and to marry. In light of Kierkegaard’s family mythology, the first two must have held a special poignancy for him: as Lasse Horne Kjældgaard points out, the Postscript is ‘written by a thirty-two year old man preparing for death’ (Kjældgaard 2005: 90). Climacus presents each of these topics as the sort of thing a highly educated, inquisitive reader might take to be subjects they could deal with quickly, before moving on to loftier matters like Hegelian system-building. Paul Muench, for instance, argues 3 4 5 6

On ‘dying to the world,’ see Buben 2011; Podmore 2011. On this topic, see Søltoft 1998; Keeley 1999: 211–48; Ferreira 2001: 211–12; Stokes 2011. On Kierkegaard and ‘living death’, see Connell 2011; Podmore 2011. On Kierkegaard’s discussions of suicide, see Mjaaland 2011.

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that the Postscript is directed towards a very specific type of reader: not the committed Hegelian, nor those with no interest in or capacity for philosophy, but the philosophically inclined reader who risks slipping into a state of ‘absent-mindedness’, and who therefore has to learn to restrain themselves in order to think slowly, deliberately, and carefully about matters which should properly concern them for a whole lifetime (Muench 2011). Hence the examples all begin with a declaration of what Climacus knows about the topic. When the topic is death, it’s no surprise that Climacus knows quite a lot: For example, what it means to die. On that topic I know what ordinary people know: that if I swallow a dose of sulphuric acid I will die, likewise by drowning myself or sleeping in coal gas etc. I know that Napoleon always carried poison with him, that Shakespeare’s Juliet took it; that the Stoics regarded suicide as a courageous act and others regard it as cowardice, that one can die from such a ludicrous trifle that the most solemn person cannot help laughing at death, that one can avoid certain death etc. [. . .] If there is no other hindrance to moving on to world history, then I am ready; I need only buy some black cloth for a clerical gown, and then I shall deliver funeral orations as well as any ordinary clergyman. (SKS7: 153–4/CUP1: 165)

Half a century after Kierkegaard’s death at Frederik’s Hospital, its chief surgeon Oscar Bloch would publish a two-volume work composed almost entirely of this sort of detail: medical descriptions of various causes of death and accounts of individual deaths both historical and contemporary (Bloch 1903). Climacus would not have been impressed, for despite his own ‘almost extraordinary knowledge or proficiency of knowledge’ about death (SKS7: 154/CUP1:165), he confesses to being ‘very far indeed from having comprehended death’ (SKS7: 157–8/CUP1: 170). This denial is, as Muench argues, liable to make the reader decidedly uncomfortable: if an articulate and highly educated ‘idler’ with ample time to investigate such matters has failed to understand death, can readers be sure they have understood it themselves? Climacus then immediately compounds the situation by interrupting his own doubt about whether he has ‘become so erudite that that I had forgotten to understand what will happen to me and every human being sometime—sometime, but what am I saying! Suppose death were insidious enough to come tomorrow!’ (SKS7: 154/CUP1: 166). The structure of this sentence is instructive. The dash (Danish tankestreg, ‘thought-stroke’)7 represents a seismic shift between a detached consideration of death per se and an awareness of death under conditions of radical uncertainty. Just as death intrudes disruptively into life, its uncertainty intrusively breaks through the impersonal ‘absentmindedness’ of objective thought. The inescapable temporal finitude and subjection to the utterly contingent timing of death that characterize the life of the thinker qua mortal not only invest the thought of death with a new temporal urgency, but actually change the subject of that thought: If death is always uncertain, if I am mortal, then this means that this uncertainty cannot possibly be understood in general if I am not also such a human being in 7

For some comments on the importance of Kierkegaard’s use of the tankestreg, see McDonald 2003: 93.

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general. But this I am not. [ . . . ] If, however, the uncertainty of death is something in general, then my dying is also something in general. Perhaps dying is also something in general for systematicians, for absentminded people. For the late bookseller Soldin, dying is said to have been something in general—‘When he was going to get up in the morning, he was not aware that he was dead.’ But for me, my dying is by no means something in general; for others, my dying is some such thing. Nor am I for myself some such thing in general; perhaps for others I am some such thing in general. But if the task is to become subjective, then every subject becomes for himself exactly the opposite of some such thing in general. (SKS7: 154– 5/CUP1: 167)

The thought of death per se leads to the thought that each one of us will die—unless we flee from or bury this corollary, as Heidegger (1962) and Becker (1973), both drawing on Kierkegaard, claimed we typically do. In contemplating the mortality of the human race, we are a fortiori contemplating our personal mortality as well. But as Tolstoy captures in the musings of the dying Ivan Ilyich, when the subject is death, the transition from the universal to the particular brings something wholly new into view: . . . ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had seemed to him all his life to be true as applied to Caius but certainly not as regards himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius, nor man in the abstract: he had always been a creature quite, quite different from all others [. . .] Caius was certainly mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my thoughts and emotions–it’s a different matter altogether. (Tolstoy 1960: 137)8

Caius, ‘man in the abstract’, here corresponds to Climacus’ ‘self-in-general’, a token who merely exemplifies the properties of the species. What Ilyich experiences for the first time is the beginnings of Climacan subjective thought, an inwardness and depth that changes his conception of the object of the thought ‘I will die’. When we think this thought as if ‘I’ refers to a ‘self-in-general’, we think the thought denuded of some subjective element that is essential to understanding what it really means that I am mortal. But the difference between these two ways of thinking about my death cannot be got at linguistically (the thought in both cases is ‘I will die’); nor can expressions of these two modes of thinking about my death be differentiated by emphasis alone. Just as a speaker is still reciting by rote even if he pounds the table and sweats profusely while he does so (SKS7: 157/ CUP1: 170), simply italicizing the ‘I’ doesn’t help (‘Someday I will die.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘No, you don’t understand, I will die!’). Climacus shows us that there is something about ourselves that is invisible from the viewpoint of any merely objective conceptual framework (Mooney 1996: 78), and language, being such a framework, will struggle to find a place for it. Ilyich is reduced to pointing to what’s missing by enumerating a list of concrete particulars: ‘Was it Caius who had kissed his mother’s hand like that, and had Caius heard the silken rustle of her skirts? Was it Caius who had rioted like that over the cakes and pastry at the Law School? Had Caius been in love like that?’ (Tolstoy 1960: 137). Such seemingly insignificant factors play no role in our conception of the mortality of humans 8

This passage is discussed in relation to Kierkegaard in Stokes 2006; Connell 2011; and Marino 2011.

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as such, but when we contemplate individual mortality, they suddenly point to an irreducible, ineffable particularity about ourselves that is threatened by death. And the way this thought strikes me, as captured in that disruptive tankestreg, is not deductive, but rather via a sudden shift in vision. I go from seeing the subject of the thought ‘I will die’ as an abstract token (that bears my name and likeness more or less accidentally) to seeing it as me, the object of my self-regarding concern and affective identification. Such nondeductive immediacy is characteristic of the ways in which, for Kierkegaard, we truly see ourselves in imagined presentations of our possible futures.9 Climacus fails to acknowledge that this point holds for the deaths of those we know and love as well as ourselves: the realization that this person will die someday can strike me in a profoundly different way from simply thinking it as an entailment of the thought that every person I know will die someday. But the uncertainty of death’s timing that provokes the move into subjectivity also has massive practical, ethical, and soteriological repercussions, and these serve to focus me on my own death as having unique significance for me. Heidegger’s thought that no one else can die my death for me, such that ‘death is in every case mine’ (Heidegger 1962: 284), and indeed his whole conception of Sein-zum-Tode [Being-towards-death] as a projective comportment towards living that factors the finitude created by my impending death into my self-accounting, owes an unacknowledged debt to Climacus here. The uncertainty of death’s timing must become ‘more and more dialectically penetrating in relation to my personality’, and in order to achieve this I must ‘think [death] into every moment of my life’; to think it ‘once and for all, or once a year at matins on New Year’s morning, is nonsense, of course, and is not to think it at all’ (SKS7: 154/CUP1: 167). And it is easy, Climacus claims, to speak about the uncertainty of death and yet fail to think it into what one says, such that ‘the statement itself does not contain in itself the consciousness of that which the statement directly declares’ (SKS7: 157/CUP1: 170). But what would ‘thinking death into every moment’ look like? It surely cannot mean, as Merold Westphal notes, that at all moments death is the thematic object of my consciousness, as if ‘whenever offered a penny for my thoughts, I could answer, “I am thinking about my death and immortality” ’ (Westphal 1996: 109–10).10 Edward F. Mooney agrees: were death ‘an obsessive and explicit focus that always floods one’s awareness’ then such a thought would ‘ruin’ life. Instead of ‘dwelling’ on death, Mooney takes Climacus to recommend ‘having the thought of death [. . .] with requisite salience and intensity, at the ready every moment’ (Mooney 2011: 135). Westphal, by contrast, argues that death becomes part of the subjective thinker’s non-thetic apprehension of the world, such that the thought of her mortality is built into every moment of her intentional consciousness, without each thought being thematically about mortality (1996: 110). I’m not sure that Westphal and Mooney offer truly incompatible answers to the question, but Westphal’s formulation perhaps coheres better with the non-thematized self that seems 9 This form of non-thematized self-recognition in Kierkegaard’s moral psychology is the main focus of Stokes 2010. 10 See also Stokes 2010: 126; Muench 2011.

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to be present in most of Kierkegaard’s descriptions of subjective thinking. Kierkegaard counsels omnipresent self-concern, but not self-absorption, as if I was constantly thinking about myself during all my practical and ethical engagements with the world. Westphal’s answer also helps make sense of what Climacus tells us two pages later: that the subjective thinker ‘does not think for a moment: Now, you must keep watch every moment—but that he keeps watch every moment’ (SKS7: 157/CUP1: 169). The imperative to keep watch is not explicitly thought about, but is built into the very attitude of watchfulness; likewise, the thought of personal mortality is not explicitly contemplated, most of the time, but is nonetheless built into the subjective thinker’s every thought. The thought of death, then, individuates us in ways that cannot be easily expressed, yet which are utterly decisive for subjectivity. Yet Climacus still insists that he has not understood what it means to die. This thought should, he says, provoke subjective deepening and sharpen or alter our priorities, but he does not supply that thought with any content. Are we to understand death as biological annihilation whereby ‘materiality conquers in death, so that a human being dies like a dog’ (SKS7: 155/CUP1: 168) or as transition to a posthumous existence? Is it even possible to have an idea of death, whose ‘actual being is a non-being’ and which therefore ‘is only when it is not’, and if so, can it be anticipated through that idea (SKS7: 155/CUP1: 168)? Even if these questions could be answered, they bring yet more questions in train—and Climacus seems to be in no mood to answer them. Ultimately he appears to end his discussion of the meaning of death every bit as ignorant as he began. This is not mere ignorance, however, but an attitude that David Possen calls ‘concerned ignorance’. Possen avers that Climacus’ refusal to give details about death or even ‘take a stand on whether death can be thought at all’ (Possen 2011: 124) echoes Socratic ignorance, which ‘presupposes precisely that I know enough about an issue to know that I am ignorant of it, and to become concerned about that fact’ (Possen 2011: 126). Knowing that I will die makes the things I do not know (when I’ll die and what, if anything, will happen to me afterwards) deeply important. Socrates lived as if he was immortal, and thereby expressed both his ignorance and his ethical concern. It is this sort of concern that Climacus wants to awaken, a concern that discloses aspects of what we are that are simply unavailable to abstract or disinterested thought and that calls for commitment to certain ways of living. Yet Climacus’ refusal to tell us more about death is also part of Kierkegaard’s broader concern to demarcate which questions are ethically legitimate ones for temporally finite beings to ask—and which are not.

III. ‘At a Graveside’: The Indefinability of Death A year before the publication of the Postscript, Kierkegaard, under his own name, discusses the thought of death at length in the discourse ‘At a Graveside’. Once again, we are told that the ‘earnest thought of death’ will have a decisive impact on the lives of those

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who contemplate it, and once again the ‘certain-uncertainty’ of a death that will inevitably come and could come at any time plays the decisive role. Yet here, Kierkegaard makes a stronger claim: not just that he hasn’t understand death, but that death is essentially incomprehensible. The upbuilding that lies in death does not lie in death itself, which ‘is not something actual, and as soon as one is dead it is too late to become earnest’ (SKS5: 445/TDIO: 74), and so ‘it is not death that is earnest but the thought of death’ (SKS5: 445/ TDIO: 75, my emphasis). But what is the content of this thought? Despite being a religious discourse, ‘At a Graveside’ essentially equates death with annihilation, with no appeal to an afterlife. The repeated refrain ‘then all is over!’ picks out an end as final as any, for ‘when death tightens the snare it has indeed caught nothing, because then it is all over’ (SKS5: 445/TDIO: 74). ‘At a Graveside’ here agrees to a large extent with the ontological status of the dead presented later in Works of Love, where Kierkegaard insists that the dead person is ‘no one’ (SKS9: 341/WL: 347). Yet as with the Postscript, it is only the thought of one’s own death that is potentially upbuilding: ‘To think of oneself as dead [At tænke sig selv død] is earnestness; to be witness to the death of another is mood’, even if the deceased is your child or beloved (SKS5: 445/TDIO: 75). The earnest thought of one’s own death, by contrast, ‘gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does’ (SKS5: 453/TDIO: 83). Perhaps most strikingly, it overcomes Epicurus’ insistence that we should be indifferent to the prospect of death because ‘when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not’ (Diogenes 1979–80: 650). That ‘pagan’ claim is, according to Kierkegaard, a mere ‘jest’ designed to evade a subjective confrontation with death by taking oneself out of the equation.11 Even if contemplation is accompanied by a mood of horror, something essential is lost if one ‘merely contemplates death and not himself in death, if he thinks of it as the human condition but not as his own’ (SKS5: 444/TDIO: 73). If, however, we approach death in a certain self-reflexive mode of contemplation, becoming ‘alone with’ death (the same expression as Kierkegaard uses for a reflexively engaged manner of reading Scripture in For Self-Examination [SKS13: 58/FSE: 31]), then the Epicurean dilemma is overcome: ‘Earnestness is that you think death, and that you are thinking it as your lot, and that you are then doing what death is indeed unable to do—namely, that you are and death also is’ (SKS5: 446/TDIO: 75). As in the Postscript, though, the problem is that we usually aren’t alone with our death in this way, and fall prey to the temptation to see ourselves as something-ingeneral. ‘At a Graveside’ is alive to the myriad means of escaping the implications of our deathly finitude, by thinking it with ‘mood’ (Stemning) as opposed to ‘earnestness’ (Alvor). Whether we come at the thought of death through scenes of tragedy and horror or through more abstract ways of thinking about death, in each case we take our own relation to death out of our thinking; ‘the thought of one’s own death evaporates in a fog before the eyes and the reminder of one’s own death becomes an indefinite buzzing in the ears’ (SKS5: 461/TDIO: 92). Lost in an ‘elevating impersonal forgetfulness that forgets itself over the whole, or, rather, forgets itself in thoughtlessness’, we fall into 11

See also SKS24: NB23:58 [JP1: 726].

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the same trap Climacus would later describe, whereby one’s own death is viewed as just another ‘droll instance’ of death (SKS5: 461/TDIO: 92). The force of the thought of death can be ‘mitigated’ through figurative language that describes death as a night, a sleep, a transition, a struggle, the wages of sin, and so on. These expressions may well capture genuine aspects of death, but they can also be used to distract the speaker or listener from the implications of impending annihilation, and help him ‘refuse to understand that the discourse is about the acquiring of retroactive power in life through the explanation’ (SKS5: 466/TDIO: 99). Throughout, it is this ‘retroactive power’ to reshape the contemplator’s life and attitudes that is emphasized. To be co-present with the event of one’s own death is to imagine it with a reflexive quality that refers the imaginer back to her present life (cf. Stokes 2006), giving her a renewed impetus and making her rearrange her priorities, choosing projects and commitments whose ethical character means they do ‘not depend on whether one is granted a lifetime to complete [the work] well or only a brief time to have begun it well’ (SKS5: 464/TDIO: 96). Earnestness is not simply, as the contemporary cliché has it, living each moment as if it’s your last, but the more complex attitude of ‘the living of each day as if it were the last and also the first in a long life’ (SKS5: 464/TDIO: 96).12 Earnestness understands that ‘if death is night then life is day, that if no work can be done at night then work can be done during the day; and the terse but impelling cry of earnestness, like death’s terse cry, is: This very day’ (SKS5: 452–3/TDIO: 83). At death all is over, but the thought of death propels the earnest person back into life with renewed urgency, with the thought that right now, at least, all is not over (SKS5: 454/TDIO: 85)— but the clock is ticking. As with the Postscript, it is death’s ‘certain-uncertainty’ that gives the thought of death this retroactive power over life. Death is decisive (SKS5: 448/TDIO: 78)—however things stand at the point of death is how they will stand forever—but this decision will happen at an utterly unforeseeable time.13 Hence, while we still live, death casts a modal pall over every moment, every plan, every intention, declaring of each no more than that ‘it is possible’ (SKS5: 462–3/TDIO: 94–5). That death will come is what makes us earnest, while uncertainty continually inspects us to see whether our lives actually express that earnestness (SKS5: 467–8/TDIO: 100). The impossibility of escaping death gives the thought that death could come at any time an urgency it would otherwise lack, and hence uncertainty constitutes a ‘daily or at least [. . .] frequent or necessary surveillance that watches over the earnestness—only this is earnestness’ (SKS5: 463/TDIO: 95). While apparently not invoking the non-theticality of the thought of death, we are here pushing in the direction of ‘thinking death into every moment’, precisely because each moment could be our last. Once again, though, the thought of death, which gives such impelling power to life, appears to be strangely lacking in content. Death, according to Kierkegaard, is indefinable. 12 Kierkegaard also rejects the equally clichéd ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’ response to the thought of death as a doomed attempt to flee from the very thing it claims to ignore (SKS5: 453/TDIO: 83). 13 On the fixity of meanings at death, see Davenport 2011.

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‘By this nothing is said,’ he admits, ‘but this is the way it must be when the question is about an enigma’ (SKS5: 454/TDIO: 85). Death being a negation, we can say precious little about it. Attempts to define it in terms of the equality of the dead, for instance, will fail precisely because ‘the equality consists in annihilation’ (SKS5: 455/TDIO: 86). In death, there’s no one left to be equal with. Death is also inexplicable: ‘That is, whether or not people find an explanation, death itself explains nothing’ (SKS5: 465/TDIO: 96). Kierkegaard’s point here concerns the different levels on which we seek explanations. We can certainly tell a good causal story about why this organism stopped metabolizing under these conditions, but when we come to questions of the sort ‘why did she have to die?’ whatever answers we find will be functions of our interpretation, not death itself. Regarded in itself, death is merely the transition from life to non-life, and ‘knows nothing about the circumstances, nothing at all’; thus any explanation we can provide on this level of meaning ‘does not explain death but discloses the state of the explainer’s own innermost being’ (SKS5: 464/TDIO: 97). It is a sign of nascent earnestness that someone is reluctant to offer this sort of explanation in the face of death, for it indicates that she ‘understands that death, just because it is nothing, is not some sort of strange inscription that every passerby is supposed to try to read or a curiosity that everyone must have seen and have an opinion about’ (SKS5: 465/TDIO: 97), but is instead a task for existential engagement. Only an explanation that ‘acquires retroactive power and actuality in the life of the living person’ (SKS5: 465/TDIO: 97) can survive the negative character of the idea of death, for only such an explanation stops asking about death itself, and asks about mortal life. ‘Death has no need of an explanation and certainly has never requested any thinker to be of assistance. But the living need the explanation—and why? In order to live accordingly’ (SKS5: 466/TDIO: 99).

IV. The Afterlife We’ve seen that Kierkegaard refuses to say anything positive about what death is—which is understandable in so far as it is difficult to say much at all about annihilation. But there is more to Kierkegaard’s reticence here than simple wariness of the conceptual difficulties involved in talking about non-existence. After all, the most pressing question about death is whether it is the annihilation of consciousness or is instead a process of transition from one form of existence to another. A Christian writer like Kierkegaard should surely be able to tell us quite a lot in answer to that question; and indeed Anthony Rudd (2008) and Tamara Monet Marks (2010) have recently argued that Kierkegaard accepts an orthodox Christian view of the reality of posthumous survival. Yet, once again, Kierkegaard appears loathe to say anything about what the afterlife might be like, and even his affirmations that there is such a continued posthumous existence follow the pattern familiar from Postscript and ‘At a Graveside’: he sets up the topic in such a way that the reader is provided with scant information about the subject at hand, and is instead deflected back into a consideration of life as we live it now.

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As Kjældgaard points out, the central motivating question of the Postscript—whether an eternal blessedness (salighed) can be based upon the historical event of the incarnation—implicitly asks about salvation in the hereafter (Kjældgaard 2005: 91). In contemporary mouths, this language of the hereafter had, as Møller had complained, become a vacuous ‘pleasantry’ which made it ‘amus[ing] to remember that there was a time when this idea transformed all existence’ (SKS7: 329/CUP1: 361–2). Giving the pith back to that language is one of Climacus’ major concerns. He presents himself as assuming, just like everyone else, that ‘a highest good, called an eternal happiness, awaits me’ (SK7: 25/CUP1: 15, my emphasis); yet when he comes to consider ‘what it means to be immortal’ he offers it as another example of the sort of ethical uncertainty that should provide the grounds for deepening subjectivity. As with what it means to die, he declares that while he knows ‘what people ordinarily know’, (SKS7: 158/CUP1: 171) he denies knowledge of ‘whether the consciousness of immortality is an instructional topic that can be taught and how the instruction must be dialectically qualified in relation to the learner’s qualifications; whether these are not so essential that the instruction becomes an illusion if one is not properly aware of this and in that case changes the instruction into noninstruction’ (SKS7: 158/CUP1: 171). The point of this denial of knowledge centres on how one is to be taught about immortality, and here the Postscript connects with Kierkegaard’s wider preoccupation with the difficulties associated with demonstrating the existence of immortality. Heiberg had insisted that every ‘honest’ religious believer (by which he meant ‘those who lie only to themselves but not to others’) would have to admit that if the immortality of the soul could be demonstrated, ‘as clearly as a mathematical proposition’, they would feel ‘infinitely happier’, their new-found certainty exposing their earlier faith in immortality as ‘nothing more than a hope and therefore a doubt’ (Heiberg 2005: 96). It is the task of philosophy to provide this grounding. Møller’s essay, in which he concludes that no demonstration is ultimately possible and that it is the subjective response to immortality that matters, is more or less a direct response to Heiberg’s position. In The Concept of Anxiety Vigilius Haufniensis notes that while the present age expends so much energy on demonstrating immortality, ‘strangely enough, while this is taking place, certitude declines’ (SKS4: 440/CA: 139)—surely a rejoinder to Heiberg, among others. As if to show just how ineffectual such demonstrations are for sustaining belief, the aesthete ‘A’ claims that while he wrote outstanding compositions on the immortality of the soul as a schoolboy, by the age of twenty-five he could no longer muster a single demonstration (SKS2: 43–4/EO 1: 34). His ironic advice is not that the project of demonstration be abandoned, but that students should simply hold on to their schoolwork for later reference. But the real problem with such demonstrations is not whether or not they work in their own terms or can promote certainty in an afterlife, but that ‘wanting to demonstrate immortality [. . .] places it at a distance and keeps it at a distance from one’ (SKS10: 212/CD: 203). Trying to demonstrate the reality of immortality might seem like a form of denial of death, in that it tries to secure posthumous continuance, but what it actually shares with that denial is a hidden intention to evade the full personal import of what is contemplated. Like the Epicurean ‘jest’, it is an attempt to take oneself out of what one

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contemplates. Haufniensis reminds us that ‘The thought of immortality possesses a power and weightiness in its consequences, a responsibility in the acceptance of it, which perhaps will recreate the whole of life in a way that is feared’ (SKS4: 440/CA: 139). Trying to give objectively valid proofs of immortality is actually a covert means of avoiding that fear, by occupying ourselves with immortality as a conceptual puzzle rather than a call to revise our way of life. The same point is made in Christian Discourses, where Kierkegaard laments that ‘immortality has been turned into a question’ rather than a ‘task for action’, a riddle to entertain ourselves with rather than a spur to live with renewed urgency (SKS10: 214/CD: 205). And this is very much the position Climacus takes: ‘the question of immortality is not a learned question; it is a question belonging to inwardness, which the subject by becoming subjective must ask himself ’ (SKS7: 160/CUP1: 173). Once again, the objective thinker misses the point, because in approaching the question in a detached, objective way we actually change the subject. The thought of immortality per se and the thought of one’s own immortality are importantly different—the same inexpressible difference we saw in the discussion of death in the Postscript, and which also motivates Haufniensis’ claim that if we think about sin in the wrong mood we actually fail to grasp the concept altogether (SKS4: 321–2/CA: 14–15). Death’s individuating power, the power of making me into an I rather than an ‘I-ingeneral’, is to be found here too. ‘[T]he consciousness of my immortality belongs simply and solely to me,’ such that the question of immortality cannot be answered socially, for no partnership or association is possible here (SKS7: 160/CUP1: 173). Just as, for Heidegger, no one else can die my death for me, no one else can survive it for me either; nor can we survive it en masse. Hence ‘the existing subject asks not about immortality in general, because a phantom such as that does not exist at all, but about his immortality’ (SKS7: 161/CUP1: 174). And no systematic demonstration, even the most logically sound, can demonstrate my immortality, for ‘viewed systematically, the whole question is nonsense’ (SKS7: 161/CUP1: 174). Just as the content of the thought I will die is importantly different from the thought that I-in-general will die, a difference that resists conceptual expression, so too my immortality, rather than the immortality of immortal beings as a species, cannot be thought conceptually. Climacus therefore asserts (again reminiscent of Møller) that the certitude of immortality proceeds from immortality’s status as ‘the individual’s most passionate interest’ (SKS7: 161/CUP 1: 174). That does not mean, just as it did not mean for Møller, that we are immortal because we are passionately interested in our survival (Marks 2010: 150); rather, immersion in a particular world view centrally involves a certitude that death is not the end. Marks points out that for a Christian, the thought of death-as-annihilation is horrifying, not because of a fear of permanent extinction or desire to prolong existence, but because it runs athwart the Christian hope for ‘a resurrection [that] is placed within a narrative of cosmic redemption and a new, disambiguated creation’ (Marks 2011: 281–2). That hope makes speaking of immortality difficult, according to Climacus, for immortality exposes the subject to a bifurcated temporality, the same dual temporality one encounters in The Concept of Anxiety with its account of ‘the moment’ (Øjeblikket), in ‘An Occasional Discourse’, and in The Sickness Unto Death. Aware of her

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immortality, the subject is simultaneously located in time and eternity, oriented towards both a world of diachronically-extended projects and the ever-present possibility of impending eternal judgement over her whole life.14 The thought of immortality therefore raises a new problem for the subject: how to live in two registers of time at once, how to ‘simultaneously speak from the standpoint of the infinite and of the finite and think the two together in one moment’ (SKS7: 162/CUP1: 175), how to live as if it is the last day and the first in a long life, how to live in both the earthly realm where there is ‘a time for everything’ while living under the shadow of eternity, which makes it ‘the eleventh hour’ for young and old alike (SKS8: 130/UDVS: 15), how to live with the understanding that the span of a human life, so vanishingly insignificant compared to eternity, nonetheless has infinite significance for the subject (SKS7: 162/CUP1: 175). Once again, immortality, like death, must ‘transform’ the life of the living person, through a consciousness that must be kept present ‘at all times’ (SKS7: 162/CUP1: 175). The emphasis remains resolutely on the individual’s pre-mortem life, though radically requalified by the thought of impending death and eternal judgement. Climacus may live in a state of suspended belief about these matters, but in the discourse ‘There Will Be a Resurrection of the Dead, Of The Righteous—And The Unrighteous’ Kierkegaard is quite unambivalent about the question of immortality: ‘Fear it, it is only all too certain; do not doubt whether you are immortal—tremble, because you are immortal’ (SKS10: 212/CD: 203). So much for uncertainty! But this urgent shutting down of doubt is the result of combining ‘concerned ignorance’ with the belief that ‘Immortality is judgement’. Once we’ve posited that doctrinal claim, then ‘There is not one more word to say about immortality; the one who says one more word or a word in another direction had better beware of judgment’ (SKS10: 215/CD: 206, my emphasis). Understood as final judgement, immortality does not simply push the contemplator back into an interrogation of their own life with renewed urgency, as in the Postscript and ‘At a Graveside’ (though it certainly does that: ‘fear it!’),15 it actually closes off the possibility of continuing to ask certain questions. To say anything more about immortality beyond ‘it is judgement’ is not merely to fail to understand the thought of immortality in its first-personal significance, but to fail ethically. The normativity of immortality’s power to transform life while we live it derives not from the thought of immortality as such, but from an eschatological conception that does not leave time for asking questions about the nature of the afterlife. If we stop to think about what an afterlife would be like, we inevitably come up against some intriguing puzzles. The early Church found itself beset with conundrums raised by the doctrine of bodily resurrection, while Luke depicts Jesus confronting the question of how remarriage will be dealt with in the post-resurrection world (Luke 20:27–38). Jesus’

14 This is, as Rudd points out, a key difference between Heidegger and Kierkegaard on the role of death plays in qualifying temporality (Rudd 2008: 56). 15 An important point here is that what we fear is actually judgement, not death itself. ‘Christianity took away the fear of death and replaced it with the fear of judgment; this is a sharpening but is a step forward as well’ (SKS26: NB31:143 [JP1: 727]).

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answer is, in effect, that the question improperly assumes that the life of the resurrected will be like their present lives, a point which Kierkegaard also insists upon: ‘Immortality is not a continued life, a continued life as such in perpetuity, but immortality is the eternal separation between the righteous and the unrighteous; immortality is no continuation that results as a matter of course but a separation that results from the past’ (SKS10: 214/CD: 205). Eternity, we’re told in ‘An Occasional Discourse’, is not to be construed as a new world, as if having lived in temporality we could then ‘try [our] hand at adopting the customs and practices of eternity’ (SKS8: 174/UDVS: 66). Kierkegaard seems deeply suspicious of enticing visions of what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the encore temporality of the dead’, ‘the temporality of soul-ghosts’ (Ricoeur 2009: 45). Envisioning posthumous survival as a state where we go on much as before would, as Mario von der Ruhr notes, take the sting out of death’s radical and utterly final break with our earthly life (von der Ruhr 2000: 216). However, the main problem with asking these sort of questions, like asking for demonstrations of the reality of immortality, is that they amount to an evasive form of intellectual procrastination, in which we avoid allowing the thought of death and immortality to work its ‘retroactive power’ on our lives. The systematic inquirer into these topics is simply a more intellectually rarefied version of the figure mocked multiple times by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, who goes to the Pastor and asks if he will remain the same and be able to recognize himself and others in the afterlife when he has barely been able to maintain a stable ethical identity in this life (SKS7: 162/CUP1: 176; SKS10: 213/CD: 204; SKS11: 171/SUD: 56). To ask questions about the experiential character of the afterlife is to miss the whole point; to someone genuinely situated within a Christian world view, ‘you are immortal whether you want to be or not’ (SKS10: 221/CD: 212), and once this is posited, continuing to ask questions about that immortality is wilfully to ignore its stark implications for the living.

V. Questions not for Asking Kierkegaard’s discussions of death and immortality end up insisting that from within a certain world view, some important and perfectly sensible questions are ethically unaskable. It is not just that answering these questions requires a sub specie aeternitatis viewpoint that is not accessible for finite creatures, or even that such questions are presumptuous, but that their immediate moral force impels us to not inquire into them further; they confer a moral urgency that is incompatible with continued inquiry. In various places, this way of thinking about moral urgency leads Kierkegaard to make some troubling claims. In Christian Discourses he insists that there should never be a question about what my duty is but simply about whether I have done my duty (SKS10: 214/CD: 205), and that asking such questions about the content of duty is therefore simply an evasion of the demand to do my duty. In For Self-Examination we are told that it is an evasion to continue to try to understand the content of Scripture completely, rather

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than seeking to carry out those of its demands one has understood, however imperfectly (SKS13: 59–60/FSE: 32). Yet ‘what is my duty here?’ and ‘what precisely does Scripture require of those who believe in its moral authority?’ seem to be perfectly philosophically (and theologically and philologically) respectable questions—even ones that might be essential to practical reason. Kierkegaard seems to betray both an overconfidence in the clarity of Scripture and a stunning blindness to the possibility of genuine moral disagreement.16 If we find Kierkegaard’s claims here hard to digest, however, we should remember that ‘we’ aren’t his intended audience. Our pluralistic moral and religious context is very different to the one Kierkegaard inhabits, in which intellectual assent to a Christian world view is taken as a given—it is those who self-deceptively fail to truly inhabit and live up to that world view who are Kierkegaard’s main targets, not those who explicitly reject it. In our context, no easy return to such ethico-religious homogeneity is possible. In a sense that actually makes our predicament worse, for we are still subject to the predations of temporality that Kierkegaard sets at the heart of his discussions of death, immortality, and ethical urgency. We are at the mercy of time on various fronts: love must be transfigured into the open-ended ethical project of marriage if it is to overcome the ‘enemy’ of time (SKS3: 137/EO2: 138),17 death continually threatens our projects and plans, and the ever-looming prospect of eternal judgement leaves us always situated at the soteriological ‘eleventh hour’. Even our very temporal emplacement continually compounds our guilt: Haufniensis claims that in an important sense Fichte was right that we have no time for repentance, ‘inasmuch as the moment of repentance [itself] becomes a deficit of action’ (SKS4: 419/CA: 118). Even with the best of intentions, simply being in time makes our guilt pile up moment upon moment. Divine grace, according to Kierkegaard, is the only way out of this bind. Perhaps even within Kierkegaard’s view of these matters it would be possible to contemplate these apparently forbidden topics in an appropriately earnest rather than evasive way. The Climacan non-theticality of the thought of death might be of use here: if we can inquire into death or the afterlife (or the contents of Scripture) in an earnest, subjectively and ethically engaged manner, then perhaps these questions can be asked after all.18 But Kierkegaard’s greatest skill as a psychologist is surely his capacity for sniffing out and closing off all possible routes of escape, and for his audience—and perhaps for us too—the idea of an ‘earnest scholarship’ would have offered an irresistible path out of the existential difficulties created by the thought of death. We are altogether too quick to believe the best of ourselves, as Kierkegaard reminds us again and again in a variety of ways. So even if earnest scholarship is possible, the risk of scholarship constituting an

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On Kierkegaard’s apparent blindness to the possibilities of moral dilemma, see Marino 2001: 43–60. Of course, what Judge William here says about love is far from Kierkegaard’s last word on the matter. However, Works of Love also posits time as the enemy of love in a different, but related, sense: the memory of the loved one who has died has to be defended against time in order to preserve the beloved from annihilation (SKS9: 347/WL: 354). See Stokes 2011: 264–5. 18 I make a case for this in chapter 10 of Stokes 2010. 17

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evasion of deathly finitude gives Kierkegaard a good reason (if maybe not, for us, a good enough reason) to leave that possibility off the table in discussions that are meant to be religiously edifying. ‘Earnestness’, Kierkegaard insists, ‘does not waste much time in guessing riddles; it does not sit sunk in contemplation, does not rewrite expressions, does not think about the ingeniousness of imagery, does not discuss, but acts’ (SKS5: 452/TDIO: 82–3). Besides, for all his suspicion of iconic depictions of the afterlife, perhaps Kierkegaard hints that there will be time enough for contemplation in eternity, through the lines from Brorson’s hymn ‘Hallelujah! I Have Found My Jesus’ that he chose for his gravestone: It is just a little while, Then I shall have won. Then the whole struggle Will have disappeared at once. Then I may rest In bowers of roses And unceasingly, unceasingly Speak with my Jesus.

References Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death (New York: Simon & Schuster). Bloch, Oscar (1903). Om Døden. En Almenfattelig Fremstilling (Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag). Buben, Adam (2011). ‘Christian Hate: Death, Dying, and Reason in Pascal and Kierkegaard’, in Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben (eds.), Kierkegaard and Death (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 65–80. Connell, George (2011). ‘Knights and Knaves of the Living Dead: Kierkegaard’s Use of Living Death as a Metaphor for Despair’, in Kierkegaard and Death, 21–43. Czakó, István (2008). ‘Becoming Immortal: The Historical Context of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Immortality’, Kierkegaard and Christianity (Acta Kierkegaardiana vol. 3) eds. Roman Králik, Abrahim H. Khan, Peter Šajda, Jamie Turnbull, and Andrew J. Burgess (Slovakia: Kierkegaard Society in Slovakia and Kierkegaard Circle, University of Toronto), 59–71. Davenport, John J. (2011). ‘Life-Narrative and Death as the End of Freedom: Kierkegaard on Anticipatory Resoluteness’, in Stokes and Buben (eds.), Kierkegaard and Death, 160–83. Diogenes Laertius (1979–80). Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II, trans. R. D. Hicks (Loeb, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Garff, Joakim (2005). Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (2005). On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, ed. and trans. Jon Stewart (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row).

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Horn, Robert Leslie (2007). Positivity and Dialectic: A Study of the Theological Method of Hans Lassen Martensen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Keeley, Louise Carroll (1999). ‘Loving ‘No One’, Loving Everyone: The Work of Love in Recollecting One Dead in Works of Love’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 211–48. Kirmmse, Bruce (1996). Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Kjældgaard, Lasse Horn (2005). ‘What it Means to be Immortal: Afterlife and Aesthetic Communication in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Herman Deuser (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2005 (Berlin: de Gruyter). Marino, Gordon D. (2001). Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press). ——– (2011). ‘A Critical Perspective on Kierkegaard’s “At a Graveside” ’, in Stokes and Buben (eds.), Kierkegaard and Death, 150–9. Marks, Tamara Monet (2010). ‘Kierkegaard’s “New Argument” for Immortality’, Journal of Religious Ethics 38:1, 143–86 ——– (2011). ‘Kierkegaard’s Conception of the Afterlife’, in Stokes and Buben, Kierkegaard and Death, 274–98. Martensen, Hans Lassen (1882). Af Mit Levnet, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Gylendalske Bohandels Forlag). McDonald, William (2003). ‘Love in Kierkegaard’s Symposia’ Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 7, 60–93. Mjaaland, Marius Timmann (2008). Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida (Berlin: de Gruyter). ——– (2011). ‘Suicide and Despair’, in Stokes and Buben Kierkegaard and Death, 81–100. Møller, Poul Martin (1837). ‘Tanker over Muligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed, med Hensyn til de nyeste derhen hørende Literatur’, Maanedskrift for Litteratur 17, 1–72. Mooney, Edward F. (1996). Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology from Either Or to Sickness Unto Death. (New York and London: Routledge). ——– (2011). ‘The Intimate Agency of Death’ in Stokes and Buben (eds.), Kierkegaard and Death, 133–49. Muench, Paul (2011). ‘Thinking Death Into Every Moment: The Existence-Problem of Dying in Kierkegaard’s Postscript’, in Stokes and Buben, Kierkegaard and Death, 101–21. Podmore, Simon D. (2011). ‘To Die and Yet Not Die: Kierkegaard’s Theophany of Death’, in Stokes and Buben, Kierkegaard and Death, 44–64. Possen, David D. (2011). ‘Death and Ethics in Kierkegaard’s Postscript’, in Stokes and Buben, Kierkegaard and Death, 122–32. Ricoeur, Paul (2009). Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Rudd, Anthony (2008). ‘Kierkegaard on Patience and the Temporality of the Self: The Virtues of a Being in Time’, Journal of Religious Ethics 36: 3, 491–509. Søltoft, Pia (1998). ‘The Presence of the Absent Neighbor in Works of Love’, trans. M. G. Piety, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Herman Deuser (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1998 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 113–28. Stewart, Jon (2007). A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark Tome I: The Heiberg Period: 1824–1836 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel).

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Stokes, Patrick (2006). ‘The Power of Death: Retroactivity, Narrative, and Interest’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Prefaces/Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 387–417. ——– (2010). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision (Hampshire: Palgrave) ——– (2011). ‘Duties to the Dead? Earnest Imagination and Remembrance’ in Stokes and Buben, Kierkegaard and Death, 253–73. Taylor, Charles (2007). A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap). Tolstoy, Leo (1960). The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Rosemary Edmondson (London: Penguin). von der Ruhr, Mario (2000). ‘Kant and Kierkegaard on Eternal Life—A Reply’, in D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (eds.), Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion (Hampshire and New York: Macmillan). Westphal, Merold (1996). Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press).

Suggested reading Connell, George (2006). ‘Four Funerals: The Experience of Time by the Side of a Grave’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Prefaces/Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 419–38. Czakó (2008). Kjaeldgaard (2005). Marks (2010). Mjaaland, Marius Timmann (2006). ‘On Death: The Autopsy of One Still Living’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Prefaces/Writing Sampler and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 359–76. Mooney (1996). Stokes (2006). ——– and Buben (2011). (edited collection). von der Ruhr, Mario (2000). Watkin, Julia (1979). ‘Dying and Eternal Life as Paradox’, PhD Diss., University of Bristol. Westphal (1996).

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K I ER K EGA A R D A F T ER K I ER K EGA A R D

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chapter 20

Tr a nsl ati ng K ier k ega a r d A lastair H annay

I. Many Styles but One Signature? Commentators often refer to the variety of styles in Kierkegaard’s production, while at the same time admonishing translators for failing to capture or recreate it. Scholars intent on isolating the philosophy and theology in Kierkegaard’s works tend on the contrary to go straight to the heart of their own matters, leaving concerns of style and the confusion of pseudonymity to their literary colleagues. But voices from this latter quarter can also be heard claiming to detect in the variety of styles what might be called their collective signature. Since they are no doubt the better equipped to see it, the chances are that they may be right. If so, recapturing both the styles and the signature must surely be part of a translator’s task. For Anglophone readers, however, the style itself is hard enough to get hold of even within any one of Kierkegaard’s authorial guises. He wrote in a Danish that Danes themselves today find alien, the syntax of their language having undergone changes that make its accompanying rhythms no longer directly audible. The vocabulary too contains changes that can lead even the unwary Dane astray. Anglophone translators reading the original face the additional challenge of the still deep-rooted lexical and syntactic disparities between their language and Danish. Although a translator may cherish the hope of producing an equivalent style suited to the language of translation, actually to reproduce it, even were it possible, would mean standing with one leg in the original, thus defeating a regulative idea of translation, namely the elimination as far as possible of any indication that the text was not written in the translator’s native language. Similar considerations apply to what, following Johannes Climacus’s distinction between ‘what’ and ‘how’, can be called the ‘what’ of the thought-content of Kierkegaard’s texts. Apart from the complication often pointed out that any attempt to encapsulate the ‘what’ of Kierkegaard’s writings without their characteristic ‘how’ involves loss of content, the

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background of his thinking both in philosophy and theology is something only those familiar with the relevant landscapes and subsequent paths in the history of ideas can draw on without substantial recourse to commentary and works of reference. Yet one undoubted advantage in rendering classic texts in another language is the opportunity provided to freshen them up for modern readers. It is an advantage that is typically denied to native speakers of the original, though drama is an exception; thus the plays of Henrik Ibsen, whose Norwegian at that time was almost indiscernible from Kierkegaard’s Danish, and who would (as he undoubtedly did) find Kierkegaard’s texts congenial in more ways than one, are constantly adjusted to suit modern ears even in Norwegian. But the theatre is a special case, and no one would think of tampering with the Sonnets even though the words of Shakespeare’s characters are constantly adjusted to the demands of actors and stage- and film directors. Just as literary scholars safeguarding the national canon shudder at the thought of a modernized edition of Shakespeare, so too are Danes loath to take liberties with the texts of their famous author—so much so that Kierkegaard’s writings have been considered sufficiently canonical for the Danish government to fund a critical edition intended to ensure for all time an accurate rendering of Kierkegaard’s manuscripts. This, of course, is not merely a matter of piety or national pride. Dressed, or perhaps undressed, in a contemporary idiom, Kierkegaard’s texts would probably lose a great deal of their literary quality and thereby impact, just as English-language revisions of the Bible pale in comparison with the Authorized King James Version. The opportunity given to translators to freshen up Kierkegaard is therefore one to be grasped but with care. One aspect of the task should be unproblematic but is overlooked if Kierkegaard’s texts are read with the aid only of a modern Danish dictionary. The distance between Kierkegaard’s and today’s Danish means that a non-Dane tackling Kierkegaard with modern dictionaries is easily misled. But there are several nineteenth-century Danishto-English dictionaries to put one on track. A more complex question is just how fresh should a translator otherwise make Kierkegaard appear? Should the translation nevertheless reflect the time to which he belonged? Just as an author’s eloquence can easily get lost in translation, so too may the natural feel or style of the language in which the author wrote. But then should we not perhaps consider translation itself in a historical dimension and somehow convey the impact made by Kierkegaard’s writing on Danish reading habits? That is surely impossible; the distance implicit in the freshness that Kierkegaard brought to his own language is not one that we can envisage from our own vantage point, nor therefore can it be represented in the way in which we freshen up his language today. However, even if the past in which he was an innovator is no longer ours, and whatever freshness is imparted to his writing can only be compared with a still recognizable past of our own, ours is nevertheless a past that we might well think has inherited innovations of the kind Kierkegaard introduced to the past he himself inherited. That can mean that we are closer to Kierkegaard than we thought, and thus justified in taking advantage of the opportunity to present a more contemporary sounding writer. This offers the translator the conscience-saving thought that in doing something that is forbidden for Danes, he or she does indeed have the advantage over them.

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Nonetheless, the truth is probably that however word perfect in the translated language Kierkegaard’s text can be made to appear, translation, even good translation, even the best, if some measure of optimality were at all available, will only give us something we might call another Kierkegaard, a substitute for the original rather than a repeat. Such substitutes can vary. If we can talk of languages as individuals, then they could be said to have their own idiolects, so that we may expect a French Kierkegaard to differ from a Spanish one, and both from either a German or an English Kierkegaard. But as readers of the English translations will recognize, even within one language there can be many Kierkegaards. Every Kierkegaard in translation bears the imprint of the translator’s background and not least the translator’s reason for translating specifically Kierkegaard. These, after all, are not professional translators but scholars who have felt a rapport with the writing and feel impelled to bring them to the notice of contemporaries. Emanuel Hirsch’s German translation has been described as a ‘Germanification [Verdeutschung]’, bearing more specifically the imprint of the translator’s personal interest in an existence theology apt for National Socialism (Schulz 1999: 229). From quite another cultural perspective David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, having translated Kierkegaard, as one commentator puts it, ‘as an orthodox Christian believer’, are said to have paid too little attention to the latter’s insistence on the importance of indirect communication in matters of religion (Poole 1998: 59). Similarly, the Hongs’ translations are often said to present an asseverative rather than a more Socratic Kierkegaard (Poole 1998: 61).1 Perhaps such judgements should be balanced against the fact that those who make them are also scholars and readers who approach Kierkegaard from quite distinct backgrounds and interests. There are many ‘takes’ to be made on Kierkegaard, although that too may incline one to side with those who seek openness rather than instruction in a translation. An interesting sidelight on the diversity of guises in which Kierkegaard can be made to appear is thrown by the writing of someone close enough to home to require no translation. William Heinesen, a Faroese novelist to whom Danish came as easily as his mother tongue, has Kierkegaard as a man ‘possessed of a superior intellect’ and who deploys it ‘with the same supple facility and tirelessness as that devil’s chargé d’affaires in Goethe’. From Heinesen’s more local vantage point, Kierkegaard is presented as ‘the dire sufferer of his own Satanism’, or ‘[as] one might say, the tragic Satan . . .’ (Heinesen 1965: 144, my translation). A far cry from Socrates? Or from the sainthood that Wittgenstein bestowed on Kierkegaard? (Hannay 1999: p. ix) These are questions that also deserve to be kept open. Diversity of another kind confronts the translator facing Kierkegaard’s Danish, namely that sheer variety of genre and style we mentioned at the start. Amid this profusion it may seem pointless to seek out anything that might be called Kierkegaard’s ‘signature’. The urgent formality of the Discourses, only lightly touched by irony, differs from the looser and more conversational styles of the pseudonymous writing, indicating that Kierkegaard has commuted at least metaphorically between writing desks when penning 1 Poole also writes: ‘The existential, humorous, continuously self-referring nature of Kierkegaard’s syntax is expunged from the translations’ (Poole 1998: 61).

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works simultaneously in these distinct genres. But then the pseudonym Johannes Climacus himself is also protean in this respect; there are, as Lowrie noted, abrupt changes of style even in the same work once a ‘personal theme . . . is suddenly introduced’ (Kierkegaard 1941: 572); the light ironical tone with which Climacus sets off gives way to frequent passages of an expository nature along with appropriately informative footnotes of the kind one finds in any scholarly treatise. The journals introduce their own variations; while many entries are as elegant as anything Kierkegaard ever wrote, cast as they were for later generations that he hoped would be better able than his own to appreciate what he was up to, many are evidently written in some haste as one would expect. Yet, in spite of this diversity, and as has often been said, even by those who have read Kierkegaard only in translation, there is a distinct impression of Kierkegaard’s presence in all that he wrote, something that might indeed be called his ‘signature’. Two questions arise: how to identify such a signature and how to restore it in translation. The simple answer to both, but one that doesn’t work, is to say, ‘Just follow the Danish’. It won’t work because not only is Danish a language with its own personality, it is also the language in which Kierkegaard’s personal idiolect, properly so-called, is deeply embedded. A well-known journal entry from 1848 records: ‘I am proud of my mother tongue, whose secrets I know, the mother tongue I treat more lovingly than a flautist his instrument’ (SKS21/KJN5: NB7:41/Kierkegaard 1996: 97). You could say that while, on the one hand, Kierkegaard’s poetic nature confined him to his mother tongue, on the other this confinement had the advantage of allowing the author to develop a virtuosity that would have been denied him had he sought an audience outside Denmark. The instinct of selfprotection that can be detected in Kierkegaard’s refusal to have his dissertation translated into German is something his translators may well bear in mind. It should alert them to a need to attune their ears to the presence in the texts of this literary flautist’s virtuosity. Musicality may not be a metaphor that first comes to mind on first contact with the spoken Danish language. But perhaps that is because it is a language well used to being spoken. Loquacity, after all, and the needs of verbal economy can be a reason why it is the loosely articulated language it is, a language that to outsiders can sound as if it swallows as many words as it utters. That Danish is a language that its speakers enjoy using would account for this feature being a more recent development and especially pronounced (if that word is in place here) in Copenhagen. Kierkegaard was clearly sensitive to the sound of spoken Danish. He was sensitive to the need for a reader to catch the text’s rhythm. He confessed that although ‘bow[ing] unconditionally to authority’ in matters of spelling’, when it comes to punctuation, having in mind the needs of a reader who ‘reads aloud’ he makes his own rules (SKS20/KJN4: NB146/Kierkegaard 1996: 257). Kierkegaard also records that before penning his words it was his practice to rehearse his lines to himself: ‘Most of what I have written was spoken aloud many, many times, and often heard perhaps a score of times before being written down’ (SKS23/KJN7: NB30:41/Kierkegaard 1996: 588). Anyone familiar even with today’s spoken Danish will detect an unmistakably Danish rhythm in the texts. As with all languages, the rhythm of Danish depends on the placing and order of words, not first and foremost the ‘big’ words that provide literal content or meaning, but

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the ubiquitous ‘small’ words, typically with fewer syllables than such English equivalents as ‘indeed’, ‘after all’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘precisely’, and to render which slavishly into these English expressions is to remove the rhythm entirely. Since word order in English is more flexible than in Danish, a translator can often avoid this result by rephrasing a sentence in a way that allows the other words to convey the required tone of voice. A particular obstacle is ‘precisely’ which no readjustment of words will make redundant. With its three syllables instead of the quickly delivered two of netop, the former introduces a tone of formality and even of superiority that is quite absent in the Danish. The Danish vel corresponds to a definitive tone of voice, not always the same, and to translate it officiously as ‘indeed’ is again to diminish the oral character of the language. Mostly, however, its finely nuanced variations can be reflected in English phrases that capture the required tone of voice, which may correspond in some cases, or come near to the French ‘n’est-ce pas?’ and in English to phrases like ‘isn’t it?’, or ‘aren’t they? The question of a signature is that of the author’s felt presence in his or her writings. In whatever way we try to convey or reproduce anything like Kierkegaard’s presence it will not be by ‘putting on the style’ or inserting something into an already translated body of literal meaning. Here we can apply Kierkegaard’s own neat metaphor for the way in which ‘an author’s work should bear the imprint of his likeness, his individuality’. He likens it to ‘a sort of emanation on the canvas’, contrasting this with a portrait, or ‘a minutely detailed reproduction’ (SKS17/KJN1: DD:151/Hannay 1996: 99). In these terms what a translator may hope to produce in the translating language is something corresponding to an author’s individual use of the language of the original. Supposing that in Kierkegaard’s case we want to give it a Socratic feel, we might try to find in our own language a lightness of touch that avoids portentousness and which can invite the reader’s own participation. Here too some remarks by Kierkegaard himself are worth bearing in mind. An early journal entry tells us that writing was his way of hiding—though not of hiding from— his melancholia, while in another, later entry he confides that his writing kept him away from the ‘temptations of doubt’ (SKS19/KJN3: Not8:9/Kierkegaard 1996: 141 and SKS20/ KJN4: NB108/Kierkegaard 1996: 244). Due to their very content, the burden of such remarks obviously cannot influence the picture presented by the text itself, what they point to is something that lies beneath. Nevertheless, some understanding on the translator’s part of the pressures beneath a creative author’s work can suggest the mood in which what he writes is written, and this might well be something that a translator can bear in mind, and which may convey in translation something of the author’s individuality. To do so, however, requires something more of the translator. Beside an ability to reproduce what might abstractly be called literal content, and to produce equivalent styles, a translator needs sufficient knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of his or her own mother tongue to recreate the author’s presence in his or her works. This might even lead us to suppose that variety should also be found in the persons of the translators each with their own special command of mother tongue secrets. In general, I suggest that what is most important in translating Kierkegaard in a way that allows Kierkegaard’s presence to be felt in his texts is some combination of the

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seriousness that lies behind their very existence and the liveliness of their surface, something that is inescapably bound up with the momentum that can be felt in the Danish. Whatever else is needed, a vital requirement is an ability to produce a rhythm, and in general a style, that provides the text with its own English momentum. As far as secrets of language are concerned, however, there is no call for the translator to show off whatever secrets he or she is privy to in the mother tongue, or even to give rein unthinkingly to whatever skills in that respect come naturally. In spite of their admired literary qualities, Kierkegaard’s writings are not literary in any conventional, self-conscious or ceremonial way; their primary appeal is not to a reader’s sense of style, form, inventive language, talent for metaphor, etc. Kierkegaard by his own admission (or according to his own claim) paid special attention only latterly to his style: ‘taking care of style really came later . . . since anyone with genuine thoughts has form from the start’ (SKS25/KJN7: NB30:41/Kierkegaard 1996: 559). There is, in short, no vestige of the portentous or ‘look at me’ in Kierkegaard’s writings. At every step there is movement and purpose and stimulation. Perhaps this is what most obviously, or most generally, deserves to be called his ‘signature’.

II. Influential Translation Momentum is something translations also provide. Their vocabularies and selected renderings can determine the language of commentaries and dissertations in an indefinite future. To translate a nineteenth-century author is to resurrect him or her in a discourse over which he or she has no control but with which that author will be identified in readers’ minds for generations. For whole populations of readers an established translation forms the prism through which uniquely they are able to identify the original author, but now as someone writing not necessarily all that perfectly in their own and the translator’s language. Since translation of an oeuvre is typically funded by backers guided by the economics of publication, the complex forces at work here determine which translations survive. Through sheer availability the translation of an entire oeuvre, or even a significant part of it, achieves canonical status. Under its sway the shelf lives of individual efforts such as Dru’s translation from the journals and Steere’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, however admirable, are cut short, these previously treasured translations surviving only in references in a secondary literature whose constant regeneration spells their eventual disappearance even there. Replete with their biases and the occasional unavoidable mistake, translations can thus shape and reshape the discourse of countless commentaries and dissertations to come. Phrases due only to a translator can even assume the status of mantras that encapsulate the essence of the author’s thought. Kierkegaard is no exception. Who, for example, has not heard it repeated time and time again that for Kierkegaard we are ‘in process of becoming’, and how many essays and dissertations have titles containing the expression ‘indirect communication’?

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Both are harmless enough in their way as mantras. They are also misleading, although it is easy to see how a translator looking for idiomatic substitutes in English would settle for these translations. ‘In process of becoming’ is misleading in so far as ‘process’ suggests something more regulated and predictable than Kierkegaard insists is true of human becoming. The Danish term Proces is one that Kierkegaard uses but in contexts to which human becoming is explicitly opposed (‘the speculative process’ and ‘the scientific process’). The expression translated ‘in process of becoming’ is not easy to translate into idiomatic English but expedients are available, for instance ‘in the course of becoming’ and or even, more daringly, ‘on the way to being’. The latter captures the thought behind Kierkegaard’s theology that the creation is still in progress, but not in the way of a process. Similarly with ‘indirect communication’. Here again we have a word (‘communication’, the same in English and Danish) that Kierkegaard uses but in contexts that differ significantly from those in which he refers to indirecte Meddelelse. In modern Danish a meddelelse is an announcement, typically official and authoritative, and correspondingly it is also used in connection with scientific ‘reports’ of the kind indeed referred to in English as ‘communications’. But as with the German zu mitteilen, the corresponding Danish verb form at meddele has the sense, only implicit in the above, of to ‘share’ or ‘impart’. Although ‘Communication’ occurs in Kierkegaard, it does so rarely and not in connection with the famous distinction between direct and indirect ‘communication’. Meddelelse is better, if less idiomatically, translated as an ‘imparting’, even better but still less idiomatically as ‘with-parting’ (as against a ‘parting with’). But ‘sharing’ captures it quite well so long as we grasp this as the sharing of something that is the sharer’s to give. It might be a piece of news perhaps, or something you want to ‘put across’ or ‘let someone in on’. Although today meddelelse does serve as a synonym of ‘communication’, for Kierkegaard it seems clearly to have had this sense of ‘sharing’ in the sense of ‘imparting’. For how otherwise could he make play as in such remarks as that ‘[i] Forhold til at meddele er det ogsaa af Vigtighed at kunde fratage’ (regarding Meddelelse it is also important to be able to take away (Pap. VI B 52)). There is no wit in the remark that in relation to communicating it is important to be able to take away. Unlike communication, Meddelelse is essentially a one-way relation—also in the case of sharing where what is shared is something first in the possession of the sharer. The contexts in which Kierkegaard uses ‘Communication’ are typically those in which we would talk of ‘being in touch with’, including the reciprocal means of communication that are provided by channels of information and by transport.2 Unless we think of teaching as no more than a levelling up of information quanta, this model offers no foothold to a one-way teacher-learner relation. True, it was not always so, and the Latinist Kierkegaard would know that the primary sense of communico/communicare was precisely that of to ‘share,’ or to ‘make a sharer in’. The root munis in ‘communication’, but also in ‘communal’ and its cognates, 2 See SKS8: 62/TA: 64/Kierkegaard 2001: 56: ‘how ironic that the rapidity of the transport system and the speed of communication [Communicationens Hastværk] stand in inverse relation to the dilatoriness of decision.’

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has the double sense of ‘charge’ (in the sense of what one is charged with doing—hence also immunis for one who is excused) and, derivable from the related munus, that of a ‘gift’ or ‘present’ (as in ‘munificence’). But by Kierkegaard’s time the new technology of transportation had already made topical what we now call ‘communication’, a notion lacking any vestige of the connotation of a ‘giving’ that can be contrasted with a taking away, as against, say, a withholding. Johannes Climacus in Postscript leads us to suppose that indirect communication is called for when we transcend the bounds of what can intelligibly be said in the language with which we share our beliefs and concerns, and through which we merely add to each other’s body of knowledge of facts of the world. He brings the two aspects of indirect ‘communication’ (giving and taking away) together in a reference to Socrates. Think! Socrates was a teacher in the ethical, but he took note of the fact that there is no direct relation between the teacher and the learner, because inwardness is truth, and because inwardness in the two is precisely the path away from each other. (SKS7: 225/PC: 142/Kierkegaard 2009: 207)

Another instance of the power of translation to create a portrait of the author in the image of the translator’s personal impression is to be found in a landmark decision made by Lowrie on taking over the translation of Postscript on the death of Swenson. Against his inclination, Lowrie chose to respect the latter’s wishes to translate Philosophiske smuler as ‘Philosophical Fragments’. The fact that Swenson had already completed his translation of that work with that title no doubt contributed to Lowrie abandoning his own preference for ‘Scraps’ over ‘Fragments’, a choice he supported with a reference to the quotation from Plato’s Hippias Major that forms Postscript’s epigraph (Kierkegaard 1941: 557). In fact ‘scraps’ or ‘scrapings’ would be better rendered in Danish by Flager, leaving ‘Crumbs’ as a linguistically more appropriate alternative. However, readers used to the literary sheen that Swenson and Lowrie brought to their translations, or brought up on the no-nonsense and formidably prosaic Hong translation, can easily feel that the informal ‘crumbs’ is stylistically inappropriate. Beyond that, however, there is sheer force of habit, a habit that links ‘Philosophical Fragments’ inseparably with Kierkegaard’s name. However, the translation of Smuler in Philosophiske Smuler as ‘Crumbs’ requires in fact no complex justification. In a literary context ‘fragments’ suggests detached parts of a composition, as in a jigsaw puzzle, or of a body of thought only pieces of which have seen (or still see) the light of day, fragments that as with a jigsaw puzzle might conceivably be put together to form a whole again. Crumbs, however, will never make a loaf. ‘Leftovers’ might catch it, as in the Danish Bible’s rendering of the feeding of the five thousand (‘tiloversblevne Stykker’: leftover pieces) (John 6:12). If Kierkegaard intends a biblical source, it could be the story of the beggar Lazarus wanting to be fed from what fell from the rich man’s table (Luke 16:21). According to the Authorized English Version, what fall are crumbs (Greek ψιχιον: a crumb of bread). The Danish Bible, however, has only ‘what falls from the rich man’s table’. Habits, good or bad, can of course be changed by new translations once established as scholarly resources. The Hong translations remove most of the mistakes and excesses

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due to Swenson and Lowrie, but on the other hand not all their adjustments to detail may be for the better. Among the more conspicuous of these adjustments is to have replaced Lowrie’s choice of ‘edifying’ for the Danish opbyggelig with ‘upbuilding’. There are contextual reasons for doing so, since Kierkegaard uses the verb form ‘build up’ (bygge op) in contexts which directly allude to the adjective opbyggelig, whereas ‘edifying’ resists being thus dismantled. The latter nevertheless enjoys an identical etymology (Latin ædificare, to build) and it possesses the required literal sense. So why change a prettier word for one more likely to grate in the ears of those who, like Kierkegaard, like to read half aloud to themselves? For the Hongs it can be part of the same policy that leads them to choose ‘enclosed reserve’ for the Danish Indesluttethed, readily translated simply as ‘reserve’, though in this writer’s view their choice is an improvement on Lowrie’s ‘shut-upness’, while other elaborations of the Danish to be found in the secondary literature include ‘self-enclosed reserve’, though also, in the Hongs’ six-volume selection from the notebooks and journals, ‘self-encapsulation’ (Kierkegaard 1978: 443, 556).3 I suspect a preference for the simpler expression serves the author best whenever it forms part of the everyday speech of those for whom that author wrote. One may suppose that as long as ‘edifying’ brings to mind the ‘uplift’ of hymn singing and Bible schools, or is associated with ‘improvement’ and ‘accomplishment’ rather than building up from the foundations, as (perhaps only in apparent paradox) the down-to-earth opbyggelig more easily suggests, it had better bide its time. However, in a generation that has grown up with ‘down- and uploading’ as well as ‘downplaying’ and ‘downputting’, such a workaday word will hardly halt contemporary readers of the virtuoso flautist in their tracks. More’s the pity. A consolation that not everyone will consider a virtue is that the appropriately building-block appearance of ‘up-building’ adds to the already wellsupported impression we have of Kierkegaard as a thinker in whose tracks the etymologically focused early Heidegger studiously followed. This Heidegger seems, however, to have inherited Hegel’s belief that the genius of the German language lies exactly in the integral part played in it by prepositions. For Hegel they express the dynamic in which the absolute comes to thought, while for Heidegger they form the basic relationships to be uncovered in a fundamental ontology of being. Neither of these, nor any such belief in the genius of the not so dissimilar Danish language, as opposed to that of someone using it, is evident in Kierkegaard.

III. Preserving Ambiguity Translators with concomitant lives as Kierkegaard scholars and commentators—as any translator of Kierkegaard had better be—are exposed to at least two temptations. One is to ease the passage of a translated author’s text into the new language by amending the original in ways that make it more immediately intelligible. The other is to provide 3

The translators confess to this expression ‘exuding the odor of jargon’.

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renderings that conform with—and may then be taken to confirm—a preferred reading. In both cases a translator risks perpetrating and—if not corrected in later translation— perpetuating significant misreadings. Interpretation can be left to commentators, while translators do well on their behalf to preserve original ambiguity as far as possible. The dangers can be illustrated in the two following examples. In the Swenson and Lowrie Postscript translation, to cite just one of several instances of padding, we read: ‘In passion, the existing subject is rendered infinite in the eternity of the imaginative representation’ (Kierkegaard 1941: 176). The term ‘representation’ is an addition due to the translators, the original reading simply ‘Phantasiens Evighed [the eternity of imagination]’ (SKS7: 181). This may seem a harmless enough gloss to commentators less than familiar with the roles attributed to imagination by post-Kantian philosophy. But it obscures a real possibility that for Kierkegaard imagination is to be grasped here in the manner of Schelling, for whom imagination intuits rather than represents reality (Hannay 2003: 13–14). At least one commentator takes Climacus here to be saying that the unity of finite and infinite takes place only in the imagination, and concludes from this that by offering an obviously invalid argument concerning the truth of Christianity, Postscript is to be understood as a ‘carefully constructed parody of the Phenomenology of Mind’ (Allison 1967: 7–29). Commentators are of course free to come to such far-reaching conclusions, but it is unfortunate if the rapidity with which they reach them is due to bias prematurely imparted to the text by the translator. Our second example is just as far-reaching but has even wider ramifications. It concerns the term fortvivlet in The Sickness unto Death. The term occurs in the title heading of the very first section of The Sickness unto Death introducing two ‘authentic’ forms of despair. Since despair is the book’s central topic, it is natural to infer from the fact that the word occurs identically in each expression4 that it means the same in each case. Not all commentators feel bound by this; one recent revision of my own translation of the passage renders the first occurrence with ‘desperately’ and the second with ‘despairingly’.5 This is of course perfectly legitimate when a commentator provides, as here, a well-documented case for a reading that calls for this apparently anomalous result and also acknowledges the adjustment, so that other commentators can go back to the translation and begin from there. However, it seems that in this case there is no clear way to preserve the original ambiguity in English. It is an ambiguity that applies to almost every occurrence of the term and its cognates in the authorship and can be illustrated as follows. I fall overboard and reach for the rope thrown out to save me. I will be said to reach for it desperately if it seems as though I might reach it if only the gap could close. In other words there is still hope. If, on the other hand, my reaching out continues as the rope drifts inexorably out of reach, that behaviour will be rightly described as ‘despairing’. Despair is losing hope, while desperation comes close to calling on the gods to make good what seems beyond human reach. 4 See the title heading to the first section of Sygdommen til døden: ‘fortvivlet ikke at ville være sig selv’ and ‘fortvivlet at ville være sig selv.’ 5 Dreyfus 2008: 12.

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Like other translators, I have rendered fortvivlet in the two expressions in question at the very beginning of The Sickness unto Death as ‘in despair’. This expression is, however, not entirely neutral. For one thing it sides with ‘despairing’ rather than with ‘desperate’, thus playing down the element of ‘affect’ more readily associated with desperation; but it has the advantage, at least in my judgement, of suggesting a settled state or disposition, more so than the ‘despairing’, which characterizes the forlornness of my reaching for a rope beyond my grasp. As I read The Sickness unto Death, this is in keeping with its analyses of despair as in its most common guise a condition that despairers will not accept that they are in, and to which in its most telling instances there is no correspondingly affective element. A commentator who disagrees is Michael Theunissen, who claims that Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair is incomplete. When revised in the light of a more basic despair than the one that the text overtly analyses, its account can be shown to be wrong in denying that the presence or absence of a feeling of despair is an indicator of despair’s actual presence or absence (Theunissen 1993: 119). Theunissen has accordingly less reason to opt for my own (only in a manner of speaking) ‘desperate’ solution. Nor are the German translators forced to make a choice here. Verzweifelt is an exact translation of the Danish fortvivlet, allowing the text’s original ambiguity to be preserved. The problem re-arises, however, where the German commentator has in turn to be translated into English. Where a German translation of the Danish preserves original ambiguities, the decisions are simply handed on to the Anglophone translator. It is unfortunate that, in many cases, because the latter is too little versed in the thoughtworld shared in varying degrees by the commentator and the author of the texts he or she critically examines, the translator remains unaware of the options and the risks. Theunissen’s own translators provide an illustration, admittedly in a footnote but in a way that radically misrepresents the claims of another commentator (myself). They express my own disagreement with Theunissen as my ‘represent[ing] the counter-thesis corresponding to Kierkegaard’s self-conception that authentic despair was that one despairs of wanting to be oneself ’ (Theunissen 2005: 121).6 The position I defend, which Theunissen acknowledges to be that of the uncorrected Kierkegaard, is that the basic form of despair in The Sickness unto Death is wanting to be oneself (one’s own self-edited version of the self), not despairing of wanting to be oneself. Wanting to be oneself is basic because, as the pseudonym Anti-Climacus says, all the forms of despair he discusses share with it the aspect of defiance, something that he says is already implicit in the very idea of ‘not wanting to be’ (Kierkegaard 1989: 80). It is indeed possible through some tortuous rephrasing to parse these two ‘definitions’ of authentic despair in terms of ‘despair[ing] of ’. To despair of wanting to be oneself might be read as despairing of being (wanting to be) one’s true self. A more straightforward reading situates fortvivlet appositively in the expressions in question. It is as if to say: here are two ways in which a person can be genuinely in despair: one is not wanting to be themselves at all, and the other is 6 The German (Der Begriff Verzweiflung, p. 10) goes: ‘Hannay vertritt die dem Selbstverständnis Kierkegaards entsprechende Gegenthese, dass die eigentlich eigentliche Verzweiflung die sei, verzweifelt man selbst sein zu wollen.’

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wanting to be their own selves. Given the context, the term becomes essentially redundant. Translating fortvivlet as ‘in despair’ leaves the simpler option open. Worth noting in passing is the fact that although with some effort the ‘despair of ’ locution can be made to apply, its implication is of a project begun but now abandoned. The reader of The Sickness unto Death may be struck by the way the task with regard to which that work presents despair as a way of failing is one in which diverse strategies are at work in attempts not fully to grasp it. Also worth bearing in mind is what we might accept is one general principle of translation, namely to assume as far as possible that authors have chosen their words with care. The assumption is well justified in Kierkegaard’s case; the more familiar one becomes with his wide-ranging texts, the clearer it becomes that his use of language, where it counts, is both systematic and nuanced. This holds also for fortvivlet and Fortvivlelse (despair). In The Sickness unto Death we find ‘despair of ’ used in only one way, and it is one that in this case does not fit the above idea of a project begun but abandoned. What a person despairs ‘of ’ is the ‘eternal’. As objects of despair the ‘earthly’ and the ‘self ’ are that which we despair ‘over’. We despair over ourselves when we find ourselves incapable of averting the kinds of disappointments that make us despair over the earthly, either in particular instances or in general. The underlying object of despair in all this is said to be ‘something eternal’ in the self, and it is the hope that lies in this thought that a despairer fails or refuses to grasp. Someone alive to this something eternal will look upon the energy we devote to avoiding disappointment as an unwillingness ‘to be comforted and healed in the eternal’, and realize that a fixed focus on the earthly makes it hard to see what comfort the eternal could possibly provide (Kierkegaard 1989: 101). Such a person is a ‘psychic expert [Sjelekyndig]’ (Kierkegaard 1989: 53), not for Kierkegaard a psychologist but someone whose knowledge is drawn from their own experience. Psychology is associated with experiment and observation, even curiosity, and with reducing to a ‘state [Tilstand]’ a notion such as sin, which is a matter for the ‘sermon’ where ‘the individual speaks as the single individual to the single individual’ (SKS4: 322–3/CA: 15–16). The pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis says in his introduction that he intends to ‘treat of [avhandle]’ the concept of anxiety [Angest] in a psychological way with the dogma of original sin [Arvesynden] in mind (SKS4: 321/CA: 14). The latter is not a subject for psychology, but it is significant that psychology here is a string to Kierkegaard’s bow. It raises a question that commentators have begun to ask concerning the expression ‘unscientific’ [uvidenskabelig] in the title of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus’s mammoth Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It was once thought to be aimed at the self-advertised ‘Science [Wissenschaft]’ of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, but with a better grasp of the terminology of the time, where ‘science’ was understood as a broadly objective approach to truth rather than, as today, a range of special disciplines each subject to its distinctive methodology, we can see that the target of Climacus’s term ‘unscientific’ is far more plausibly identified as those objective approaches to truth outlined in the short first part of Postscript. Assisting in this revision, as in many other cases, is the work uncovered by researchers, more specifically in Copenhagen, who could reveal that during its preparation the work had ‘Concluding Simple-minded [eenfoldig] Postscript’ as its provisional

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title. This also, on the other hand, allows us to link the psychology that plays a part in The Concept of Anxiety indeed with Hegel, since it comes within the orbit of what he called the ‘science of subjective spirit’. Where Kierkegaard departs from Hegel is not with regard to there being a science of psychology, but as Vigilius Haufniensis points out, by taking the extension of it to religious notions such as sin, and indeed ethics, to be a category mistake. Here again there are stylistic matters to consider. The Danish videnskab like the German Wissenschaft translates straightforwardly as ‘science’, but in order to capture its broader sense in Kierkegaard’s time translators have settled for the somewhat cumbersome ‘science and scholarship’, refraining however from replacing ‘unscientific’ in Postscript’s title with what would be its even more cumbersome equivalent. Readers aware of the term’s history will have no need of this unavoidably clumsy flagging of the historical dimension, while on the other hand today’s scholars, along with general readers, may be grateful not to be misled by the simpler expression through any understandable ignorance of that dimension. Kierkegaard’s translators must after all take into account a more diverse readership than Kierkegaard’s own. Aside from problems and strategies concerning changes in a term’s meaning over time, translators have the more straightforward task mentioned earlier of not leading readers astray through an over-reading of the text. Two examples with significant ramifications are the following. First, a question the answer to which we have so far taken for granted is whether, in the case of the two locutions discussed in connection with The Sickness unto Death, to translate the Danish sig selv as ‘oneself ’ or as ‘one’s self ’. Selfhood is of course a central topic of that work and the term occurs twenty-five times on the first page. But it does so in two guises, one as a substantive with an upper case ‘S’, and the other in the reflexive form sig selv. Seeing that the latter guise is that in which it occurs in the two locutions discussed, translation can usefully avoid taking the step that a commentator might by giving selv a more definite reference. Readers and commentators know enough not to make the inference from substantive to substance: selfhood in The Sickness unto Death is not a thing but a relation, a self-relating relation. But whatever notion or notions of selfhood emerge from this quite radical innovation on Kierkegaard’s part, these can be left to the reader, the translator tactfully rendering sig selv with the usefully vague ‘oneself ’. Secondly, it is unfortunate that too little attention to the syntactical habits of Germanic languages has led earlier translators of The Sickness unto Death to give an inappropriately copycat rendition of its opening passage. The now familiar rigmarole of a self ‘relating itself to itself ’, a rendering that in its apparent approximation to something that might be called the Hegelian style has led many to assume this work to be deliberate pastiche, is due to just such a habit. In Danish, again as in German, the reflexive form is liberally used whereas in English whatever ontological implications may be drawn from it are left implicit in the context of use. Where we say that we ‘relate to’ this or that, implying in the very saying, at least in some weak sense, that it is ourselves that we are relating to this and that, they say explicitly, and in this sense redundantly, that they are relating themselves to it. In English the reflexivity lies in the very fact that the relation is one of which

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we are aware and for which we are in some way responsible. So here too, by preserving possible ambiguity the translator can leave further elaboration of Kierkegaard’s notion of selfhood to commentators. The translator of the Danish ‘Selvet er et Forhold, der forholder sig til sig selv’ can simply pass over the first sig, thus omitting what to the Anglophone’s ears would be (and in extant translations is) an obtrusive and ‘oddly foreign’ first occurrence of ‘itself ’. Further disambiguations that can be usefully avoided in translation include occurrences of terms found also in Hegelian discourse, or less commonly in Hegel himself, for instance ‘synthesis’. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms repeatedly describe the self as a product of a synthesis between infinite and finite, temporal and eternal, and freedom (or possibility) and necessity. Since selfhood is construed as a task, a conventionally Hegelian reading would suggest that ‘synthesis’ here refers to its successful completion. But in its literal meaning the term has the same sense as the Danish Sammensetning, meaning ‘composition’ or ‘compound’, a term that also occurs in this precise connection (‘et existerende Menneske er sammensat af Uendelighed og Endelighed, bestedt i Tiden [an existing human being is a composite of the infinite and the finite situated in time]’) (SKS7: 202/Kierkegaard 2009: 186). The clear implication in this context is that the opposites (variously referred to in translations as ‘factors’ or ‘terms’) combine to form the task itself. The opposite case occurs where a translator introduces an ambiguity not present in the original text. An example is the distinction made in Danish between Existents and Tilværelsen. The latter is related to the German Dasein and an instance of the previously mentioned prevalence of prepositional forms that distinguish that language from English. It has the sense of ‘being here’, or of ‘being there’ (in general), and can be rendered not inaccurately as ‘life itself ’, or ‘life as such’. In an appropriate context it can be translated as ‘this existence of ours’, and it is perfectly possible to convey this sense with ‘existence’. But there is some loss of content or emphasis if the distinction is not preserved, and a translator who is responsive to nuances not made in the translating language may with some justification regard it as a translator’s duty to prevent their loss in translation. Ideally, both Tilværelsen and the corresponding verb forms at være til (to be there) and blive til (come to be, come about) should be translated in ways that avoid the English terms ‘existence’, ‘exist’, etc.

IV. Multiple Translations The existence of several translations of the same work helps to dispel the illusion a translator hopes to create that the author wrote in the translator’s language. Meeting more than one version helps to recreate in the reader’s mind the real distance, as many vestiges as possible of which the translator tries to remove. It brings us back to the reality that in fact translation in any literal sense of the word is impossible. It should also help to dispel another illusion, namely that we get nearer the original simply by correcting mistakes.

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Second-time translators do indeed have the advantage over first-time translators that they can correct mistakes, many of which will already have been discovered and made public in the secondary literature. But although there is less excuse for inaccuracy in a second-time translation, there is no reason to assume that the later translations do better justice to the author. But then accuracy itself is an ambiguous notion for reasons we mentioned at the start. Is rendering an author accurately in another language than the author’s to lose sight of the linguistic landscape in which the author was at home, or is it to transport those surroundings along with the author? If the latter, the author will seem foreign, which of course in his or her original context the author, however original, was not. If the former, the writer we meet who retains no vestige of the foreign about him, and with whom we may feel we could one day shake hands, is an imposter. With some detail in hand we may now see more clearly what is at issue when a translator confronts a canonical figure from the past: whether to produce a text that is maximally intelligible and free from foreign ‘noise’, or do justice as far as possible to the lexical and syntactic individuality of the author’s language. It depends on the canonical figure. In the case of a Hegel, for example, or a Kant, Anglophone readers would not want to miss anything that contributed to a grasp of the thought even in places where the thought resists mellifluous articulation in their own language. For a thinker like Kierkegaard, however, for whom style is essential to the way in which we read him, attempts to mirror the lexicality and syntax of the original can only get in the way. Instead of bringing the author nearer, any even minor efforts in this direction, or any failures to come up with a suitably Anglophone rendering of an original expression, generate distance. A telling if not broadly significant example is the Hongs’ both lexically and syntactically faithful rendering of Johannes de silentio’s ‘Foreløbig Expectoration’ as ‘Preliminary Expectoration’. This one-to-one translation serves to amplify any novelty the expression may have had to a readership well versed in Latin. In spite of the greater lexical difference, such more recent alternatives as ‘Preamble from the Heart’ (Hannay) and ‘Preliminary Outpouring from the Heart’ (Walsh) may well present a more accurate impression of the measure of the freshness of the original. In that case, they are better suited than the imitative rendering to bringing Kierkegaard into our company. In other instances the introduction of more modern expressions may have the opposite effect. Taking an example of much wider significance, the effect of rendering the Danish ‘Aand [spirit]’ as ‘mind’ would be to close the door on Kierkegaard. A balance must be kept and preserving it requires a sensitivity to context that resists any antecedent decisions as to what English words best translate key terms in the Danish. Thus the adjective ‘aandelig’ may be rendered either by ‘spiritual’ or by ‘mental’ according to context. It may even refer to intellectual ability. Much also depends on a translation’s intended purpose. To talk roundly of bringing canonical writers or philosophers within reach of wider audiences leaves open the nature and possible diversity of the wider audience’s interests. Now that Kierkegaard is an object of scholarly research and his works are established on reading lists for university students along with other canonical thinkers, the growing scholarly apparatus supports greater isomorphism in respect of the Danish than would have been considered

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necessary by early translators such as Walter Lowrie and Alexander Dru. Uninhibited by such considerations and driven by a sense of affinity with the author, these translators may have succeeded in bringing Kierkegaard closer to their wider audience than have their successors. The massively annotated Kierkegaard that reaches us through the Hongs, although assisting enormously in clarifying the background, can have the reverse effect. It invites us to treat the texts as objects of scrutiny. This distances us from them and the space thus created tends then to be one in which any individuality emanating from them is the translators’ rather than the writer’s to whom that dedicated team devoted so much of their lives.

V. Conclusion Most precepts or rules presented to translators prove academic once it comes to the actual task. Larger matters of principle become situational as bigger problems give way to a mass of worrying detail, whether for example the context says that the preposition ‘efter’ should be translated ‘after’ in the chronological sense or as ‘according to’ or ‘in the light of ’. Being situational, these matters certainly require considerable familiarity with not just the background but also the language. It is almost unthinkable that a professional translator whose skills were confined to other fields, say classical literature and novels, could take on Kierkegaard. And yet to do so nevertheless requires something of the expertise that a translator of classical literature and its novels will have acquired, but which those whose interests have given them a familiarity with Kierkegaard’s philosophical and theological background may sometimes understandably lack. Such thoughts lead, it seems inexorably but fortunately not disastrously, to the conclusion that only a native-English-speaking Kierkegaard could translate Kierkegaard. But just as with that other precept which says that a translation should conceal every sign that it is one, or, to bear in mind what was just noted, not reveal that it is the work of the translator, in the real world this ideal too must be filed away as a regulative idea, though not to be forgotten as such. As a pair these two quite general considerations serve to emphasize the interplay of distance and illusion, a complex ‘game’ of opposites from which no translation emerges unscathed—which is to say that all translation can be labelled imperfect in the one direction or the other. The bright side, that of reality, is that we can count ourselves lucky to have translations that err in both directions.

References Allison, Henry E. (1967). ‘Christianity and Nonsense’, The Review of Metaphysics, 20: 3, repr. in Daniel W. Conway (ed.), Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 3 (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 7–29. Dreyfus, Hubert L. (2008). ‘Kierkegaard on the Self ’, in Edward F. Mooney (ed.), Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

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Hannay, Alastair (1999 [1982]).‘Kierkegaard, The Arguments of the Philosophers’, rev. edn. (London/New York: Routledge). ——– (2003). Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (London/New York: Routledge). Heinesen, William (1965). The Doomed Fiddlers (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Kierkegaard, Søren (1941). Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——– (1956). Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas Steere (New York: Harper & Row). ——– (1989). The Sickness unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books). ——– (1996). Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books). ——– (2001). A Literary Review, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books). ——– (2009). Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Poole, Roger (1998). ‘The Unknown Receptions: Twentieth-century Receptions’, in Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schulz, Heiko (1999). ‘Die theologische Rezeption Kierkegaards in Deutschland und Dänemark’, in Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 1999, eds. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Theunissen, Michael (2005). Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. Barbara Harshaw and Helmut Illbruck (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press). ——– (1993). Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrektur an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).

Suggested Reading Dru, Alexander (1958). The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834–1854 (New York: Fontana). Pym, Anthony (2010). Exploring Translation Theories (London and New York: Routledge). Schulte, Rainer and Biguenet, John (1992). Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Steiner, George (1998 [1975]). After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Venuti, Lawrence (2004 [2002]). The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge).

chapter 21

K ier k ega a r d a n d N ietz sche M arkus K leinert 1

I. The Vitality of Faith in Providence ‘I present you the proof of divine providence in the anatomy of a louse’ (Weber 1992: 91). This assertion, ascribed to the seventeenth-century naturalist Jan Swammerdam, was used by Max Weber in his 1917 lecture on ‘Science as a Vocation’ as characterizing how, three hundred years previously, science had been generally understood as a way to God. Doubtless Weber’s citation elicited a smile from the audience since it had been precisely the development of science that was held responsible for the process of intellectualization and rationalization that Weber himself had spoken of as ‘the disenchantment of the world’ and that had robbed religion of its authority and power. Against the background of this process, not only the optimism of physico-theology, which had sought to track the ways of providence by the methods of natural science but also the entire Christian idea of providence had become anachronistic and the faith it inspired seemed childish, fanciful, or just dishonest. But if it was the case that individuals no longer looked to religious ideas in order to direct their lives, was the science that was driving the process of modernization able to step into the gap? Weber himself limited the existential significance of science rather sharply: science cannot fulfil the need for unconditional meaning but can only offer the individual a certain clarity concerning his ultimate orientation and ‘compel the individual, or at least help him, to make an accounting of the ultimate meaning of his own action’ (Weber 1992: 104). That is, science could offer only the ideal of ‘intellectual probity’ or honesty—an ideal that has, of course, its own attendant problems (Hartung and Schlette 2012). 1

Translated by George Pattison.

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This short imaginary visit to Weber’s lecture hall has touched on a problem that stands in the background of the following discussion of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.2 For, on the one hand, providence epitomizes the kind of idea that seems to be incompatible with and superseded by the scientific world view, and, on the other, science itself brings to view its own intrinsic purposelessness. And, as far as the century in which both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche lived, we can at the very least say that neither faith in providence nor faith in science was self-evident. For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the issue of providence is occasioned not primarily by the study of nature or of history but of their own lives. That the thematization of providence was thus occasioned by considering the individual’s own life and became manifest in autobiographical literature typifies the development of faith in providence in the modern period: As far as its inter-subjective and natural criteria are concerned, the experience of God’s nearness in events of nature and history remained controversial, whether the problem was posed in terms of scholastic teleology, Calvinistic doctrines of predestination, or Lutheran ideas of God’s creative presence. Consequently it is with regard to religious subjectivity, the self-reflective life, the diary, in which the productive aspect of faith in providence became overwhelmingly apparent and could be documented—even when the objective natural theological aspect of scientific progress started of necessity to appear ever more problematic. (Deuser 2003: 310)

The turn to religious subjectivity and its literary reflection does not of itself explain the questions relating to providence that interest philosophers of religion, such as questions that concern the specific ways in which the relationship between God and world is mediated and how God can be known in the world-process. In order to deal with such questions nineteenth-century philosophy of religion developed existential-anthropological models in which providence could be shown to be necessary for the thorough comprehension of human subjectivity so that, by way of contrast, analytic-semantic, and cosmological attempts at comprehension receded in significance (Deuser 2003: 316–19). At the same time, attempts to ‘rescue’ a subjectivized version of faith in providence had to defend themselves against critiques of the Church, of Christianity, and of religion for which providence no longer posed a problem, or for which it ought not to do so. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can generally count as representatives of these two intellectual tendencies, that is, on the one hand, a religious version of existentialism, and, on the other, a radical critique of religion—a point that brings us to the central theme of this chapter. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can help us see more clearly how neither faith in providence, nor the abandonment of such faith, can be taken too lightly. As already indicated, I shall focus on texts in which both authors make an account of themselves and of the ultimate meaning of their work, in particular Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for my Work as 2 Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s works cited are as follows: AC: The Antichrist; BT: The Birth of Tragedy; EH: Ecce Homo; GM: On the Genealogy of Morals; GS: The Gay Science. References will be given to section or fragment number and page number in KSA. For full bibliographical details, see References.

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an Author and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. Of course, given the complexities of transmission and publication, it is easy to arrive at a multi-interpretable situation vis-à-vis the author’s supposed ‘final word’, and to conclude with a kind of reductio ad absurdum of faith in any such ‘final word’. But this should not prevent us from considering how these texts can throw light on the question of providence, as I shall attempt to do in Parts III and IV of this chapter. However, since Nietzsche seems to be less preoccupied than is Kierkegaard by the theme of providence, I shall in his case go further afield and draw in a number of thematically relevant connections from elsewhere, also calling on Schopenhauer. Concentrating on the major works in which both authors present their view of themselves has the advantage of helping us see how they confronted the theme of providence and explicitly and implicitly engaged it. Thus the analysis of specific texts will enable us to see both the relevance of the theme as well as how the two authors might be brought into relation to each other. Finally, in Part V, I shall look at how the theme might be deepened and made contemporary. However, before we embark on analysing the texts themselves, it is appropriate to make a few comments about comparing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—a rather popular undertaking and one that obscures as often and as much as it illuminates.

II. Comparisons and Levelling To use a cultural typology employed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, we cannot but suspect a certain Alexandrianism in the accumulation of research literature on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.3 Of course, this phenomenon can also be understood in a positive way.4 In any case, there is now a multitude of comparative studies to refer to (cf. Miles 2011: 288–98). An early indication of their potential affinity was the fact that the reception history of both authors was considerably influenced by the same person, namely, the Danish literary and cultural historian Georg Brandes. Brandes contributed to shaping a view of Kierkegaard that ran on into the second half of the nineteenth century and that was in particular characterized by the critical attempt to separate Kierkegaard’s proto-existential category of ‘the individual’ (or: ‘the single one’) from Christianity—and which was probably known to Nietzsche (Brobjer 2003: 255). With regard to Nietzsche, Brandes set academic interest in motion through his lecture and the resultant treatise on ‘aristocratic radicalism’. Nietzsche himself was partially aware of this and showed his appreciation in Ecce Homo. In a letter of 11th January 1888, Brandes (who had been in correspondence with Nietzsche since the previous November) referred directly to Kierkegaard and to his own study of the Danish writer:

3 ‘. . . Alexandrian man, who is basically a librarian and copy-editor, wretchedly blinded by book-dust and orienting errors’ (BT: 18, KSA 1: 119f.)! 4 Especially worth mentioning here is the success of some newer biographies (e.g. Safranski 2000; Garff 2001) that, on account of their own mixture of scholarly and narrative style, have had to take a position vis-à-vis the respective author’s self-presentation.

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There is a Scandinavian writer whose work would interest you were it to be translated, Sören Kierkegaard. He lived 1813-55 and, in my view, is one of the deepest psychologists there has ever been. A little book I wrote about him (translated Leipzig 1879) doesn’t sgive any adequate idea as to his genius, since it is in its way a kind of polemic, written in order to limit his influence. In psychological respects, however, it is decidedly the finest that I have published. (cf. Brobjer 2003: 252)

In his reply, on 19th February 1888, Nietzsche declared that he wanted to take up ‘the psychological problem of Kierkegaard’ (KSB 8: 259), although he seems not to have got any further with this idea during the rush of literary creativity preceding his mental breakdown in the early days of the following year. Thus arose the image of the missing encounter of two epochal spirits—an image that requires correction in two respects. Firstly, Brandes was wrong in thinking that Kierkegaard’s works were not available in German translation (just think of The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Practice in Christianity, or The Sickness unto Death, translated into German by Albert Bärthold in 1876, 1878, and respectively 1881; cf. Schulz 2009: 388f.). Secondly, it is wrong to infer from this correspondence that Nietzsche had at this time no knowledge of Kierkegaard. Such an inference is disproved by a closer examination of the relevant sources that does not limit itself to a direct relationship between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche but that pays attention also to mediating and secondary sources, leading to potentially impressive discoveries. Thus it can be demonstrated that Nietzsche was familiar with certain specific presentations of Kierkegaard from contemporary literature that also, in part, involved Kierkegaard’s own self-presentation, and it is possible that he took account of these in his own work (Brobjer 2003). So much for the historical relationship. With regard to comparisons, the title of a small study published by Karl Löwith in 1933 epitomizes one influential approach: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche or the Philosophical and Theological Overcoming of Nihilism. Both authors are seen as reacting to the situation of nihilism in a manner characteristic for the nineteenth century as a whole: by concentration on the individual. According to Löwith, the consequences of this isolating tendency manifest themselves very differently in each case. Kierkegaard neglects the dialectical dependence of individualization on the historical situation in order to lead the absolutized individual to a choice between meaninglessness and Christian faith, ‘to find the way to faith through the nihilism of despair’ (Löwith 1933: 15). In contrast to this theological misprision of nihilism Nietzsche saw nihilism as leading to a critique of metaphysics that can—potentially—liberate new ways of existence. While comparisons of this kind became quite popular in the first half of the twentieth century (e.g. Jaspers 1936; Struve 1948), at least two opponents of any such comparison should be named. Firstly, Theodor Haecker, whose translations and commentaries strongly influenced the German reception of Kierkegaard, emphasizes the deceptive nature of the kinship between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In his secret Journal in the Night from 1939–45, he states that The endless chatter about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is quite hopeless. Outward similarities set up a superficial sphere of comparison that is utterly meaningless, for

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they are localised and limited by a decisive difference at a deeper level; the one prayed, the other did not. And people are quite satisfied, and the radical difference is no longer perceived. An example of the growing ‘blindness’ of which I spoke. (Haecker 1950: 212)

And secondly, at about the same time, Heidegger too dismisses the comparison: The customary but for this reason no less suspect correlation of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard fails to see—and does so because it fails to see the essence of thinking— that Nietzsche preserves a nearness to Aristotle as a metaphysical thinker. Although Aristotle is repeatedly mentioned by Kierkegaard, he is essentially alien to him. For Kierkegaard is no thinker, but a religious author, and, indeed, not one amongst others, but the only one appropriate to the fate of his time. Therein lies his greatness, if talking in such terms is not already to misunderstand him. (Heidegger 1994: 249)

The history of comparison reflects the shifting trends of theories, methods, and debates in the human sciences as well as in the fields of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche research. These are accompanied by the kind of warnings against erroneous comparisons given by Alastair Hannay in comparing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with regard to the question of naturalism: ‘In short, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in such fundamental disagreement in the matter that interests them most that it is closer to the truth to describe any apparent similarities and parallels ultimately as differences’ (Hannay 2003: 214). In order to avoid ending up trapped in an Alexandrian archive, I shall at this point leave the tradition of comparison and proceed to consider Kierkegaard’s self-presentation.

III. Kierkegaard—Genius and Governance Providence is thematized in all periods and parts of Kierkegaard’s authorship, that is, in the pseudonymous and in the signed books, in the journals and notebooks—although not always equally explicitly or intensely. I shall focus here on The Point of View for my Work as an Author. I do so with the rather modest thesis that it shows how relating the self to providence limits the way in which the self is set up, so as to prevent the absolutization of a single point of view on life and work. The philological problems associated with this work have already been indicated. Kierkegaard wrote the greater part of it in 1848, influenced by the political changes of that year. In addition, the second edition of his literary debut Either/Or provoked a rethinking of his entire work up to that point that is relevant to his working on the writings of the pseudonym Anti-Climacus at the same time. Kierkegaard eventually turned away from the idea of publishing The Point of View (a topic on which he recorded numerous thoughts in the journals). However, in 1851, he did have the closely related sketch On my Work as an Author published, while The Point of View itself was posthumously published in 1859 by his brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard, albeit on the basis of a

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problematic text (SKS K13: 38–57; Garff 1998: 77–82). Yet even if a certain reserve regarding the authoritative status of the current text is therefore called for, I shall now proceed to analyse the corrective function played in it by how Kierkegaard relates his work to providential guidance. Both the title and subtitle (A Direct Communication: Report to History) of The Point of View seem to be determined by a desire to be as simple and unambiguous as possible, as its author directly states the point of view from which he wishes his work to be known in perpetuity. Yet the twofold motto already serves notice that the declared point of view may be more differentiated and plural in meaning than might appear at first glance. Two mottos are set next to each other, divided originally by a vertical line: ‘In every thing the purpose must weigh with the folly’5 and ‘What shall I say? My words|Desire not to say much,|Oh, God, how great your wisdom is,|Your goodness, power, and Kingdom’6 (SKS16: 514/PV: 22). This special page layout may have been offered by way of anticipating how Kierkegaard wants to unify the apparently parallel aesthetic and religious writings as the work of a single author. The twofold motto may also be a way of sustaining the difference between reflective speech and silent immediacy, or between Socratic tactics and Christian obedience; issues with which Kierkegaard’s self-portrait will certainly occupy itself.7 In the Introduction and First Section of The Point of View, Kierkegaard explains that the entire authorship, also and even precisely with regard to its twofold aestheticreligious character, is to be understood as the work of a religious author. He does not seek to defend this explanation, but to demonstrate it is the sole possible, the absolute explanation of the entirety of his work to date—a task that takes up the Second Section of The Point of View. This second section is in turn divided into three chapters, in which the entirety of the authorship is brought into relation to its context, to the author himself, and to providence. The relationship between work and context relies upon the procedures of Socratic irony, with which Kierkegaard had been occupied since his Magister’s dissertation. Thus Kierkegaard seeks to dissolve a self-deception that has become a kind of common sense by pretending ignorance about the meaning of being human and being Christian. His Socratic literary activity aims to bring the individual to be clear about the position he has taken up without prescribing any definite position of its own, whereas a standard polemical or apologetic approach would be unproblematically absorbed by the relativism of the present age. Socrates is also present in the portrayal of the relationship between work and author, for example, as the model for the incognito of the affable persona that Kierkegaard cultivates in the period dominated by the aesthetic writings. The Concluding Unscientific

5 From W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II, Act 2, Sc. 2. Kierkegaard quotes in German from the Schlegel-Tieck translation. 6 From a hymn by the Pietist Danish Bishop, Hans Adolph Brorson. 7 For an essential discussion of Kierkegaard’s mottos, see Rehm 1964: 225–48. The Point of View is discussed on pp. 246ff. See also Cappelørn 1975: 68f.

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Postscript then emerges as a turning point in the development of the work by explicitly making the question of becoming a Christian its central problem. With the consequent redistribution of the balance of forces between the aesthetic and the religious writings, however, the relationship between author and work also changes. With reference to the ‘Corsair Affair’, Kierkegaard sees in this a striking harmony between his own aims and external circumstances: ‘I myself had an eye as to what had to be done when, in a most opportune manner, a little circumstance, in which I saw a hint from governance, assisted me, so as to act decisively in this direction’ (SKS16: 549/PV: 63). This points the way to the third chapter, in which the Socratic prefiguration of Kierkegaard’s own self-image recedes. The heading of this chapter, ‘The Part played by Governance in my Work as an Author’, uses provocatively insouciant wording to bring the work into relation to the theme of providence, or, more precisely, an aspect of the doctrine of providence that is comprised in Protestant dogmatics under the doctrinal headings of: the divine conservation of the world (conservatio); divine co-operation with nature (concursus); and divine governance of human beings (gubernatio). Kierkegaard’s own appropriation of this doctrine of providence can be reconstructed by making use of the early notebooks and journals: ‘Kierkegaard from the beginning professed the importance not only of Providence, but of a special Providence, providentia specialissima, a “Governance” in which God intimately attends to each individual and employs the most minute events and circumstances to draw the individual toward the possibility of faith’ (Dalrymple 2010: 1668). Here it will be most helpful to get to grips with how Kierkegaard applies the idea of governance to his own life and work, without systematically expounding the concept itself (which, incidentally, seems to be used throughout Kierkegaard’s work in its traditional meaning—see Dalrymple 2010: 174–8). In the first instance, Kierkegaard thematizes governance in terms of ‘divine assistance’, which, of course, is not to be confused with worldly help but points to human beings’ fundamentally being in need of radical help. Governance is therefore not to be seen in terms of spectacular interventions in the natural course of things. On the contrary, the possibility of interpreting one’s life as involving being tested by providence in each moment prevents one from becoming lost in any particular interpretation of oneself or of the world. This has and ought to be unsettling for those who rely confidently on the false security provided by their own power and by worldly assistance. ‘But the point for me in the service of the truth was that if I went astray, if I became presumptuous, if it were untrue, governance would then strike me absolutely, so that, facing the possibility of this examination that hovered over me at every moment, I had to remain awake, attentive, obedient’ (SKS16: 557 n. 1/PV: 72 n. 1). This emphasis on the immediacy of the

8 For the whole context of this comment, see Dalrymple 2010: 162–7. Cf. the detailed presentation of the dogmatic context in Schulz 1994: 21–64. It should be noted that Kierkegaard’s Danish term Styrelse is not limited to religious usage but can also be used more generally with regard to technical and organizational ‘steering’ (Cappelørn 1975: 62 n. 3). On the question of English translation, see Dalrymple 2010: 162 n. 7.

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providential God-relationship corresponds to a self-critical warning against the fetishizing of literary works: ‘For the fact that I have needed and how I constantly, day by day, year after year, have needed God’s assistance is not something I need memory or recollection, journals or diaries, or the comparison of these with one another, to help me be aware of so as to be able to state it accurately: I am reliving it again so vividly, so presently, at this moment’ (SKS16: 557/PV: 72). With regard to his own work Kierkegaard illustrates that governance does not mean determinism but a relationship between divine and human freedom by insisting that it is not a result either of verbal inspiration or of mere virtuosity (think, for example, of the image of the copyist that Kierkegaard uses for his manner of working, an image that scarcely fits the cult of genius and its emphasis on originality—see SKS16: 561/PV: 76). And he does it with regard to his own identity as a religious author, by acknowledging that without a divine confidant he would despairingly lose himself in conscience’s endless monologues. Kierkegaard refuses to give a merely abstract answer to the question as to how divine assistance is to be recognized but instead draws attention to the concrete process joining life and work. In the first instance he specifies the role of governance in this process in categorical terms: ‘it is governance that has educated me, and this education is reflected in the writing process’ (SKS16: 562/PV: 77). This affirms the liberative effect of governance, since this educative process frees him from being identified without remainder with a once-and-for-all image of self and world—and does so precisely by means of experiencing the collapse of all such images and the consequent task of having to develop a quite particular image of himself and his world. Furthermore, governance inspires action on the basis of an affective certainty, a fundamental trust; and this practical aspect might be the essential difference between radical awareness of contingency and faith in providence. Characterizing governance as educatively productive has an important retroactive effect on how the self is portrayed, lending it a preliminary and experimental character for as long as the educative process lasts. Every self-interpretation comes with a note of reserve, lest divine governance is anticipated and subjected to human calculations. Such a reserve should not be overlooked when, having offered an autobiographical narrative as to how he became a (religious) writer, Kierkegaard affirms in the third person that, ‘Therewith, the entirety of the work as an author turns on this: becoming a Christian in Christendom. And the expression for the part played by governance in this authorship is that the author is the one who has himself been educated in this manner, yet nevertheless in such a way that he was conscious of this from the very beginning’ (SKS16: 575/PV: 90). This is not Kierkegaard’s final word. In the final part of The Point of View the model of Socrates is once more introduced still more emphatically. As had already been demonstrated at the beginning, what was needed in order to free the fantasy world of Christendom from its self-deception was not a saint but an indirect, negatively dialectical forerunner having the character of a fool. And when, in conclusion, Kierkegaard imagines how ‘his poet’ will envisage the fate of the religious author ‘Kierkegaard’ as being in retrospect as tragic as it is comic, one might do better to think not of one

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promised poet but of the three poets Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, and their different tragic-comic portrayals of Socrates.9 The self-interpretation of ‘Kierkegaard’ is then confirmed a second time from the perspective of ‘his poet’: ‘while he qua author dialectically maintained an overview over the whole, he understood Christianly that for him the whole thing meant that he himself is being educated in Christianity’ (SKS16: 582/PV: 97). And yet even this affirmation is qualified. The religious author may be as sure as is possible as regards governance, but the recognition of its incomprehensibility forbids wanting to fix the relation to it in the form of ascribing too definite a role to it. If the religious author made an indicative statement as to how he had dedicated his work to governance, he would then really be tracing the source of the work back to himself. For this reason his position in relation to governance must remain subjunctive: ‘if he had to ascribe it to anyone, this would have been to governance, to whom, however, it was constantly ascribed by the author, day by day, year after year’ (SKS16: 582/PV: 97). Kierkegaard’s invocation of governance should therefore not be taken as authorizing the self-portrait offered in The Point of View once and for all. Rather, it affirms a Sword of Damocles that, despite all the rhetoric about the totality of the authorship, never allows the self-presentation to come to rest in any one point of view because of the permanent possibility of having to be put to the test. Referring himself to governance is therefore not the presumption of some unconditional way of seeing himself but rather makes clear the conditionality of human ways of seeing things. Kierkegaard’s exuberant reliance on governance may be off-putting or even repellent for contemporary readers,10 yet neither its alleged artificiality nor the perspectivism built in to the self-presentation as a consequence of the relation to governance contradict his religious self-understanding. In any case, the question must remain open as to how far Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Christian faith in providence signifies a modernization of the earlier speculative and systematic view and, then, to what extent it also enables an interpretation appropriate to the present age.11 Because of its intrinsic openness, the presentation given in The Point of View was not superseded by subsequent developments in the author’s life and work, but endorsed by Kierkegaard himself even in the last year of his life (e.g. SKS16: 611/PV: 125). The possibility of misinterpreting the stated relation to providence as the presumptuous absolutizing of a particular point of view may be one of the reasons why governance is only briefly, albeit emphatically, discussed in the published accounting On my Work as an Author. Personally [. . .] only one thing concerns me unconditionally and it is more important to me than the entire authorship and lies more upon my heart, namely, to

9 According to that ‘his lover’ might have the traits of Alcibiades—see SKS16: 555f./PV: 69f. Cf., in contrast, Walther 2004: 94–100. 10 Even a scholar sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s religious self-understanding can complain of the ‘theatrical belaboring of [. . .] the author’s providential gifts of genius’ (Whitmire 2010: 352). 11 It might most easily be seen as successful in relation to Kierkegaard’s approach to the theory of subjectivity—see Schulz 1994: esp. ch. 6.

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express as honestly and forcefully as possible, what I can never be sufficiently grateful for and what, when I will one day have forgotten the entire authorship, I will eternally and unalterably remember: how infinitely much more governance has done for me than I had ever expected or could have expected or dared have expected. (SKS13: 18/PV: 12)

IV. Nietzsche’s Work on Faith in Providence Providence is also persistently thematized in Nietzsche’s works and scarcely less strikingly, although less noticed, than in Kierkegaard. Before proceeding to Ecce Homo, I shall therefore begin by offering a short overview of some of the clearest testimonies to this in Nietzsche’s work, in which an excursus on Schopenhauer will also play a role. In relation to the central project of a ‘great enlightenment concerning existence’ of Nietzsche’s mature work, which tracks the inner dynamics of forms of existence or world views, Christian faith in providence may seem to be of merely historical interest and, even then, only to the extent that it is a part of the Christian world view that continues to influence the present. That this world view has lost its compelling power is evident in the renowned aphorism 125 on the Death of God from The Gay Science (‘The Madman’). Faith in divine providence would therefore seem to be a kind of melancholy holding on to a world view of which the declining persuasiveness has not yet been acknowledged (cf. e.g. Pippin 1999). Later in The Gay Science, Nietzsche addresses faith in providence explicitly, at the start of the fourth book, ‘Sanctus Januarius’ (a section that would later be emphasized in the commentary on his own work found in Ecce Homo). After the preliminary verse thanksgiving the first aphorism of this book contains the programmatic formula amor fati [love of fate]. Against the background of the justification of the entirety of existence indicated by this phrase, the following aphorism warns the author himself and his readers against falling back into belief in providence. I give the aphorism in full: Personal providence. There is a certain high point of life. If we have once attained it, then, for all our freedom and no matter how we have driven away all ideas of being cared for by reason and goodness from the beautiful chaos of existence, we come once more to the greatest danger of spiritual unfreedom and have to endure our heaviest test. It is now that the idea of a personal providence first confronts us with the most penetrating force. On its side it has its very best advocate, how things seem, now, in the moment when we are able to grasp with our hands how everything and all things that happen to us constantly serve us for the best. The life of each day and each hour seems to want nothing more than constantly to demonstrate this proposition: that whatever may befall, bad weather or good, the loss of a friend, an illness, a calumny, a letter that doesn’t come, a sprained foot, looking in a shop-window, a counter-argument, opening a book, a dream, a deception—it shows itself at once or

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markus kleinert shortly afterwards as something that ‘could not have been left out’: it is full of deep meaning and usefulness precisely for us! If there is any more dangerous seduction than to cancel one’s faith in the gods of Epicurus, those carefree unknown ones, and to believe in a worrisome and petty divinity who takes a personal interest in counting every hair on our heads and is not repelled by the most wretched acts of service? Now—I mean despite all that!—we desire to let the gods rest in peace and the helpful genii as well and be satisfied with the acknowledgment that our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and ordering events has now attained its high point. We do not desire to think too highly of how nimble our wisdom is even when we are all too surprised by the wonderful harmony that flows from our instrument— a harmony that sounds too well for us to dare think it emanates from us. In fact, now and then One does play along with us—blessed chance. From time to time he leads us by the hand and not even the wisest providence could conceive a more beautiful music than when our foolish hand thus succeeds. (GS: 277, KSA 3: 521f.)

Faith in providence becomes a test when we come to recapitulate our own lives, including its smaller or greater annoyances, in such a way that the impression of it all being meaningfully disposed can force itself upon us with such evidential force as to be scarcely resistible. According to Nietzsche, responding to the test consists in a twofold denigration of meaning that concerns both the possibility of any antecedent meaning as well as the capacity of any act of bestowing meaning on events. The test provided by faith in personal providence should therefore be by no means underestimated. It is not a matter of taking leave of a curious, antiquated doctrine but of problematizing any claim concerning a meaning that might sustain the entirety of life. An illustration of how demanding this trial can be may be seen by turning briefly to Schopenhauer’s ‘Transcendent Speculation on the Appearance of Purpose in the Fate of the Individual’ (in Parerga and Paralipomena). Although Schopenhauer leaves us in no doubt from the beginning as to the speculative and possibly fantastic character of the idea that he develops here, he nevertheless suggests that with regard to one’s own life it is almost unavoidable: the idea ‘that the course of life of the individual, no matter how confused it may appear, is, as a whole, attuned harmoniously to a certain end and has an instructive meaning’ (Schopenhauer 1996: 249). The power that, as unity of chance and necessity, governs the life of the individual cannot be grasped conceptually but only metaphorically as fate, as genius (a daimon) or even as providence. And although Schopenhauer sees the Christian doctrine of providence (which he regards as still so well known as not to need explaining) as less suitable, because of how it involves intellectualistic and anthropomorphic elements, the differences between the various metaphors are less significant. This, then, is how he spells out the truth value and function of such metaphors of providence: . . . if the dogma regarding providence could not count as directly or in sensu proprio true on account of its being so thoroughly anthropomorphic, it would, like all religious myths, nevertheless be entirely sufficient for practical needs and for subjective consolation as the mediate, allegorical, and mythical expression of what is true. That is, it would be true in the sense of Kant’s moral theology that is to be understood

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solely as a schema for orientation and therewith allegorically. In a word, it would indeed not be true, but it would be as good as true. (Schopenhauer 1996: 261)

Schopenhauer’s speculation thus directs us to the unification of the contradictory powers of freedom and necessity, causality and teleology or, as he puts it, ‘between the apparent randomness of all events in the life of the individual and their moral necessity as a means of giving shape to life, corresponding to a transcendent purposiveness for the individual or, in popular parlance, between the course of nature and providence’ (Schopenhauer 1996: 271). And one may even go so far as to speculate on this transcendent purposiveness, the goal of providence, since, we are scarcely surprised to learn, the whole course of life directs us towards a pessimistic world view that brings about the renunciation of the will to life. Nietzsche may have had Schopenhauer’s essay in his mind’s eye as a negative example when he explained personal providence as the touchstone of spiritual freedom. But his interest in the faith in providence was not limited to the traditional Christian version: it also concerned its more subterranean history, transformations in the ways of interpreting providence, and attempts to overcome it. In a note from autumn 1887 Nietzsche focuses on the survival of the Christian faith in providence after the death of God: Something to think about: how far the fateful belief in divine providence—this most crippling belief, for both hand and mind, there has ever been—continues; how far Christian presuppositions and interpretations continue to live on under the rubrics ‘nature’, ‘progress’, ‘fulfilment’, ‘Darwinism’ or in superstition concerning a certain coherence of happiness and virtue, unhappiness and guilt. That absurd trust in the course of events, in ‘life’, in ‘life’s instincts’, that philistine resignation that expresses the faith that if only everyone does their duty all will be well—all of this is only meaningful if we suppose that things are being governed sub specie boni. Even the fatalism that is the current form of philosophical sensibility is a consequence of that most enduring belief in the divine ordering of things, an unconscious consequence— for it is as if it does not concern us how everything functions [. . .] We owe Christianity: [. . .] psychological falsity in relation to oneself. (Nachlass 1887: 10[7], KSA 12: 457f.)

If Christianity brings about ‘psychological falsity in relation to oneself ’, does that then mean that, conversely, overcoming Christian faith means becoming honest in relation to oneself? Indeed, in the fifth book added to the second 1887 edition of The Gay Science, intellectual honesty is exemplified by overcoming Christian faith in providence: To look at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god; to interpret history in honour of a divine reason, as the constant witness to a moral world-order and ethical goals; to expound one’s own experiences in the way that pious people have long expounded them as if everything was ordered, everything contained a directive, everything was thought out and sent from love for the salvation of the soul: that is now over, our conscience speaks against it, all more delicate consciences find it unworthy, dishonourable, lies, womanly, weak, cowardly [. . .]. (GS: 357, KSA 3: 600)

But there are other respects in which overcoming faith in a providential governance of nature, history, or the course of an individual life is not to be confused with overcoming

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Christianity. The intellectual honesty that forbids faith in providence as a projection of human interests could itself be derived from Christian ideas of truthfulness and the possibility that Christian faith in providence might have to be renounced due to a Christian ideal is seen by Nietzsche as epitomizing the self-transcendence of Christian faith.12 Many more examples could be added to give evidence of Nietzsche’s interest in the question of providence, but the passages that have been cited are sufficient to indicate the background to the following discussion of Ecce Homo. We therefore now turn with a certain tense anticipation to how Nietzsche subjects himself to the test of personal providence in this text. It was written by Nietzsche in the last quarter of 1888, but was not sent to the publisher before Nietzsche’s mental collapse immediately afterwards. It was first published in 1908 in a deficient version and, for philological reasons, the text continues to be problematic (KSA 14: 454–70). The following exposition will offer the decidedly modest thesis that it is the relation to providence that promotes the perspectivism of Nietzsche’s self-presentation. As evidence for this claim, I would like first to look at three ways in which this relation is represented. Firstly, there are the mysterious coincidences with which Nietzsche caricatures the desire to ascribe purpose to what is accidental. He starts in this vein already in the first chapter in his depiction of family relationships. Against the reality of a kind of kinship that he interprets in terms of a disharmonia praestabilita, Nietzsche projects an ideal kind of kinship that immediately seems to be miraculously legitimated: ‘. . . I don’t understand how, but Julius Caesar could be my father—or Alexander, this embodied Dionysos . . . In this same moment, as I write this, the postman brings me a Dionysos head . . .’ (EH: Why I am so Wise 3, KSA 6: 269). The history of his experiences in writing knows similar coincidences: the works that led to the breach between Nietzsche and Wagner crossed each other in the post (EH: Human All Too Human 5, KSA 6: 327), Zarathustra was completed in the very same hour as Wagner’s death (EH: Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1, KSA 6: 335f.), and so on. Nietzsche plays with the providential interpretation of one’s own life experiences that would see everything as a meaningful sign. Comically illuminated in this way, the attraction that such a way of interpreting life might still possess is at one and the same time acknowledged and limited by being seen as a construct and therefore disqualified. More significant than such comical provocations of the providential form of interpretation is Nietzsche’s own appropriation of it, involving the substitution of a Christian faith in divine providence with a view based on the instincts. In chapter two Nietzsche sketches a concept of physiological cunning that evaluates supposedly marginal factors in life (diet, place, climate, and suchlike) as playing a decisive role in the development of the personality. The fact that he himself had for a long time failed to see any significance in such circumstances is now seen by Nietzsche as an error that cannot be made good again: 12 This example is taken up—by means of extensive self-citation—in On the Genealogy of Morals, GM III 27, KSA 5: 409f. With regard to the self-transcendence of Christian faith in nuce, see the fragment ‘The European Nihilism’, Nachlass 1886: 5[71], KSA 12: 211–7.

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But ignorance in physiologicis—that damned ‘idealism’—is the real doom hanging over my life. In its superfluousness and stupidity it is something incapable of producing anything that is good and for which there is no compensation or counterbalance. It is as a consequence of this ‘idealism’ that I explain all the false moves, all the great deviations from instinct and acts of ‘humility’ that draw me away from the task of my life . . .’. (EH: Why I am so Clever 2, KSA 6: 283)

Yet a few pages later this error is not only compensated for but re-evaluated. The ‘false move’ proves to have been a ‘fortunate move’ that makes it possible for Nietzsche to manage his exceptional task by inhibiting a precipitate confrontation with it: ‘From this point of view even the false moves we make in life have their meaning and value, as do the occasional byways and false turns, the hesitation, the acts of “humility”, the earnest waste of effort on tasks that were outside the scope of the task’ (EH: Why I am so Clever 9, KSA 6: 293). This re-evaluation runs through the whole of the book, as Nietzsche meditates on the nature of his particular task. When he marvels at ‘the long, secret labour and artistry of my instinct’ and the ‘higher protection’ it bestows (EH: Why I am so Clever 9, KSA 6: 294), we can recognize once more ‘that absurd trust in the course of events, in “life”, in “ life’s instinct” ’ that we have seen Nietzsche identify as the spectre of Christian faith in providence. Nietzsche thus appropriates features of the providential interpretation in his self-portrayal without taking on the Christian form of this interpretation, so that the absence of the caring God as a point of reference becomes all the more visible. In addition to such a subversive appropriation of the providential interpretation, Ecce Homo also contains an explicit criticism of the Christian doctrine. In commenting on Daybreak Nietzsche sees the doctrine of providence as exemplifying the Christian devaluation of reality against which his own attempt at a re-evaluation of all values is reacting. My task, of preparing a moment of the very highest self-awareness on the part of humanity, a great noon, in which humanity looks backwards and ahead, in which it removes itself from the dominion of chance and of the priests and for the very first time poses the question ‘Why? To what end?’ with regard to the whole—this task follows necessarily from the insight that humanity is not on the right way just by being as it is, that it is not at all governed by divine agency but rather that precisely its most sacred ideas of value have been a front for the seductive rule of the instinct of negation, of corruption, of the instinct of decadence. [. . .] The demand that one should believe, that everything is basically in the very best of hands, that a book, the Bible, provides the ultimate consolation, that there is a divine governance and wisdom in the destiny of humanity, is translated back into the reality, the will not to let the truth about the pitiful opposite of that belief be made known, namely, that until now humanity has been in the very worst hands, that it has been governed by those who are disadvantaged, the maliciously vengeful, so-called ‘saints’, these worldcalumniators and slanderers of humanity. (EH: Daybreak 2, KSA 6: 330f.)

Against the background of this criticism, Nietzsche’s famous self-portrayal in the final chapter is entirely consistent: ‘I do not want to be a saint, but rather a buffoon . . . Perhaps

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I am a buffoon . . . And despite that or rather not despite that—for there has been nothing more full of lies until now than the saints—truth speaks from me’ (EH: Why I am a Fate 1, KSA 6: 365). The truth that this buffoon claims to be an organ of is not simply the opposite of what Christianity has taught, nor can it be simply stated. It means permitting alternative possibilities of interpretation and challenges us to a permanent situation of experimentation: ‘Truth as the freedom to decide about truth or truth as freedom’ (Stegmaier 2008: 95f.13). In Nietzsche’s treatment of providence he first sketches the spheres in which the providential interpretation is relevant and its continuing role there in order to introduce an experiment in the irreducibility of competing interpretations, which leaves behind both the Christian faith in providence and any too hasty critique thereof that remains trapped in a straightforward psychological inversion. By developing a position in relation to providence that involves caricature, subversion, and criticism, Nietzsche is able to distance himself from faith in providence without denying its attraction or having to take up a definite opposing position. This procedure can also be described in terms of Nietzsche’s invocation of ‘decency’, the intellectual honesty in which he saw his fate. On the one hand intellectual honesty compels us to free ourselves from the Christian faith in providence, which is exposed as manipulative and as belonging to a world view that loses its attractiveness.14 On the other hand, the critique does not result in an absolutized counter-position, not even in the absolutizing of intellectual honesty, which would all too quickly lead to the loss of the freedom that had been attained in thorough-going perspectivism. In his self-presentation, Nietzsche remains free precisely because he does not suffer from the illusion that one can simply be done with Christian faith in providence, but rather recognizes the power of this faith in the multilayered stance he takes towards it.15

V. The Presence of Providence This discussion of the question of providence in the self-portrayals offered by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is intended to offer an original angle on a familiar comparison, no more and no less. Both use the idea of providence as a way of reflecting on the problematic place of religion in modernity. Kierkegaard posits a relation to governance in his own self-presentation by defining its meaning in terms of the perspective of the individual. Thus it serves as a corrective to ideas of subjective autonomy, opening and keeping open the possibility of alternative relationships that might contribute to the formation of the self. A challenge to this attempt to interpret providence in a new way 13

The full discussion can be found at Stegmaier 2008: 92–6, 114. Cf. Danto 1965: ch. 3. See The Antichrist on the ‘indecency’ of providential interpretation, AC: 52, KSA 6: 233f.; cf. Sommer 2000: 512f. 15 A concept of subjectivity corresponding to perspectivism might be compatible with the theory of narrative identity in which the literary genres of autobiography and biography are naturally given a certain emphasis, cf. Mulhall 2009; cf. with regard to Nietzsche, e.g. Anderson 2009. 14

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would be how what is said with regard to self-representation might plausibly be developed conceptually and in relation to nature and history. In his own self-presentation, Nietzsche argues himself out of the Christian faith in providence by not succumbing to a simple denial that would only be the obverse of a pseudo-naive affirmation. By this means he offers a general clarification of the horizon in which the problem of providence arises and brings about a perspectival way of philosophizing by allowing conflicting methods of interpretation to coexist. That this philosophical procedure cannot be reduced to a single definite standpoint has led to Nietzsche’s perspectivism being interpreted in varied and contradictory ways—as a diffuse religiosity (and therefore occasionally as a kind of utopian Christianity), as an idiosyncratic religion of art, or as a consistent non-religious philosophical life. There are, of course, many ways of deepening the topic. I mention just one. This chapter has shown how the relativizing function of the relation to providence is developed in both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s self-presentations in such a way as to hinder any artificial closure or totalization. Whilst both authors’ writings about themselves are characterized by complex self-reflection, they nevertheless also contain appeals to a condition of immediacy in which the task of offering a self-justificatory account of oneself has become superfluous. In a certain proximity to The Point of View, Kierkegaard approaches the possibility of a new or ‘original’ immediacy in, above all, the three discourses, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air (cf. Purkarthofer 2005: 90–101; Schreiber 2010: 420–5) that can be understood as a commentary on the obedience and joy of the religious author who has been educated by governance. In The Antichrist, the twin to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche draws attention to the utter immediacy of the type represented by Jesus, a symbol for the ‘entry into the complete feeling of all things being transfigured (blessedness)’ (AC: 34, KSA 6: 206f.; cf. Detering 2010: chs. 4, 6, and 7)—and, in his own self-presentation, he partially identifies himself with this type. A more thorough investigation could well be devoted to such ‘transfigurations’ (see Kleinert 2012), i.e. transitions from self-reflection to a new immediacy, which, incidentally, are discussed by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with reference to Luke 23:43 in which the relationship between temporality and eternity is at issue (SKS11: 48/WA: 44; AC: 35, KSA 6: 207f.). Of course, the actuality of faith in providence is a matter of some interest in itself, with or without reference to Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s reflections on the subject. If the idea of providence still has any philosophical or theological traction, this might seem to be more easily thematized by means of a rather indeterminate concept of fate than by the Christian doctrine (cf. Jaegle 2011). The final word ought not to concern problems, however, but is left to a poet who was important for both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard: Goethe. Goethe’s works contain a sequence of texts that are essential for considering the question of providence (as in Elective Affinities), but, in the present context, it is his self-presentation that is of most interest. At the end of the autobiographical From my Life: Poetry and Truth, which begins with the image of astral guidance and ends with that of the charioteer, Goethe allows himself to speculate on his life as a whole, with regard to his own approach to a world beyond that of the senses. With regard to the tragedy Egmont as well as to his own life, he

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refers to an incomprehensible and contradictory being that resembles both chance and providence and that he calls ‘the demonic’ (Goethe 1998: 171–87, esp. 175–7). In parablelike form Goethe suggests that this demonic power and the moral world order may be woven together in some higher whole. This reference to the person who is guided by the demonic may, for the well-disposed reader, be related to both the authors who have been under discussion here: ‘Rarely or ever do their equals exist at the same time and they cannot be conquered except by the very universe with which they began their struggle. And it may be that it is from such observations that that remarkable yet tremendous saying arose: Nemo contra deum nisi deum ipse [no one can be against God except God himself]’ (Goethe 1998: 177).

References Agamben, Giorgio (2010). Herrschaft und Herrlichkeit: Zur theologischen Genealogie von Ökonomie und Regierung (Homo Sacer II.2), trans. Andreas Hiepko (Berlin: Suhrkamp). Anderson, R. Lanier (2009). ‘Nietzsche on Redemption and Transfiguration’ in Joshua Landy and Michael Saler (eds.), The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 225–58. Brandes, Georg (1992). Nietzsche: Eine Abhandlung über aristokratischen Radikalismus, intro. Klaus Bohnen (Berlin: Berenberg). ——– (2004). Søren Kierkegaard: Eine kritische Darstellung. [Anonymous 1879 trans., rev., and comm. Gisela Perlet] (Reclam: Leipzig). Brobjer, Thomas H. (2003). ‘Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Kierkegaard’, in Journal of the History of Philosophy 41: 2, 251–63. Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen (1975). ‘Kierkegaards eigener “Gesichtspunkt”: “Vorwärts zu leben, aber rückwärts zu verstehen” ’, in Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 17, 61–75. Dalrymple, Timothy (2010). ‘Modern Governance: Why Kierkegaard’s Styrelse Is More Compelling Than You Think’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), The Point of View (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 22) (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 157–81. Danto, Arthur C. (1965). Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: The Macmillan Company). Detering, Heinrich (2010). Der Antichrist und der Gekreuzigte: Friedrich Nietzsches letzte Texte (Göttingen: Wallstein). Deuser, Hermann (2003). ‘Vorsehung (I. Systematisch-theologisch)’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, vol. 35 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 302–23. Garff, Joakim (1998). ‘The Eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View on Kierkegaard’s Work as an Author’ in Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (eds.), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 75–102. ——– (2001). SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, en biografi (Copenhagen: Gad). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1998). Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (14–20. Buch), in Erich Trunz (ed.), Goethes Werke (Hamburger Ausgabe), vol. 10 (Munich: Beck), 7–187. Grün, Sturmius (1948). Gespräche über die göttliche Vorsehung. (Aschaffenburg: Pattloch). Haecker, Theodor (1950). Journal in the Night, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon Books). Hannay, Alastair (2003). ‘Nietzsche/Kierkegaard: Prospects for dialogue?’, in id., Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays (London and New York: Routledge), 207–17.

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Hartung, Gerald/Schlette, Magnus (eds.) (2012). Religiosität und intellektuelle Redlichkeit. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Heidegger, Martin (1994). ‘Nietzsches Wort “Gott ist tot” ’, in id., Holzwege, ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann, 7th rev. edn. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann), 209–67. Jaegle, Dietmar (ed.) (2011). Schicksal: Sieben mal sieben unhintergehbare Dinge (Marbacher Magazin, vol. 135) (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft). Jaspers, Karl (1936). Nietzsche: Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter). Kampmann, Walther Bo. (2004). ‘Søren Kierkegaards elsker. En læsning af Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed’, in Sven Halse (ed.), Livet som indsats: Livshistoriske satsninger og iscenesættelser (University of Southern Denmark Studies in Literature, vol. 42) (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag), 87–103. Kleinert, Markus (2012). ‘Glanz und Ermattung: Über die Verklärung als Bezugspunkt von Kunst und Religion’, in Thomas Erne and Peter Schüz (eds.), Der religiöse Charme der Kunst (Paderborn: Schöningh), 201–17. Löwith, Karl (1933). Kierkegaard und Nietzsche oder philosophische und theologische Überwindung des Nihilismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann). Lypp, Bernhard (1985). ‘Nietzsche: Die Selbsterzeugung der Aufklärung’, in Merkur 39, 474–83. Miles, Thomas (2011). ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Influence on Existentialism (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 9) (Aldershot: Ashgate), 263–98. Mulhall, Stephen (2009). ‘Autobiography and Biography’, in Richard Eldridge (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press), 180–98. Nehamas, Alexander (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Nietzsche, Friedrich (KSA) (1999). Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, new edn. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag/Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). ——– (KSB) (2003). Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 2nd edn. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag /Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). Pernin Segissement, Marie-José (1999). Nietzsche et Schopenhauer. Encore et toujours la prédestination (Paris and Montréal: L’Harmattan). Pippin, Robert B. (1999). ‘Nietzsche and the Melancholy of Modernity’, in Social Research 66: 2, 455–520. Pletsch, Carl (1984). ‘The Self-Sufficient Text in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’, in Yale French Studies 66, 160–88. Purkarthofer, Richard (2005). Kierkegaard (Leipzig: Reclam). Rehm, Walther (1964). ‘Mottostudien: Kierkegaards Motti’, in id., Späte Studien (Bern and Munich: Francke), 215–48. Safranski, Rüdiger (2000). Nietzsche: Biographie seines Denkens (Munich and Vienna: Hanser). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1996). ‘Transzendente Spekulation über die anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des einzelnen’, in id., Sämtliche Werke, textcritically rev. and ed. Wolfgang Frhr. von Löhneysen, vol. 4, Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine philosophische Schriften I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 243–72. Schreiber, Gerhard (2010). ‘Glaube und “Unmittelbarkeit” bei Kierkegaard’, in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser, and K. Brian Söderquist (eds.), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2010: Kierkegaard’s Late Writings (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), 391–425.

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Schulz, Heiko (1994). Eschatologische Identität: Eine Untersuchung über das Verhältnis von Vorsehung, Schicksal und Zufall bei Sören Kierkegaard (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter). ——– (1999). ‘Kierkegaard on Providence and Foreknowledge: A Critical Account’, in Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41, 115–31. ——– (2009). ‘A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard’ in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Northern and Western Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8): I (Aldershot: Ashgate), 307–419. Shapiro, Gary (1989). Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Sommer, Andreas Urs (2000). Friedrich Nietzsches ‘Der Antichrist’: Ein philosophischhistorischer Kommentar (Beiträge zu Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2) (Basel: Schwabe). Stegmaier, Werner (2008). ‘Schicksal Nietzsche? Zu Nietzsches Selbsteinschätzung als Schicksal der Philosophie und der Menschheit (Ecce Homo, Warum ich ein Schicksal bin 1)’, in Nietzsche-Studien 37, 62–114. Struve, Wolfgang (1948). ‘Die neuzeitliche Philosophie als Metaphysik der Subjektivität. Interpretationen zu Kierkegaard und Nietzsche’, in Symposion. Jahrbuch für Philosophie 1, 207–335. Thomä, Dieter (1998). Erzähle dich selbst: Lebensgeschichte als philosophisches Problem (Munich: Beck). Weber, Max (1992). ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf ’, in Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, eds. Horst Baier, M. Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Wolfgang Schluchter, and Johannes Winckelmann, sect. I, vol. 17 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 71–111. Whitmire, Jr., John F. (2010). ‘Reconstructing the Religious: Deconstruction, Transfiguration, and Witnessing in The Point of View and On My Work as an Author’ in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), The Point of View (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 22) (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 325–58.

Further Reading Brobjer (2003). Danto (1965). Detering (2010). Löwith, Karl (1991 [1941]). From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Columbia University Press). Miles (2011). [Bibliography 288–98]. Schulz (1994, 1999).

chapter 22

K ier k ega a r d a n d Heideg ger C lare C arlisle

In April 1964 the 150th anniversary of Søren Kierkegaard’s birth was marked by a conference held in Paris, organized by Unesco, and entitled ‘Kierkegaard vivant’. Participants included Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Wahl, Jean Beaufret, Jean Hyppolite, and Emmanuel Levinas, but perhaps the most eagerly anticipated contribution was that of Martin Heidegger, who was by then in his seventies. On this occasion, it could be expected, the controversial German philosopher would present for the first time his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s work. He might also offer his first sustained reflection on his own engagement with a thinker whose influence is evident in his writings throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. However, any such hopes would remain unfulfilled. Not only was Heidegger absent from the conference, but his written contribution, ‘La fin de la philosophie et la tâche de la pensée’, made no mention of Kierkegaard or his works.1 As Wahl put it, Heidegger’s paper ‘kept Kierkegaard in the shadows’ (Unesco 1966: 255). Beaufret, who translated and presented it, was obliged in the discussion that followed to excuse the way in which his mentor ‘had spoken without speaking of Kierkegaard’ (Unesco 1966: 313, see also 253–9). In fact, it is not just in ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, but in much of his work from the early 1920s until his latest writings, that Heidegger could be said to ‘speak without speaking of Kierkegaard’. This contrasts with his focused discussions of many of the key thinkers of the western philosophical tradition, whether in his books, in 1 The title, at least, of Heidegger’s contribution to the Paris conference is singularly Kierkegaardian. ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ echoes Kierkegaard’s distinctive emphasis on the limits of philosophy, and his claim that what lies beyond philosophy takes the form of a task. For both Kierkegaard and Heidegger, this idea of a task expresses something essential about the shape of human existence: a task is defined by a goal that is yet to be reached and may well remain elusive, even as it constitutes the work undertaken. A task takes time, patience, perhaps courage—and it might be difficult to know how to begin it. Perhaps every task begins with a leap, whether this is a leap into faith, or a ‘leap into thinking’ (see Heidegger 1968: 7).

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essays, or in lecture courses. Heidegger does mention Kierkegaard from time to time, but when brought together these remarks do not form a clear interpretation or assessment. According to Heidegger, Kierkegaard ‘has nothing whatever to say’ about the ‘decisive question . . . of Being’ (Heidegger 1968: 213); ‘Kierkegaard is not a thinker but a religious writer, and not just one religious writer among others, but the only one who accords with the destiny of his age’ (Heidegger 2002: 186). In this chapter, then, I want to address the following questions: Why would Heidegger speak of Kierkegaard at all? Why might he have done so reticently? And who is the Kierkegaard of whom Heidegger speaks? Heidegger’s reluctance to clarify the relationship between his own thought and Kierkegaard’s leaves us to uncover a path running through the two thinkers’ works. This task involves interpretation as well as a certain amount of scholarly detective work. And it raises this methodological issue: to what extent is a contemporary reader’s interpretation of Kierkegaard already shaped by Heidegger’s philosophy?—and, indeed, is one also reading Heidegger in the light of Kierkegaard? (Even if this is a hermeneutic problem that remains unsolved, it may nevertheless be illuminating to see what these mutually-informed readings of Kierkegaard and Heidegger might look like.) My approach here will be to begin by distilling and elaborating what I believe to be Kierkegaard’s distinctive contribution to philosophy, and then to show how this was taken up by Heidegger—not just in Being and Time, where its influence is most obvious, but also in his later writings.

I. Kierkegaard’s Single Thought Heidegger is well known for suggesting that every great thinker has a single thought (see Heidegger 1968: 50; Heidegger 1991: 4). Even on this point there is an echo of Kierkegaard, whose 1847 discourse ‘The Work of Love in Praising Love’ envisages a thinker who ‘perseveres for a long time in thinking one thought’—a thought which does not take an external object, but ‘has an inward direction in self-deepening’ (SKS9: 354/WL: 360–1). As Kierkegaard here emphasizes—and as Heidegger would perhaps have agreed—this single thought cannot, and should not, be detached from the life of the single individual who thinks it. Thus, if a philosopher has a single thought, this takes the form of a path of thinking followed, over the course of time, by someone who exists and is therefore ‘in a process of becoming’ (SKS7: 73/CUP1: 73). Such a thought may, then, be unfolded and articulated in different ways at different times, and in response to different questions, preoccupations, and events. Kierkegaard’s single thought is elaborated in successive texts by a variety of pseudonyms, in varying moods, and in relation to a range of subjects: romantic love, marriage, sacrifice, the Incarnation, sin and repentance, revelation, and so on. Because this single thought is complex in both its content and its form, we might hesitate to name it. But it can, nevertheless, be named as ‘repetition’, so long as this name encompasses and joins together a

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constellation of concepts, including possibility, spirit, transcendence, temporality, task, freedom, repentance, and forgiveness. I want to show here that Kierkegaard’s thought of repetition responds to what Heidegger calls ‘the question of being’, although it does so from a religious perspective that, according to Heidegger, compromises proper philosophical enquiry (see Weston 1994: 35). Repetition can only be understood against the background of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Christian life, and the distinctive intellectual and existential problems this presents.2 The task of becoming a Christian can be reduced to two basic elements: recognition that one is a sinner, and faith in the forgiveness of sins. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus puts it, ‘Christianity begins here—with the teaching about sin, and thereby with the single individual’ (SKS11: 231/SUD: 120). This starting point leads directly to the question of what, or who, a human being is—to the question of the human being’s ontological status. Becoming a Christian requires recognition that one is a sinner, that is to say, someone who has through her own free actions disrupted her relationship to God. These sinful actions take many forms—all of them transgressions of the divine law—ranging from acts harmful to others, like murder, theft, or adultery, to the failure properly to worship God or fully to acknowledge one’s dependence on him. For Kierkegaard, such a failure is self-destructive, since the self is grounded in God (see SKS11: 129–32/SUD: 13–16; SKS4: 409/CA: 107). From this Christian perspective, then, the question of who a person is finds a double response. First, a person is constituted by her past actions: in so far as she has sinned, she is a sinner. This idea that a person’s present identity encompasses her past draws attention to the temporality of human being. Second, a person is constituted by her relationship to God, and in this respect human being is rooted in eternity. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis puts it, ‘Man is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal’ (SKS4: 329/CA: 85). According to this ontology, the recognition that one is a sinner problematizes the second moment of the Christian task. For the more fully and deeply one acknowledges one’s sinfulness, the more urgently arises the question of how faith in the forgiveness of sins is possible. How can one’s relationship to God be restored when it has been broken by irrevocable actions? How can one who has sinned be anything other than a sinner? Kierkegaard’s response to this question draws on the philosophical distinction between possibility and actuality, terms that signify two ways in which something can be said to be. Kierkegaard writes in more than one text that the human being is a synthesis of 2 In Repetition, Constantin Constantius states that ‘repetition is conditio sine qua non [the indispensable condition] for every issue of dogmatics’ (SKS4: 26/R: 149), and in an unpublished response to J. L. Heiberg’s review of the book the same pseudonym indicates that repetition has implications concerning sin and atonement: see Pap. IV B 117 293–4/R: 313 (see also the chapter by Joakim Garff in the present volume). In a journal entry of 1843, which constitutes a sort of sketch of the thought of repetition, Kierkegaard writes that ‘the problem of sin . . . is the second repetition’ (SKS18/ KJN2 JJ:159 [JP3: 3793]). In The Concept of Anxiety, as in Repetition, a distinction is made between a ‘Greek’ or ‘pagan’ philosophy ‘whose essence is immanence’, and a ‘modern’ or ‘Christian’ philosophy ‘whose essence is transcendence or repetition’ (SKS4: 329/CA: 21).

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possibility and actuality. It seems natural to equate these categories with the future and the past respectively, so that the possible corresponds to what may happen, and the actual to what has happened and cannot be altered. On this view, the present moment is caught between these two temporal-ontological dimensions, for it is constituted by past actuality but opens on to and anticipates future possibilities. Humanly speaking, then, as the future becomes the present and moves into the past, it loses its character of possibility. Of course, we may acknowledge the contingency of the past, the fact that it could have been otherwise. But equally, we must accept that the past is as it is, or rather as it was; that what is done cannot be undone; that history cannot be rewritten, at least not without falsification. And this gives human life a tragic aspect: we are beings who are constituted by a past that we are powerless to change. For Kierkegaard, the classical, pre-Christian world view amounted to precisely this—and thus tragedy, in which an irrevocable past is personified as Fate, is the highest and most existentially truthful form of Greek drama (see SKS4: 400/CA: 97). However, Kierkegaard repeatedly refers his readers to Jesus’s saying, recorded in all three of the synoptic Gospels, that for God all things are possible (see Matt 19:26; Mk 10:27; Lk 18:26). In The Sickness Unto Death the pseudonym Anti-Climacus radicalizes this teaching into the claim that, ‘since everything is possible for God, then God is this— that everything is possible’ (SKS11: 154/SUD: 40). Indeed, the second half of this sentence might alternatively be translated as: ‘God is: that all things are possible’. Anti-Climacus goes on to accentuate the ontological import of this thought, asserting that ‘the being of God means that everything is possible, or that everything is possible means the being of God’ (SKS11: 154/SUD: 40)—and that, correspondingly, belief in God is the belief that all things are possible (see SKS11: 153–5/SUD: 38–41). In the concluding chapter of The Concept of Anxiety, entitled ‘Anxiety as Saving through Faith’, Vigilius Haufniensis states that ‘in possibility all things are equally possible’ (SKS4: 455/CA: 156). If we interpret ‘everything’ or ‘all things’ in these passages as denoting—or at least as encompassing—the past, the present, and the future, then faith in God comes to signify a transformation in the ontology of the self outlined above. This suggests an answer to the question of forgiveness. If what is past can retain, or can regain, its character of possibility, then it can be taken again, repeated qua possibility. And this means that the miracle can happen: the past can be changed.3 Although it is still true to say that what is done cannot be undone, the meaning of the past can be transformed, and without thereby distorting or concealing its truth. Kierkegaard’s appropriation of Aristotle’s distinction between

3 Interestingly, Heidegger seems to approach something like this Kierkegaardian thought of repetition in the course of his discussion of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, which he compares with the Christian teaching on repentance and forgiveness: ‘Christian dogma knows of another way in which the “It was” may be willed back—repentance . . . If repentance, joined to the forgiveness of sin, and only that way, can will the return of the past, this will of repentance . . . is always determined metaphysically, and is possible only that way—possible only by its relation to the eternal will of the redeeming God’ (Heidegger 1968: 105). For a comparative analysis of Kierkegaard’s repetition and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, see Carlisle 2011.

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possibility and actuality turns out to ground a distinctive philosophical interpretation of the Lutheran characterization of the faithful Christian as at once righteous and a sinner.4 As actual events or actions, one’s past sins remain, and thus one is constituted as a sinner. But in so far as they have become possibilities they can gain a new meaning, according to which they are no longer counted as sins. And as her past is changed in this way, the individual gains a new being: she is no longer a sinner, but has become righteous. This is what Kierkegaard means by a transcendent, religious repetition—and in this connection Vigilius Haufniensis quotes Paul’s proclamation in 2 Corinthians: ‘Behold all things have become new’ (SKS4: 325/CA: 17). If ‘all things’ are possible for God, even the past can ‘become new’. This is a line of thinking that Heidegger takes up, with reference to Paul, in his lecture course on the phenomenology of religion in 1920–1 (see Heidegger 2004: 48–9). Different versions of Kierkegaard’s complex thought of repetition recur in several texts. Kierkegaard mentions repetition in his unpublished, unfinished work of 1841–2, Johannes Climacus; Or, De omnibus dubitandum est, but he introduces it officially, as it were, in his 1843 text Repetition. As its subtitle suggests, the mood or method of this work is ‘experimenting psychology’. In the opening paragraph, the pseudonymous author Constantin Constantius raises ‘the question of repetition—whether or not it is possible, what importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being repeated’, and he suggests that ‘this question will play a very important role in modern philosophy’ (SKS4: 9/R: 131). Thus repetition is first named as a question, rather than as a thesis or a concept. Furthermore, this text is written in such a way as to disclose the meaning of repetition indirectly, ironically, and—some might say—obliquely. Constantin compares repetition to Aristotle’s conception of kinesis (the change or movement involved in becoming) as a transition from possibility to actuality. However, he fails to grasp the full significance of these two ontological categories, and thus he fails to arrive at the true sense of repetition that he is groping after: a repetition that is ‘a transcendence’ (SKS4: 57/R: 186) and ‘freedom itself ’ (Pap. IV B 117/R: 302); a ‘repetition of the spirit’ (SKS4: 88/R: 221; see also SKS4: 326/CA: 18). Constantin does not understand that what is repeated in this kind of repetition is not something actual or concrete, but a possibility. In other words, the repetition in question does not concern a particular action or experience, but rather the moment of freedom itself. If, for example, at some point in the past one faced a choice between two possibilities— such as getting married or not getting married; travelling to Berlin or remaining in Copenhagen—a repetition would consist not in a second engagement or a second journey, but in a renewal of the decision, and thus in a return of the freedom that this decision expresses. While repetition of something actual merely produces habit (which is, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, a deadening mechanization of life—see

4 It might however be argued that something like this is already implicit in Luther’s own thought, which draws on Aristotelian categories, including that of kinesis. For a discussion that touches on this question, see Van Buren 1994a: 168–70.

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SKS4: 50/R: 179; SKS4: 448–9/CA: 148–9), repetition of the possible as possible produces spiritual freedom.5 Constantin Constantius’s misguided conception of repetition is contrasted with the genuine repetition that is encountered by the book’s other protagonist, a nameless young man who regrets his engagement to his fiancée. Caught in this unhappy situation, the young man finds that he has lost himself, and his freedom, for it seems that whether he remains engaged or breaks it off he is guilty of some kind of deceit. But then his fiancée becomes engaged to someone else, and this changes, retrospectively, the ethical significance of his decisions. The young man finds his freedom restored to him. In fact, in regaining his freedom, and thereby his self, he receives more than he had before he lost them, for he has a new awareness of their meaning and value—and for this reason, he compares himself to Job. The story of this young man illustrates Constantin Constantius’s suggestion that repetition is the ‘solution [Løsnet] in every ethical view’ (SKS4: 25–6/R: 141). From a merely human perspective, the tragic temporality of life condemns the individual to fall short of ethical requirements; repetition, however, transcends the ethical domain and can restore righteousness. Repetition’s young man does not directly attribute his repetition to God, but he does experience it as a kind of miracle. In Philosophical Fragments (1844) the thought of repetition receives a different expression: here, the pseudonym Johannes Climacus argues that the past is no more necessary than the future, and suggests that this claim highlights a crucial difference between the Greek and Christian world views (see SKS4: 272–84/PF: 72–88). And in this pseudonym’s following work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), we find another variation on the theme. At the end of his lengthy Postscript, Climacus revokes the whole text (see SKS7: 562/CUP1: 619). This has been interpreted in various ways by commentators (see Hannay 2010), but it certainly provides a formal indication of a gesture by which what has gone before is not altered in its substance, but is nevertheless cast in an entirely new light, so that its significance is transformed. In this way, Climacus’s act of revocation mirrors the act of forgiveness. 5

It is important to clarify what Kierkegaard means by ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’. His conception of spirit is inseparable from the idea of relationship. And for Kierkegaard, a relationship is not something static, but a movement, at once active and passive, which involves both consciousness and will. He understands the human self in precisely these dynamic, relational terms: the self is a spiritual being, for it is a reflexive movement of being aware of itself, and of willing to be—or not to be—itself. This self-relation, in Kierkegaard’s view, encompasses a relation both to God and to one’s world. Thus conceived, selfhood is synonymous with freedom. As a spiritual being, the human self should be interrogated and understood by means of its ‘how’: the question of who or what a particular self is amounts to the question of how it relates to itself (and thus to God and to the world). One of the remarkable features of this conception of spirit is that it indicates both what the self is and a task for it to undertake. The self is spirit, but precisely as such it loses itself, and so it has the task of becoming itself. Thus a movement of repetition, or redoubling, is implicit in the very idea of spirit. Although human beings are spirit, they have a tendency to ignore, forget, or conceal from themselves this fact, and the task that it brings: ‘The lostness of spiritlessness, as well as its security, consists in its understanding nothing spiritually and comprehending nothing as a task’ (SKS4: 398/CA: 95). Kierkegaard believed this tendency to be particularly prevalent among his contemporaries in nineteenth-century Denmark, and in his 1846 book, Two Ages, he offers a detailed analysis of the spiritlessness of his ‘present age’.

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The way in which the specifically Christian thought of repetition entails a distinctive conception of both time and being is indicated most directly in the difficult and, admittedly, ambiguous section of The Concept of Anxiety that discusses ‘the moment’ (Øiblikket, derived from Øiets Blik, ‘a glance of the eye’). As we shall see in the following section, this is an important text for Heidegger (see Magurshak 1985). When he begins his discussion of the moment, Vigilius Haufniensis suggests that what is at stake here is ‘the category of transition’ (SKS4: 384/CA: 81). This issue marks, so to speak, the front line of Kierkegaard’s confrontation with Hegelian philosophy (see Carlisle 2005: 33–110). Kierkegaard claims that although movement or transition has a central role in Hegel’s thought, this is conceived according to an ontology of immanence and continuity that is essentially the same as the ancient Greek, i.e. pagan, interpretation of being. In other words, he argues that Hegel fails to accomplish the radical break with Greek thought that a genuinely Christian philosophy requires—and on these grounds he opposes the attempt by his Danish contemporary, Hans Lassen Martensen, to develop a Hegelian theology (see Stewart 2003). According to Vigilius Haufniensis, the category of the moment ‘is of utmost importance in maintaining the distinction between Christianity and pagan philosophy, as well as the equally pagan speculation in Christianity’ (SKS4: 387/CA: 84). The ‘speculation’ in question here is Hegelian thought: for both Plato and Hegel, claims the pseudonymous author, ‘the moment remains an abstraction . . . It is only with Christianity that . . . temporality and the moment can be properly understood’ (SKS4: 388/CA: 84). The analysis of ‘the moment’ in this section of the text is, as I have noted, difficult to follow, partly because it proceeds dialectically, considering several different views in turn, and partly because the problem it addresses remains rather unclear. But it is possible to identify a set of claims arising from Vigilius Haufniensis’s discussion. One is that ‘the moment’ is the medium within which significant change, or transition, occurs—and the kind of change in question here seems to concern the events that structure the Christian life: conversion, repentance, atonement, redemption, and resurrection (see SKS4: 393/CA: 90). Another claim is that the moment is a category of spirit, not of nature (see SKS4: 392/CA: 88–9), arising from the fact that the human being is ‘a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal’ (SKS4: 388/CA: 85). And another is that a proper understanding of ‘the moment’ cannot be based on a naive, everyday understanding of time as a succession of ‘now’ moments (see SKS4: 385, 388–9/CA: 82, 85–6). On the contrary, the moment signifies ‘the fullness of time’ (SKS4: 393/CA: 90). This conception of the moment is clearly indebted to Pauline theology. ‘The fullness of time’ references Galatians 4:4, and Vigilius Haufniensis suggests that Paul in I Corinthians offers a ‘poetic paraphrase’ of the moment when he writes of resurrection to eternal life following physical death: ‘Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed’ (1 Cor: 15:51–2). These biblical references indicate that ‘the moment’ and ‘the fullness of time’ signify a temporality in which extraordinary spiritual events occur. Such events as the Incarnation, final judgement, and resurrection of the dead do not take place within time, ordinarily conceived, but rather point to a rupture or a transformation of this ordinary temporality; they

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point to the new possibility of a meeting point between time and eternity, between human beings and God. According to Vigilius Haufniensis, then, ‘the moment’ names a radically new conception of temporality, in which past and future—that is to say, the dimensions of time—are joined together in eternity: ‘If the moment is posited, so is the eternal, but also the future, which reappears as the past . . . The pivotal concept in Christianity, that which made all things new, is the fullness of time, but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is at once the future and the past’ (SKS4: 393/CA: 90). This conception of the moment as a meeting point between time and eternity certainly has a metaphysical character, and might be supposed to belong to a domain of theological speculation that lies beyond the reach of legitimate cognition. However, it also has an existential and ethical significance, in so far as it signals the possibility of the human being’s encounter with God at every moment of his or her life—the possibility, to put it another way, of living this life ‘before God’. This may mean accepting a summons to examine one’s conscience in the light of a demand such as loving one’s neighbour as oneself; it may mean receiving each new day, whether happy or painful, as a gift from God; or it might mean repeatedly recognizing one’s own sinfulness, and maintaining hope for the fulfilment of a promise of eternal life. In this way, even within the worldly time measured by minutes and hours and days, ‘the moment’ renders the individual’s temporal existence ecstatic: open to something beyond itself, which casts it in a new light and thus reveals its meaning from the perspective of eternity. Just as the moment encompasses both past and future, so these two temporal dimensions can be encountered in the mode of possibility. Again, The Concept of Anxiety is not especially clear on this point, and indeed Vigilius Haufniensis states that ‘The possible corresponds exactly to the future. For freedom, the possible is the future, and the future is for time the possible’ (SKS4: 394/CA: 91). But he also suggests that ‘the past [may] stand in a relation of possibility to me . . . because it may be repeated, i.e., become future’ (SKS4: 394–5/CA: 91). According to the Christian temporality expressed in the concept of the moment, there can be freedom in relation to the past as well as to the future. It is this account of freedom that underpins, ontologically, the Christian message of redemption from sin through forgiveness. As we will see in the remainder of this essay, these intensely theological thoughts would be appropriated by a thinker who insisted that philosophy must be methodologically atheistic (see Heidegger 1985: 80).

II. Heidegger’s Early Appropriation of Kierkegaard’s Thought By the beginning of the 1920s, Heidegger’s intellectual trajectory had brought him close to Kierkegaard. In the decade leading up to this time, Heidegger progressed through a phase of study that focused on Catholic theology, and especially medieval scholasticism.

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But in turning to authors such as Augustine, Eckhart, Luther, Schleiermacher, and Kierkegaard, he underwent a kind of Protestant conversion. By 1920 Heidegger was arguing that ‘the original experience’ of ‘primordial Christianity’ (Heidegger 2004: 49) had been distorted by Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy—and he sought in his work to retrieve this early Christian form of existence.6 The idea that ‘Christian religiosity lives temporality as such’; ‘Christian experience lives time itself ’ (Heidegger 2004: 55, 57) was central to Heidegger’s 1920–1 lecture course at the University of Freiburg on the phenomenology of religious life. The first half of this course focused on Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Thessalonians, with a view to illuminating the ‘core phenomenon’ of ‘the historical’ (see Heidegger 2004: 22–39). Heidegger explored how, in these texts, Paul’s teaching on the Second Coming involves a conception of time as kairos, ‘fullness of time’, or moment (Augenblick—see Sheehan 1979; Heidegger 2004: 72, 106–7). He discussed at length how the early Christian’s relationship with God encompassed, in each moment, the temporal-existential dimensions of ‘having-become’ (Gewordensein) and expectant waiting-toward the future (Zukunft—see Heidegger 2004: 65–78). This ‘kairological time’ represented, according to Heidegger, ‘a new becoming’ (Heidegger 2004: 69), an authentic mode of temporality to be contrasted with quantifying, calculating ‘chronological time’ (see Van Buren 1994a: 163–4). Heidegger did not, in this lecture course, focus on Kierkegaard’s own reflection on the moment in The Concept of Anxiety, but he was evidently aware of it: Karl Jaspers discusses the Kierkegaardian moment in his 1919 book The Psychology of Worldviews, which Heidegger reviewed in the year it was published (see Heidegger 1962: 497). In the preceding section of this chapter, I attempted to elucidate Kierkegaard’s thought of repetition, not only in order to show that Heidegger, especially in Being and Time, takes up and develops several Kierkegaardian concepts, but also in order to reach a better understanding of why he did so. Once we recognize what is at stake, philosophically, in Kierkegaard’s project, its significance for Heidegger becomes clearer. In footnotes to Being and Time, Heidegger implies that Kierkegaard’s work is not properly ontological (see Heidegger 1962: 494, 497)—a judgement he repeats more explicitly in his 1950–1 lecture course ‘What Is Called Thinking?’: By way of Hegelian metaphysics, Kierkegaard remains everywhere philosophically entangled, on the one hand in a dogmatic Aristotelianism that is completely on a par with medieval scholasticism, and on the other in the subjectivity of German idealism. No discerning mind would deny the stimuli produced by Kierkegaard’s thought that prompted us to give renewed attention to the ‘existential’. But about the decisive question—the essential nature of Being—Kierkegaard has nothing whatever to say. (Heidegger 1968: 213)

Nevertheless, it is precisely Kierkegaard’s ontology, as outlined in the previous section, that Heidegger takes up and develops in Being and Time.

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For discussion of Heidegger’s interest in early Christianity, see Kisiel 1994; Van Buren 1994b.

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At the beginning of that 1927 text Heidegger announces his own philosophical task: to raise anew the question of the meaning of being. His method will be a distinctively historical and hermeneutic form of phenomenology, which aims to uncover and articulate structures hidden both within the philosophical tradition, from ancient Greek thought until his own time, and within the practical lifeworld of the human being. These two spheres of investigation are, in fact, inseparable: Heidegger follows Hegel and Nietzsche in emphasizing that human beings are shaped by an historical destiny, and in Being and Time he claims, moreover, that one of the distinctive features of the human way of being is the fact that Being is an issue and a question for us. In other words, the human being has a history—the history of philosophy—that discloses our peculiarly enquiring and ontological character, but which also provides us with certain tasks that constitute our present and our future. The ‘forgetting’ of the question of being that Heidegger diagnoses in the history of philosophy turns out to be mirrored in a tendency, in everyday life, to fall short of an ‘authentic’ way of being that remains a possibility for each existing individual. In this way the project of Being and Time, although it draws on Kant’s transcendental philosophy and on Husserl’s phenomenology, gains a new impetus from its engagement with the philosophical tradition as a whole. For Heidegger, the task of philosophy is to make transparent to itself not just the structure of consciousness, but also the human being in its historicality, its historical situation. In order to bring to light and gain critical purchase on an interpretation of being that has prevailed throughout the philosophical tradition, Heidegger tries to avoid definitions of the human being used by earlier philosophers. Designations such as ‘rational animal’, ‘thinking thing’, and ‘knowing subject’, he suggests, conceal within them the assumption that to be means to be present; to be actual at the present time (see Heidegger 1962: 44–8, 86–7). Instead, he uses the term Dasein to denote the specifically human way of being. This word, which might be translated as ‘there-being’ or ‘being-there’, discloses the way in which human existence is always situated in a ‘world’ (that is to say, a context or a network of relationships—see Heidegger 1962: 78–80, 93–4, 112–22), always involved in some kind of ‘situation’ (Heidegger 1962: 346; see also Heidegger 2004: 63–5).7 In Being and Time Heidegger approaches the question of being through an analysis of Dasein—and this analysis is manifestly Kierkegaardian. There are significant continuities between Kierkegaard’s conception of the human self as spirit (see note 5 above) and Heidegger’s phenomenological account of Dasein. Heidegger in 1927 eschews the term ‘spirit’, including it among those designations which ‘remain uninterrogated with regard to their Being and its structure, in accordance with the way in which the question of Being has been neglected’ (Heidegger 1962: 44). Furthermore, as a former theologian he sought to distance himself from a discourse that might compromise his philosophical credentials. However, in Being and Time, ‘Dasein’, like the Kierkegaardian ‘spirit’, indicates an irreducibly relational way of existing: the human being is not a thing that, perhaps in distinction from other kinds of 7

On the influence on Heidegger of Karl Jaspers’ notion of a ‘limit situation’, see Pöggeler 1994: 141, 146–8.

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thing, has a relationship to itself and to others; rather, the human being is this complex relationship. Understood in this way, Dasein is not to be conceived according to the category of substance, and the manner of its being encompasses possibility as well as actuality—indeed the former has a priority over the latter (see Heidegger 1962: 63; SKS11: 131/SUD: 15). According to Heidegger, ‘in each case Dasein is its possibility’ (1962: 68)8. And just as, for Kierkegaard, ‘spirit’ names both an ontological constitution and an existential task, so Heidegger states that ‘because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, “choose” itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself, or only “seem” to do so’ (1962: 68). In his 1935 lecture, ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’, Heidegger seems to change his mind about ‘spirit’ and actually emphasizes the link between ‘spirit’ and his existential conception of ‘world’, argues that ‘spirit is the sustaining, dominating principle’ of Dasein, and warns of the ‘spiritual decline of the earth’ in the modern, technological age (1961: 31–9).9 The close connection between these two conceptions of the human being is illustrated by the interpretations of death presented by Kierkegaard and Heidegger. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym emphasizes the contrast between the death of human beings and that of other organisms such as animals and plants: ‘The beast does not really die, but when the spirit is posited as spirit, death shows itself as the terrifying’ (SKS4: 395/CA: 92). This follows from the fact that, as spirit, the human being has, and indeed is, a relationship to herself. What Vigilius Haufniensis regards as ‘really’ dying involves not simply biological death, but a relationship to the fact of death that is characterized by both consciousness and will: the human being is aware or unaware of her mortality, and wants or does not want to die. This relationship does not, of course, take place only at the moment of death (when, strictly speaking, it is too late); such a view represents a ‘crass materialism’ (SKS4: 140/FT: 46). Rather, relating to death takes the form of an ‘anticipation’. Thus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript Johannes Climacus asks ‘whether death can be anticipated and anticipando [by being anticipated] be experienced in an idea, or whether it is only when it actually is’. Climacus then directs his reader’s attention to ‘the question about what death is and what it is for the living person, how the idea of it must change a person’s whole life if he, in order to think its uncertainty, must think it every moment in order to prepare himself for it’ (SKS7: 156/CUP1: 168). In Being and Time Heidegger provides an answer to these questions—the same answer, indeed, as seems to be implicit in the discussions of death offered by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Just as Vigilius Haufniensis highlights the difference between human, ‘spiritual’ death and organic death, so Heidegger distinguishes between Dasein’s death, and the ‘perishing’ of organisms, which is simply a physiological and biological process (see Heidegger 1962: 284, 290–3). And just as Climacus wonders whether death has being as ‘an idea’, or only as an actuality, so Heidegger, in discussing Dasein’s relationship to its death, argues that an authentic relationship to death regards it as a possibility, whereas an inauthentic relationship to death treats it as an actuality (see Heidegger 1962: 304–11). 8 However, Heidegger offers the kind of critical reflection on the concept of possibility (see Heidegger 1962: 183) that is lacking in Kierkegaard’s work. 9 For a discussion of Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude to the concept of spirit, see Derrida 1991.

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As a possibility, death has being, and meaning, and relevance to the individual at every moment; if it is viewed as an actuality, then it becomes an event that has not yet happened and is not yet a matter of concern. The latter kind of attitude, insists Heidegger, constitutes an ‘evasive concealment in the face of death’, a covering-up of ‘what is peculiar in death’s certainty—that it is possible at any moment . . . Thus death’s ownmost character as a possibility gets veiled’ (Heidegger 1962: 297, 302). Authentic Being-towards-death ‘understands’ and ‘cultivates’ death ‘as a possibility’, and this means ‘anticipation of this possibility [Vorlaufen in die Möglichkeit]’ (Heidegger 1962: 306). There are also echoes here of Climacus’s claim that authentically becoming a Christian involves the transformation of ‘an initial being-Christian into a possibility’—that is to say, the transformation of an (apparent) actuality into a possibility—and that precisely this movement constitutes the individual’s ‘appropriation’ of Christianity (see SKS7: 332–4/CUP1: 365–6). More generally, the discussion in Being and Time concerning Dasein’s possibilities for existing authentically or inauthentically draws on Kierkegaard’s account of the human being’s spiritual task. Heidegger’s analysis of the way in which Dasein, in its everyday life, loses itself in ‘the publicness of the “they” [das Man]’ follows very closely Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the spiritlessness of his times in Two Ages (see Hoberman 1984). Without acknowledging his sources, Heidegger invokes concepts discussed in this 1846 text, such as ‘levelling down [Einebnung]’, ‘idle talk’, ‘curiosity’, ‘ambiguity’, and ‘the public’ (see Heidegger 1962: 165, 210–24; Pattison 2002: 136–7), and like Kierkegaard he suggests that this ‘fallen’ way of being is motivated by an evasive desire for tranquillization. Only because Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein so closely reflects Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the human being as spirit can the latter’s discussion of spiritlessness be applied to inauthentic Dasein. Equally, on the question of Dasein’s authenticity, Heidegger takes up the Kierkegaardian concepts of anxiety, repetition, and the moment. Like the Danish Øiblikket, the German Augenblick means ‘glance of an eye’, and for this reason Robinson and Macquarrie translate it as ‘moment of vision’. Just as Kierkegaard’s ‘moment’ signifies a meeting point of time and eternity that encompasses all three temporal dimensions, so Heidegger’s ‘moment of vision’, in being joined with ‘repetition’ (of the past) and ‘anticipation’ (of the future), testifies to the ‘ecstatic’ character of Dasein’s temporality. And, as for Kierkegaard the individual’s encounter with ‘the eternal’, or God, within the time of her own life is an ethical call to responsibility, so for Heidegger the moment of vision is a time for resolution or decision. However, this resoluteness connects the individual not to God, but to her whole temporal existence, stretched between what has been and what is to come. The Augenblick is ‘the resolute self-disclosure of Dasein to itself ’ (Heidegger 1995: 149): it is, according to this formulation, a movement of self-relating that involves both consciousness and will. If, as Heidegger wants to argue in Being and Time, the human being simply is its time, and if the human being equally is its relationship to itself and to its world, then existing authentically—that is to say, in a way that is true to one’s own being—is to take up or appropriate one’s own past and future in each moment. The concept of the ‘moment of vision’, then, illustrates the close connection between the ethical and the ontological concerns at work in Heidegger’s 1927 text. The question of

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who Dasein is—the question of the meaning of its being, which is itself inseparable from the question of the meaning of Being as such—leads directly to the question of how to live authentically, and vice versa. Again, this echoes the distinctive blend of ethical and ontological issues in Kierkegaard’s works. Although Heidegger does not in Being and Time acknowledge his debt to Kierkegaard with respect to the moment, and to the issue of temporality more generally,10 in his Freiburg lecture course on ‘The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics’ (1929–30) he states that ‘What we here designate as “moment of vision” is what was really comprehended for the first time in philosophy by Kierkegaard—a comprehending with which the possibility of a completely new epoch of philosophy has begun for the first time since antiquity’ (Heidegger 1995: 150). Heidegger adds here that ‘today when Kierkegaard has become fashionable, for whatever reasons, we have reached the stage where the literature about Kierkegaard, and everything connected with it, has ensured in all kinds of ways that this decisive point of Kierkegaard’s philosophy has not been comprehended.’ This comment illuminates the ambivalent character of his relationship to Kierkegaard: on the one hand, Heidegger recognizes something of real and profound significance in Kierkegaard’s thought; on the other hand, conscious that ‘Kierkegaard’ and his ‘philosophy of existence’ were in fashion—and thus, inevitably, an object of ‘curiosity’ and ‘idle chatter’—he sought to distance himself from such associations. And, on a more philosophical note, Heidegger is clear that a thinker’s relationship with the tradition he has inherited, even if this relationship is one of appropriation and repetition, should be critical and questioning— that, indeed, this might be the most faithful way of honouring one’s philosophical ancestors. In a letter to Karl Löwith in 1920, he writes that ‘What is of importance in Kierkegaard must be appropriated anew, but in a strict critique that grows out of our own situation. Blind appropriation is the greatest seduction . . . Not everyone who talks of “existence” has to be a Kierkegaardian. My approaches have already been misinterpreted in this way’ (see Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 98). We can detect in this remark a rather defensive dissociation from Kierkegaard that seems to reflect Heidegger’s personal frustration at contemporary attitudes. But it is also a statement of philosophical principle that is itself true to Kierkegaard’s insistence that a genuine, spiritual repetition is always free, creative, and open to the new, in contrast with a mindless, slavish, habitual repetition that merely copies what has gone before. When Heidegger writes of repetition in section 76 of Being and Time, on Dasein’s historicality, it is this idea of appropriation of one’s intellectual and cultural inheritance that he has in mind. Like Kierkegaard, he suggests that the true freedom in repetition involves encountering the past as possibility, rather than in its factual concreteness: Repeating is handing down explicitly—that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there . . . Repetition does not allow itself to be persuaded of something by what is past, just in order that this, and something which was 10 Indeed, he criticizes Kierkegaard for remaining bound to the ordinary conception of time: ‘When Kierkegaard speaks of “temporality”, what he has in mind is man’s “Being-in-time”. Time as withintime-ness knows only the “now”; it never knows a moment of vision’ (Heidegger 1962: 497).

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clare carlisle formerly actual, may recur. Rather, the repetition makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence which has-been-there . . . Repetition does not abandon itself to the past, nor does it aim at progress. In the moment of vision authentic existence is indifferent to these alternatives. (Heidegger 1962: 437)

This way of thinking about the existing individual’s relationship to her history certainly resonates with one aspect of Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition—an aspect that he focuses on in Philosophical Fragments, where the central question is the Christian’s relationship to the historical event of the Incarnation. But, as I have argued, Kierkegaard’s thought of repetition is complex, and encompasses a constellation of theological, ontological, and ethical concerns. Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time narrows this down to something more straightforward, less paradoxical, so that it becomes an element of a broader account of authentic existence, rather than the ‘single thought’ underpinning this account.

III. Kierkegaardian Themes in Heidegger’s Later Work: The Gift and the Heart To the extent that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time can be regarded as Kierkegaardian, it certainly represents a partial appropriation of the Danish thinker’s work. Seeking to purify philosophy from theology by bracketing the question of God, Heidegger does not follow Kierkegaard in claiming that the self-relationship, which constitutes the spiritual self, is grounded in a relationship to God; that, to put it another way, the individual’s repetition and anticipation of her ‘possibilities’ are grounded in a relationship to a God who signifies—who even is—the possibility of all things. And, of course, this departure from Kierkegaard’s explicitly Christian interpretation of the human being has ethical as well as ontological implications. In Kierkegaard’s work, the emphasis on responsibility, freedom, and decision that made him famous as the ‘father of existentialism’ is tempered by an insistence on our dependence on God, which demands a response of gratitude, humility, and patience. These virtues of receptivity are right at the heart of his account of the spiritual life, and they are thematized in his pseudonymous texts as well as in the edifying discourses. Kierkegaard frequently draws attention to an existential dialectic of activity and passivity that runs through, and indeed shapes, the religious sphere of existence. Being and Time, by contrast, offers an account of Dasein’s authentic life that is both humanistic and voluntaristic. In this respect at least, Heidegger’s position in 1927 seems closer to Nietzsche’s rejection of Christian humility than to Kierkegaard’s polemic against the hubris of any philosophy that seeks independence from God. However, Heidegger’s work in the decades following the publication of Being and Time grapples continually with precisely this problem—often in confrontation with Nietzsche, and through

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reflection on ‘the question concerning technology’ that he came to see as the most urgent matter for thinking. In explaining this striking difference between Being and Time and Kierkegaard’s works, we might be tempted to point to the fact that Heidegger’s phenomenological method results in a certain formalism, which seems to accompany the sharp distinction drawn in Being and Time between ontology and the ontic sciences (which include theology). This formalist tendency may also bear traces of Heidegger’s extensive engagement with scholastic thought prior to his Protestant turn of the early 1920s. However historically-engaged, anti-intellectualist, and ‘situated’ in the concreteness of everyday life Heidegger’s particular brand of phenomenology aspires to be, its aim is to uncover existential structures that can, at least in principle, be separated from specific content. Thus, for example, he extracts from Pauline theology a structure of temporality that can—and, it seems to be implied, that should—be purged of the content of Christian faith. But if Heidegger’s philosophical development from the 1930s onwards includes a corrective to the humanism and voluntarism of his earlier work, this is not accomplished by abandoning his formalism, but rather by expanding it to encompass structures of the Christian life that he had hitherto overlooked. One unacknowledged consequence of this development, then, is that Heidegger’s thought moves, in its essence, even closer to Kierkegaard’s. The immediately recognizable Kierkegaardian concepts and categories— such as moment, repetition, anticipation, anxiety, and the symptoms of inauthentic modern life—may no longer be in play in Heidegger’s later writings, but what does emerge is a clearer sense that the proper relationship between Being and (human) beings is one of giving and receiving: the movement of a gift. This concern to overcome the voluntaristic humanism of Being and Time is exemplified in Heidegger’s lecture course What Is Called Thinking?, which was his final course at Freiburg before his retirement from university teaching. The ‘thinking’ (Denken) in question here features in many of Heidegger’s later writings—including his contribution to the Paris conference on Kierkegaard’s thought—but it receives the clearest and most sustained attention in these lectures of 1950–1. ‘Thinking’, we might suppose, is the activity of a subject, but Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes that being capable of thought depends on receptivity to a call from beyond ourselves: ‘we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline only toward something that in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as the keeper who holds us in our essential being’ (Heidegger 1968: 3). In the second part of the course, Heidegger clarifies his own idiosyncratic interpretation of ‘thinking’ by highlighting an etymological connection between thinking and thanking, and between thinking and memory or recollection—which is, he suggests, a kind of ‘devotion’ (Heidegger 1968: 140). He also refers here to a ‘thinking of the heart’, which he traces to Pascal (Heidegger 1968: 139). The ‘original nature of memory’, for Heidegger, is ‘the gathering of the constant intention of everything that the heart holds in present being’. And ‘intention’ here signifies ‘the inclination with which the inmost meditation of the heart turns towards all that is in being—the inclination that is not within its own control and therefore also need not necessarily be first enacted as such’ (Heidegger 1968: 141). This

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thinking of the heart, then, involves not only receptivity to a gift of being, but a kind of entrusting of oneself—a reciprocal self-giving—in gratitude to being: The things for which we owe thanks are not things we have from ourselves. They are given to us. We receive many gifts, of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it . . . In giving thanks, the heart gives thought to what it has and what it is. The heart, thus giving thought and thus being memory, gives itself in thought to that to which it is held. It thinks of itself as beholden, not in the sense of mere submission, but beholden because its devotion is held in listening. Original thanking is the thanks owed for being. (Heidegger 1968: 141–2)

It seems fitting that Heidegger’s final lecture course at Freiburg dwelt at some length on this notion of the heart, for it evidently had a personal significance for him. Above the door of his family home at Zähringen—a suburb of the university town—there was inscribed a line from Luther’s translation of the Hebrew Bible: Behüte dein Herz mit allem Fleiss; denn daraus geht das Leben (Shelter your heart, for from it life flows forth— Proverbs 4:23—see Van Buren 1994b: 151). The ‘sheltering’ in question here indicates a kind of guarding or protecting, but this cannot be a defensive contraction of the heart, for ‘life’ surely will not flow forth from a heart that is closed. Rather, this sheltering must at the same time be an opening: ‘We shall call [memory] the “keeping” . . . “Keeping” alone gives freely what is to-be-thought, what is most thought-provoking, it frees it as a gift’ (Heidegger 1968: 150–1). Indeed, it is precisely the openness of the heart—which is its capacity for thinking, in the Heideggerian sense of Denken—that needs to be protected and nurtured. Of course, if Heidegger’s attentiveness to such matters of the heart is indebted to the Christian tradition, this manner of thinking can be traced back far earlier than Kierkegaard: to Pascal, as Heidegger indicates in these lectures, but also to Augustine, who begins his Confessions with an appeal to the restless hearts of those who seek rest in God. However, Kierkegaard’s authorship contains a sustained reflection on the human heart that is integral to his distinctive philosophical contribution to the question of Christian faith. In Fear and Trembling, for example, the heart is a metaphor that gathers together the text’s key themes: love, suffering, and courage (see Carlisle 2010: 70–2). When the pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio claims that the knight of faith is distinguished by a ‘paradoxical and humble courage’ (SKS4: 143/FT: 49), he indicates a specifically Christian virtue that combines strength of heart and openness of heart (see Carlisle 2010: 193–9). More generally, throughout Kierkegaard’s work the central concept of appropriation—that process through which the existing individual relates herself to the truth, at once making it her own and becoming herself—is understood as a ‘taking to heart’ (Inderliggjørelse), a passionate ‘making-inward’. In What Is Called Thinking?, in the course of a discussion of a fragment from Parmenides, Heidegger echoes this in translating the Greek νοειν (usually translated as ‘thinking’ or ‘perceiving’) as ‘taking to heart’. This, he explains, expresses the way in which νοειν denotes not simply a passive reception of sense data, but a process involving

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an ‘active trait of undertaking something’: ‘In νοειν, what is perceived concerns us in such a way that we take it up specifically, and do something with it. But where do we take what is to be perceived? How do we take it up? We take it to heart. What is taken to heart, however, is left to be exactly as it is’ (Heidegger 1968: 203, see also 207). Heidegger goes on to argue that this ancient Greek ‘non-conceptual’ manner of thinking is lost when νοειν subsequently comes to be understood in terms of reason or ratio, and, in modern philosophy, ‘the systematic and system-building way of forming ideas through concepts takes control’ (Heidegger 1968: 212–13). It is interesting that at precisely this point in his lecture Heidegger offers a remark about Kierkegaard. Acknowledging that the latter, like Nietzsche, opposes such systematic thinking, he insists that both these thinkers nevertheless ‘remain the system’s captives’, and that Kierkegaard ‘has nothing whatever to say’ about the question of being. It seems as if Heidegger, conscious that his discussion of thinking and the heart is moving closer to Kierkegaardian territory, and that his critique of modern rationalism echoes Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian philosophy, needs to accentuate the originality of his own thesis. Heidegger’s philosophical position as articulated in these lectures certainly is distinct from Kierkegaard’s, although whether his account of this difference is satisfactory—and fair to Kierkegaard—is more questionable. His claim that Kierkegaard’s work fails to engage with the question of being seems to be closely related to his view, expressed earlier in the lecture course, that Christian discourse in general is ‘determined metaphysically’, and rests on a metaphysical, or Platonic, conception of God. This characteristic dismissal of theology seems to assume too much—as if all Christian thinkers clearly understand and agree on what ‘God’ means; as if to speak of God is always to invoke a special sort of being as the source and ground of all other beings. Kierkegaard, for his part, is not the sort of thinker to offer a definition of God, but in fact he comes closest to this when, in the name of his pseudonym Anti-Climacus, he suggests that God is the ‘possibility’ of ‘all things’. Of course, this is open to interpretation, but it certainly might be taken to mean that God should be thought as the originary giving or gift that allows beings to be the beings that they are. And according to this reading, the difference between Kierkegaardian theology and Heideggerian ontology seems very slight indeed. Where Heidegger does depart from Kierkegaard, however, is in his view of the relationship between human beings and the gift of being. On this question, Heidegger does seem to move beyond the subjectivism that he attributes to Kierkegaard. For all his emphasis on the human being’s ontological dependence on God, and his critique of the ideal of human autonomy that defines modern thought from Descartes to Hegel, Kierkegaard shares with other Christian thinkers the conviction that the individual fails to be true to her relationship to God—and thus falls repeatedly into sin—through her own free actions. This condition of despair is, as Anti-Climacus argues in The Sickness Unto Death, a wilful and self-deceptive turning away from the divine source of one’s being. The sinner is one who does not want to be herself in her dependence on God, or who wants to be herself independently of God; the person of faith, by contrast, is one who ‘in willing to be [her]self, rests transparently in God’. In this respect, then, Kierkegaard, in spite of his Christian emphasis on humility, is, like Nietzsche, a thinker

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of the will. In sharp contrast, Heidegger argues that if human beings are cut off from being, this is not solely attributable to a defect of willing, but is due also to the fact that being itself ‘turns away’ from us: That we are still not thinking is by no means only because man does not yet turn sufficiently toward that which, by origin and innately, wants to be thought about since in its essence it remains what must be thought about. Rather, that we are still not thinking stems from the fact that the thing itself that must be thought about turns away from man, has turned away long ago . . . What must be thought about turns away from man. It withdraws from him. (Heidegger 1968: 7–8)

For Heidegger, it is precisely in this movement of withdrawal that being, paradoxically, issues the call that constitutes the thinker’s highest task: ‘But—withdrawing is not nothing. Withdrawal is an event. In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him’ (Heidegger 1968: 9). According to Kierkegaard, the rift between the individual and God that constitutes sin is, existentially speaking, untruth—and this untruth, like the truth of faith that is its opposite, is a mode of ‘subjectivity’. In Heidegger’s thinking, however, the rift between Dasein and being indicates a mutual turning away that is integral to the truth of being.

References Carlisle, Clare (2005). Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). ——– (2010). Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (London: Continuum). ——– (2011). ‘Repetition and Recurrence: Putting Metaphysics in Motion’, in Alison Stone (ed.), The Edinburgh Critical History of Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 294–313. Derrida, Jacques (1991). Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Hannay, Alastair (2010). ‘Johannes Climacus’ revocation’ in Rick Anthony Furtak (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 45–63. Heidegger, Martin (1961). An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Doubleday Anchor). ——– (1962). Being and Time trans. John Macquarrie and Edward (Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell). ——– (1968). What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row). ——– (1985). The History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (1991). Nietzsche vols. 3 and 4, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper). ——– (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (2002). ‘Nietzsche’s Word: “God is Dead” ’, in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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——– (2004). The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Hoberman, John M. (1984). ‘Heidegger’s Two Ages and Heidegger’s Critique of Modernity’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) The International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 223–58. Kisiel, Theodore (1994). ‘Heidegger (1920–21) on Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture Show’, in Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in his earliest thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 175–94. Kisiel, Theodore and Sheehan, Thomas, eds. (2007). Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press). Magurshak, Dan (1985). ‘The Concept of Anxiety: The Keystone of the Kierkegaard-Heidegger Relationship’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), The International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 167–95. Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (London: Routledge). Pöggeler, Otto (1994). ‘Destruction and Moment’, in Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Sheehan, Thomas (1979). ‘Heidegger’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, 1920–21’, Personalist 60, 317–22. Stewart, Jon (2003). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Unesco (1966). Kierkegaard vivant (Paris: Gallimard). Van Buren, John (1994a). ‘Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther’, in Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 159–74. Van Buren, John (1994b). The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Weston, Michael (1994). Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge).

Suggested Reading Heidegger (1962, 2004). Heidegger, Martin (1993). Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge). Kisiel, Theodore and John Van Buren (eds.) (1994). Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Mulhall, Stephen (2001). Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon). Pattison, George (2000). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (London: Routledge). Van Buren (1994). Weston (1994).

chapter 23

K ier k ega a r d a n d Phenom enol ogy C laudia W elz

I. Introduction: Kierkegaard—a Phenomenologist? The task of relating Kierkegaard to phenomenology immediately raises the question as to which type of phenomenology is at issue. It would, of course, be anachronistic to call Kierkegaard a ‘phenomenologist’ in the sense that this word acquired in the twentieth century. However, Kierkegaard was without doubt acquainted with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, inspired Heidegger, and anticipated issues that became prominent in the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology. Despite some early tentative attempts to find phenomenological traits or to identify a phenomenological method in Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms (Schrag 1961; McCarthy 1978; Taylor 1980; Pojman 1984; Come 1988), it is only since the 1990s that such attempts have been used for in-depth investigations of Kierkegaard’s works (Disse 1991; Grøn 1997; Lincoln 2000; Welz 2008). The current debate is mirrored by the essays in Hanson (2010). Phenomenology in the broadest sense of the word deals with phenomena, i.e. with appearances in the how of their appearing to someone. While it is uncontroversial that Kierkegaard has offered viable descriptions of phenomena such as anxiety or despair, it is highly controversial whether one can legitimately consider him to be a phenomenologist. In particular, there is disagreement concerning the question as to whether Kierkegaard’s project includes a phenomenology of the divine and of religious life. Can God and faith be taken as ‘phenomena’ at all? The question is radicalized further if connected to the problem of theodicy and then leads to the question as to whether it is at all possible to trace manifestations of divine love in human life.

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If one answers in the affirmative, one presupposes that God enters and affects experience, although his properties such as wisdom and goodness can, according to Kierkegaard, never be ‘right in front of our noses’ (SKS4: 246f./PF: 42). Neither evil nor God’s goodness can be seen ‘as such’. Rather, the way something appears is dependent on the observer. In his 1853–5 journals, Kierkegaard claims that qua Spirit God is related paradoxically or inversely to what appears phenomenally (SKS26: NB32:132 [JP3: 3099]). Yet, if God’s love can be hidden sub contrario, phenomenality does not so much reveal God as become his hiding place. For this reason, one might be sceptical about the idea that a phenomenological account can show human existence to be indissolubly bound up with a Godrelationship. Experiences with God might count as a fact for the believer but remain no more than a possibility for the phenomenologist. Does this mean that a phenomenology of religious life—and all the more of the divine—is theoretically impossible? Can Kierkegaard’s account of religious life be incorporated into a phenomenology of religion only by omitting what is most distinctive about this account or by reading Kierkegaard in a sense contrary to that which he himself intended (Pattison 2010: 193)? In what follows, the arguments that have been put forward for and against reading Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist will be reviewed. In order to do justice to the historical development, the relation between Kierkegaard and phenomenology will be explored in five steps corresponding to different epochs in the history of phenomenology. Firstly, I shall examine the heritage of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Kierkegaard. In a second and third step, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s forms of phenomenology will be compared to Kierkegaard. In a fourth step, it will be shown in what sense Kierkegaard anticipated features prominent in French phenomenology. Finally, arguments against seeing Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist will be reconsidered, followed by a proposal for a classification of Kierkegaard’s project in relation to these forms of phenomenology.

II. Step 1: The Heritage of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Kierkegaard Hegelian aspects in Kierkegaard’s writings include similarities in method—first and foremost between Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Janke 1974; Theunissen 1993: 149ff; Grøn 1996; Deuser 1997; Stewart 1997). Phenomenology in the sense of a description and analysis of phenomena that is reminiscent of German idealism has also been discovered in Works of Love (Grøn 1991, 1994, 1998b; Lincoln 2000; Dalferth 2002: 21–4), The Concept of Anxiety (Grøn 1993, 2008; Gonzáles 2010) and other writings (Stewart 2003).

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The Sickness Unto Death as Phenomenology of Subjectivity, Despair, and Freedom One might trace Kierkegaard’s understanding and practice of phenomenology back to Hegel’s usage, according to which it refers to the description, analysis, and dialectical critique of the various forms and stages within the (self)experience of consciousness (Schulz 2010: 125 n. 30). In this line, The Sickness unto Death can be read as a phenomenology of subjectivity, despair, and freedom. Grøn (1997: 35–9) suggests understanding The Sickness unto Death as a dialectical negative phenomenology. Its point of departure is the problem that subjectivity tends to escape our grasp precisely because subjectivity concerns us as a matter of what and who we are. ‘In dealing with subjectivity, subjectivity itself comes in between’ (Grøn 2010: 84). How, then, does it come to appear? According to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit consciousness relates to its objects but not to itself as object. Yet the self-givenness of subjectivity is not reducible to the ‘mineness’ of experience, to my experiencing of something else, or to the ‘co-givenness’ of subjectivity in something else that is ‘given’. Rather, the conscious subject of experience is itself changed through its experiencing, coming to experience differently. As a consequence, the self-givenness of subjectivity, its beinggiven to itself as a self, its self-understanding, has changed as well (Grøn 2010: 85–8, 96). The ‘development’ of the self portrayed in The Sickness unto Death takes place through a negative analysis of forms and figures of despair defined as not being oneself (Grøn 2010: 88–92). The truth (being oneself) is reached through untruth (not wanting to be oneself). What comes to appear is the self that fails in, or even resists, understanding itself, but in its failure and resistance it is given to itself as the self that is to be acknowledged. Wanting or not wanting to be oneself is not just an ordinary choice between A and B. Rather, it is a matter of what one is doing and wanting in what one is doing and wanting. It is a choice in one’s choices, and one might not always be conscious of what this choice consists in. Although the figure of despair becomes more and more conscious of itself in the course of Kierkegaard’s book, the negative or broken character of this progression is due to the fact that Kierkegaard deals not only with figures or stages of consciousness, but also with movements of existence. In existence, consciousness and will (or rather: unwillingness) are intertwined in such a way that despair is connected to repugnance: to not wanting to be oneself (Grøn 1997: 137–42). At its extreme, human freedom presents itself to itself as the possibility of unfreedom (Gonzáles 2010). Freedom is reached through despair, although despair is generally a misuse of freedom (Dahlstrom 2010: 58–62). Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the intertwinement of consciousness and willing indicates that he aims at an ethical phenomenology that discloses the conditions, aims, and limits of human action. Further, the fact that he interprets self-enslaving freedom in theological terms, as sin, indicates that his phenomenology of despair is inspired by religious interpretations of the human condition. These two points seem to suggest that Kierkegaard has developed a Hegelian phenomenology of ethico-religious life. But does

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Kierkegaard’s phenomenology also include a phenomenology of the divine or of an ‘absolute spirit’—and if not, why not?

Works of Love as Ethical and Theological Phenomenology of Invisible Love Both Hegel in his Phenomenology and Kierkegaard in Works of Love describe the structure of the absolute as ‘reduplication’, ‘spirit’ and ‘love’ (SKS9: 182, 278/WL: 182, 280; SKS26: NB 33:23 [JP4: 4571]; Hegel 1986: 23). Yet, similarity in terminology does not imply that Kierkegaard and Hegel mean the same. Since Works of Love and the journal entries from that period are silent about Hegel, the relation between Hegel’s and Kierkegaard’s positions can only be reconstructed on the basis of a systematic comparison of their texts (Welz 2007a; 2008b: 72–83, 108–36, 219–25). (1) In the Phenomenology Hegel portrays the progressively increasing self-consciousness of the absolute spirit until it comprises the whole world and is no longer opposed to it (Hegel 1986: 31, 78–80, 557). Kierkegaard portrays, on the one hand, human love in different existential situations, (mis)relations, and forms of interaction, and, on the other, the regulative ideal of divine love as described in the New Testament. Viewing the ‘is’ in the light of the ‘ought’, he also takes into account the norm and criterion of our actions (Deuser 1993: 120, 129). Seen from this perspective, human love is not only a form of consciousness or self-knowledge, but also and above all a form of praxis, of acting for the good of the other (Lincoln 2000: 355f., 442–4, 498f.). In seeing love as the practical relationship between human agents in relation to God, Kierkegaard effects a pragmatic turn of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Love is no longer thought of in the context of a ‘science of appearing knowledge’ (Hegel 1986: 591), but in a social and soteriological context where it concerns human life as whole. (2) For Hegel, love can and ought to be an object of knowledge. For Kierkegaard, this is possible only in a limited sense, since the origin, life, and works of love belong to the sphere of inwardness and faith and therefore remain hidden (SKS9: 16f., 147, 278/WL: 8, 146, 280f.). Love shows itself in words, emotional movement, and actions, but we have to believe in love and to trust that it is there in order to ‘see’ or understand that it is love and not something else that shows itself. God’s love becomes phenomenally present only in its effects, i.e. in intersubjective relations that are characterized by the formative influence of all participants, and only in actu, i.e. in being expressed and realized in human actions and interpretations (Lincoln 2000: 38f., 244f.). Divine love and human love of neighbour are not additional phenomena alongside others but offer a new interpretation of and another way of dealing with existing phenomena. Kierkegaard’s phenomenology remains idealistic in so far as it envisions not only the worldly phenomena of erotic love, friendship, or neighbourly love but also the horizon in which they appear, namely God’s love. However, otherwise than in Hegel, the latter is ‘known’ only as the unknowable.

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(3) According to Hegel, the spirit gains experience through self-alienation and selfappropriation (Hegel 1986: 38f.). Hegel polemicizes against the ‘upbuilding’ but ‘boring’ idea that divine life is just the ‘play of love with itself ’, unspoilt identity and unity with itself without gravity and pain, self-estrangement and its overcoming (Hegel 1986: 24). As self-opposing reduplication, the absolute is self-reflection in otherness. The life of the spirit endures negativity, death, and devastation (Hegel 1986: 36). Evil is an inalienable moment of the spirit (Hegel 1986: 566f.). Kierkegaard, however, holds fast to the belief that God’s eternal love remains unchanged in the course of time. Its element is ‘infinitude, inexhaustibility, immeasurability’ (SKS9: 180/WL: 180). It never turns into what is not love, and therefore will always remain opposed to its opposite. (4) Hegel’s concept of the absolute spirit comprises the finite spirit that finally knows its identity with the ‘eternal as such’, whereas Kierkegaard, assuming an identical structure of the human and the divine spirit in the activity of loving, insists that the temporally existing spirit that relates the body and the soul remains, for the time being, ‘before God’. The works of love of which Kierkegaard speaks are actions of finite subjects, not of an absolute spirit. Hegel interprets the absolute spirit’s being with the other of itself as love, while Kierkegaard distinguishes between God as Spirit of Love and human spiritual power in relation to God (SKS9: 356/WL: 362).

III. Step 2: Kierkegaard and Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology As all scholars concede that Kierkegaard is not a phenomenologist in the classical, Husserlian sense (Hanson 2010: p. xi), the main issue here is to show why not. This will be done by, first, pointing to characteristics of Husserl’s phenomenology that are absent in Kierkegaard’s work and, second, pointing to what is crucial for Kierkegaard but bracketed in Husserl’s phenomenology.

Reduction to the Transcendental Ego— Rigorous Science? Husserl’s phenomenology can be described as an analysis of consciousness on the basis of the so-called ‘reduction’, i.e. the leading-back to the factors involved in phenomenality that are otherwise overlooked, and the epoché, i.e. the suspension of the natural attitude prior to and apart from the philosophical interest in the display of phenomena. In most of his works, Husserl reserves the word epoché for the phenomenological reduction leading back to the transcendental ‘I’ as agent and dative of manifestation (Husserl 1970: §41; 1983: §33). Through intentionality, the transcendental ‘I’ constitutes phenomena. Constitution is the process that permits that which is constituted to appear, articulate

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and show itself as what it is. Intentionality is the object-directedness of consciousness. Only in or rather for consciousness can something extra-mental be given to experience and appear as a phenomenon, i.e. as a manifestation of that which is intended (Zahavi 2003; Husserl 1984: 614, 646, 666). Being is interpreted phenomenologically as a particular mode of givenness to transcendental subjectivity which is, as it were, a ‘view point’ on the world and everything worldly (Husserl 1976: 217, 233, 303). As to the status of phenomenology, Husserl held it to be not merely one positive science among others, but the basis for all positive science and properly scientific work. According to Logical Investigations, phenomenology establishes a domain of neutral research in which various sciences have their roots (Husserl 1984: §1). In The Crisis, however, phenomenology is also concerned with the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and the texture of lived experience. Like the later Husserl, Kierkegaard confronted a crisis in European society and turned to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt as the place where existential thinking is rooted (Dooley 2010: 169). Nonetheless, the ultimate objectives of Kierkegaard and Husserl clearly diverge. Kierkegaard does not mention the suspension of the ‘natural attitude’. Neither is he occupied with the laws of ‘constitution’ or with ‘intentionality’ in the context of phenomenology taken as a rigorous science. Instead of understanding transcendental subjectivity as the non-empirical condition of human experience, Kierkegaard disclaims transcendental subjectivity in favour of a more comprehensive phenomenology of the conditions of factual human existence including temporal development, the freedom and the sociality of subjects, and narratives relating to autobiographical identity (Deuser 1997: 272f., 276–8). Kierkegaard is not first and foremost interested in exploring the conditions of possible experience but rather in what is in fact experienced and what should be done. In Husserl’s sense, then, Kierkegaard is plainly not a phenomenologist.

Excluding Divine Transcendence? As the absolute, God is by definition beyond any possible intuition (Bloechl 2010: 30). Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with the paradox of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, of the eternal entering human temporality, raises the question of whether Husserlian phenomenology can account for the dynamics of divine transcendence that affect and surpass human consciousness. Kierkegaard was aware of the fact that seeing our lives in terms of the movement of creation, fall, and redemption is not something that can be read off from what we experience. Rather, it is a faith-based interpretation of life that comes from beyond the limit at which human thought breaks down (Pattison 2010: 194). Yet Husserl, too, took these problems seriously—for epistemological and for theological reasons. It is well known that Husserl explicitly excluded God’s transcendence from the field of phenomenological research (Husserl 1976: 125). The thought of God can be adequate only on condition that God is neither confused with inner worldly entities, nor with the world as the horizon of possible experience or with the experiencing subject. For this reason, Husserl cannot conceive of God as a given phenomenon among other phenomena.

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In his Nachlass Husserl describes God as the Alpha and Omega of all processes of constitution, as the ground, entelechy and telos of conscious life (Husserl 1973b: 608–10; Hart 1986; Laycock 1986; and Ms. B II 2, 54; E III 4, 60–1; F I 24, 41b). As that which ‘aims’ in all intentional aiming and as the teleological ‘target’ of this aiming, God is identical with the source and destination of transcendental (inter)subjectivity (Husserl 1973a: 9). Yet, neither the synthesis of all constituting subjectivity nor the synthesis of all constituted objectivity is experientially given to us. Thus, Husserl has good reasons to bracket divine transcendence. God is not given in experience but only in a reflection about experience, i.e. in a second-order experience. There is nothing that compels us to identify the ground, entelechy, and telos of experience with God. Such an identification would assert more than the data of the experience itself (Welz 2008: 40–58). Is it not precisely for this reason that Kierkegaard resists any attempt to prove the existence of God? Husserl’s reflections about God might be closer to Kierkegaard’s than hitherto assumed. When Shestov met Husserl in 1928, Husserl made Shestov promise to read Kierkegaard (Shestov 1962; Paradiso-Michau 2006). Yet, it belongs to the desiderata of future research to scrutinize Husserl’s Kierkegaard-reception.

IV. Step 3: Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology Despite integrating Kierkegaardian concepts into his own ontological project, Heidegger relegated Kierkegaard to the category of an ontico-existentiell psychologist or religious thinker (Wyschogrod 1954; Caputo 1987: 82f.; Dreyfus 1991; McCarthy 2011: 114;). Although Heidegger understated his dependence on Kierkegaard, the following arguments speak against understanding Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist in Heidegger’s sense: (1) Kierkegaard did not develop philosophy as universal phenomenological ontology; (2) Heidegger’s ambiguous relation to Kierkegaard makes it difficult to depict the Dane as congenial phenomenologist; (3) Kierkegaardian faith questions the reliability of the links between Being, manifestation, and consciousness (Pattison 2010: 188, 191, 194, 202f.).

Universal Phenomenological Ontology? In Being and Time, Heidegger defines philosophy as ‘universal phenomenological ontology’ and Wissenschaft von den Phänomenen (Heidegger 1996: 34; 1993: 28). The universality of phenomenology as science of all thinkable phenomena seems to be at variance with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual and the mystery of its self-choice. Further, in contrast to Heidegger, Kierkegaard does not take the question of the meaning of being as the fundamental question (Heidegger 1996: 3). Yet, although their projects differ

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significantly in their aim and design, there seems to be a point of contact in their methodology in so far as Heidegger’s ‘hermeneutic of Da-sein’ (Heidegger 1996: 34) builds on Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics of human existence. In designating the analysis of existence as origin and end of all philosophical explorations, Heidegger is close to Kierkegaard’s core interest. In his 1920 review essay, ‘Critical Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldview’, Heidegger praised ‘the height of methodological rigor’ that Kierkegaard reached (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 147f.). Heidegger’s formulations of the tasks of phenomenology are remarkably reminiscent of Kierkegaardian formulations in The Sickness unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger highlights the relationality and historicity of the self: ‘The self is what it is in its relations to the world of the self ’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 142f.). Heidegger announces programmatically that the concrete self must be made the starting point of the approach to the problems of existence. He observes that the factic, i.e. historically actualized life is already at work within how we approach the problem of self-appropriation. Heidegger’s description evokes Kierkegaard’s analysis of the self that does not want to be itself in despair. Heidegger suggests applying a hermeneutical method—‘the interpretive, historically actualizing explication of the concrete modes of fundamental experience in which I have myself ’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 143), thereby catching not only the universal but precisely the individual features of human experience. Further, Heidegger stresses that ‘having oneself anxiously’ (bekümmert) is actualized before any knowledge about it. Bekümmerung is an affective experience that extends into one’s past (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 138f.). Heidegger explains that the ‘I’ experiences this past ‘within a horizon of expectations placed ahead of itself by itself ’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 139f.). This connection between temporality and anxious concern (Danish: Bekymring) can also be found in Kierkegaard’s 1848 Christian Discourses, e.g. in ‘The Care of Self-Torment.’ Self-torment consists in care about the next day. We can cause this care because we can look ahead in ‘fear’, ‘presentiment’, and ‘expectancy’ (SKS10: 82/CD: 73). Kierkegaard recommends turning wholeheartedly to the day today, turning our back to the goal, trusting that God measures out the trouble that is enough for each day. Self-torment loses its strength when one no longer lends one’s own strength to it, the strength of a being existing tensed, in the tension between past and future. This fits well with Heidegger’s lecture course ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’ where he sees the human being as ‘an object in becoming, standing within time’ (Heidegger 2004: 25). For Heidegger, ‘the genesis of dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of Christian life experience’, which is constituted by ‘compressed temporality’ without time for postponement (Heidegger 2004: 79, 85). Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger does not focus on the transcendental ‘I’ beyond time, but rather on the embodied and ‘enworlded’ self that is intensely concerned about matters of life and death. And like Kierkegaard, Heidegger does not accentuate theoretical approaches to religion, but rather the practical implications of religious commitment. However, in Being and Time Heidegger does not follow Kierkegaard who assumes that the human being is compounded of the temporal and the eternal (SKS10: 80/

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CD: 71). It is not clear whether Heidegger, in prioritizing the future over the present, takes up Kierkegaard’s notion of the future as eternity’s incognito, since he reduces human existence to radical finitude. Further, Kierkegaard’s concept of Bekymring does not correspond to Heidegger’s concept of Sorge, ‘concern’ or ‘care’ with which he circumscribes the structure of existence. While Heidegger’s agenda was clearly in line with Kierkegaard’s at the time of his lecture courses on the Phenomenology of Religious Life, this is no longer the case in Being and Time.

Heidegger’s Ambiguous Relation to Kierkegaard According to Heidegger’s footnotes in Being and Time, Kierkegaard is not a phenomenologist devoted to fundamental ontology, for Kierkegaard thought through ‘the problem of existence as existentiell’, but ‘the existential problematic [aiming at the question of being as such in general]’ is foreign to him (Heidegger 1996: 407 n. 6). Heidegger concedes that Kierkegaard ‘got furthest of all in the analysis of the phenomenon of Angst—but he did so in the theological context of a psychological exposition of the problem of original sin’ (Heidegger 1996: 405 n. 4). Heidegger holds that theology can find the ontological condition of the factical possibility of sin in his existential analysis of being guilty (Heidegger 1996: 410f. n. 2), thereby suggesting that his phenomenological analysis can ground Kierkegaard’s theological analysis. Moreover, he claims that he has explored a more primordial temporality, while Kierkegaard got stuck ‘in the vulgar concept of time’ in the sense of the human being’s ‘being-in-time’ (Heidegger 1996: 412f. n. 3; Quist 2009). This raises two questions. First, how are Heidegger’s dismissive statements about Kierkegaard in Being and Time related to his praise of Kierkegaard’s methodological rigour in 1920? Second, do Heidegger’s descriptions of his relation to Kierkegaard correspond to the way he actually works with Kierkegaard’s thoughts? (1) When reading Heidegger’s early occasional writings, one can detect an astonishing development. In 1920, Heidegger wrote to Karl Löwith that Kierkegaard ‘can only be theologically unhinged’ and that ‘Kierkegaard must be appropriated anew, but in a strict critique that grows out of our own situation. Blind appropriation is the greatest seduction’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 97f.). Heidegger finds himself misinterpreted as a Kierkegaardian and underscores that he at least wants something else. Curiously enough, this is written in a Kierkegaardian spirit. Kierkegaard’s theory and praxis of indirect communication and his non-persuasive rhetoric fight against blind appropriation. Thus, Heidegger did exactly what Kierkegaard wanted when reading him critically. In another letter to Löwith from 1921, Heidegger declares the incommensurability of their respective heritage, milieu, and life contexts. It comes as a surprise that Heidegger continues with the confession to be a ‘Christian theologian’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 99f.). At that time, Heidegger was after a phenomenology of Christianity in its historical particularity. Yet, a year later, a new phase is inaugurated when radical questioning (‘scepsis’) wins out over any specific ‘world view’ (Kisiel 1995: 80). In the typescript to his

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‘Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle’ (1922), Heidegger claims that ‘if philosophy is fundamentally atheistic’, then it has ‘decisively chosen factic life in its facticity’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 165). Heidegger adds that philosophy’s ‘atheism’ means ‘staying clear of the seductive activity concerned solely with arguing glibly about religiosity’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 479f. n. 24). These quotes demonstrate that Heidegger’s growing distance from his Christian background goes in line with his growing reserve towards Kierkegaard. (2) Still, there is reason to suspect that Heidegger did use Kierkegaard’s ideas, albeit without either affirming or denying their origin. Heidegger’s notes to his 1921 Freiburg lecture course ‘Augustine and Neo-Platonism’ show that he interpreted Augustine with the help of direct quotes from Kierkegaard without indicating where they come from (Heidegger 2004: 130, 186, 192, 199, 202). In addition, Heidegger read Augustine’s Latin key terms in a Kierkegaardian way. The following two examples are worth mentioning: First, Heidegger takes the term molestia, which literally denotes ‘trouble’, in order to point to the burden, which pulls life down and endangers the having-of-oneself. He establishes that hidden in this lies self-importance and the possibility of falling, but at the same time the opportunity to win oneself and to appropriate the burden (Heidegger 2004: 181–3, 200). The movement in Heidegger’s interpretation is noticeable. The negative possibility of losing oneself is turned into an opportunity of being strengthened by what drags one down. Kierkegaard, too, tries to reverse negativity so that it becomes something that gets one further. Discourse 7 in his Christian Discourses about ‘States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering’ is entitled ‘The Joy of It: That Adversity Is Prosperity’. It pleads in favour of accepting the inevitable and withstanding the temptation to give oneself up and to let fall oneself. The second example concerns Heidegger’s notes on the term tentatio. On his view, temptation is ‘no event, but an existential sense of enactment, a How of experiencing’ (Heidegger 2004: 186). Identifying life with temptation, he defines tentatio as an ‘opening in relation to oneself ’, but also as ‘falling’ that does not simply happen, but is experienced. Possibility turns out to be the true ‘burden’. These sketchy notes remind us, again, of Kierkegaard’s description of despair in its ambiguity of, on the one hand, happening to oneself in so far as one becomes overwhelmed by it and, on the other hand, being enacted by oneself in so far as it is oneself who despairs. The difficulty lies in the fact that one has to relate somehow to what happens to oneself. Temptation discloses possibilities that one would otherwise have missed. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard links up the anxiety provoked by the sight of one’s possibilities with an insight in the abyss of freedom that makes one dizzy (cf. SKS4: 365f./CA: 61). It is natural to draw a line to Being and Time, where the two motifs appear again, albeit modified. The realization that the temptation of and the tendency towards falling endure throughout life is mirrored in Heidegger’s characterization of human existence as Sorge, which has threefold structure of Geworfenheit—Seinkönnen—Verfallen, i.e. of facticity or thrownness, potentiality, and falling-prey-to. Already in one of his sketches from 1921, he jotted down the questioning sentence ‘In how far the tentatio is a genuine existential’ (Heidegger 2004: 191). In Being and Time, he made it into an existential. Despite

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Heidegger’s denials, his phenomenological analysis of human existence was profiting considerably from Kierkegaard’s discoveries. Denying Kierkegaard’s influence, Heidegger indulged in performative self-contradictions.

Theological Objections The theological objections against understanding Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist concern two issues: (1) Does the intentional structure of religious consciousness not resist clarification, if faith will always be ambiguous and if there will be no way of finally telling whether it expresses a genuine God-relationship? (2) If human beings as sinners are estranged from the ground of their being, then not even the most careful analysis of human consciousness can account for this condition, let alone for how God might be present in or to human life. Regarding the first point, we should not forget that Heidegger changed the original title of the school binder in which he had bound his studies of the phenomenology of religion. The original title was ‘Phenomenology of Religious Consciousness’. Later the word ‘consciousness’ was crossed out and replaced with the word ‘life’. Further, in contrast to the usual philosophy of religion of his time, Heidegger concentrated not only on conscious religious experiences, but first and foremost on the historical situation in which they were gained (Heidegger 2004: 52, 58, 259). He was well aware of the problem of guiding or misleading preconceptions. Therefore, he developed the so-called ‘formal indication’ that is designed to keep the problems open by keeping away preconceived opinions or classifications, asking after (1) the experienced ‘what’, i.e. the content of experience, and (2) after the ‘how’, i.e. the way in which it is experienced, and (3) the relational meaning in which the experience is enacted (Heidegger 2004: §§11–13). This procedure shows that Heidegger did not try to clarify what cannot be clarified, but rather had the courage to face the ambiguities of faith and religious consciousness. Regarding the second point, Heidegger’s interpretation of the Augustinian phrase quaestio mihi factus sum [I have become a question to myself] (Heidegger 2004: 130) shows that he did not ignore the basic experience of being-hidden-from-oneself due to sin. Human beings wish that the ‘truth’ reveals itself to them, but they themselves close themselves off against it and do not want to be discovered by it (Heidegger 2004: 148, 189). Heidegger determined the category of sin as ‘category of individuality’ (Heidegger 2004: 199). Needless to say, he therein followed Kierkegaard, though again without saying so. In the last two sessions of Bultmann’s theological seminar on ‘Paul’s Ethics’ at the University of Marburg in 1923–4, Heidegger gave a lecture on ‘The Problem of Sin in Luther’. Here he claimed, ‘Faith can be understood only when sin is understood, and sin is understood only by way of a correct understanding of the very being of the human being’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 194). He illustrated what this means by referring to a remark found in Kierkegaard’s journal of 1852, invoking ‘a human being who sits there in mortal anxiety—in fear and trembling and great spiritual trial’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 194). The spiritual dimension has been deleted in Being and Time. Only the tendency of

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falling that also pertains to sinning is taken over and integrated into a description of the human condition which, however, is not seen as determined by the God-relationship. To sum up: Since Kierkegaard’s concern is to live coram deo and not before being or before death, he is not an ontologist in Heidegger’s sense of the word (Hart 2010: 17f.). For Heidegger, theology is an ontic, not an ontological science (Heidegger 1998: 41). Is it possible to ground theological anthropology in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology? Heidegger would like to have the former inscribed in the latter. However, if the two are located on the same level and offer competing views of the human being, this does not work. While Heidegger developed his Phenomenology of Religious Life in a Kierkegaardian style, he definitely departed from Kierkegaard’s concern in Being and Time. Therefore, Kierkegaard does surely not belong to the league of ontologically devoted phenomenologists. Yet, nearly all post-Husserlian existential phenomenologists—Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Ricoeur, and Derrida—owe their principal debt to Kierkegaard. Moreover, the protagonists of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, too, are indebted to Kierkegaard.

V. Step 4: Kierkegaard and the ‘Theological Turn’ in French Phenomenology In his 1991 essay, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Janicaud coined the notion of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology. His essay is a critique of what he took to be a perversion of the phenomenological method for explicit or implicit ends (Janicaud 2000). The persons put on trial were the so-called ‘new phenomenologists’, namely Lévinas, Marion, Chrétien, and Henry. Referring to the paradoxical, the enigmatic, and the oblique, this school of thought wishes to challenge Heidegger’s claim that everything that is must appear within the horizon of our relation with being (Bloechl 2010: 24, 33). The preoccupation with ontology and epistemology at the expense of what is transcendent, exterior, beyond, and otherwise than the totality of being or knowledge is criticized. Kierkegaard anticipated some elements characteristic of this school of thought, e.g. the appreciation of particularity and singularity instead of generality, of contingency instead of necessity, of the time-bound incompleteness and openness of experience instead of a completed system of knowledge, and of its multidimensionality and plurality that is not subordinated to universal principles. Scholarly attention has recently focused primarily on Lévinas’ relation to Kierkegaard (cf. Janiaud 2006; Simmons/Wood 2008; Westphal 2008; Welz/Verstrynge 2008; Sheil 2010; Paradiso-Michau 2011) and on Derrida’s reception of Kierkegaard (Beyrich 2001a; Dooley 2001; Schmidt 2006; Mjaaland 2008; Llewelyn 2009). Derrida himself asserted

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that ‘it is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful and who interests me most’ (Derrida/Ferraris 2001: 40). Accordingly, the first subsection deals with Kierkegaardian motifs in Lévinas’ phenomenology, the second with Marion’s and Derrida’s debate on the (im)possible gift, which is also a debate on the limits of phenomenology, and the third summarizes the state of the art concerning the other protagonists of the French debate.

Lévinas on God’s Non-Phenomenality Lévinas’ relation to Kierkegaard was ambiguous. On the one hand, he praised Kierkegaard’s efforts to resist totality as well as ‘the Kierkegaardian God’ understood as ‘persecuted truth’ (Lévinas 1996: 71). On the other hand, Lévinas attacked what he perceived to be Kierkegaard’s ‘violence’ and his attempts to transcend the ethical (Lévinas 1976: 77–92; 1998b). Still, most scholars agree that Lévinas is much closer to Kierkegaard than his harsh criticisms would suggest (Westphal 1992, 1995, 2000; Butin 1999; Beyrich 2001b; Ferreira 2001, 2002). The following three Kierkegaardian motifs are especially worth mentioning (Welz 2007a–c and 2008b: 277–326). First, like Kierkegaard, Lévinas recurs to the Neoplatonic tradition of God as ‘the Good beyond being’, i.e. to a conception of an absolute that can never become an object of knowledge. Lévinas claims that God, in principle, does not manifest himself phenomenally and therefore cannot be present and presented in the same way as worldly entities. God does not appear, but remains an enigma beyond cognition and absent from perception (Lévinas 1996: 66, 77). Lévinas appreciates the enigmatic character of the Kierkegaardian God who, in his revelation, preserves his incognito instead of appearing as a phenomenon (Lévinas 1996: 70f.), yet he rejects the Christological explanation because for him, God’s epiphany does not occur above all in the face of Christ, but, if at all, in the face of any human other— without being identified. In the ethical relation to a human You, God remains an anonymous He, ‘a third person or Illeity’, ‘the he in the depth of the You’ (Lévinas 1996: 141). Second, in Lévinas, the idea of God’s non-presence and anonymity acquires a similar function to the concealedness of God’s love in Kierkegaard. It makes human beings become present for each other, doing to each other directly what God can do only indirectly. God’s revelation is expressed through the love of the neighbour whose vulnerability appeals to one’s solidarity. Lévinas leaves behind the primacy of the theoretical plane. This brings him close to Kierkegaard. Further, like Kierkegaard, Lévinas finds it impossible to await action ‘from an all-powerful God’ (Lévinas 1998a: 94). Yet, while Kierkegaard’s God can be addressed personally, and while the activity of loving can be ascribed to him, Lévinas interprets the divine attributes, above all, as imperatives addressed to human beings. Third, Lévinas observes that we have been accustomed to reason in the name of the freedom of the ego—‘as though I had witnessed the creation of the world, and as though I could only have been in charge of a world that would have issued out of my free will’— yet this freedom is finite, and the subjectivity of a subject come late into a world does not consist ‘in treating this world as one’s project’ (Lévinas 1981: 122). He transfers the legal

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metaphor from theodicy—God on trial?—to subjectivity so that it is not God transcendent but me who is summoned to appear, the self in the accusative prior to the ego taking a decision, answerable for everything and everyone, responsible even for what I did not will and before having done anything (Lévinas 1996: 88, 90, 93f.). This understanding of the subject as utterly responsible creature that is affected before being able to (re)act can be read as a radicalization of Kierkegaard’s understanding of intersubjectivity. Both Kierkegaard and Lévinas affirm the antecedence of passivity to activity in so far as we receive ourselves from elsewhere.

Marion and Derrida on the (Im)Possible Gift While Lévinas opposes God’s non-phenomenality to the phenomena phenomenology deals with and thereby acknowledges its limits, Marion has instead tried to extend phenomenology and adapt it to theological affordances. Marion maintains that God can well be taken as a phenomenon that is present to us. He characterizes God as a ‘saturated phenomenon’ with an excess of intuition that gives more than the intention ever has intended (Marion 2000: 195f.). This phenomenon is ‘a paradox’ that imposes ‘an impossible experience’, for the eye sees only its own impotence to constitute anything at all, and the constituting subject finds itself constituted by what it receives (Marion 2000: 210). While Lévinas seeks to replace the epistemological paradigm of intentionality by the ethical paradigm of responsivity, Marion inverts intentionality and turns it into counter-intentionality. However, even if we cannot see God and experience only our bedazzlement, the very attempt to see or experience something presupposes intentionality, no matter if the intentions are fulfilled, disappointed or overwhelmed. Therefore, Derrida reiterated Janicaud’s critique when discussing with Marion at Villanova University in 1997 (Caputo and Scanlon 1999). It is doubtful whether a theory that rejects the condition of a horizon as a ‘prison’ of phenomena, that denies the hermeneutical as-structure of manifestation and challenges intentionality and constitution is rightly called phenomenology. If Marion is a phenomenologist, then he is not one in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s sense. While Heidegger defines theology as a thinking of Revelation (Offenbarung) and philosophy as a thinking of revealedness (Offenbarkeit), Marion suggests taking phenomenology as ‘donatology’—a new ‘first philosophy’ as rational foundation for theology (Caputo and Scanlon 1999: 63). Marion seeks to avoid the aporia of the gift that Derrida sketches in his book Given Time where the prime example for an impossible gift that is called a present and is said to be given but nevertheless cannot be present as gift is time (Derrida 1992: 14f., 29). Derrida claims that as soon as the gift is presented and recognized as a gift, its character as a gracious gift begins to be destroyed because it will inevitably oblige its recipient and enter a circle of exchange and payback (Derrida 1992: 12–14, 23). Therefore, the ‘pure’ gift has to remain aneconomic. Can the gift of God’s presence then be preserved in an oeconomia salutis? Marion alternately brackets the giver, the recipient, and the gift-object. He wants to reduce the gift to givenness. However, seen from a theological

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point of view, this is just as problematic as the implications of Derrida’s approach, which aims at a critique of the self-present subject. The problems of both approaches become clear when one confronts the debate on the (im)possible gift with Kierkegaard’s 1843 Upbuilding Discourses on James 1:17–22, which are about the difficulties of receiving what God gave (SKS5: 39–56, 109–158/EUD: 31–48, 109–58). Kierkegaard’s view of how God’s presence as love can be given, received, and communicated as a gift can function as a critical corrective of Marion’s and Derrida’s views. Kierkegaard’s insights question both Marion’s extension of traditional Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology and Derrida’s diagnosis of its aporetic character. (For a more detailed argumentation, see Welz 2008: 327–74.)

Chrétien, Henry, and Lacoste For Chrétien, too, Kierkegaard is a significant point of reference (Chrétien 2002: 15, 36f., 72f., 75; 2004: 52). However, to my knowledge, Chrétien’s reception of Kierkegaard has not yet been investigated more closely. Nor has Henry’s reception of Kierkegaard, although he discusses Kierkegaard’s account of despair and takes Kierkegaard to be a phenomenologist (Henry 1973: 676ff.). Lacoste’s so-called ‘liturgical reduction’ that involves ‘a certain bracketing of world and earth’ (Lacoste 2004: 175), as the one who prays withdraws from world and earth but remains before God, has been related to Kierkegaard’s descriptions of the person in prayer who is looked at by God and has to look to him—suggesting that Kierkegaard, too, practiced a liturgical reduction where the ‘I’ that stands before God is exposed to the counter-intentionality of the divine gaze and thereby called into question (Hart 2010: 15–18). However, the same could be said about any praying person without this person necessarily having to be a phenomenologist. Thus, it remains a task of future research to explore in what sense Kierkegaard also has inspired Chrétien, Henry, and Lacoste. So far, it has become clear that it is impossible to reduce Kierkegaard’s specific way of approaching phenomena to any type of existing phenomenology that has been recognized as phenomenology. In what sense, then, if at all, can Kierkegaard nonetheless be labelled a ‘phenomenologist’? This disputed question will be reconsidered in the next section.

VI. Step 5: Reconsidering the Quaestio Disputata In what follows, I will summarize the arguments against any phenomenological reading of Kierkegaard (Pattison 2002: 69–85; 2005: 82–9), attempt to counter these counter-arguments where possible, and offer my own proposal of how Kierkegaard’s project could be classified.

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Arguments Against Understanding Kierkegaard as a Phenomenologist Pattison raises the following three objections against understanding Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist: (1) Husserl’s and Heidegger’s forms of phenomenology rest upon a self-legitimating and self-interpreting intuition, whereas the phenomena Kierkegaard describes are no determinate phenomena that we could apprehend in a pre-reflective manner but are ambiguous, concealed, oblique phenomena like anxiety and despair, i.e. imaginative evocations of particular ways of viewing the world, depending on how we look. Rather than resolving the question of self-knowledge, these phenomena are enigmas whose interpretation must always remain a matter of debate, and they make it questionable whether knowledge is at all possible in relation to ourselves. (2) Second, while Hegel’s, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s forms of phenomenology claim to be forms of science, Kierkegaard’s ‘second ethics’ in Works of Love is not a science but a matter of concrete judgment concerning good and evil. (3) In a rhetorical question, Pattison asks: What kind of phenomenalization could adequately and of itself stand as a grounding intuition of a transcendent God? (3.1) This sets a question mark against any kind of general ontology that might nurse an ambition to embrace both divine and human, God and creature. (3.2) Kierkegaard’s statements are guided by theological fore-conceptions that are presupposed rather than derived from experience. A Christian phenomenology that is constructed on the basis of dogmatic presuppositions would be open only to those who shared them.

Countering the Counter-Arguments What responses can be given to these counter-arguments? (Ad 1) The phenomena described by Kierkegaard also belong to the subject area of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s forms of phenomenology. Husserl’s concept of intentionality gives access both to corporeal reality and to ideality, phenomena can be given either in perceptual presentation or in linguistic representation, and even ideal objects can appear intuitively in a categorial fashion (Zahavi 2003: 17–35, 107f.). Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies of the mood attest to the fact that they also describe ambiguous, concealed and oblique phenomena (Heidegger 1993: 277, 296; Lee 1993, 1998). Phenomenology gives a perspective-bound interpretation of constituted objects, which entails one’s own meaning-giving contribution (Husserl 1984: 54, 397, 399). The Heideggerian Dasein is far from being self-transparent. Therefore, phenomenology needs hermeneutics to gain access to the phenomena, work through the coverings and explicate them. It follows that hermeneutical phenomenology is not in principle unsuitable for the explication of phenomena as unfathomable as anxiety and despair, sin or faith.

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(Ad 2) It is correct that Works of Love is not scientific in Hegel’s, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s sense. Kierkegaard does not even provide an extended ethical theory. Instead, he understands ethics as an existential project of the individual. Nevertheless, Works of Love can be read as a ‘phenomenology of love’ if phenomenology is defined in the broad sense of a reflective method of describing phenomena, which is not only based upon the attentive observation of phenomena, but also in search of appropriate linguistic distinctions that can catch the differences between a variety of similar phenomena. Thereby it is crucial to consider again and again whether one’s intuitions correspond to one’s descriptions, and to see how a certain matter discloses itself in various situations. (Ad 3) Pattison’s third objection addresses the most serious difficulties. (3.1) I agree that including God in a general ontology is problematic, and human fallibility might distort the ways we think, speak, and feel about God. However, the experience that God surpasses our experience should not lead us to claim that divine transcendence has no relation whatsoever to experience. At least the transformation of our experiences and concepts can be experienced—through ‘someone’ or ‘something’ ultimately eluding our experience. (3.2) Kierkegaard understands ‘becoming a Christian’ as a lifelong task, and therefore he keeps distinguishing between the factuality of the life of those who understand themselves as Christians and the biblical ideals of how a Christian life should be lived. Consequently, Kierkegaard’s work remains open to everyone who is ready to consider handed-down concepts that challenge one’s own experience and to reconsider both the concepts and the process of experience.

Semiotic Phenomenology of the Invisible My proposal is to classify Kierkegaard’s project as semiotic phenomenology of the invisible (Welz 2008b: 378–84). Unlike Janicaud, I do not think that theology and phenomenology have to remain separate because faith consists in giving oneself over to the hold of things we do not see, while there is nothing to look for behind the phenomena of phenomenology (Janicaud 2000: 103). After all, phenomenology and theology deal with the same worldly things and the same persons to whom they appear. However, can a phenomenology of the invisible God avoid dealing with something behind visible phenomena? A phenomenology of the invisible must deal with something behind the phenomena, namely the horizon of interpretation. This horizon is, however, not just the background of whatever appears; it is also the foreground that predetermines how we see what we see and how we interpret what we cannot see. Kierkegaard’s theological and ethical project must involve a semiotic dimension because sin, faith, and love can be given as such only in a linguistic process of signification, determination, and interpretation. If God appears as present, this is not due to God’s own perceivable (non)apparition but rather to the mediation of his non-material presence by signs which do, in fact, appear. Signs do not necessarily make visible what is invisible, but they can at least refer to that which remains invisible.

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Since we have no sensual impressions of God, we can only become aware of him with inner experience, but he is not given in it as a determinable thing being present. Thus, any supposed phenomenology of ‘God’ turns out to be a phenomenology of the human understanding of God. It is only retrospectively that we can find God’s discreet traces: in newly oriented emotions and actions, thoughts and talks. Kierkegaard outlines these existential changes and sketches what could be called a phenomenology of religious life.

vii. Conclusion: the Abiding Questions of Phenomenology The similarities and differences between the projects of the figures considered here suggest that Kierkegaard is historically and conceptually located between German idealism and French phenomenology. Yet, his project can surely not be fully assigned to any of these types of phenomenology. It remains idealistic in so far as Kierkegaard’s descriptions link factual experiences with their regulative ideal and offer an overall view of the physical and metaphysical aspects of reality. It is post-idealistic in clinging to the first-person perspective of description. My characterization of Kierkegaard’s project as ‘semiotic phenomenology of the invisible’ does not imply that Kierkegaard was a phenomenologist in any stricter programmatic sense. Kierkegaard has not promoted phenomenology theoretically, but he practised it ‘as a manner or style of thinking’ (Merleau-Ponty 1958: p. viii). Instead of always seeking to go directly ‘to the things themselves’, Kierkegaard sometimes turned rather to prior interpretations in terms of which to develop his own interpretations (Westphal 2010: 52). The comparison between Kierkegaard and Heidegger showed that the similarities in hermeneutical methodology do not entail similarities in the results of their respective explorations. To conclude, I would like to argue that although Kierkegaard’s ethical and theological project diverges from Heidegger’s ontological project, there are nevertheless at least three points of contact between Kierkegaard and Heidegger. The commonalities concern that which motivates any phenomenological enterprise: difficulties that can hardly be surmounted otherwise. (1) First, there is the difficulty of beginning at the beginning. If a phenomenon is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself and thus is in need of an explicit exhibiting (Heidegger 1993: 35), phenomenology cannot just ‘read off ’ the phenomena. After all, we are not just dealing with the phenomena, but are doing so in form of traditions, opinions, or fossilized interpretations (Grøn 2010: 79f.). By trying to go back zu den Sachen selbst, phenomenology questions our preconceptions. ‘In order for us to come to ask the questions where philosophy begins, we have to critically appropriate traditions which both disclose and close these questions’ (Grøn 2010: 80). That is why Kierkegaard has expressed the desire to examine anew the human condition that we think we know already. As he avouches in the Postscript, the importance of his pseudonyms does not consist in making any unheard-of discovery, but in wanting

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‘once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers’ (SKS7: 573/CUP1: 629f.). (2) Second, when observing something, the observer has a blind spot, namely his or her own first-person perspective. Phenomenology is dealing with precisely this problem, the difficulty of not overlooking the one who is looking. Kierkegaard’s texts point to the reader and make apparent that humans come to appear in making things appear (Grøn 2010: 92). For example, our own judgement about another reveals what is in ourselves. Kierkegaard has elaborated on this dialectic in the first discourse in Works of Love. In Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of the opacity of Dasein that in average everydayness flees from or forgets its being, although it is nearest and most familiar (Heidegger 1996: 41). We have the capacity of self-understanding; yet, we do not ‘get’ ourselves. Kierkegaard, too, struggled with what obstructs human self-understanding: temptation and self-deception—states and movements in which self-consciousness can no longer be taken at face value (Gregor 2010: 140). (3) Third, the tendency of self-evasion includes the difficulty of dealing with negative experiences. In Kierkegaard, the figures of despair indicate the constant possibility of failing oneself. What comes in between is, again, oneself: the self not wanting to be itself. While Kierkegaard and Heidegger have the problem in common, they do not support the same solutions. In Kierkegaard, the negativity of missing oneself and misrelating to God in despair and sin is to be overcome with the help of faith. When Kierkegaard advocates keeping the ‘wound of negativity’ open (SKS7: 84/CUP1: 85), negativity is related to becoming, and we cannot overcome becoming. In The Concept of Anxiety, negativity is a possibility related to human freedom. Does this negative possibility correspond to the tendency of falling-prey-to that Heidegger describes in Being and Time? In Heidegger, fallenness is described as an ontological structure. This implies that it is unavoidable. We can at best appropriate inauthenticity as a part of authentic existence. Kierkegaard would never accept this. Here the ways part. Can Kierkegaard, then, be counted as a phenomenologist? To put it in one sentence: he is a phenomenologist at least in so far as he had a sense for the abiding questions of phenomenology.

References Beyrich, Tilman (2001a). Ist Glauben wiederholbar? Derrida liest Kierkegaard (Berlin: de Gruyter). ——– (2001b). ‘Kann ein Jude Trost finden in Kierkegaards Abraham?’ Jüdische KierkegaardLektüren: Buber, Fackenheim, Lévinas’, in Judaica 57, 20–40. Bloechl, Jeffrey (2010). ‘Kierkegaard Between Fundamental Ontology and Theology: Phenomenological Approaches to Love of God’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 23–35. Butin, Gitte (1999). ‘Encounter with the Other: A Matter of Im/Mediacy. Lévinas and Kierkegaard on the Other and Mediation’, in Kerygma and Dogma 45, 307–16.

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Caputo, John D. (1987). Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– and Scanlon, Michael J. (eds.) (1999). God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Chrétien, Jean Louis (2002). The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press). ——– (2004). The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press). Come, Arnold B. (1988). ‘Kierkegaard’s Method: Does He Have One?’, in Kierkegaardiana 14, 14–28. Dahlstrom, Daniel (2010). ‘Freedom Through Despair: Kierkegaard’s Phenomenological Analysis’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 57–78. Dalferth, Ingolf U. (2002). ‘, . . . der Christ muß alles anders verstehen als der Nicht-Christ . . .’ Kierkegaards Ethik des Unterscheidens’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth (ed.), Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards ‘Taten der Liebe’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 19–46. Derrida, Jacques (1992). Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press). ——– and Ferraris, Maurizio (2001). A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity Press). Deuser, Hermann (1993). ‘Die Taten der Liebe: Kierkegaard’s wirkliche Ethik’, in Wilfried Härle and Reiner Preul (eds.), Gute Werke (Marburg: Elwert), 117–32. ——– (1997). ‘Kierkegaards Phänomenologie der humanen Existenzverhältnisse. Oppositionsvortrag zu Arne Grøns Disputation über Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 270–81. Disse, Jörg (1991). Kierkegaards Phänomenologie der Freiheitserfahrung (Freiburg (Breisgau): Alber). Dooley, Mark (2001). The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press). ——– (2010). ‘Kierkegaard: Reenchanting the Lebenswelt’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 169–87. Dreyfus, Hubert (1991). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’. Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Ferreira, M. Jamie (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——– (2002). ‘The Glory of a Long Desire. Need and Commandment in Works of Love’, in Ingolf U. Dalferth (ed.), Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards ‘Taten der Liebe’ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 139–54. Gonzáles, Darío (2010). ‘The Meaning of “Negative Phenomena” ’ in Kierkegaard’s Theory of Subjectivity’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 149–66. Gregor, Brian (2010). ‘Kierkegaard and the Phenomenology of Temptation’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 128–48. Grøn, Arne (1991). ‘Kærlighedens gerninger og anerkendelsens dialektik’, in Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 4, 261–70. ——– (1993). Begrebet angst hos Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). ——– (1994). ‘Liebe und Anerkennung’, in Kerygma und Dogma 40, 101–14. ——– (1996). ‘Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?’, in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 91–116. ——– (1997). Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). ——– (1998b). ‘The Dialectic of Recognition in Works of Love’, in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 147–57. ——– (2008). The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. J. B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press).

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Grøn, Arne (2010). ‘Self-Givenness and Self-Understanding: Kierkegaard and the Question of Phenomenology’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 79–97. Hanson, Jeffrey (ed.) (2010). Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). Hart, James G. (1986). ‘A Précis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology’, in Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart (eds.), Essays in Phenomenological Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 89–168. Hart, Kevin (2010). ‘The Elusive Reductions of Søren Kierkegaard’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 5–22. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1986). Phänomenologie des Geiste, in: Eva Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (eds.), Werke 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Heidegger, Martin (1993). Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer). ——– (1996). Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). ——– (1998). Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (2004). The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Henry, Michel (1973). The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff ). Husserl, Edmund (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). ——– (1973a). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil 1905–1920 (Husserliana, vol. 13), ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). ——– (1973b). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935 (Husserliana, vol. 15), ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). ——– (1976). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Husserliana, series, 3), ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). ——– (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Kluwer Academic). ——– (1984). Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis (Husserliana, vol. 19), ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). Janiaud, Joël (2006). Singularité et responsabilité: Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Lévinas (Paris: Champion). Janicaud, Dominique (ed.) (2000). Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press). Janke, Wolfgang (1974). ‘Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards Phänomenologie des subjektiven Geistes’, in Ingeborg Schüßler and Wolfgang Janke (eds.), Sein und Geschichtlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), 103–13. Kisiel, Theodore (1995). The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Kisiel, Theodore and Sheehan, Thomas (eds.) (2007). Becoming Heidegger. On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings 1910–1927 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). Lacoste, Jean-Yves (2004). Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Shekan (New York: Fordham University Press).

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Laycock, Steven W. (1986). ‘The Intersubjective Dimension of Husserl’s Theology’, in Steven W. Laycock and James G. Hart (eds.), Essays in Phenomenological Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 169–86. Lee, Nam-In (1993). Husserl’s Phänomenologie der Instinkte (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer). ——– (1998). ‘Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology of the Mood’, in Dan Zahavi and Natalie Depraz (eds.), Alterity and Facticity. New Perspectives on Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer), 103–19. Lévinas, Emmanuel (1976). Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana). ——– (1981). Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff ). ——– (1996). Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (1998a). Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshaw (New York: Columbia University Press). ——– (1998b). ‘Existence and Ethics’, in Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (eds.), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell), 26–38. Lincoln, Ulrich (2000). Äußerung: Studien zum Handlungsbegriff in Søren Kierkegaards Die Taten der Liebe. (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). Llewelyn, John (2009). Margins of Religion between Kierkegaard, and Derrida (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Marion, Jean-Luc (2000). ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Janicaud (ed.), 176–216. McCarthy, Vincent A. (1978). The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff ). ——– (2011). ‘Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and In Full View’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Burlington: Ashgate), 95–125. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1958). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge). Mjaaland, Marius Timmann (2008). Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida (Berlin: de Gruyter). Paradiso-Michau, Michael R. (2006). ‘Suspensions in Kierkegaard and Husserl’, in The Lev Shestov Journal 6 (Autumn), 11–24. ——– (2011). The Ethical in Kierkegaard and Lévinas (London: Continuum). Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Theology, Literature (London and New York: Routledge). ——– (2005). The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press). ——– (2010). ‘Kierkegaard and the Limits of Phenomenology’. in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 188–207. Pojman, Louis (1984). ‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of the Stages of Existence’, in George L. Stengren (ed.), Faith, Knowledge, and Action (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel), 116–45. Quist, Wenche Marit (2009). Tid og eksistens: Kierkegaard og Heidegger (Frederiksberg: Anis). Schmidt, Jochen (2006). Vielstimmige Rede vom Unsagbaren: Dekonstruktion, Glaube und Kierkegaards pseudonyme Literatur (Berlin: de Gruyter). Schrag, Calvin O. (1961). Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). Schulz, Heiko (2010). ‘A Phenomenological Proof? The Challenge of Arguing for God in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 101–27. Sheil, Patrick (2010). Kierkegaard and Lévinas: The Subjunctive Mood (Farnham: Ashgate).

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Shestov, Lev (1962). ‘In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl’, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22, no. 4 (June), 449–71. Simmons, J. Aaron and Wood, David (eds.) (2008). Kierkegaard and Lévinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Stewart, Jon (1997). ‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness Unto Death’, in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 117–43. ——– (2003). Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Taylor, Mark C. (1980). Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Theunissen, Michael (1993). Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Welz, Claudia (2007a). ‘Present within or without Appearances? Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of the Invisible: Between Hegel and Lévinas’, in Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, 470–513. ——– (2007b). ‘Reasons for Having No Reason to Defend God—Kant, Kierkegaard, Lévinas and their Alternatives to Theodicy’, in Hendrik M. Vroom (ed.), Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi), 167–86. ——– (2007c). ‘The Presence of the Transcendent—Transcending the Present: Kierkegaard and Lévinas on Subjectivity and the Ambiguity of God’s Transcendence’, in Arne Grøn, Iben Damgaard, and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Subjectivity and Transcendence (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), 149–76. ——– (2008). Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck). Welz, Claudia and Verstrynge, Karl (eds.) (2008). Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Lévinas (London: Turnshare). Westphal, Merold (1992). ‘Lévinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task’ Modern Theology 8, 241–61. ——– (1995). ‘The Transparent Shadow: Kierkegaard and Lévinas in Dialogue’, in Martin Joseph Matuštík and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 265–82. ——– (2000). ‘Commanded Love and Divine Transcendence in Lévinas and Kierkegaard’, in Jeffrey Bloechl (ed.), The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (New York: Fortress University Press), 200–23. ——– (2008). Lévinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (2010). ‘Divine Givenness and Self-Givenness in Kierkegaard’, in Hanson (ed.) (2010), 39–56. Wyschogrod, Michael (1954). Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence (New York: Humanities Press). Zahavi, Dan (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Suggested Reading Deuser (1997). Grøn (1997, 2010). Hanson (ed.) (2010). Janicaud (2000). Levinas (1998b).

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Lincoln (2000). Pattison (2010). Ricoeur, Paul (1979). ‘Philosophieren nach Kierkegaard’, in Michael Theunissen (ed.), Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 579–96. ——– Ricoeur, Paul (1980). Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. and trans. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). Welz (2007a, 2008). Westphal (1995, 2008).

chapter 24

K IER K EGA A R D A N D POSTMODER N ISM S teven S hakespeare

Was Kierkegaard a liar and a thief? According to one distinguished source, he ‘ceaselessly fabricated himself by writing’ and ‘stole language from knowledge in order to use it against knowledge’. Such charges, teetering between reproof and admiration, make Kierkegaard sound mendacious, slippery, and untrustworthy. It seems that he invents literary masks to hide behind, and spins a cloud of words, which are not anchored in any foundational, objective truth beyond language. Is this Kierkegaard no longer to be read as the father of serious, striving existentialism, but as a relativizing postmodernist before his time? The irony, of course, is that the citations with which we began were offered by the definitive existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre. In his famous essay ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal,’ Sartre offers a provocative reading of his predecessor (Sartre 1974). He argues that Kierkegaard’s impact should not be reduced to general truths or structures described in his thought. Nor should it be psychoanalytically reduced, so that Kierkegaard’s works become no more than a reflex of his biography. Rather, Kierkegaard’s importance lies in his withdrawal from such structures of comprehension. Kierkegaard is ‘nonsignifying’ and only as such does he empty history of its supposedly rational pattern, confronting us with the decision to make meaning, to transform mere chance into the necessity of a life: the singular universal. Sartre may not have been writing in the shadow of what has come to be called postmodernism, but his analysis of Kierkegaard offers some fascinating connections with that condition. Postmodernism, of course, is a term of questionable value. Emerging differently in different contexts and disciplines (literature, architecture, philosophy, photography, and so on, each with their own distinctive formulation of the ‘modern’), postmodernism seems to contest the very notion of stable essences, which would allow a secure analysis to unfold. Rather than attempting this Protean task, the present chapter will invoke a number of elements and sensibilities associated with postmodernism in theory and postmodernity in social practice. These elements will be those most clearly associated with readings of and by Kierkegaard which seek to expose the destabilizing paradoxes of the present moment

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and the present age. What makes these paradoxes postmodern is their complex and necessary relationship with their own linguistic and performative expression. In one of the most well-known attempts to provide an (ironically) overarching account of the postmodern, Lyotard proposed that at its core is an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984: p. xxiv). The Christian, Marxist, and liberal grand stories of the west, which provided an account of human origins and telos, had broken down. They were unable to provide themselves with a secure foundation, or a narratorial point of view, which transcended the secondariness, provisionality, and difference endemic to our attempts at knowledge. To borrow a phrase of Derrida, the postmodern no longer recognizes a transcendental signified, a real or conceptual meaning which grounds and orients the play of signifiers. Language and communication are cut off from source from the very first (because there actually is no ‘very first’ that is not relativized the moment it is brought to expression). Authors and intentions no longer control the meaning of communications. Textuality is an operation at work prior to any effort to stabilize coherent meanings or truths by a sovereign subject. Indeed all controlling centres—the author, the subject, the party, the academy, science, God—are all effects of an unruly clash and sport of signifying forces. Mark C. Taylor, himself a significant reader of Kierkegaard, delineated three interlocking aspects of postmodernity as it affected theology: the death of God, the disappearance of the self, and the closure of the book (Taylor 1984). God, as the ultimate guarantor of the meaning, intelligibility, and purpose of the world, was dethroned and dispersed into the mazing flows of language. The self, in the sense of the sovereign, free subject, is also dissolved inasmuch as it mirrors the nature of God. The self is no longer a substantial entity, grounded on transparent reason, but is called into being by forces of time, language, and difference which deprive it of any essential permanence. And the book stands for the dream of an absolute, encyclopaedic knowledge, affirmed in the Enlightenment project. The book can no longer contain truth between hardened covers, but is disseminated as the endless play of writing. In the background of these theoretical claims is the spectre of capitalism. For Frederic Jameson, postmodernism is a cultural symptom of the effects of capital, at once liberating and corrosive (Jameson 1991). Capitalism is a system which is not about anything other than itself, its own perpetuation as self-differing commodification, in the process of which nature or reality is consumed and regurgitated as pure simulacrum. There is nothing but image, nothing but fashion, nothing but the flickering vibrations of changing values (of bonds, stocks, derivatives), which has no basis on anything outside the processes of exchange and credit.

I. Against the Postmodern On one level, Kierkegaard might appear as an arch-opponent of incipient postmodernism. After all, he resists the distractions, simulations, and fantasies of the aesthete. He insists on the transcendent otherness and eternity of God, the scandalous historical

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paradox of the God-man, the passionate resolution of the subject, the purity of heart which wills one thing. The ironic evasions of the postmodern seem anathema to this approach. Against all devaluations of the currency of faith, Kierkegaard’s works seem to heighten the stakes, to make things more difficult. Moreover, Kierkegaard is an early critic of the age of secondhand public opinion and spectacle, which kept genuine decision and risk at a distance, notably in his A Literary Review of 1845. Such a reflective, ironic age of entertainment foreshadows the late capitalist culture machine, along with the necessary suppression of the grotesque sacrifices that make it possible. The point can be illustrated by three well-known parabolic fragments from the first volume of Either/Or. In the opening fragment of the ‘Diapsalmata’, we read ‘What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are formed so that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music’ (SKS2: 27/EO1: 19). At once we are confronted with the tortuous passage from inner to outer reality. Poetry is a painful translation, resulting in a commodity form. The poet’s hearers demand more beauty and therefore more suffering from the poet. The implication is that the aesthetic fixation on what is interesting, admirable, and appealing is a kind of reification, which sacrifices the poet’s singular agony. Whatever falls outside the forms of good taste is left unheard and unseen. In the second fragment, it is the spectators who are exposed to disaster: In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed—amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke. (SKS2: 39/EO1: 30)

Appearance and reality are fatally confused. As the world goes to hell, those who gaze on its apocalypse can recognize only the reflection of their own insignificant desire for entertainment. The first part of Either/Or thus seems to expose the sacrificial logic at the heart of the aesthetic, a logic that is uncannily close to that of the postmodern. Simulation triumphs, signs become detached from reality, as with the sign in a shop window that declares ‘Pressing Done Here’: ‘If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale’ (SKS2: 41/EO1: 32). The subject veers between the anomie of bitter meaninglessness or boredom, and a ‘poetic’ sensibility, which makes a futile attempt to grasp transient immediacy in poetic recollection. When this fails, all that remains is the ‘rotation method’ of staving off boredom by constant distraction. Any decisive choice leads only to regret, for all outcomes are pointless. Always lurking in the background is the spiralling vortex, the nothingness and abyss that stand in place of any foundation. As another fragment puts it, in a manner prescient of Borges: My life is utterly meaningless. When I consider its various epochs, my life is like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which first of all means a string, and second a daughter-in-law. All that is lacking is that in the third place the word Schnur means a camel, in the fourth a whisk broom. (SKS2: 45/EO1: 36)

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These texts could well form part of a case that Kierkegaard would have nothing to do with the supposed key characteristics of postmodernism: its aestheticized nihilism and relativism; its separation of signifier from signified and the conversion of the real into commodities; its denial of real foundations for truth or objective meanings for texts; its celebration of plurality, play, and irony for their own sake. There has been no shortage of scholars arguing that, for these reasons, Kierkegaard cannot be lined up with postmodernism in any straightforward way (for example: Norris 1989; Walsh 1991; Rudd 1998). Sylvia Walsh and Anthony Rudd take the line that Kierkegaard’s early work constitutes a rejection of the untrammelled irony of the Romantics, which is a forerunner of postmodern ironic relativism. Their case can be summarized in a few propositions: 1. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard argues that irony can only serve thinking as a ‘controlled’ element. Absolute irony leads to the dissolution of the subject. 2. In emphasizing the choices and commitments the subject must make, Kierkegaard is refusing any disintegration of the self into mere appearances or a series of masks. There is no endorsement of plurality and difference as such. 3. The ‘aesthetic’ elements of Kierkegaard’s authorship do not constitute an endorsement of the ‘aesthetic’ as a stage of life. They argue that the latter is left behind in the ethical and religious stages, because it is incapable of forming and carrying out decisive resolutions. For Walsh, ironic aestheticism (which promotes the self as its own creator) must be distinguished from a legitimate integration of the poetic into the ethico-religious life, directing us to a deeper immersion into actuality. 4. The subject must make her choices in response to an objective truth, or givenness. Neither the ethical nor the religious may be legitimately shaped at will by the fleeting whims of an ironic ego. The subject appropriates truth subjectively and passionately, but this is not the same as saying that truth itself is constructed. The self is most truly itself in relation to its transcendent source. 5. The outlook of Romantic irony and the Kierkegaardian aesthete are closely analogous to postmodernism. The latter must therefore be rejected for the same reasons. These arguments are rooted in a serious and deep reading of Kierkegaard’s texts. However, as with many debates about the postmodern, there is a risk that they are constructed to counter the kind of adversary of which the aesthetic author of Either/Or complains: ‘the pale, bloodless, tenacious-of-life nocturnal forms with which I battle and to which I myself give life and existence’ (SKS2: 32/EO1: 23). Postmodernism is easy to portray as a nihilistic bête noire, but such highly abstracted foes seldom do justice to what is actually said and done in specific texts. The arguments also raise questions on their own terms: what is the relation between the aesthetic forms of Kierkegaard’s writings and their content (Pattison 1992)? Why does Kierkegaard retain indirect and poetic forms for his religious and explicitly Christian writings (Pattison 2002)? To what extent is Kierkegaard as author willing and able to determine the meaning of his writings (Garff 1991)? Is irony ever fully ‘controlled’

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(an idea that in any case is found in Kierkegaard’s dissertation rather than his published work) (Capel 1966; Strawser 1997)? Does indirect communication ever simply give way to direct edifying and Christian works (Poole 1993)? Clearly all of these questions demand complex hermeneutical engagements with the texts, and I am certainly not suggesting that they are neglected or answered in a wholly one-sided way by Walsh or Rudd (particularly as each discerns an authentic reconciliation of aesthetic, ethical, and religious modes of writing and living in Kierkegaard’s work). Nevertheless, underlying these questions is a suspicion that the formal elements of the authorship cannot be artificially isolated from its substantive themes, and that Kierkegaard had good reasons for insisting upon this himself. Furthermore, the formal elements of pseudonymity and indirectness are subtle, modulated, and pervasive through the authorship, and it may be that, for Kierkegaard, a direct communication of Christian truth claims is not possible for both intrinsic and contextual reasons—see for example the statements that ‘The direct relationship with God is simply paganism’ (SKS7: 221/CUP1: 243) and ‘Spirit is the denial of direct immediacy’ (SKS12: 139/PC: 136) and their contexts. Even if the maieutic gives way to ‘witnessing’, this is not necessarily the same as direct communication, which comes to ruin on the sign of contradiction that is Christ (SKS12: 129–30/PC: 125). If this is so, then we have to look more carefully at what lies behind the association of his work with postmodern themes. The previously cited fragments from Either/Or themselves give pause for thought. The poet suffers a kind of hidden martyrdom at the hands of a tyrannical public interested only in the appearance of beauty. The inward suffering in the translation of the ideal into communicable form can be read as a parable of the authorship’s central dilemma. In this respect, the poet is not unlike the Christian witness of later works. The clown in the theatre suffers an analogous fate, and the repeated metaphors of conflagration and destruction this part of Either/Or suggest an apocalyptic reading. The detachment of sign from reality is experienced as a crisis of meaning, but it is not one which can be overcome by more and better direct communication, or by the assertion of any foundational authority. A different step is needed; a step into the disappointing negativity, which ensues when one crosses the threshold of the shop to find that only the sign is for sale. At the least, then, the aesthetic dilemma demands a different kind of response from rational apologetics or appeals to authority. In the case of the latter, Johannes Climacus persuasively argues that the authorities of Scripture, Church, and Christian history cannot be invoked in such a way that all objective uncertainty will be dispelled. There will always have to be a decision for faith which breaks with all demonstrations and proofs: ‘As soon as subjectivity is taken away, and passion from subjectivity, and infinite interest from passion, there is no decision whatever, whether on this issue or any other. All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity.’ (SKS7: 39/CUP1: 33). Decision cannot arise from the qualitatively objective stance of demonstration. It is important to see that this point applies to dogmatic theology as much as it does to speculative philosophy, and there is no reason to suppose that it does not also apply to the varieties of empiricism. Decision cannot be captured in any web of authorization established by either philosophy or theology.

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Kierkegaard was thus well aware of the crisis of legitimation, which, for Lyotard, lies at the root of the postmodern condition (Lyotard 1984: 8). Legitimation depends upon a ‘legislator’, who is authorized to determine whether proposed statements, judgements, and interpretations are acceptable to the discourse which is normative in a certain context. However, what happens when the legislator’s own authority is called into question? What grounds can be sought to buttress it? When this happens, we are forced to look beyond the discourse in question, perhaps to a more ‘foundational’ narrative. However, the same problem affects legitimacy in this narrative too, so that we are compelled to seek a self-evident starting point, immune to doubt. And this is just what Kierkegaard argues is lacking. Neither philosophical method nor theological claims to authority can simply circumvent the reflexivity of the modern age, a reflexivity which, when turned upon itself, harbours the postmodern serpent. We can begin to itemize why it is, therefore, that Kierkegaard’s authors (including himself) write ‘without authority’. First, in a reflective age, which has pushed the dialectical quest for self-evident knowledge to its ultimately futile conclusion, no objective demonstration of ultimate or infinite truth is possible (or desirable). Subjective decision cannot be mandated by the accumulation of knowledge. Secondly, given the cultural presupposition operative in Denmark, that Christianity was a given identity, Kierkegaard writes to divest his readers of this confidence that they are already Christians. In this context, merely restating Christian dogmas in an objective form would only reinforce the illusion that there is a shared, intelligible, and legitimate discourse about what Christianity is. Thirdly, the authorship must exercise a repellent force, directing the reader to take responsibility for her own interpretation of the possibilities offered by the texts. As the upbuilding discourses make clear, the author must be considered as one ‘absent on a journey’. Fourthly, the specific issues of the authorship—such as one’s interest in an infinite happiness, the expectation of eternity, receiving one’s soul in patience, the suspension of the ethical, purity of heart in willing one thing, witnessing, the absolute paradox of the God-man—variously defy direct communication. They require a kind of poetry, even when the text appears signed and direct. It is therefore not accidental that Kierkegaard’s texts have trouble saying what they mean and meaning what they say. With this in mind, we will explore a little further some of the key readings of Kierkegaard, which are arguably engaged with the tropes of the postmodern, though, as we will see, this terrain is everywhere contested.

II. Deconstructing Kierkegaard for his Own Sake In the critiques of postmodern readings of Kierkegaard previously mentioned (Walsh 1991 and 1994; Rudd 1998), one notable feature is their tendency to conflate postmodernism with deconstruction, identifying both with a nihilistic ‘anything goes’ approach

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to truth and interpretation. Sylvia Walsh, for example, states that those ‘influenced by Derrida and others in the French postmodernist camp have begun to subject his writings to deconstructive analysis and to construe his thought in terms of a philosophy of difference’ (Walsh 1991: 114). She goes on to claim that this perspective involves ‘the overthrow of metaphysics and any form of foundationalism’ (Walsh 1991: 114) and leads to a trivialization of authorship by making it all thoroughly ironic and therefore ‘open to any and every kind of interpretation by the reader’ (Walsh 1991: 116). Anthony Rudd also lumps deconstruction in with postmodernism (both of which are rather tendentiously represented by the work of Richard Rorty), claiming that their all-consuming irony leads to ‘bizarre nihilistic conclusions’ (Rudd 1998: 85). The problem is that Rorty’s robustly pragmatic endorsement of relativism and irony does not adequately reflect the way in which a thinker such as Derrida continues to maintain that we cannot simply jump clear of metaphysical notions of truth and reality, and that our speaking, thinking and doing is solicited by an otherness, which cannot be reduced to ironic self-creation (Derrida 1988: 146). This unfortunate caricature is avoided by other critics of postmodern anti-realism (e.g. Norris 1984 and 1989), who are careful to distinguish deconstructive readings from simplistic attempts to evacuate texts of any meaning apart from the arbitrary projections of the reader. Mark Dooley concurs, arguing that deconstruction has a significant ethical and political dimension entirely missed by Walsh (Dooley 2001: 146–57). For Dooley, Kierkegaard is linked to Derrida via an ethic of radical responsibility to ‘the other as one who has no place to call his or her own in the established milieu’ (Dooley 2001: 193). As associated with the work of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction does indeed deepen philosophical complications of notions of truth and intentionality, but it does not abandon them. Rather, texts are read in a way that traces the forces at work in them which subvert and counter their surface, explicit, direct meaning. At the heart of deconstruction is a questioning of the notion of a stable, self-identical origin or goal of meaning, a meaning which can be purely ‘present’ to an ideal consciousness. Rather, meaning emerges through processes of temporal and spatial displacement and differentiation. It is not so much that truth is trapped within language, but that language itself is a trace of the differential forces, which open texts out to an otherness that cannot be comprehended or assimilated according to notions of truth as correspondence or intuition (Derrida 1976: 60–2). Deconstruction is not a mere opposition to or rejection of truth, comprehension, or even the systematic impulse in philosophy. It ‘solicits’ these necessary concepts, in the sense of ‘shaking’ them, making them unsteady in the face of what they always exclude and suppress in order to establish themselves. Seen in this way, deconstruction is not merely a method or technique applied to texts in an external way. It is a destabilizing process at work in the text itself and in the act of reading it (a process also at work in other interpretative engagements, whether erotic, ethical, scientific, aesthetic, political, or religious). It is not a mere celebration of difference for its own sake.

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Kierkegaard’s authorship is relevant here because it is poised as a deconstructive enterprise in its own terms, as well as inviting further destabilizing readings. Joakim Garff puts it succinctly: . . . the deconstructive reading has led to a paradigm shift in research: the supposed father of existentialism has been lifted free of the jargon of authenticity into the labyrinth of his own writings . . . To deconstruct Kierkegaard (to read Kierkegaard with Kierkegaard and against Kierkegaard) is, in my view, to read him adequately, since his texts are already and in advance in one way or another potentially deconstructive. (Garff 2004: 69)

According to Garff, what is needed is a ‘less reverent, more flippant’ reading, because this is actually ‘truer’ to the texts themselves, in the sense of repeating their own satirical and ironic undermining of scholarly pathos. Garff ’s other work provides excellent examples of this type of interpretation. Faced with the argument that Kierkegaard has himself provided directions for how to read his work in the posthumously published The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Garff argues that even this work is riddled with indirectness (Garff 1991; cf. Mackey 1986, who pluralizes the ‘points of view’ in his title). Kierkegaard still presents himself as a reader without authority, appealing to a Providence which can never appear as such in his writings. Perhaps Garff ’s most significant work is his biography of Kierkegaard (Garff 2007). One of the motifs of Garff ’s account is the way in which Kierkegaard from very early on self-consciously positions and poetizes himself. His ‘private’ journals do not confront us with a privileged point of access to the ‘real’ workings of his mind, because they themselves are aesthetic creations in which Kierkegaard tries on various roles (not least the Romantic searcher for existential truth of his younger days) and mythicizes his story in a manner reminiscent of the aesthete and even the Seducer of Either/Or. This is a substantial recounting of Kierkegaard’s life, albeit one that has been charged with significant failures of scholarly accuracy in its use of sources, albeit on a relatively small number of points (Tudvad 2007). Garff ’s work provides evidence that a deconstructive reading is not a one-sidedly negative attempt to tear down meanings and authors and show them up for the mendacious charlatans they really are. It is an attempt to show how the real is incessantly complicating itself and failing to coincide with itself, and that this is in fact the condition for our concepts of truth and responsibility. Kierkegaard’s work is important because it performs and generates this complication in a particularly productive way. It is for this reason that ironic and aesthetic elements are brought to the fore in deconstructive readings, not because they are being elevated into a new ‘super-truth’. The aesthetic brings to incomplete expression something of the incalculable nature of truth and reality. Louis Mackey was an influential early proponent of this kind of approach. In his 1971 book, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, he claims that ‘Poems like jokes may be refused; they can never be refuted’ (Mackey 1971: 290). However, poetry is still a cognitive response to ‘the imaginative cultivation of multiple perspectives’ (Mackey 1971: 293). The poem offers a possibility, a true possibility which invites a response (‘true’ in the sense of a

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viable life view). It is in this sense that Kierkegaard’s work is poetic, and it is a poor view of poetry that characterizes it as mere non-cognitive adornment, which must fall away when the direct truth of the letter arrives. There are of course significant works in the secondary literature that take full account of Kierkegaard’s use of poetry, subjectivity, and passion, but still defend a critically realist interpretation of his concepts of self, faith, and God ( Evans 1992; Walsh 1994). Critical realism entails the claim that language contains terms, which can successfully refer to objective realities existing independently of language, but which do so in complex, mediated, and stratified ways. In the context of Kierkegaard’s overall reception, this remains a necessary task, given superficial accusations of irrationalism levelled at him. However, in the desire to defend Kierkegaard, the subversive and even self-subversive elements of his authorship can be underestimated. Neither Johannes Climacus, AntiClimacus, nor Kierkegaard himself have the point of view necessary for drawing the limits that lie between the subjective and the objective. The transformation of the subject may also transform the object appropriated—or else expose the way in which that object is always potentiating itself, abandoning its own ideality. In the process, the form/ matter or form/content binaries (or in more Kierkegaardian terms, the distinction between the ‘how’ and the ‘what’) are contested in ways that cannot be classed as merely formal without begging the question. This goes to the heart of substantive issues in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Mackey thus proposes that ‘the apparent contradiction between Kierkegaard’s negative theology and his habit of thinking in images, similes and analogies’ is that ‘the path to reconciliation lies not through a univocal conception of the content of Kierkegaard’s statements’, but in seeing these statements as ‘formal entities’ such that ‘the literary techniques of Kierkegaard cannot be interpreted as devices for the expression of a content independently intelligible’ (Mackey 1971: 258–9). The ‘negative theology’ of Kierkegaard does not mean a mystical intuition of union with the divine, but the negative presentation of God as limit concept and the paradox as a non-object. Representational thinking and language break down at this point, but they do not give way to silent, immediate encounter with God. Instead, Kierkegaard’s images—and by extension his writings as a whole— constitute strange formal hybrids: ventriloquized pseudonyms used to reassert the need for first-person perspectives, for example, or edifying discourses, which wander from authorial intention and which make the reader self-active by also making him capable of nothing. Mackey applies this to the later religious writings too: ‘What Anti-Climacus writes is not theology or criticism, but rhetoric designed to introduce his reader into the presence of the “sign of contradiction” ’ (Mackey: 1971: 244). In his later work, Mackey went on to argue that the self analysed in The Sickness Unto Death (which in Walsh’s view is necessarily a self in relation to an objective transcendent power) is deconstructed by that text, because it can never recollect itself in a moment of pure self-presence. That means it can never simply intuit its dependence upon God as an external source (Mackey 1989). God remains a possibility, a limit. This larger ‘irony’ is distinct from the egotistically inflated Romantic or speculative irony critiqued in Kierkegaard’s dissertation, which makes the productive ego the

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absolute origin of phenomena. For Agacinscki, ‘Kierkegaard’s special theory of indirect communication, then, is also a general theory of language as irony’ (Agacinski 1988: 20), because irony names that which always exceeds the speculative gaze. Writing plays a special role here, since ‘The possibility of writing is also the possibility of irony: it is the possibility of detachment’ (Agacinski 1988: 76). Agacinski is clearly influenced by Derrida’s argument that speech has traditionally been privileged over writing in western philosophy, because it appears to offer access to the pure unmediated meaning present to the speaker’s mind as she talks. In contrast, writing is always secondary, always at risk of appearing and being read outside of its original context, in the absence of its original author. Writing is thus associated with death and loss; speech with life and fullness. Derrida’s argument is that those elements of writing, which seem to condemn it to secondary status, are in fact inescapable for all language, all signs (something which goes well beyond what we understand by human language in the narrow sense). Signs must be iterable, repeatable, if they are to function as signs at all. They all involve the ‘detachment’ from the origin, the supplementation of that ‘first’ moment of truth. There is a tempting connection to make here with Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition. According to John Caputo, ‘Kierkegaardian repetition is the first “post-modern” attempt to come to grips with the flux, the first try not at denying or “reconciling” it, in the manner of metaphysics, but of staying with it, of having the “courage” for it.’ (Caputo 1987: 12). Repetition is contrasted with recollection, the Platonic attempt to retrieve a truth already known and present, if hidden. Unlike recollection, repetition faces an open future. In the unpublished essay Johannes Climacus, repetition is characterized as the collision between reality and ideality which happens in language, a collision which renders any purely conceptual comprehension of actuality impossible (JC: 171). In Repetition itself, Constantius remarks that ‘Modern philosophy makes no movement . . . and if it makes any movement at all, it is always within immanence, whereas repetition is and remains a transcendence’ (SKS4: 56–7/R: 186). Repetition is a forward movement, a kinesis, in which ‘actuality, which has been, now comes into existence’ (SKS4: 25/R: 149). Anticipating deconstruction’s critical-parasitical relationship with metaphysics, we read that ‘repetition is the interest of metaphysics and also the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief ’ (SKS4: 25/R: 149). For Caputo, repetition is posed against nostalgia, the yearning for a fullness of meaning which we have lost. Eternity for Kierkegaard is an existential task, something to be achieved, something to come (Caputo 1987: 14–15). Temporality becomes detached from any eternal source. The risk of decision, which is also a necessary part of hermeneutics, becomes radical. Caputo traces the different forms of repetition in aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages, so cannot be accused of conflating the various aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship on to one level. A key difference is that the kind of aesthetic repetition critiqued by Kierkegaard is merely ‘more of the same’. In contrast, ethical repetition involves a decision to choose freedom in time. It is worth citing Caputo’s understanding of this, as it is clearly distinct from the illusion of pure freedom and self-creation which is supposedly characteristic of postmodernism for Rudd and others: ‘Repetition is thus not an

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ethical gymnastics which thinks anything possible. It begins with the situatedness in which one finds oneself. It is not abstract freedom but the freedom to actualize possibilities’ (Caputo 1987: 30). It is only in the wake of this form of repetition that we can address a religious repetition, what Caputo calls a ‘mad religious economy’ (Caputo 1987: 31). However, once more we are not dealing with an insipid relativism, but with a movement that breaks with immanence, and which therefore deconstructs self-sufficient metaphysical grounds for faith and action. Walsh objects that Christian repetition relies on grace and transcendent divine command, and accuses Caputo of dealing only in the aesthetic play of endlessly becoming various ironic personae (Walsh 1991: 121). However, it is difficult to see this as a just reading of Caputo on this point, since as we saw above, he explicitly opposes a reading of repetition which equates it with the ‘gymnastics’ of thinking ‘anything possible’. The fact that he advocates adopting various ironic personae as a strategy of evading fixed identities can only be taken to count against this if one assumes that such an approach straightforwardly equates with aesthetic frivolity and egoism. Since Kierkegaard adopts such personae himself, such an argument is self-defeating if it is meant to preserve the Dane from postmodern interpretation. There is clearly a serious issue at stake here about the nature of transcendence for Kierkegaard, one which is instructive about some of the debates that have shaken continental philosophy of religion in recent times. We need to be clearer about the kind of discourse on ‘otherness’, which has been bequeathed to continental philosophy by such thinkers as Lacan, Derrida, and Lévinas. For instance, it is clear to Walsh that Agacinski embraces a form of relativism. However, the latter’s interpretation is more complex than this. Agacinski is deeply concerned with Kierkegaard’s biography, and with applying psychoanalytical, deconstructive, and feminist readings and criticisms to Kierkegaard’s work. It is not that anything goes, or that reality is reduced to the status of illusion or projection. For Agacinski, Kierkegaard’s writings perform a resistance to totalizing discourses which reduce all otherness to the same. Where they can be critiqued for their reduction of women to passivity, or to a threat to male singularity, they also subvert this patriarchal framework of mastery. The curious text Prefaces in which Nicholas Notabene offers a collection made up entirely of prefaces for unpublished works, is held up as an example of this: Here, the strategy consists in blurring the distinction between the work and its preface, in exploding the principle of an opposition that would guarantee the preface at one and the same time a fundamental and privileged position (the moment of reappropriation and mastery) and an always secondary position of submission or of necessary articulation to the body of the book, without which it would lose its reason for being. (Agacinski 1988: 233)

Writing becomes a theme not because of an obsession with the inner workings of language, or because of a belief that we are somehow trapped within it, but precisely because it carries with it an irreducible reference to an unmasterable excess or alterity.

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This is a point underscored by Mark C. Taylor and Pat Bigelow. Taylor, writing appropriately in the preface to Bigelow’s major study, argues that ‘The strange shapes of Kierkegaard’s texts are, in effect, various folds in discourse written to solicit an Other that can never be represented’ (Taylor in Bigelow 1987: p. viii). The negativity, the absence of the other (already remarked upon by Mackey) is the dynamic force of Kierkegaard’s texts, in a kind of parody of Hegelian dialectics (cf. Shakespeare 1998). For Taylor, ‘Kierkegaard points towards this ungraspable remainder with the term “singularity [Enkelthed]” ’ (Taylor 1987: 341). The substantial self may be dissolved, but the individual remains as a stubborn singularity, whose event horizon resists any speculative appropriation. As we have seen, Taylor’s own position embraces the death of God, but this is not simply an affirmation of a disenchanted secular space. The identity of God dies, but the signifier ‘God’ continues to do its work of disrupting pure immanence: Awareness of the wholly Other must come from elsewhere; it must be solicited by otherness itself. Kierkegaard names this soliciting Other, which calls every identity out of itself, God ‘.God’ is an improper ‘name’ for absolute exteriority that resists all interiorization and recollection. (Taylor 1987: 342)

Echoing Philosophical Fragments, Taylor invokes the limit of the unknown, which is both the object of reason’s passion and the repellent force which causes reason to fall: ‘As the difference that “precedes” all differences, the Unknown, which is forever unknowable, is the condition of both the possibility and the impossibility of reason’ (Taylor 1987: 343; cf. Bigelow 1987: 192). Taylor and Bigelow agree, therefore, that Kierkegaard is engaged in something that looks rather like negative theology. However, there is a crucial qualification: what lies beyond the boundary of the unknown is not a pure presence, but difference ‘itself ’, a difference which is invoked not in non-linguistic experience, but textually: ‘The Kierkegaardian gambit: to say by unsaying and unsay by saying. In writing. That is the deconstructive force of Kierkegaard’s indirect communication’ (Bigelow 1987: 3). Bigelow further clarifies this deconstructive apophaticism: For Kierkegaard language is always and everywhere coming fervently, furtively, futilely up against its fugitive other, yet this other to language is always and everywhere the origin of language . . . such is the nature of this thought that it can neither be said not shown—it can only be performed. And performed by a writing concerned with such phenomena that to write about them is to be deprived of them. (Bigelow 1987: 58)

He points to the non-objectification of love in Works of Love: love is not a unitary concept or object, but a work, one which can only take place in the interstices of time and difference. In this sense, ‘the divine is the transcendens pure and simple; it is never present, never immediate. Yet the divine enters into the breach—by withdrawing from it, but in such a way that by withdrawing it leaves a trace’ (Bigelow 1987: 97; cf. Žižek 2006: 80). Bigelow too notes the importance of repetition in linking this reading of

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transcendence to the deconstructive force of writing, and affirming that ‘Repetition can only be performed’ (Bigelow 1987: 163). I have referred to a kind of deconstructive apophaticism at work here. I have done so bearing in mind that Derrida himself resisted any simple equation of deconstruction with negative theology, since he argued that the latter is premissed on a desire for a God exalted beyond being, a ‘hyper-essentialism’, which reinstated metaphysical foundationalism. Nevertheless, we have seen how Agacinski, Taylor and Bigelow all emphasize alterity, the withdrawal of the other as an excess which cannot be comprehended, but which leaves its trace in language and thought. This other is not a purely simple and selfidentical God, but itself a temporal movement of difference; nevertheless, it is a kind of transcendence, a rupturing of immanence allied to Kierkegaardian notions of faith, individuality, the unknown, the paradox, indirect communication, and repetition. The centrality of this language about the other has been at the heart of attempts to reread Kierkegaard’s ethical and political thought. We have already mentioned Mark Dooley, who outlines a constructive politics of responsibility and hospitality to the other, which draws on Kierkegaard and Derrida’s critique of Hegelian totalization (Dooley 2001; cf. Jegstrup 1995). For Dooley, the concept of repetition is again key. It holds open not only texts but also political institutions, offering the possibility of a critical practice, which resists all forms of systematic closure and exclusion: Identity for both these thinkers does not presuppose autonomy, but implies that the self is ineluctably related to the other (both past and future). There can be responsibility and ethical commitments only when this alterity is affirmed as that which is noncontemporaneous with the present time of the self. In other words, justice amounts to expanding the borders in order to welcome the foreigner. (Dooley 2001: 227)

In the background to this lies Derrida’s own work, not least the reading of Fear and Trembling offered in The Gift of Death. In this work, Derrida attempts a reading ‘with and against’ Kierkegaard, in which the sacrificial dilemma faced by Abraham is generalized into a paradox facing all our ethical decisions and commitments to others. A relatively lengthy quotation gives a flavour of how Derrida proceeds: Duty or responsibility binds me to the other, to the other as other, and ties me in my absolute singularity to the other as other. God is the name of the absolute other as other and as unique (the God of Abraham defined as the one and unique). As soon as I enter into a relation with the absolute other, my absolute singularity enters into relation with his on the level of obligation and duty. I am responsible to the other as other, I answer to him and I answer for what I do before him. But of course, what binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of an absolute sacrifice. There are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility, a general and universal responsibility (what Kierkegaard calls the ethical order). I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], every one else is completely or wholly other. (Derrida 1995: 68)

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The name of God is subjected to an inescapable translation into a dispersed but no less singular otherness. This otherness is not merely a heuristic device or human projection (indeed it cannot be limited to human others as it disrupts any self-contained human essence), but nor is it objectively ‘locatable’. The dilemma of responsibility that ensues is not intended to paralyse decision, since it is the precondition for any real decision which is not merely the automatic application of a rule. In Kierkegaardian terms, the ‘conclusion of belief is no conclusion [Slutning] but a resolution [Beslutning]’ (SKS4: 283/PF: 84), for belief entails an act of freedom which corresponds, not to a static object, but to a new quality coming into existence which cannot be assimilated to necessity or reduced to a reflection of the self ’s own cognitive capacities. The language of otherness thus plays an important role in the reception of Kierkegaard in broadly postmodern, and more particularly deconstructive terms. Its use has allowed Kierkegaard’s texts to be opened up to the kind of less reverent but nevertheless productive readings envisaged by Garff. However, it is also problematic, both as an interpretative device for Kierkegaard and on its own merits. Caputo indicates something of this when he argues that Kierkegaard and Derrida have different understandings of decision. For Derrida, the central issue is the irreducible conflict of duties we experience when acting on our responsibility to the other. For Kierkegaard, however, the key dynamic is the suspension of the ethical in order to relate to the absolute. Kierkegaard’s path leads him to an affirmation of determinate Christian faith, the God of Abraham who becomes man in Jesus Christ. It is this particularity above all which accentuates the paradox and the responding passion of faith. Derrida, on the other hand, resists identification with determinate faith traditions in favour of a ‘religion without religion’, a (mad) logic of responsibility to the other which cannot be wholly narrated by any one perspective (Caputo 2004: 21–2). This analysis directs us back to the question of the teleology of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Does it drive the reader inexorably towards the choice between offence and submission in the face of the transcendent God uniquely (if paradoxically) revealed in the incarnation of Christ? Isn’t this the rock upon which postmodern readings come to grief? Is the ‘other’ of recent continental philosophy anything more than either a redescription of worldly ethical relationships, or else a dematerialized Gnostic fantasy of a wholly other that never appears in time? In which case, hasn’t it always missed the paradoxical core of Kierkegaardian faith?

III. Beyond Postmodernism In his brief treatment of Kierkegaard in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze does not attempt to paper over this crack. He notes at some length the close relationship between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s concepts of repetition. Both thinkers, he argues, ‘oppose repetition to all forms of generality’ (Deleuze 2004: 6) in which there is equivalence or substitutability between different instances. These forms of generality include natural

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law, moral law, habit, and memory. Whether through the infinite contestation of Job or the infinite resignation of Abraham, repetition concerns a singular suspension of the law (Deleuze 2004: 8). For Deleuze, it holds the promise of a genuine thinking of difference, a thinking that is not always subordinated to some given universal category. However, Deleuze is critical of what he sees as the self-contradiction in Kierkegaard’s account: ‘He can thus invite us to go beyond all aesthetic repetition, beyond irony and even humour, all the while painfully aware that he offers us only the aesthetic, ironic and humoristic image of such a going-beyond . . . Kierkegaard dreams of an alliance between a God and a self rediscovered’ (Deleuze 2004: 12). In other words, Kierkegaard seeks to recoup repetition and annul difference though an appeal to a transcendent other, in whose image the self is ultimately made (though one should point out that Kierkegaard himself does not conflate the ironic and the humorous, cf. Lippitt 2000). However, the means chosen always defeat the envisaged end. One might compare the reading offered by Peter Fenves in his analysis of the concept of ‘chatter’ in Kierkegaard’s work. It appears that, against the insubstantial secondhand talk of the present age, Kierkegaard is offering an authentic language of faith and responsibility. However, for Fenves, faith can only speak in the absence of its object, which makes it no more than hearsay: ‘The fate of “chatter” thus encircles the spread of faith’ (Fenves 1993: 15). Any transcendence which is located is negated as transcendence. It becomes merely a reflex of one’s self-conception (Fenves 1993: 116). A more positive interpretation of this reduction is offered by Don Cupitt, for whom Kierkegaard’s work tends towards a non-realist conception of God (at least in his work of the 1980s). God, in other words, becomes a subjective ideal rather than an objectively existing being: We do not have any objective knowledge of God, and Kierkegaard was emphatic that God’s existence cannot be proved; so that to suppose that our various images of God can be checked for their accuracy against an independently-known Original in order to harmonize them and remove their mutual inconsistencies is to fall into the absurd and impious fancies of objectifying dogmatic theology. For us, God is the various roles God plays in the formation of a Christian, and no more can or should be said. (Cupitt 2003: 158)

This statement certainly captures an aspect of the authorship, but it seemingly leaves the status of the paradox, and its resistance to subjective assimilation, unthought (Shakespeare 2001). Deleuze and Fenves also make challenging points, but they arguably rely upon isolating formal aspects of the authorship in order to set up their contradictions. For example: chatter and faith both occur in the absence of their object, therefore they cannot be qualitatively distinct. Or, Kierkegaard’s presentation of the transcendent uses aesthetic means, therefore it cannot refer to anything beyond its own image. These objections beg the question if Kierkegaard is precisely trying to show that there can be qualitative distinctions between modes of aesthetic presentation. In contrast, John Milbank notes the irony of a poststructuralist embrace of Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition, a concept ‘it can only repeat by way of an immense

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rupture, since he not only upheld, above all else, a transcendent God and the ethically constrained human subject, but reaffirmed them precisely in connection with this quasicategory’ (Milbank 1998: 135). For poststructuralists, Kierkegaard’s reference to God must either be reduced (e.g. to a reference to the human other, or a pure absence) or else dismissed as mere fideism. Milbank thus anticipates Quentin Meillassoux’s characterization of post-Kantian continental philosophy, which by restricting the object of knowledge to whatever can be correlated with a human subject, leaves reality in itself as a blank void upon which any and every fideistic fantasy may be projected (Meillassoux 2008: 28–49). The romance of the ‘other’ and the return to religion in postmodern philosophy is thus the thinly veneered version of fundamentalist resurgence. However, Milbank is not advocating a simple return to pre-critical metaphysics. He acknowledges the essentially aesthetic dimension of Kierkegaard’s writings, which show ‘the inescapability of both the decisionist and the textual aspects of subjectivity’ (Milbank 1998: 134). Kierkegaard rejects the Cartesian and idealist subject, standing in relation to an object, because both the object and the subject’s own reason is in flux. The true rift lies not between subject and reality, ‘but rather reality itself is incessantly fractured between the actual and the possible, and within this rift “subjectivity” comes to be/ becomes possible’ (Milbank 1998: 135). It follows that ‘Kierkegaard’s apparently “existential” categories are equally ontological categories’ (Milbank 1998: 137). Milbank’s postmodernism lies in his embrace of the fictional aspect of ontology itself: being is not merely ‘there’, but is fashioned, performed, and enacted. His Christian response is not a retreat to any kind of foundationalism, but the wager that there can be a performance or repetition, which enables us at once to establish a ‘stable self-inscription’ and so to find a ‘proper’ proportion between our performance and the eternal other of time (Milbank 1998: 137). This eternal is not an ideal nostalgically recalled, as in Greek reason, but is embodied in Christ’s particular incarnation. The subject ‘repeats’ Christ through the risk of its commitments and decisions. Only though these leaps can the self find a kind of continuity and sociality. Milbank’s analysis leads therefore to a reaffirmation of material immanence (as opposed to the merely detached contemplation of an aesthetic sublime) and of the Church, once rescued from the positivism, that sets them up as independent, selffounding entities. The aesthetic returns in the religious as an excessive vision, projecting a telos, which our actual performance always falls short of except through the gift of God (Milbank 1998: 147). Milbank thus seeks to preserve the transcendence of God and the particularity of Christ against their dissolution into sublime ‘otherness’, without resorting to a direct reading of Kierkegaard’s texts which fails to relate their fictional form to their ontological claims. Milbank’s reading undoubtedly provokes critical response itself (Shakespeare 2005). Does it depend upon a ‘vision’ of the Christ event and the ecclesial tradition which somehow escapes the internal fracturing of reality? Is all existence reduced to a flux to the extent that it is only formed through arbitrary acts of human and divine decision? After all, one of Kierkegaard’s key objections to Hegel was that the latter set logic itself in motion, confusing thought and being.

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Nevertheless, Milbank does lay down a necessary challenge for Kierkegaardian scholarship, especially as continental philosophy of religion’s love affair with the ‘other’ and with tropes of writing come under attack by new breeds of speculative thinking (such as that championed by Meillassoux). This presents a new opportunity to do the kind of work Milbank proposes, in which Kierkegaard’s existential and ontological commitments are understood in their profound interrelationship. Can Kierkegaard provoke us to construct an aesthetics of faith and an existential ontology, sensitive to the qualitative distinctions without which the paradox is dissolved? Roger Poole, who was influential in relating deconstruction to Kierkegaard’s work, states that ‘all the essays in Either-Or belong to the aesthetic, and in so far as they raise ethical issues, they do so from an aesthetic point of view’ (Poole 2004: 53). However, Poole also affirms that Kierkegaard ‘places himself beyond postmodernism’ because he insists that we each ‘have a right to our own subjective reality’ (Poole 2004: 53). This becomes a point of resistance to postmodern ‘objectivity’ (the determination of the self by linguistic and cultural forces, for example) and Nietzschean nihilism (Poole 2004: 54). Poole’s resistance is important. If I have been critical of the rather stereotypical dismissals of postmodernism in some quarters, it has not been so that a postmodern master discourse can occupy the ground of Kierkegaard scholarship unchallenged. The potential to press the authorship into the service of culturally dominant ideas and narratives remains as tempting as ever. If postmodernity does proclaim the death of the grand narratives, it is not beyond resurrecting shibboleths of its own. Keeping open the gap between postmodernity and deconstruction is therefore an essential task. I say ‘task’ rather than a settled result, since deconstruction names an historical practice which has the potential both to descend into programmatic platitudes, and to keep alive our attention to the inescapable, if unthinkable, margins of any text. There is little doubt that the kind of interpretations explored in this chapter have fruitfully complicated debates about Kierkegaard’s irrationalism, individualism, and Christian orthodoxy. The deconstruction of binary oppositions allows us to trace the strange dynamics of Kierkegaard’s texts, with and against his apparent intentions. It can also invite us to deconstruct the unity of the ‘postmodern’ itself, not least when that term becomes a mask for celebrating the commodified flux of capital. In this context, ‘Kierkegaard’ continues to name a work that repeatedly resists the flattening and assimilating forces of the present age. It faces us with the critical paradox of thinking what is not thought, without sacrificing the world to a Big Other. Now postmodernity, the overturning of epochs, has itself become an epoch, the dynamism of this work may carry us elsewhere, into other such singular readings.

References Agacinski, Sylvia (1988). Aparté: Deaths and Conceptions of Søren Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida University Press). Bigelow, Pat (1987). Kierkegaard and the Problem of Writing (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press).

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Capel, Lee (1966). ‘Historical Introduction’ in Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (London: Collins). Caputo, John (1987). Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutical Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). ——– (1995). ‘Instants, Secrets and Singularities: Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida’, in Matuštik and Westphal (1995), 216–38. ——– (2004). ‘Either-Or, Undecidability, and Two Concepts of Irony: Kierkegaard and Derrida’ in Jegstrup (2004), 14–41. Cupitt, Don (2003). The Sea of Faith, 2nd edn. (London: SCM). Deleuze, Gilles (2004). Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum). Derrida, Jacques (1976). Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). ——– 1988). Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). ——– (1995). The Gift of Death (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Dooley, Mark (2001). The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press). Emmanuel, Steven (1989). ‘Kierkegaard on Doctrine: A Post-Modern Interpretation’, Religious Studies 25, 363–78. Evans, C. Stephen (1992). Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Fenves, Peter (1993). ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Garff, Joachim (1991). ‘The Eyes of Argus’ Kierkegaardiana 15, 29–54. ——– (2004). ‘ “The Esthetic Is Above All My Element” ’, in Jegstrup (2004), 59–70. ——– (2007). Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Jameson, Frederic (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso). Jegstrup, Elsebet (1995). ‘A Questioning of Justice: Kierkegaard, the Postmodern Critique and Political Theory’, Political Theory 23: 3, 425–51. ——– (ed.) (2004). The New Kierkegaard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Lippitt, John (2000). Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Mackey, Louis (1971). Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press). ——– (1986). Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press). ——– (1989). ‘Deconstructing the Self: Kierkegaard’s “Sickness Unto Death” ’ Anglican Theological Review 71, 153–65. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum). Milbank, John (1998). ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’, in Philip Blond (ed.) Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge), 131–56. Norris, Christopher (1984). ‘Fictions of Authority. Narrative and Viewpoint in Kierkegaard’s Writing’, The Deconstructive Turn (London: Methuen), 85–106. ——– (1989). ‘The Ethics of Reading and the Limits of Irony: Kierkegaard Among the Postmodernists’, Southern Humanities Review 23, 1–35.

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Pattison, George (1992). Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious (London: Macmillan). ——– (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (London: Routledge). Poole, Roger (1993). Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press). ——– (2004). ‘Reading Either-Or for the Very First Time’, in Jegstrup (2004), 42–58. Rudd, Anthony (1998). ‘Kierkegaard’s Critique of Pure Irony’, in Shakespeare, Steven and Pattison, George (eds.), Kierkegaard on Self and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 82–96. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1974). ‘Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal’, in Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon), 141–69. Shakespeare, Steven (1998). ‘Books About Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Liberating Rhetoric’, in Steven Shakespeare and George Pattison (eds.), Kierkegaard on Self and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 97–111. ——– (2001). Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (Aldershot: Ashgate). ——–(2005). ‘Better Well Hanged Than Ill Wed? Kierkegaard and Radical Orthodoxy’, in Wayne Hankey and Douglas Hedley (eds.), Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric and Truth (Aldershot: Ashgate), 133–48. Strawser, Michael (1997). Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard From Irony to Edification (New York: Fordham University Press). Taylor, Mark C. (1984). Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). ——– (1987). Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Tudvad, Peter (2007). ‘SAK—An Unscholarly Biography of Kierkegaard’, The Torch, http://www.faklen.dk/english/eng-tudvad07-01.php accessed 6/10/11. Walsh, Sylvia (1991). ‘Kierkegaard and Postmodernism’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 29, 113–22. ——– (1994). Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press). Žižek, Slavoj (2006). The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT press).

Suggested Reading Bertens, Hans (1995). The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge). ——– (2004). ‘A Rose By Any Other Name . . .’ in Jegstrup (ed.) (2004), 70–87. ——– (ed.) (2004). The New Kierkegaard (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Press). Bigelow (1987). Bøggild, Jacob (2004). ‘Revocated Trials: On the Indirect Communication in Two of Kierkegaard’s Early Religious Discourses’, in Jegstrup (ed.) (2004), 112–27. Caputo (1987). Derrida (1995). Dooley (2001). ——– (2004). ‘Kierkegaard and Derrida: Between Totality and Infinity’, in Jegstrup (2004), 199–213. Garff (2007). Jegstrup (2004). Lindbeck, George (1984). The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK).

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Mackey (1971). Matuštik, Martin and Westphal, Merold (eds.) (1995). Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Smyth, John Vignaux (1986). A Question of Eros: Irony in Sterne, Kierkegaard and Barthes (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press). Taylor, Mark C. (1980). Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). ——– (1987). ——– (1995). ‘Instants, Secrets and Singularities: Dealing Death in Kierkgaard and Derrida’, in Matuštik and Westphal, 216–38. Walsh (1991). Weston, Michael (1994). Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge).

chapter 25

K IER K EGA A R D, W IT TGENSTEI N, A N D THE W ITTGENSTEI N I A N TR A DITION A nthony R udd

I. Wittgenstein’s Relation to Kierkegaard Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) has often been described as the greatest—or at least, one of the greatest—philosophers of the twentieth century. He is certainly the central figure in the history of early or ‘classical’ analytic philosophy. A close reader of Frege when the latter was still virtually unknown, Wittgenstein became first a student of, and then a major influence on, Bertrand Russell. His early work, the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1921) was a crucial inspiration for both inter-war Anglo-American philosophical analysis and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle. And his later work, especially the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), which in part repudiated the teachings of the Tractatus, was of comparable importance for the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ that dominated the post-war British philosophical scene. Some of Wittgenstein’s students, such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Norman Malcolm, went on to become influential philosophers in their own right; they and others, such as Stanley Cavell, D. Z. Phillips, Peter Winch, Anthony Kenny, Peter Hacker, and Ilham Dilman have—in sometimes very different ways—maintained a continuing tradition of Wittgensteinian philosophy that has survived the demise of both Logical Positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Moreover, many eminent analytical philosophers who cannot be considered disciples of Wittgenstein have still found him a vital stimulus and an essential point of reference for their own work—e.g. Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke,

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Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, and Richard Rorty. Meanwhile, more and more selections from Wittgenstein’s vast Nachlass have been published over the years, and a quite unsurveyably vast secondary literature on Wittgenstein has now grown up. What, though, has all this to do with Kierkegaard? He seems to belong, not to the analytical tradition, but to its main rival in the twentieth century—the ‘continental’ philosophical tradition, or family of traditions (phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, postmodernism, etc.) and to religious thought. Neither his complex literary style, nor his ultimately religious aims, nor his central concern with existential issues, would seem to commend him to the mainstream of the analytic tradition, with its scientific self-image, studied impersonality of style, and generally secular orientation. But in recent decades there has been an increasing realization that, despite his historical centrality to the development of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein never really fitted in that tradition either. As his biographer Ray Monk puts it, ‘Wittgenstein’s tone [is] manifestly different from that in which most analytic philosophy is written. . . . To read anything by him is to see immediately that the spirit and personality expressed is greatly at odds with the spirit that informs, say, the work of Russell, Ryle, Quine and Ayer’ (Monk 2001: 4). It is also, I would add, to find a spirit that is not at all at odds with that in which Kierkegaard writes. So it should not come as too great a surprise that Wittgenstein had in fact read a good deal of Kierkegaard’s work, thought deeply about it and expressed great admiration for it. He once described Kierkegaard to a friend as ‘by far the most profound thinker of the last [i.e. the nineteenth] century’ (Drury 1984: 87) and told another that he had learned Danish so as to be able to read Kierkegaard in the original (see Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 22). Wittgenstein did not philosophize by commenting in any detail on the works of other philosophers, historical or contemporary, so it is not surprising that Kierkegaard is not mentioned in either the Tractatus or the Investigations. But there are a fair number of explicit references to him, and various allusions also, to be found in Wittgenstein’s notebooks, private diaries and letters, as well as in students’ notes of lectures and recollections of conversations with friends, subsequently published in memoirs of him. These make clear his enduring interest in and knowledge of Kierkegaard. According to Genia Schönbaumsfeld, who has carefully investigated Wittgenstein’s knowledge of Kierkegaard, ‘There is every reason to suppose that that Wittgenstein was introduced to the writings of Kierkegaard from a very early age.’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 13). He certainly read some Kierkegaard during and after World War One (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 14–17) and seems to have been reading or rereading him again in the 1930s (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 23, 24). As to which of Kierkegaard’s works Wittgenstein had read, Schönbaumsfeld claims that he ‘knew the Postscript well and greatly esteemed it’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 20) and also finds ‘textual evidence to support the claim that Wittgenstein read The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, and The Sickness Unto Death’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 24). He also seems to have been familiar with Practice in Christianity, perhaps the Attack on Christendom (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 24, 29–30) and maybe other works as well. Wittgenstein did, however, mention in a 1948 letter that he had never read Works of Love (Malcolm 1962: 75).

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Schönbaumsfeld’s research has, I think, shown that ‘Wittgenstein was an avid and admiring reader of Kierkegaard [and] that Kierkegaard keeps coming up time and again in almost all of Wittgenstein’s reflections on religious belief ’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 36). And, as she also notes, Wittgenstein’s reflections on religion ‘show such remarkable affinities with those of Kierkegaard that it is nigh on impossible not to speak of a direct influence—especially now that we know exactly how much Kierkegaard Wittgenstein actually read’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 36). I will look at Wittgenstein’s Kierkegaardian philosophy of religion later—but first I want to explore the philosophical commonalities between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in more general terms, and look at what some would-be Wittgensteinian philosophers have made of them.

II. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein as Post-Kantian Philosophers Perhaps the most useful brief way to describe what Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard have in common is to say that they were both post-Kantian philosophers. Neither was a Kantian in any narrow sense, but both were inheritors of Kant’s philosophical revolution, and both took up and developed Kant’s basic insights. I will treat these under three headings—The Critique of Metaphysics, The Primacy of Practice, and The Problem of Philosophical Communication.

The Critique of Metaphysics ‘Metaphysics’ is an extremely ambiguous word. Philosophers as wildly different from one another as Carnap, Heidegger, and Rorty have all denounced something they have called ‘metaphysics’, but they are not all denouncing the same thing. For our purposes it will be important to distinguish two senses of ‘metaphysics’. In the first sense, metaphysics is concerned with putative realities beyond the physical world, beyond what can be observed with the senses. In the second sense, metaphysics is the attempt to understand reality absolutely, as it is in itself, rather than as it appears from this or that limited perspective. It attempts to say how the world would look from an ‘absolute point of view’ (Williams 1978: 65–8, 245–9; 1985: 138–40) or a ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). It is important to note that one may embrace metaphysics in the former sense but not the latter—one may suppose that there are super-empirical realities, but that they are only accessible from a particular perspective (e.g. that of faith) and cannot be known absolutely. And one can be a metaphysician in the latter sense but not the former—if one supposes that what the absolute point of view discloses is a reality that is exclusively physical. (This view is indeed taken by many contemporary practitioners of ‘analytic metaphysics’.) Kant, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein all rejected metaphysics in the

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second sense, but Kant and Kierkegaard accepted it in the first sense, and, while Wittgenstein’s personal position is harder to pin down, I think he was certainly open to the possibility of metaphysics in the first sense. Kant’s critique of metaphysics is based on his claim that our minds are active in perception; they use and, indeed, necessarily have to use, certain categories (e.g. causality, substance) in order to make sense of our experience. (As well as fitting it into the ‘forms of intuition’—space and time.) But, Kant argues, this has two large consequences. Firstly, we can only know the world as we interpret it using our categories; we cannot experience it simply as it is ‘in itself ’. And secondly, although the categories have an essential role to play within experience (indeed, in making experience even possible for us) we have no right to suppose that they can yield determinate knowledge when applied beyond experience. This means that metaphysicians are under an illusion when they think that arguments using the categories can either give us knowledge of non-empirical realities, or show that there can be no such realities. In either case, they are claiming to know reality as it is absolutely, forgetting that the demonstrable validity of the categories is limited to their employment within our experience. Kierkegaard’s critique of metaphysics, though based on a less intricate epistemological analysis, is in broad agreement with Kant’s. For Kierkegaard, it is our finitude that prevents us from seeing things as an infinite intellect (God’s) would see them. This means that we cannot think of reality absolutely, as a ‘system’. ‘Existence itself is a system—for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit’ (SKS7: 114/CUP1: 118). (I should say that I am drawing largely on the Postscript here and am assuming that in it Climacus does express Kierkegaard’s own views. As I will discuss further below, this is not uncontroversial—but I think it is true.) Kierkegaard/Climacus accepts the validity of thought that abstracts from aspects of our finite perspective on reality (as in mathematical or scientific thinking) but firmly rejects the ‘pure thinking’ that aspires to see the whole of reality sub specie aeterni (see e.g. SKS7: 277–80, 285–6/CUP1: 305–7, 313–14). What is distinctive about Kierkegaard’s critique of metaphysics, though, is its ethical dimension; the metaphysical attempt to ignore or deny one’s finitude is not a merely intellectual error, a mistake. It is, rather, a form of arrogance that will, Kierkegaard fears, lead the metaphysician to ignore as below his dignity, the personal or ‘existential’ issues of how to live well. Hence his jibes at the metaphysician who builds a great castle of speculation but actually lives in the doghouse next door (SKS11: 156–9/SUD: 43–4). This is, moreover, according to Kierkegaard, not only ethically dubious, but comical. Hence the critique of Hegel in Postscript in particular is full of jokes at the expense of would-be contributors to ‘the System’. This might seem entertaining but unfair, a substitution of ad hominem abuse for serious argument. But Kierkegaard’s point is deeply serious; we will have missed something philosophically important if we fail to see that there is something ludicrous (as well as hubristic) in a finite being trying to see the world absolutely, as God might see it (see Lippitt 2000a). Wittgenstein also takes metaphysics to be more than just an intellectual error. He once remarked in a lecture that ‘I am in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another. I am honestly disgusted with the other’ (Wittgenstein

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1966: 28). But what is most distinctive about his critique of metaphysics is his focus on issues of meaning. Here he goes beyond Kant, who rejected the idea that metaphysical arguments could provide us with knowledge, but who still considered metaphysical claims to be meaningful. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein (at least on the face of it) offers a theory of language according to which all meaningful propositions can be analysed into contingent claims about the arrangement of basic facts, leaving no room for meaningful claims about necessity and value. So the book (almost) ends with the positivistic sounding remark: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science . . . and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. (Wittgenstein 1961: 6.53)

In his later work, Wittgenstein abandoned the Tractatus’ restrictive ‘picture theory’ of meaning (propositions as pictures of putative facts) and insisted on the flexibility and variety of language-use. But metaphysics is still rejected, on the ground that it takes words out of the contexts in which they are used—contexts in which their use is entwined with all sorts of practical and social actions and interactions—and supposes that they can then be used in an absolute, de-contextualized sense. When philosophers use a word—‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’,—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself; is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (Wittgenstein 1958: 116)

Although Wittgenstein’s strategy is more flexible and pragmatic than Kant’s, it is a clear descendant of Kant’s refusal to allow metaphysicians to abstract the categories from the context of organizing experience, in which they are at home—and also of Kierkegaard’s insistence on the need for a humble recognition of our finitude.

The Primacy of Practice While Kant rejected metaphysics as the quest for an absolute point of view, he was far from rejecting it in the sense of a belief in the reality of the super-sensible—of God, freedom, and immortality. The reality of none of these can be established by empirical observations or by theoretical reasoning (though neither can their unreality). But as moral agents, Kant argues, we must necessarily presume that they are all real. From the perspective of a detached, intellectual speculator, I cannot know about God or the soul. But from the perspective of moral agency, I must believe in them. (See the discussion of the ‘postulates of pure practical reason’ (Kant 1993: Book II, ch., II, sects. IV and V).) Hence Kant’s famous remark that he was limiting knowledge to make room for faith (Kant 1933: 29)—though, for him, an austerely rational faith. A similar basic structure can be

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found in Kierkegaard’s work, although, again, he doesn’t follow Kant in detail. But he does emphatically maintain the primacy of the ethical (or ‘existential’) perspective, and the conviction that it can lead us to truths that theoretical speculation can only be agnostic about—if it can make sense of them at all. For Kierkegaard, what is contrasted with theoretical speculation is a passionate, selfconcerned subjectivity. It is only from the perspective of someone asking with existential seriousness, such questions as ‘how shall I live?’ or ‘what can I hope for?’ that the answers to those questions, which ethics and religion offer, can really make sense. Here Kierkegaard/Climacus goes beyond simply pointing out that metaphysics cannot prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. The deeper problem is that the very attempt to prove God or the soul involves adopting a detached intellectual stance towards them, and that fundamentally distorts those concepts. God cannot be apprehended objectively since ‘God is a subject and hence only for subjectivity in inwardness’ (SKS7: 183/CUP1: 200). To apprehend a subject objectively is precisely not to apprehend that subject qua subject—which for Kierkegaard means (certainly in the case of God) not to apprehend the subject at all. (Incidentally, one need not suppose all those who have offered ‘proofs’ of God to have entirely missed this point. What matters may not be the form of words a philosopher uses, but the spirit in which they are used. For a fascinating interpretation of Aquinas’ Five Ways as guides for meditation—and therefore directed to ‘subjectivity in inwardness’—rather than as quasi-scientific proofs, see Ward 2002: 54–6.) Climacus uses a nice image to make the point in discussing ‘proofs’ of immortality. ‘It is like wanting to paint Mars in the armour that makes him invisible. The point is the invisibility, and, with immortality, the point is the subjectivity and the subjective individual’s subjective development’ (SKS7: 160/CUP1: 174). To ask about immortality objectively, dispassionately, is to ask it from a perspective from which the question really makes no sense. Wittgenstein’s early work, as noted above, seems to lead to the positivistic conclusion that we can only talk meaningfully about ‘propositions of natural science’. But the last pages of the Tractatus itself contain (far from dismissive) remarks about God, ‘the mystical’, good and evil, and the sense of life. For the early Wittgenstein such matters cannot be addressed in literally meaningful language and yet the attempt to speak of them can ‘show’ something beyond the ability of literal language to state. ‘There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (Wittgenstein 1961: 6.522). Hence the Tractatus closes, not with a dismissal of the supersensible, but with a sort of negative theology. And a large part of the point of this for Wittgenstein, was to prevent pseudo-scientific approaches to religion and ethics, which would treat God or the good as objects and thus, as Kierkegaard had warned, utterly misunderstand them. Clearly Kantian in inspiration as this line of thought is, Wittgenstein is really closer to both Kant and Kierkegaard in his later work, where the ‘primacy of practice’ plays a central role. In the Tractatus, language itself is seen in a detached, intellectualized way; its essence is representation, the ‘picturing’ of reality. But the later Wittgenstein rejects the ‘logical atomism’ of the Tractatus for what has sometimes been called ‘practical holism’

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(see Stern 1994: 106–8, 120–7). This approach is holistic since it insists that concepts can only be understood contextually, in terms of their relations to other concepts; it is practical since it focuses on the way concepts are used (‘language-games’) and the ways in which that usage is embedded in various forms of human activity (‘forms of life’). ‘What I actually want to say is that . . . it is not a matter of the words one uses or of what one is thinking when using them, but rather of the difference they make at various points in life . . . Practices give words their meanings’ (Wittgenstein 1977: III, #317). One should be careful not to make the mistake of supposing ‘practice’ to be a foundational notion for Wittgenstein; one that can be understood prior to that of meaning and in terms of which meaning can be defined. (Kripke’s much discussed commentary on Wittgenstein makes roughly this mistake: see Kripke 1980.) Meaning is tied to practice (taken in a very broad sense) but our practices themselves would be impossible without language, and are permeated with meaning. Here the ‘primacy of practice’ is given a more radical meaning than either Kant or Kierkegaard had done. For while they had contrasted theoretical or abstract thinking with ‘practical’ or ‘subjective’ thinking, the later Wittgenstein sees all thinking, all language-use, as a kind of practice. This much more flexible account of meaning enabled Wittgenstein to continue to stress the difference between scientific and ethico-religious discourse, while (as the Tractatus couldn’t) allowing the latter to be perfectly meaningful. To understand what is meant by ‘God’, we need to look at those religious practices in which the word ‘God’ is actually used. (Just as, in order to understand what a fraction is, or a molecule, we need to consider mathematical or scientific practices—what mathematicians and scientists do with those words.) Confusions arise when one supposes words to have inherent meanings apart from the contexts in which they are at home. So, to take one of Wittgenstein’s own examples, it makes perfectly good sense for a believer to say that the eye of God is upon him or her. But someone who took this expression out of context and then went on to ask what sort of eyebrows God had, would have lapsed into talking nonsense (Wittgenstein 1966: 71). Of course, philosophical confusions arising from the de-contextualization of terms like ‘God’ are usually more complex and difficult to unravel than that! But, according to Wittgenstein, comic examples like the ‘eyebrow’ one, do help us to see how much more serious and solemn confusions arise. We will look in more detail at Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion below, but we should recognize that he was as deeply concerned as Kant or Kierkegaard to defend the legitimacy of forms of thought other than the scientific—and to insist on their irreducible distinctness from scientific ways of thinking.

The Problem of Philosophical Communication Kant and those philosophers who have followed him in the ways described above have a particular problem to face, which concerns the status of their own philosophical work. It can be put as a dilemma. If one simply states that metaphysics is illegitimate, this is neither interesting nor likely to be persuasive. But if one argues that it is illegitimate by

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appealing to the nature of language, or thought, or the human condition, isn’t this itself a form of metaphysicsand the argument, therefore, self-refuting? (F. H. Bradley makes this point in defence of his metaphysics: see Bradley 1897: 1–2). Kant certainly doesn’t just assert the illegitimacy of metaphysics—his exposure of its supposed errors in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason is based on his previous account in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and ‘Analytic’ of how the mind works to acquire knowledge of the world. But, if he is to avoid the second horn of the dilemma, this account cannot itself be a metaphysical one in the opprobrious sense. Nor, however, can it be an exercise in empirical psychology, based on experiment and observation, for it is supposed to be necessarily presupposed by any such empirical investigation. So it must be something sui generis—a ‘transcendental’ inquiry, to use Kant’s term. That the relationship between the mind and the world has to be thought of in this special way—neither empirically nor metaphysically—is really central to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. As one of his most perceptive recent commentators, Sebastian Gardner, has put it: ‘Transcendental idealism . . . holds that cognition is subject to conditions that cannot themselves be cognised in the same sense in which objects are cognised’ (Gardner 1999: 304). Kant thus gives us ‘a perspectival picture of our cognitive situation’. By contrast, the opposite doctrine, ‘Transcendental Realism’, ‘tries to dissolve our perspective on reality into the structure of reality itself . . . it holds that there is nothing ultimately perspectival about our cognitive situation’ (Gardner 1999: 304). But although this insight is central for Kant, he has surprisingly little to say about the status of his own work—the conditions of possibility for his own transcendental inquiries. Similar problems face Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Kierkegaard is less concerned with showing that the relation between mind and world cannot be thought of as just another relation within the world, but he is deeply concerned to resist the temptation to treat subjectivity—the passionate relation of a person to the good (God)—as an object. This, for him, is ultimately a practical problem. He needs to write about subjectivity in a way that will encourage his readers to think passionately about their own subjectivities, rather than to ponder the intricacies of ‘Kierkegaard’s Theory of Subjectivity’. The point is not that subjectivity has no content for a theory to get hold of, but that the reality of my own subjectivity can only become manifest to me in a mood of serious self-concern— precisely what is lost when I enter the mood of detached intellectual curiosity. Furthermore, neither my subjectivity nor the good which is its telos is a remote or esoteric entity, discoverable only by specialists (scientific or metaphysical). They are there for me to see—if I want to see them, that is; and if I am willing to look in the right spirit. It is to encourage his readers to do so that Kierkegaard turns to ‘indirect communication’, deploying a wide range of literary devices—pseudonymity, irony, humour, storytelling, lyrical evocation, etc., as well as ‘straight’ philosophy. But none of these is magically guaranteed to succeed. No text can compel its reader to read it in the right way. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is probably the most dramatic illustration of the antimetaphysician’s problem. We have noted above that he recognizes that its theory of meaning (which allows only for the statement of contingent possible facts) excludes ethical and religious beliefs, which are then reinstated under the dubious heading of

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what can be shown but not said. But the Tractatus gives a similar precarious status to logic—the logical form of language makes itself manifest in the logical form of all language; it cannot (properly) be presented directly. And finally, the theory of meaning that has these consequences also has to rule itself out as literally meaningless. If one can only speak of contingencies in the world, one cannot talk of the (necessary) relation of language to the world, even if that too, can ‘make itself manifest’: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way; anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright. (Wittgenstein 1961: 6.54)

In his later work, Wittgenstein abandons the theory of meaning that has these drastic consequences and tries to avoid making general theoretical claims, concentrating instead on the detailed unravelling of various particular philosophical confusions. He does however make a number of oracular pronouncements about this practice, for instance ‘Philosophy . . . leaves everything as it is . . . [it] neither explains nor deduces anything . . . The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 124, 126–7). But if we ask why we should think of the legitimate role of philosophy in this way, as a piecemeal activity of removing confusions, Wittgenstein is faced with the dilemma mentioned above. ‘Officially’ he comes perilously close to taking the first horn—simply asserting that this is how philosophers should proceed. But the rationale for his particular criticisms of metaphysics really seems to derive from the view of language and practice that I characterized above as ‘practical holism’. And even if one doesn’t want to call that a theory, it looks to be a (controversial) philosophical insight of some sort. Perhaps there is something Tractarian still going on here. The truth of ‘practical holism’ makes itself manifest in the detailed critical work that philosophy does, but cannot be stated abstractly as a ‘theory’ of language, for fear that it will be taken as some sort of empirical thesis—a kind of naturalistic pragmatism or sociological relativism. These are (as the subsequent history of commentary has shown) legitimate worries. But there remains an unresolved tension in Wittgenstein’s later work about its own status. (I try to say a little more about this issue in Rudd 2005a.)

III. Later Wittgensteinians on Kierkegaard Despite the important commonalities between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein’s high regard for Kierkegaard, there has been relatively little work done on comparing the two thinkers, especially when one considers the vast extent of the secondary literature on each of them. But the still continuing division between analytic and continental philosophy has tended to mean that those who write on one of the

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philosophers tend not to be so (or at all) well versed in the other. However, there have been a number of interesting comparative studies and, I think, a growing awareness of the value of such comparisons. In this section I will look at the ways in which some Wittgensteinian philosophers have tried to compare Wittgenstein’s and Kierkegaard’s methodologies and approaches to philosophy generally. I will look at issues more specific to the philosophy of religion in the following section. In 1969, Stanley Cavell, whose work has done much to show the relevance of Wittgenstein’s thought to wider cultural issues, published an essay on Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler. He uses his discussion of this text—not the most obviously ‘philosophical’ one in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre—to show, not only that Kierkegaard’s work is philosophical, but that his mode of philosophizing is markedly analogous to Wittgenstein’s (Cavell had already broached this theme in an earlier essay: see Cavell 1964). He sees Kierkegaard as concerned to regain clarity about a range of religious concepts, about which the age has become confused (Cavell 1969: 166). What the age is confused about is not so much the concepts in the abstract, but about how they can be used in the context of living a religious life. Cavell connects the two philosophers with the claim that ‘the Religious is a Kierkegaardian Stage of life; and I suggest it should be regarded as a Wittgensteinian “form of life” ’ (Cavell 1969: 172). What does this mean? Cavell cites Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 19) and comments, ‘When a form of life can no longer be imagined, its language can no longer be understood’ (Cavell 1969: 172). So to understand, for example, religious concepts is to understand how they work in their proper context (that of a religious life); if you can’t understand the context, you can’t make sense of the words. To speak religiously ‘is to speak from a particular perspective.’ And so, ‘to understand an utterance religiously you have to be able to share its perspective’ (Cavell 1969: 172). Note that Cavell does not say that religious concepts can only be understood by those who do share the religious perspective (this is the claim lambasted as ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’ in Nielsen 1967) but by those who can do so. You don’t have to be a believer to understand a religion, but you do need to understand what it would mean to be a believer—to give certain beliefs a place in one’s life. It is this insistence on understanding concepts in context—and on understanding that context, so to speak, from within—that is shared by Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. Cavell notes two further parallels between Wittgenstein’s and Kierkegaard’s ways of doing philosophy. Firstly, Kierkegaard often points out that what might seem to be empirical questions are really conceptual or ‘grammatical’ ones. By the ‘grammar’ of a term, Wittgenstein means the basic structure of its usage. Hence, ‘Grammar tells us what any kind of object is (theology as grammar)’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 373). It is part of the ‘grammar’, in this sense, of ‘God’ that it makes sense to talk of ‘the eye of God’, but not of His eyebrow. It is not just a mistake to think that God has eyebrows; someone who thinks that it is an open question whether or not He has them, would have shown a complete failure to grasp the concept of God. S/he wouldn’t even be doing theology badly; s/he wouldn’t be doing theology at all. Cavell’s point is that in making such claims as ‘Religion only conquers without force’ and ‘one must become a Christian’

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(cf. Cavell 1969: 169), Kierkegaard too is reminding us of the grammar of religious concepts in this sense. A second point of similarity between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard that Cavell notes is the ‘dialectical’ nature of their thinking. ‘Very generally, a dialectical examination of a concept will show how the meaning of that concept changes . . . as the context in which it is used changes’ (Cavell 1969: 169–70). This is nicely ambiguous. It may indicate that a word may mean quite different things in different contexts (e.g. ‘belief ’ in religious and in scientific contexts) and that we need to be careful not to confuse them. But it may also serve as a reminder that contexts like ‘religion’ or even ‘Christianity’, or ‘Lutheranism’ are not necessarily fixed and unchanging. As the context itself changes, so do the meanings of the terms embedded in that context. (Does ‘salvation’ mean for contemporary Christians, even self-consciously ‘fundamentalist’ ones, what it did for the apostles? Could it do?) There is a certain tension here between the idea that we can specify the grammar of a concept, perhaps laying down a set of rules for correct usage; and the idea that usage, and thus grammar, is itself vague and constantly shifting—a tension that can, I believe, be traced in much of Wittgenstein’s later work (see Rudd 2005a, 2005b). Cavell has subsequently made only brief and incidental references to Kierkegaard, but two philosophers much influenced by Cavell in general—James Conant and Stephen Mulhall—have developed a bold and striking interpretation of how both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein attempt to remove conceptual confusions. Unlike Cavell, they focus on supposed parallels between Kierkegaard and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, building on a reading of the Tractatus, developed by Conant and Cora Diamond, which is itself highly controversial. (See Diamond 1991: ch. 6. Conant 1989, 2000; Diamond 2000.) This ‘resolute’ reading denies the ‘standard’ interpretation of the work that I briefly summarized in Section II above. Conant and Diamond take very seriously the way the Tractatus ends by dismissing itself as ‘nonsense’. They deny the ‘standard’ idea that Wittgenstein has a notion of ‘significant nonsense’ (what can be ‘shown’, though not ‘said’) and insist that all nonsense is ‘garden variety’ nonsense—utterly lacking in significance of any kind. On this view, the Tractatus does not give us a theory, a philosophy of language; rather it offers a kind of therapy for our tendency to try and think metaphysically about the relation of language and world. It starts by carrying us along with it as it slips into nonsense, but then brings us up short at the end by forcing us to recognize the nonsensicality of the whole proceeding—thus, it is hoped, curing us of our desire to continue with metaphysics. Conant and Mulhall (Conant 1993, 1995; Mulhall 1994, see also Weston 1999) go on to interpret Kierkegaard’s Postscript by analogy with the Tractatus, seen in this way. (Mulhall extends this kind of interpretation to other works by Kierkegaard in Mulhall 1999 and 2001: part 3.) So the ‘revocation’ with which Climacus ends the book is taken to perform the same pulling-the-rug-from-under-us function as the concluding sections of the Tractatus. Climacus admits in effect that he has, self-refutingly, slipped into making a philosophy of religion, or of subjectivity, out of the attempt to show that there can be no such philosophy. Having seduced us into going along with him, he jolts us into a realization of our gullibility and leaves us, not with any doctrine, but a reminder of our susceptibility to nonsense that carries a delusive appearance of sense.

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This interpretation is undeniably ingenious, and it has the merit of taking very seriously what I have called above ‘the problem of philosophical communication’, and the idea of philosophy as an activity of dispelling confusion, rather than of propounding doctrines or theories. However, critics have raised formidable objections both to the Diamond–Conant reading of the Tractatus and to the Conant–Mulhall reading of the Postscript that it inspired. (See Hutto and Lippitt 1998; Hacker 2000; Lippitt 2000a: ch. 4, 2000b; Rudd 2000; and Schönbaumsfeld 2007: ch. 3.) The idea that a sophisticated work such as the Tractatus is nonsense in the same ‘plain’ sense as a random string of syllables certainly takes a lot of swallowing. Moreover, the rejection of the category of ‘significant nonsense’ seems to leave the early Wittgenstein no option but to accept the crude positivist view of all religious language as (mere) nonsense—which he certainly didn’t accept. And it is not clear why we should think that the ‘picture theory’ of meaning apparently advanced in the Tractatus is nonsense, anyway. Wittgenstein seemed to reach this conclusion by applying the standards laid down by the theory itself—but this presupposes the correctness of those standards, and therefore, contra Diamond and Conant, that the theory does ‘make manifest’ some deep truths about what does and does not make sense. Even if the proposed reading of the Tractatus was more plausible, it would still need to be shown that it provided a good model for reading the Postscript. Conant and Mulhall do not, in fact, think the whole Postscript is (intentionally) confused—they see it as starting with legitimate ‘grammatical’ remarks (in the sense of the later Wittgenstein) and only later slipping into incoherent theorizing. But this is incompatible with the claims they make about the ‘revocation’, which does revoke the whole book. For if it does that, and if even Mulhall and Conant don’t think the whole book is nonsense, then the revocation cannot be the general judgement of nonsensicality that they say it is. But if it isn’t, then the claim that the later parts of the Postscript are incoherent has to be based on a close reading of those particular sections—which most commentators have found to be perfectly intelligible, and even mostly correct, conceptual reminders. As D. Z. Phillips says, Conant thinks that we are brought to see that the work must be revoked philosophically. He claims that it ends up in self-defeating confusions and contradictions. But, viewed philosophically, this simply does not happen; rather the work provides philosophical insights about the grammar of religious belief that are similar to those which Wittgenstein provides, which is not surprising, given Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein. (Phillips 1999: 30)

Phillips himself certainly recognizes the similarities between Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s ways of philosophizing, and, in his Wittgenstein-inspired work on philosophy of religion has written quite extensively and sympathetically on Kierkegaard (see, e.g., Phillips 1970b). But in the book from which I quoted above, he is more concerned to stress the difference between the two thinkers. Kierkegaard was ‘a religious thinker, concerned with specific confusions concerning Christianity’ (Phillips 1999: 14). That is to say, Kierkegaard philosophizes when it is necessary, to serve the purposes of an essentially religious authorship. Wittgenstein, by contrast, is a philosopher first and

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foremost—his philosophical work is done for its own sake, not out of any ulterior motive. Phillips thinks that this contrast has been blurred by the widespread interpretation of (the later) Wittgenstein as concerned only with the piecemeal task of correcting particular conceptual confusions (although mostly different ones from those that interested Kierkegaard). But Phillips finds in Wittgenstein a broader, ‘contemplative’ conception of philosophy, one which is based in a wonder that there should be the varied forms of discourse that there are, and, most fundamentally, ‘at the possibility of there being sense in things at all’ (Phillips 1999: 39). For Wittgenstein, philosophy contemplates the variety of forms of life and discourse, striving for a ‘perspicuous overview’ of their grammars, and correcting the confusions that arise when one language-game is construed in terms appropriate to another. But it does not have any agenda; it makes no normative claims about the superiority or inferiority of one form of life to another. Kierkegaard, by contrast is essentially a partisan, concerned only to clear up the confusions that stand in the way of our being genuinely challenged by (genuine) Christianity. This reading of the relation between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard has attracted diametrically opposed responses. Schönbaumsfeld rejects Phillips’ claim of an asymmetry between the thinkers by denying that Kierkegaard is an ‘essentially religious’ author; denying that he uses philosophy merely as a means to a religious end; and by arguing that his work, too, consists in a wondering contemplation of ‘the possibility of discourse’ rather than advocacy of a religious point of view (Schönbaumsfeld 2007: 6–68, 68–74, 74–82). The essentially religious nature of Kierkegaard’s thinking seems to me hard to deny; however, pace both Phillips and Schönbaumsfeld, this does not mean that he is only occasionally and instrumentally a philosopher, or that his analysis of human existence may not be of great value and interest to thinkers who are not religious. Taking an opposite position to Schönbaumsfeld’s, I have argued elsewhere that Kierkegaard is not a contemplative philosopher in Phillips’s sense, and that Phillips’s ‘contemplative’ ideal is a form of the metaphysical illusion that it is possible to find a place to stand outside of all forms of life, one from which they can all be surveyed with a detached equanimity (see Rudd, 2005b). (This also makes me very sceptical about Phillips’s attribution of the contemplative ideal to Wittgenstein.) The problem from a Kierkegaardian perspective is that the ‘contemplative’ conception of philosophy seems to split the philosopher off from the existing human being, who unavoidably has normative commitments. And this splitting is something that Kierkegaard’s existential philosophizing has to reject.

IV. Wittgenstein’s Kierkegaardian Philosophy of Religion The aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that shows most fully the influence of Kierkegaard is, not surprisingly, his philosophy of religion. We noted above the mysticism of the Tractatus, but it is Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religion (see Wittgenstein

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1966, 1980, 1993)—together with applications to religion of his general philosophical principles—that have had most influence in this domain. The nature of Wittgenstein’s thought about religion is much disputed. One thing that is clear, however, is that he sharply distinguishes religious beliefs from scientific (or everyday factual) hypotheses: [O]ne would be reluctant to say: ‘These people rigorously hold the opinion that there will be a Last Judgement.’ ‘Opinion’ sounds queer . . . we don’t talk about hypothesis or about high probability. Nor about knowing. In religious discourse, we use such expressions as: ‘I believe that so and so will happen’, and use them differently to the way in which we use them in science. (Wittgenstein 1966: 59)

For many philosophers, it seems, if religious beliefs are not quasi-scientific hypotheses, then that leaves nothing else for them to be except expressions of attitude, feeling, or commitment. Hence the very widespread attribution to Wittgenstein of a ‘non-realist’ account of religion. According to Don Cupitt, non-realism ‘asks us to give up the old “objective” doctrine of God, and instead see talk about belief in God in terms of the way it leads us to see ourselves and shape our lives’ (Cupitt 1997: 83). So someone who says ‘God is love’ or ‘There will be a Last Judgement’ might seem to be stating facts about an entity or predicting the future, but what they are really doing, for the non-realist, is giving expression to, or making a commitment to, a certain attitude to life. In cruder or subtler forms, this position is regularly ascribed to Wittgenstein, both by those who, like Cupitt, sympathize with it, and by those (e.g. Hyman 2001) who don’t. The most prominent would-be Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion, D. Z. Phillips, is usually read as a non-realist about God, but he has rejected that label, insisting that realism and nonrealism are both confused attempts to put a philosophical gloss on first-order religious discourse, and that we must simply examine that discourse if we are to understand what the reality of God is supposed to amount to. (See e.g. Phillips 1993: 34–42.) This has not generally satisfied his critics, and, while his views about the reality of God are quite hard to interpret, Phillips’s treatment of religious language about death and immortality does seem more clearly non-realist. We do not ‘survive death’; the idea is incoherent. To talk of ‘eternal life’ is to talk about a way we can see our lives here and now, in the light of eternity (see Phillips 1970a.). It is worth noting, however, that Wittgenstein explicitly rejects at least the cruder kinds of non-realism. Considering a student’s suggestion that someone saying to a friend, ‘We might see each other after death’, merely ‘expressed an attitude’, Wittgenstein responds: ‘I would say, No, it isn’t the same as saying “I’m very fond of you”—and it may not be the same as saying anything else. It says what it says. Why should you be able to substitute anything else?’ (Wittgenstein 1966: 70–1). Phillips thinks that what Wittgenstein is (rightly) objecting to here is reductionism; the idea that religious beliefs express attitudes that are not themselves essentially religious—attitudes of personal affection, say, or of moral concern (see Phillips 1993: 48). But as Jamie Ferreira notes, Phillips’s critics think this does not go far enough; what they want to uphold is not merely the irreducibility of religious to other attitudes, but ‘a meaningful contrast between an irreducible dimension of human experience and a divine reality’ (Ferreira 1995: 96).

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Is there anything in Wittgenstein’s philosophy that would deny them that contrast? I don’t think there is. I have suggested above that we should see Wittgenstein as a philosopher in the tradition of Kant and Kierkegaard. Doing so can help free us from the assumption that his rejection of the idea that religious beliefs are quasi-scientific hypotheses must have committed him to some sort of expressivism (however subtle). As I noted above, the three philosophers share a recognition that as finite beings, we cannot know things absolutely, as they are ‘in themselves’ but, neither in religion nor elsewhere, do they suggest that there is nothing outside us to know. For Wittgenstein, grammar is autonomous, in that one cannot first survey the structure of extra-linguistic reality and then judge our language-games to be correct or incorrect according to whether or not they correspond to those extra-linguistic structures. Our languagegames, like Kant’s categories, come from us; they are not first read off from the structure of reality as it is in itself. But, also like the categories, they are our ways of coping with a reality that is not our creation. We cannot say how it is prior to any such ways of coping, but that does not mean that we have made it up. That ‘stone’ is a human concept does not mean that there are no stones. It is from a human cultural/linguistic perspective that the world shows up as containing stones, and beings with different natures and needs may not think of the world in that way. But when we (correctly) note the presence of stones around us, we are noting something about reality, not just about our language. Applying this insight to religion in particular; Felicity McCutcheon accepts that ‘I can’t think what the language refers to independently of the language I am thinking with. So, for any divine being I imagine, I am depending on some concept of a divine being.’ But, she rightly insists, ‘this does not mean . . . that my language can’t refer to a divine being’ (McCutcheon 2001: 111). What Wittgenstein adds to this broadly Kantian outlook is a greater pluralism. In particular, he questions the assumption that we know what it means for anything—minds, physical objects, numbers, values, God—to exist or be real, and then just have the task of considering whether they do in fact exist. But for Wittgenstein the sense that any assertion of existence may have must be derived from considering the language-games in which such assertions are made. So to understand what is meant by the claim that God exists, we need to look to religious practice. McCutcheon notes an important parallel with Wittgenstein’s treatment of sensations, such as pain (McCutcheon 2001: 110–11). Wittgenstein emphasizes the differences between the grammar of our language for sensations and our language for physical objects, and, accordingly, rejects the model of pains as ‘private objects’. At one time many commentators took this to mean that Wittgenstein had to be a sort of behaviourist—holding that there were really no such ‘inner states’ as pains, although the word ‘pain’ had a use in the language, being applied when people behaved in certain ways. This interpretation has now been almost universally abandoned. In denying that pains were (strange, private) objects, Wittgenstein was not denying the reality of pains. As he says, a pain ‘is not a something, but not a nothing either!’ (So not a thing, but not just unreal either.) He goes on: ‘We have only rejected the grammar that tries to force itself on us here’ (Wittgenstein 1958: 304). The point is that we are inclined to approach our language for mental states, or for God,

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with oversimplified, overgeneralized assumptions about what it is to be real. In particular, we tend to assume that to be real is to be a thing—a physical thing, or something like one. And so we either construe mental states or God as things—but mysterious, ethereal ones; or reject them as unreal as they can’t be experienced as things can. What Wittgenstein asks us to do is abandon the prior assumption on what it is to be real, and learn from how the relevant language-games actually work, what it is for God, or sensations, to be real (Wittgenstein 1958: 308). Their reality is not like that of physical objects, but it is an expression of philosophical prejudice to assume that this means that they are not real. In all this Wittgenstein is close to Kierkegaard, who insists that subjectivity cannot be understood objectively, by being fitted into its place in ‘the System’, but must be understood in its own terms, and who is careful to note that ‘God does not exist; he is eternal’ (SKS7: 303/CUP1: 332). For both philosophers, religious beliefs must be understood in their own terms—in their own context. (This does not, however, mean that either philosopher supposes that religious language-games are wholly self-contained and isolated from all others.) Putnam notes ‘what Wittgenstein (in company with Kierkegaard) is saying is this: that religious discourse can be understood in any depth only by understanding the form of life to which it belongs’ (Putnam 1992: 154). But the point is not just the holistic one that a term cannot be understood in isolation from its context. For, as Phillips and others, as well as Putnam, have rightly stressed, this context is not a purely intellectual or speculative one, but involves a whole way of living. So religious statements certainly do ‘express an attitude’ to life; and a religious belief is indeed ‘a passionate commitment to a system of reference’ so that ‘although it’s a belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 64). This fits nicely with Climacus’s description of Christianity as ‘not a doctrine but an existencecommunication’ (SKS7: 518/CUP1: 570). However, none of this means that there is no content to Christianity, or that religious beliefs are merely expressions of attitude. Indeed, religious discourse cannot be understood in any depth unless it is understood as intended to relate to what is ultimately real. Religions really do make ontological claims. But they cannot be understood if they are abstracted from the context of existential concern in which they are made. Wittgenstein’s closeness to, but also his divergence from, Kierkegaard emerges in his discussion of the relation of Christianity to history: Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe through thick and thin, which you can only do as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative; don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. There is nothing paradoxical about that! (Wittgenstein 1980: 32) Again, Queer as it sounds; the historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns ‘universal truths of reason’! Rather, because historical

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proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterising this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else. A believer’s relation to these narratives is neither the relation to historical truth (probability) nor yet that to a theory consisting of ‘truths of reason’. There is such a thing. (Wittgenstein 1980: 32)

Here Wittgenstein is clearly pondering the problem that Climacus addresses in the Fragments and Postscript; ‘Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness?’ (SKS4: 213/PF: title page) His response here is deeply influenced by Kierkegaard. Christianity does not depend on a scholarly sifting through of historical evidence, but nor is it just a statement of ‘eternal truths’ which we could have figured out for ourselves (‘Socratically’, through ‘recollection’ in Climacus’s extended sense of that term). It is an ‘existence-communication’ that needs to be seized on ‘lovingly’ and which we need to take up existentially, as a call to the imitation of Christ, to changing our lives. But Wittgenstein points out that a purely fictional narrative might play this role as well as a historical one. Here he severs the link between belief and history more radically than Kierkegaard (whether in his own persona or in that of either Climacus or AntiClimacus) was prepared to do. For Kierkegaard, as for orthodox Christianity generally, the historical truth of the Gospel narrative matters essentially, although there is a definite tension in Kierkegaard’s works between the concern for existential appropriation— for the believer to become contemporaneous with Christ, thus in a sense abolishing the gap which history necessarily creates—and the concern that what the believer relates to is something actually historical. Wittgenstein’s position need not be construed as a generally non-realist one; why should one not relate to the real God through a fictional narrative? (After all, Jesus’s own teaching took the form mainly of telling (fictional) stories—the parables.) But its emphasis on personal appropriation does make the historical element dispensable—while allowing that the narrative element may not be. The message of the Gospels may only be conveyable through the story that they tell, or perhaps through some other story; but it is not reducible to a set of abstract propositions or maxims. At one point, though, Wittgenstein does come closer to Kierkegaard on this issue: What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought—If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like every other man . . . in that case, he is a teacher like any other, and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation . . . [But] it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. (Wittgenstein 1980: 33)

Here is a striking echo of Climacus’s distinction between a teacher and a saviour. This willingness to at least consider the possibility of specific historical claims being religiously essential is certainly untypical of Wittgenstein. But perhaps this strikingly Kierkegaardian remark from Wittgenstein makes for an appropriate conclusion to this survey.

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References Bradley, F. H. (1887). Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Cavell, Stanley (1964). ‘Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy’, Daedalus 93, 946–74. ——– (1969). ‘Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation’, in S. Cavell, Must we Mean What we Say? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Conant, James (1989). ‘Must we Show What we Cannot Say?’, in R, Fleming and M. Payne (eds.), The Senses of Stanley Cavell (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press). ——– (1993). ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense’, in T. Cohen, P. Guyer, and H. Putnam (eds.), Pursuits of Reason (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press). ——– (1995). ‘Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors’, in Timonthy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief (Basingstoke: Macmillan). ——– (2000). ‘Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein’, in Crary, A. and Read, R. (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge). Cupitt, Don (1997). After God: The Future of Religion (New York: Basic Books). Diamond, Cora (1991). ‘Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus’, in Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). ——– (2000). ‘Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’, in Crary, Alice and Read, Rupert (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge). Drury, M. O’C. (1984). ‘Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein’, in R. Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ferreira, M. Jamie (1995). ‘Religion and “Really Believing”: Belief and the Real’ in Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief. (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Gardner, Sebastian (1999). Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge). Hacker, P. M. S. (2000). ‘Was He Trying to Whistle it?’, in Crary and Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge). Hutto, Daniel and Lippitt, John (1998). ‘Making Sense of Nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98: 3, 263–86. Hyman, John (2001). ‘The Gospel According to Wittgenstein’, in Robert L. Arrington and Mark Addis (eds.), Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge). Kant, Immanuel (1933). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan). ——– (1993). Critique of Practical Reason, trans L. White Beck (New York: Macmillan). Kripke, Saul (1980). Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell). Lippitt, John (2000a). Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan). ——– (2000b). ‘On Authority and Revocation’, in P. Houe, G. Marino, and S. Roussel (eds.), Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Soren Kierkegaard (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodolphi). Malcolm, Norman (1962). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press). McCutcheon, Felicity (2001). Religion Within the Limits of Language Alone (Aldershot: Ashgate).

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Monk, Ray (2001). ‘Philosophical Biography: The Very Idea’, in James C. Klagge (ed.), Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Mulhall, Stephen (1994). Faith and Reason (London: Duckworth). ——– (1999). ‘God’s Plagiarist: The Philosophical Fragments of Johannes Climacus’, Philosophical Investigations 22: 1, 1–34. ——– (2001). Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Nagel, Thomas (1986). The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Nielsen, Kai (1967). ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’, Philosophy 42, 191–209. Phillips, D. Z. (1970a). Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan). ——– (1970b). ‘Subjectivity and Religious Truth in Kierkegaard’, in Phillips (ed.), Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Schocken). ——– (1993). ‘On Really Believing’, Wittgenstein and Religion (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. ——–(1999). Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press). Putnam, Hilary (1992). Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Rudd, Anthony (2000). ‘On Straight and Crooked Readings: Why the Postscript does not SelfDestruct’, in P. Houe, G. Marino, and S. Roussel (eds.), Anthropology and Authority: Essays on Soren Kierkegaard (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodolphi). ——– (2005a). ‘Wittgenstein, Global Skepticism and the Primacy of Practice’, in D. MoyalSharrock and W. Brenner (eds.), Readings of Wittgenstein’s ‘On Certainty’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan). ——– (2005b). ‘Warming up the Cool Place: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and D. Z. Phillips’, Faith and Philosophy 22: 2, 127–43. Schönbaumsfeld, Genia (2007). A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Stern, David (1994). Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ward, Keith (2002). God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oxford, Oneworld Publications). Weston, Michael (1999). ‘Evading the Issue: The Strategy of Kierkegaard’s Postscript Philosophical Investigations 22: 1, 35–64. Williams, Bernard (1978). Descartes: the Project of Pure Inquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin). ——– (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958). Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell). ——– (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Pears and Brian McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). ——– (1966). Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs, ed. Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell). ——– (1969). On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell). ——– (1980). Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell). ——– (1977). Remarks on Colour, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle (Oxford: Blackwell). ——– (1993). ‘Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough’, in James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (eds.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett).

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Suggested Reading Arrington, R. and Addis, M. (2001). Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion (London: Routledge). Cavell (1969). Creegan, Charles (1989). Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method (London: Routledge). Ferreira (1995). Hodges, M. (2001). ‘Faith: Themes From Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’, in Arrington and Addis (2001). Monk, Ray (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. (New York: Macmillan/Free Press). Phillips (1993). Putnam (1992). chs. 7 and 8. Roberts, Robert C. (1995). ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and a Method of “Virtue Ethics” ’, in Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Schönbaumsfeld (2007). Wittgenstein (1958, 1961, 1966, 1969, 1980, 1993).

chapter 26

k ier k ega a r d a n d mor a l phil osoph y: som e r ecen t th em e s john l ippitt

I. Introduction In recent years, several Kierkegaard scholars have recognized intriguing links between his thought and themes in the work of several major recent and contemporary Anglophone moral philosophers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Harry Frankfurt, Iris Murdoch, and Charles Taylor. This chapter will briefly sketch some of these links. It will then focus in particular on connections that have been drawn between Kierkegaard and narrative-based views of practical identity and on one significant aspect of his contribution to the moral psychology of the virtues, his account of forgiveness. It should be noted at the outset that the explicit take-up of Kierkegaard by mainstream Anglophone moral philosophy has been quite minimal.1 Doubtless one reason for this is the reluctance of secular moral philosophy to engage with such an unapologetically Christian ethicist. The idea that any ethics, which does not reckon with the concept of sin, is ‘shipwrecked’ upon that concept (SKS4: 324/CA: 17) tends not to be received as good news in such circles. And where Kierkegaard is seen as deriding the attempts of philosophers to provide either religious or ethical truth (cf. Pattison 2002: 3), the reaction to Kierkegaard’s perceived shutting out of philosophy has often been for philosophy to shut out Kierkegaard. There are some exceptions. The virtue ethicist Christine Swanton has recently drawn appreciatively on what she presents as Kierkegaard’s attempt to delineate the ethical as 1 The engagement with Kierkegaard of figures in a broadly Wittgensteinian tradition, including those who have substantial ethical interests (such as Stanley Cavell and D. Z. Phillips) is addressed in Anthony Rudd’s chapter in this volume. See also Stewart 2012.

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‘properly objective’, a mean between forms of vice that are ‘hyperobjective’ (such as ‘Hegelianism’ as portrayed by Johannes Climacus) or ‘hypersubjective’ (such as the aestheticism of Either/Or’s ‘A’) (Swanton 2003: 184–5, 189). Prior to that, Iris Murdoch engaged seriously with Kierkegaard from at least the 1940s, an interest which reemerged in both the 1960s and the 1980s, in the writing of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Murdoch 1992; Martens 2012b). One finds a profusion of references to Kierkegaard in that text and in the essays collected as Existentialists and Mystics (1997). By and large, Murdoch tended to treat Kierkegaard in the context of existentialism and romanticism, and admired the attempt to provide ‘a philosophy one could live by’ (Murdoch 1970: 47). However, she clearly recognized the considerable differences between Kierkegaard and Sartre, the subject of her first philosophical book (Murdoch 1953), and often preferred Kierkegaard on the basis of this comparison (Martens 2012a). She seems to have had a particular fascination with Fear and Trembling (Martens 2012b), but ultimately rejected both Kierkegaard’s God and what she takes to be his qualitative separation of the religious sphere from the aesthetic and the ethical. Though he stops short of claiming a causal influence on Murdoch, Patrick Stokes is among those who have stressed the importance of moral vision (a famously Murdochian theme) in Kierkegaard. Stokes notes that both thinkers have an importantly ambivalent relation to the imagination. Sometimes it is presented as a regrettable, self-deceptive impediment to ethical life and duties, sometimes as necessary for ethical engagement (Stokes 2010a: 74–5; cf. Gouwens 1989, Ferreira 1991). However, in Taylor and Frankfurt, explicit references to Kierkegaard are few and far between. In his enormous Sources of the Self, Taylor refers to Kierkegaard on a mere five pages;2 in the even larger A Secular Age, Kierkegaard doesn’t warrant a single index entry (Taylor 1989, 2007). Yet a number of Kierkegaard scholars have argued for important affinities and connections, largely ‘missed’, between Kierkegaard’s thought and that of such figures. Consider Taylor (Frankfurt will appear later). In an essay that focuses on the connection that both Kierkegaard and Taylor see between selfhood and the good, Abrahim H. Khan lists a number of themes that unite the two thinkers. Both consider the self to be ‘essentially different from any object of scientific study, conceptualizing it in terms of a life-project whose success is not assured and which can easily go awry’ (Khan 2007: 162). Both see ‘inwardness’ as crucially important to understanding selfhood, and are influenced by St Augustine on this point. Relatedly, both consider the will and affirmation as crucial to becoming a (moral) self, but in a complex and nuanced way. And perhaps most crucially of all, both hold that modern selfhood cannot afford to ditch the idea of ‘the good’ as a moral telos(Khan 2007: 171) and propose a remedy that requires our subjectivity in appropriating it.3

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There are also a few references to Kierkegaard in Taylor’s work on Hegel (1975, 1979). Notwithstanding these affinities, Khan also emphasizes some key differences between the two thinkers, such as whether their conception of the good is (Taylor) or isn’t (Kierkegaard) historicized (see also Khan 2012). For an account that presents Taylor’s view of the self as an important corrective to Kierkegaard’s, see Mehl 2005. 3

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Perhaps the most important exception to the tendency for contemporary moral philosophy to overlook Kierkegaard has been the reading of him offered by Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre wrote on Kierkegaard in several early but widely read pieces in the 1960s: a chapter on existentialism in a history of philosophy; a chapter in his A Short History of Ethics; and an entry in what was for many years a standard reference work, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards (MacIntyre 1964, 1967a, 1967b). He offered a further account of Kierkegaard in After Virtue (MacIntyre 1985 [1981]), probably his best known and most influential work. As we shall see, MacIntyre’s reading of Kierkegaard has been subject to much criticism. Yet more than any of the figures named above, it is probably MacIntyre about whom the most detailed work has been done on affinities between his work and Kierkegaard’s.4 In recent years, discussion has moved beyond the mere complaint of Kierkegaardians that MacIntyre is one more in a long list of readers who get Kierkegaard ‘wrong’. A major contribution to the deepening of this debate has been the collection Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: essays on freedom, narrative and virtue (Davenport and Rudd 2001). In their introduction to this volume, Davenport and Rudd noted the burgeoning number of studies on Kierkegaard in the 1980s and 1990s, among philosophers as well as theologians, literary scholars, and others. Philosophers would often draw parallels between aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought and themes in contemporary moral philosophy (see e.g. Mooney 1996). Davenport and Rudd also noted that there had been, simultaneously, a ‘marked shift in the concerns of mainstream Anglo-American moral philosophy’ (Davenport and Rudd 2001: xvii) during this period, from relatively narrow debates about the nature of ethical language and of realism versus anti-realism in ethics to such concerns as the nature of human flourishing; what makes human life meaningful and purposeful; and the moral psychology of the virtues. As representatives of this expansion they counted Taylor, Frankfurt, Murdoch, Bernard Williams, and Martha Nussbaum, as well as MacIntyre. Over this period, they claim, moral philosophy has, ‘though without generally realizing it, become more Kierkegaardian’ (Davenport and Rudd 2001: xviii).

II. Kierkegaard and Macintyre; Narrative and Practical Identity There is now widespread agreement—including, to an extent, from the man himself (MacIntyre 2001)—that MacIntyre’s representation of Kierkegaard up to and including After Virtue was unfair. MacIntyre presented Kierkegaard as holding that the only justification for the move from the aesthetic sphere of existence to the ethical is ‘criterionless’

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Though on the Kierkegaard-Frankfurt connection, see Davenport 1995, 2001, 2012.

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choice (MacIntyre 1967a: 218). This means that the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical (or the ethical and the religious) is arbitrary: Judge William ‘uses ethical criteria to judge between the ethical and the aesthetic, while “A” uses aesthetic criteria. The argument of each depends upon a prior choice, and the prior choice settles what the conclusion of each’s argument will be’ (MacIntyre 1967a: 16). According to MacIntyre, Kierkegaard has clear preferences for the ethical over the aesthetic, and for the religious over both, but his position does not entitle him to justify this. In After Virtue, MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard was set in the context of a breathtakingly ambitious narrative of the failure of the Enlightenment attempt to give an independent rational justification of morality. MacIntyre presented Kierkegaard as a critical figure in this failure, Either/Or being ‘a book which is at once the outcome and the epitaph’ of this doomed ambition (MacIntyre 1985: 39). Kierkegaard was thus given a central role in MacIntyre’s history, according to which both our first-order moral discourse and moral philosophy itself are in ‘a state of grave disorder’ because we are operating with only ‘the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived’ (MacIntyre 1985: 2). Kierkegaard pioneers a radical individualism based on criterionless choice (anticipating Sartre), but inconsistently holds that some such choices are better than others. He is in the tradition of Kant, but with a crucial twist. They agree on their conception of morality, ‘but Kierkegaard inherits that conception together with an understanding that the project of giving a rational justification of morality has failed. Kant’s failure provided Kierkegaard with his starting point: the act of choice had to be called in to do the work that reason could not do’ (MacIntyre 1985: 47).5 All this provoked a chorus of voices that aimed to show what was wrong with this reading (e.g. Mehl 1986; Turner 1991; Rudd 1993: ch. 3; Davenport 1995; Marino 1996).6 Much of this scholarship aimed, in the process, to clarify what the idea of authentic ‘selfchoice’ in Either/Or actually amounted to. A view emerged that Kierkegaard’s position is actually far closer to MacIntyre’s than the latter realized, and that Kierkegaardian insights support some of MacIntyre’s key claims about tradition, virtue, and the human good (Davenport and Rudd 2001: xix). Among the claims made were the following. First, Either/Or is not about criterionless choice between the aesthetic and the ethical from a neutral standpoint outside both. Rather, the aesthetic is the default human position: to be outside the ethical is thus to be in the aesthetic. Second, that Judge William aims to give reasons to adopt the ethical that are supposed to be compelling to an aesthete. Third, those reasons are strikingly similar to those MacIntyre offers modernity to take on board a neo-Aristotelian view of ethics. Kierkegaard—like Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelianism central to MacIntyre’s project—possesses a teleological conception of freedom and a rich view of the virtues. And, like MacIntyre himself, he holds that a quest for ‘narrative unity’ is an important aspect of ethical selfhood (Rudd 2001, 2012a; Davenport 1995, 2001). 5

For a more detailed summary of MacIntyre’s account of Kierkegaard, see Rudd 2012b. These essays, together with others, mostly newly commissioned, can be found in Davenport and Rudd 2001. 6

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Rudd, for instance, claimed that the argument for the ethical life in Either/Or is effectively the same as that which MacIntyre gives for his narrative conception of the self in chapter 15 of After Virtue (Rudd 2001: 139).7 Rudd argued that the reason that A’s life constitutes despair is that it has no ‘principle of unity’: in MacIntyrean terms, it ‘lacks a narrative structure’ (Rudd 2001: 138). What does this mean? On such an account, Judge William’s argument for the ethical is to be understood in terms of intelligibility. As Rudd put it, ‘Our lives make sense to us as long as we can tell ourselves an intelligible story about who we are and what we are doing. To lack such a narrative structure in one’s life is to lack any stable sense of personal identity, any sense of oneself as enduring through time as the same person, as one who can be the bearer of obligations and entitlements’ (Rudd 2001: 138–9). It is this that aesthetes lack. The ethicist also realizes that the projects and commitments on which such a life depends ‘are themselves socially defined, and require engagement with— though not uncritical acceptance of—the traditions which give that society its sense of identity and coherence’ (Rudd 2001: 139). This focus on intelligibility is very much in the spirit of MacIntyre, who had argued that the concept of an intelligible action is more fundamental than that of an action as such (unintelligible actions being ‘failed candidates for the status of intelligible action’ (MacIntyre 1985: 209)). MacIntyre’s general point—against a widespread scientistic tendency—was that agents and actions cannot be understood atomistically. For me to understand your actions and intentions, I must locate them in a temporal, social, and teleological context, rather than viewing them as unconnected, isolated events. An apparently unintelligible action can become intelligible by ‘finding its place in a narrative’ (MacIntyre 1985: 210). MacIntyre’s memorable example of this was a young man who approaches a stranger at a bus stop and says: ‘The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus’. This apparently unintelligible action—what was the young man’s purpose in uttering this sentence?—becomes intelligible once we realize, for instance, that he has mistaken the stranger for someone who approached him in the library earlier and asked him if by chance he knew the Latin name of this particular bird. As regards Either/Or, the argument of commentators like Rudd is that we share the desire that our lives be coherent narratives, and that A’s problem is that he fails this test. MacIntyre himself contributed an interesting response to the essays in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, making some important concessions, revoking some of his earlier criticisms of Kierkegaard, and recognizing that Kierkegaard does operate with a teleological view of human nature (MacIntyre 2001: 344). However, he denied that Kierkegaard holds the version of this view attributed to him by Davenport and Rudd, ‘that it is a central goal of human existence to find meaning and coherence in our lives’ (MacIntyre 2001: 344). Moreover, the ‘criterionless choice’ objection was now restated in different form. That there are good reasons for individuals to move from the aesthetic to the ethical, and not merely good-reasons-from-the-standpoint-of-the-ethical . . . is not in the least 7 In what seems to be a curious inconsistency with his criticisms of Either/Or, MacIntyre himself had hinted at this: see MacIntyre 1985: 242.

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inconsistent with the thesis that the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical is and can be made only by a criterionless choice. For to be in the aesthetic stage is to have attitudes and beliefs that disable one from evaluating and appreciating those reasons. One has to have already chosen oneself as an ethical subject in order to do so. So I reiterate the claim that, on Kierkegaard’s view, what can be retrospectively understood as rationally justifiable cannot be thus understood prospectively. (MacIntyre 2001: 344)

In other words, only once the move to the ethical has already been made can the reasons for that move be appreciated. So those reasons cannot be those which motivated the aesthete to make the move in the first place. Some Kierkegaard scholars have claimed both that Kierkegaard holds a narrativist conception of the self and that his work contains valuable resources for better understanding the normative dimensions of ‘narrative identity’. Thus the supposed centrality of narrative to Kierkegaard’s work has enabled such scholars to connect him with the ethical dimensions of what has become a major theme in personal identity theory over the last three decades.8 However, numerous criticisms of such claims have been made (see e.g. Lippitt 2005, 2007; Stokes 2010b). Drawing on critics of narrative within the personal identity literature (e.g. Lamarque 2004; Christman 2004; Strawson 2004), objections have been made to the adequacy of the term ‘narrative’ to do the work required of it. More significantly, it has been argued that Kierkegaard’s work itself brings into focus some serious questions about, and raises potential objections to, narrative identity. Among the overlapping objections that have been raised are the following: (1) The ‘triviality’ objection. Defenders of narrative accounts are not sufficiently clear about what constitutes the type of narrative that is said to make what Christine Korsgaard calls a person’s ‘practical identity’ (Korsgaard 1996). The relevant sense of the term ‘narrative’ must not be merely trivial, or the narrativist thesis becomes vacuous (cf. Strawson 2004: 439). (2) The ‘Life isn’t literature’ objection (cf. Ricoeur 1992, Lamarque 2004). The ‘whole life’ (to use MacIntyre’s phrase) of a human being cannot consist of a single unified story, since stories are human artifacts (e.g. novels or biographies). Their unity, such as it is, results from selecting among many possible details, ‘plot-developments’, and so on, in order to present one interpretation of a diachronic set of events. Placing my life in a particular ‘genre’ (cf. MacIntyre 1985: 211–13)—tragedy, say—may prevent me from seeing options open to me that can prevent its having to continue along that trajectory. (3) The ‘Selectivity and self-deception’ objection. There is an ever-present temptation to rationalize events or aspects of our lives that conflict with others, are less palatable to us, or that simply make less sense to us. Consequently, self-deception is a constant problem, such that any story we tell about ourselves (to others or to ourselves) is overwhelmingly likely to include convenient omissions, exaggerations, 8 For narrative accounts of selfhood see, for instance, Ricoeur 1992; Schechtman 1996, 2007; and Velleman 2006a.

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overly neat connections, and other misrepresentations of the truth (cf. objection (2)). Kierkegaard, being acutely aware of the dangers of self-deception, does not overlook this (cf. Turner 1991). (4) The ‘What makes this normative?’ objection. If practical identities must include narrative structure in order to be intelligible to their agents, then such ‘narrative unity’ is not an achievement for which we are normatively recommended or obligated to strive. Rather, it is merely a constitutive condition of our agency. (5) The ‘missing the adventure’ objection.9 A focus on ‘narrative unity’ exaggerates the degree of overall coherence that is good for us, potentially cutting us off from various kinds of novelty or tension that are both necessary and desirable for our development. Such a focus may blind us to the importance of appreciating a diversity of values, which may itself be a vital component of the subjective meaningfulness of a life. (Compare Philip Quinn, who against narrativist Kierkegaardians, suggested that we should ‘welcome plural values into our lives, risking the possibility of tragic conflict among them, and . . . manage the inevitable tensions as creatively and skilfully as we can’ (Quinn 2001: 333).) At the very least, we need to be told more about what kinds of ‘unity’ are important for a meaningful, flourishing life, and precisely why they are necessary.10 (6) The ‘death’ objection. Given our mortality, a person’s life cannot be a ‘complete’ story for him while he is living it. At best, it can only become the subject of a unified narrative for others after his death. (Even then, in the case of lives thus commemorated, a version of objection (3) will arise for biographers.) As noted, some of these objections arise from the critique of narrative theories of identity in the wider philosophical literature. But objections (4) and (5) are clearly relevant to the question of whether narrativist readings of Kierkegaard can help to explain what aesthetic agents, as distinct from ethical agents, have in common (and that might justify the transition to the ethical sphere). Two objections perhaps more explicitly rooted in Kierkegaard’s texts are: (7) The ‘not just A’ objection. The distinction between aesthetic and ethical selfhood is not adequately explained in terms of greater narrative unity, and the attempt to do so has typically focused only on A, ignoring the diversity of aesthetic ways of life to be found in Kierkegaard’s work. (The appeal to ‘narrative unity’ also tends to downplay the fact that Judge William’s argument for the ethical contains far more substantive normative content than such a phrase can capture (such as the importance of faith in God).) (8) The ‘4D’ objection. If the narrative unity of a whole life is a real structure, it is a four-dimensional entity that cannot be wholly present at any one time. Yet Kierkegaard’s work shows that there are important senses in which ‘self ’ apparently

9

For the origins of this phrase, see Diamond 1991. For a narrativist attempt to address this objection (and a version of objection (3)), see Rudd 2012a: ch. 8. 10

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refers to an entity that is fully present in the ‘now’: for example, when the self is making a deliberate and significant choice.11 In recent work, narrativist Kierkegaardians have aimed to answer some or all of these objections (Rudd 2007, 2008, 2012a; Davenport 2011, 2012). In response to the challenge for greater clarity about precisely what they were committed to in their use of both the terms ‘narrative’ itself and ‘narrative unity’ in particular, they have aimed to clarify, qualify, and in some senses revise their earlier positions. For instance, talk of one’s ‘whole life’ has been revised into talk about something like the general shape of the most important values in one’s life, while there has been an explicit distancing from MacIntyre’s use of literary narrative as a guide to human life. Rudd now acknowledges that the inextricably ethical nature of the ‘narrative unity’ with which the Judge confronts A had been downplayed in his earlier work (Rudd 2012a: 170). And one of the basic theses of Davenport’s new position (which he calls ‘narrative realism’) is the ‘incompleteness thesis’, which explicitly recognizes that even the best literary or biographical portrayals of lives ‘necessarily fall short of the infinite detail of significance in actual lived experience’ (Davenport 2011: 162). A key question raised by this debate concerns the degree of desirability of ‘narrative unity’ as a goal. In earlier work, Davenport in particular had drawn a parallel between Harry Frankfurt’s valorization of ‘wholeheartedness’ against ambivalence, and Kierkegaard’s valorization of ‘purity of heart’ against ‘doublemindedness’ in ‘An Occasional Discourse’ (the text commonly known as Purity of Heart). Davenport glossed his understanding of ‘wholeheartedness’ thus: Wholeheartedness . . . typically involves some readjustment of our different priorities, and sometimes the rejection of projects and ends incompatible with other commitments we find more important, until we have reinterpreted or refashioned our ground projects so that they are mutually reinforcing in spirit . . . and so that they can be pursued together . . . in one harmonious life. (Davenport 2001: 293)

To lack this was to lack ‘existential coherence’, and Davenport further claimed that ‘all mature human agents wholeheartedly will this sort of practical coherence in their life’ (Davenport 2001: 293). Critics complained about the level of generality at which such descriptions aim to operate, and presented several examples of ambivalence and wholeheartedness aimed to counter the suggestion that wholeheartedness necessarily trumps ambivalence (Lippitt 2007: 53–4). For instance, consider the ethical depth of a deeply torn, ambivalent woman trying conscientiously to decide whether it was right to go through with her wedding and a thoroughly ‘wholehearted’—indeed monomaniacal—career-obsessed lawyer prepared to subordinate all other goods—family, friends, and a broad range of interests—to the furtherance of his career. Davenport (following ‘An Occasional Discourse’), had made clear that by ‘unity’ he didn’t mean the single-minded devotion to one particular

11

For fuller accounts of objections 1–7, see Lippitt 2007. For objection 8, see Stokes 2010b, 2012.

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goal in relation to which all other goods are subservient. But he added that unity can consist in ‘the unity of a narrative with a wide range of diverse themes and subplots involving values that are incomparable or not ranked on any single objective scale’ (Davenport 2001: 320, my emphasis). But in precisely what is the ‘unity of a narrative’ supposed to consist? Davenport’s new way of conceiving narrative identity outlines five different levels of narrative unity, each of which is ‘necessary but not sufficient for the ones after it’ (Davenport 2011: 163). These are, briefly, as follows. Unity-0 is a pre-reflective recognition of ourselves as the same subject of consciousness over time. Unity-1 (the ‘unity of planning agency’) involves most of our actions being ‘nested in intentional chains moving out from shorter to longer term plans and thus as under a conscious control steered by teleological connections between past commitments and expectations about future options’ (Davenport 2011: 163). These allow the possibility of unity-2: ‘continuity of cares through willed devotion to ends, persons and ideals’. In other words, at this stage we are in the realm of ‘personal autonomy’ and higher-order volitions in Frankfurt’s sense: ‘commitments involving higher-order volitions actively sustain the agent’s projects and relationships over time’ (Davenport 2011: 163).12 Unity-3 amounts to a version of what Frankfurt calls ‘wholeheartedness’ (the opposite of which is ‘ambivalence’, understood as volitional fragmentation): (a) The agent is fully dedicated to the goals of each of her cares and (b) has no conflicting higher-order volitions; (c) the strong evaluations that ground her different cares are not in any essential conflict, and (d) she makes a reasonable effort to balance their pursuit and reduce pragmatic conflict between them within a single life, while (e) remaining open to learning new values and accepting criticism of her existing cares. (Davenport 2011: 163, my emphases)

Davenport’s account of wholeheartedness is stronger than Frankfurt’s in so far as he, like Kierkegaard, is explicitly committed to moral realism: ‘caring depends on what agents take to be objective values, and hence . . . unity of purpose requires coherence amongst these values’ (Davenport 2011: 163). Finally, there is unity-4, an ideal of ‘perfect harmony’ that ‘always impels us forward’ but that, in a concession to the ‘narratosceptic’ ‘death objection’, Davenport admits that we will never achieve (at least this side of death, such that here an eschatological faith in post-mortem survival is required) (Davenport 2011: 178). A major issue in this debate is how best to describe the kind of shaping of a life that virtually all critics recognize to be necessary to some extent. (The disagreement is about to what extent.13) This is where the ‘missing the adventure’ objection kicks in. Against 12

The reference to a higher-order volitional disposition is to my desires or cares about my desires or cares. For example, in Frankfurt’s famous example, an unwilling drug addict may want his next fix, but desperately not want to want his next fix. Having ‘second-order volitions’ is, for Frankfurt, essential to being a person (Frankfurt 1988). 13 On this point, see Marya Schechtman’s important distinction between weak, middle, and strong views of narrative (Schechtman 2007: 160–1).

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the Frankfurt-inspired concern with unity as wholeheartedness, Quinn had objected that too strong a concern with narrative unity brings the danger of simplifying by exclusion, both in the proclivity to tell stories about our past that are self-deceptive, and to ‘miss the adventure’ in our futures (a combination of objections (3) and (5) above (Quinn 2001: 331–4)). Davenport’s new version of unity-3 seems to be an attempt to recognize both the monomania worry (our career-obsessed lawyer, in d), and the ‘missing the adventure’ worry (in e). He acknowledges that ‘the importance of unity-3 does not imply that we should never risk instrumental difficulties due to plural cares; the value of wholeheartedness for a meaningful life only implies that we should not take such risks lightly or unnecessarily’ (Davenport 2012: 119). He further acknowledges: ‘There are also unusual circumstances in which the importance of openness to different values might itself justify tolerating, for a time, conflict among cares that may turn out to be essential conflict’ (Davenport 2012: 119). But while maintaining the ‘narrative unity’ terminology, this actually seems to give Quinn and other critics much of what they had asked for. Several questions arise about narrative unity-3. As before, note that this is a very abstract account and one might question whether it is adequate to address practical issues at the level of a lived life. What does it means to make a ‘reasonable effort’ to balance potentially competing cares, and what it is to ‘remain open’ to learning new values? Worries about self-deception re-emerge at this point, as we could so easily convince ourselves that we’ve done enough and listened enough. At this point, the debate about Kierkegaard and narrativism connects with his value as a moral psychologist of the virtues. Scholars on both sides of the above debate are at one in their desire to connect Kierkegaard with virtue theory. Davenport has made the interesting case that earnestness (Alvor) is Kierkegaard’s key proto-virtue (a quality the attainment of which is the ‘constitutive condition’ for the attainment of any of the higher virtues (Davenport 2001: 321)). He notes that Kierkegaard connects earnestness with such virtues as courage and patience, just as MacIntyre connects them with ‘constancy’ (Davenport 2001: 294; cf. MacIntyre 1985: 203, where Kierkegaard’s dictum that ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’ is approvingly quoted). I would suggest that Kierkegaard has a distinct contribution to make to contemporary virtue theory, given his valuable discussions of virtue-terms—such as hope, patience, and gratitude—that remain greatly under-discussed in standard ‘virtue ethics’.14 Any account of the moral psychology of the virtues accurately labelled Kierkegaardian would need to explore these virtues, not least in their distinctly Christian manifestations. In particular, it would need to explore forgiveness (in its Christian context), given the centrality of this to Kierkegaard’s thought.15 In the next two sections, I shall make two claims. First, that Kierkegaard has an interesting contribution to make to discussions of forgiveness in contemporary moral

14

See also C. Stephen Evans and Robert C. Roberts’s chapter in this volume, especially Section VI. As M. Jamie Ferreira suggests, ‘It could easily be argued that the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation are at the heart of the deliberations in the second series’ of Works of Love (Ferreira 2001: 169). For an account of the centrality of forgiveness in Kierkegaard’s thought more generally, see Podmore 2011. 15

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philosophy, as his Christian perspective raises an important challenge to what has been called the ‘victim’s prerogative’. And second, I shall aim to use forgiveness as a test case of a virtue-term16 the grammar of which sheds some further doubt on the unequivocal value of wholeheartedness.

III. Kierkegaard and the Moral Psychology of the Virtues: The Case of Forgiveness There can be little doubt about the importance of forgiveness (and related topics such as apology, atonement for wrongdoing, and reconciliation) in recent moral and political life, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission being one of the most prominent examples (Tutu 1999). Kierkegaard’s popular reputation as the ‘melancholy Dane’—one obsessed with anxiety, despair and sin—can easily obscure the importance of forgiveness in his thought. Though it is discussed in several places, I focus here on its role as the third and ‘most notable’ (SKS9: 292/WL: 294) of three ways in which ‘love hides a multitude of sins’ that it ‘cannot avoid seeing or hearing’ in the Works of Love discourse of that name (SKS9: 286/WL: 289). Our discussion will be based around both one’s ability to forgive others and oneself, and the significance for both of accepting oneself as being forgiven by God. It is possible to perform both kinds of forgiveness with indecent haste. The endlessly betrayed spouse who always readily forgives their partner’s adultery strikes us as lacking proper self-respect. And we sometimes seem to let ourselves off the hook too easily. As Charles Griswold puts it, self-forgiveness ‘all too easily degenerates into self-interested condonation or excuse making’ (Griswold 2007: 122).Yet we should also be alive to the opposite problem. As Griswold also notes, it is possible to be too hard on oneself. And for an interesting reason: a person’s refusal to forgive herself might be problematic ethically as well as psychologically, betraying ‘an objectionable sort of pride in being outstandingly principled, in never buckling under the weight of one’s humanity’ (Griswold 2007: 122). Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus discusses this theme in The Sickness Unto Death, connecting it to the rejection of hope: ‘Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible—no, that he [the person manifesting the “despair of defiance”] does not want . . . he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell’ (SKS11: 185/SUD: 71). An obvious caveat to a discussion of interpersonal forgiveness or self-forgiveness is that strictly speaking, for Kierkegaard, only God can forgive sins. Anti-Climacus discusses ‘the sin of despairing of the forgiveness of sins’ (SKS11: 225–36/SUD: 113–24). 16 Roberts calls the virtue of forgiveness (as opposed to the process of forgiving), ‘forgivingness’. See Roberts 1995.

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In such a case, ‘it is almost as if [the sinner] walked right up to God and said, “No, there is no forgiveness of sins, it is impossible” ’ (SKS11: 226/SUD: 114). Such despair is ‘offended’, in the form either of weakness (‘which . . . does not dare to believe’ (SKS11: 225/SUD: 113)) or defiance (‘which . . . will not believe’ (SKS11: 225/SUD: 113)). From the perspective of ‘human understanding’, this is unsurprising: only ‘spiritlessness’ would fail to be offended by the claim that sins can be forgiven (SKS11: 227–8/SUD: 116). The ability to forgive sin is a ‘chasmal qualitative abyss’ (SKS11: 233/SUD: 122) between God and humanity. And yet the importance of accepting that God can forgive one’s sins is stressed: this offensive claim ‘shall be believed’ (SKS11: 228/SUD: 116). Does this mean that self-forgiveness is impossible? Apparently not: Kierkegaard does speak of self-forgiveness. In an 1850 journal entry, he makes a version of Griswold’s point in theological terms. Discussing a Catholic convert to Lutheranism who became convinced that he had committed the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit and was therefore beyond the reach of divine mercy, he observes: ‘Perhaps the sin against the Holy Spirit was rather the pride with which he would not forgive himself. There is also a severity in condemning oneself and not wanting to hear about grace which is nothing but sin’ (SKS23 NB15:94 [JP4: 4029]; my emphasis). More generally, Kierkegaard also implies that precisely because we have been forgiven, we should accept such forgiveness. Consider an 1847 journal entry: A man rests in the forgiveness of sins when the thought of God does not remind him of the sin but that it is forgiven, when the past is not a memory of how much he trespassed but of how much he has been forgiven. (SKS20/KJN4: NB2:116 [JP2: 1209])

To fail to recognize and accept this forgiveness is a form of despair. And sometimes this acceptance of forgiveness will be indistinguishable from what we would colloquially call self-forgiveness. Relatedly, the refusal to forgive myself might count as the kind of disguised pride or hubris referred to above. Similarly, for Kierkegaard, our having been forgiven means that we must be prepared to forgive others: ‘God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you’ (SKS9: 373/WL: 380; cf. Matthew 6:14–15). But what is the nature of forgiveness, for Kierkegaard? He initially seems to say that forgiveness wipes out the relevant sin, wiping the slate clean: ‘Forgiveness removes what cannot be denied to be sin’; ‘forgiveness takes the forgiven sin away’ (SKS9: 292/WL: 294, my emphases). However, he adds that ‘only love has sufficient dexterity to take away the sin by means of forgiveness’ (SKS9: 293/WL: 295). The overall impression of this discussion is that forgiveness is more of a gift than a case of ‘wiping the slate clean’ in recognition of debts repaid. But Kierkegaard also uses a variety of other images, not obviously compatible. He sometimes conflates forgiving with forgetting (SKS21/KJN5: NB6:26 [JP2: 1217]) and uses the Old Testament image of sin as being ‘hidden behind [God’s] back’ (SKS9: 293/WL: 295–6; cf. Isaiah 38:17). The overall impression here is of a wilful

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refusal on the part of the one who loves to see the sin. But sins that are ‘hidden’ or ‘not seen’ are still there. So is it really the case that forgiveness takes away sin? If so, in what sense? Andrew Burgess suggests that Kierkegaard’s position can be understood in terms of Luther’s formula that the Christian is simul justus et peccator: ‘at the same time justified and a sinner’ (Burgess 1999). Does divine forgiveness take away sin? Yes, in the sense that God totally forgives sin. No, in the sense that this does not mean that the slate is entirely ‘wiped clean’: the consequences of sin remain. An 1846 journal entry, focusing on guilt, sheds light on this position: Forgiveness of sins cannot be such that God by a single stroke, as it were, erases all guilt (Skyld), abrogates all its consequences (Følge). Such a craving is only a worldly desire which does not really know what guilt is. It is only the guilt which is forgiven; more than this the forgiveness of sins is not. It does not mean to become another person in more fortunate circumstances, but it does mean to become another person in the reassuring consciousness that the guilt is forgiven even if the consequences of guilt remain. (SKS27: 12 [JP2: 1205], my emphasis)17

As we shall shortly see, this idea—that even the total forgiveness of my sins by God does not wipe out the consequences—has an important implication for how we are to think about the psychology of forgiveness. Griswold, for instance, suggests that: ‘A moral case of self-forgiveness . . . does not assume that self-reproach is always unjustified—on the contrary, it assumes that it may be justified and then, for good reasons, cease to be’ (Griswold 2007: 127). But isn’t it possible that negative attitudes—one dimension of what Kierkegaard called ‘the consequences of guilt’—are still warranted even after one has taken responsibility for one’s wrongdoing? As Robin Dillon puts it, ‘Self-forgiveness would then involve overcoming self-reproach while recognizing that one still deserves it’ (Dillon 2001: 57, my emphasis). Perhaps this is part of what Luther’s simul justus et peccator formula is able to preserve. However, as Dillon also notes: To forswear warranted damning attitudes would seem to sacrifice integrity and selfrespect. For . . . those attitudes express one’s judgement, in light of standards that are important to one’s moral self-identity, that some central aspect of oneself is reprehensible. To overcome the attitudes would be to renounce the judgement and the standards that entail it. But when those standards are central to one’s normative selfidentity . . . renouncing them would be a failure to respect oneself and a sacrifice of moral integrity, which would give one additional grounds for self-condemnation. (Dillon 2001: 57–8)

So how can self-forgiveness do ethically significant work without sacrificing self-respect? Prima facie, given his focus on such themes as dying to the self, becoming as nothing before God, and so on, one might see Kierkegaard as being relatively unconcerned with 17 I take it that guilt and sin are more or less interchangeable here, as Kierkegaard seems to be talking about what is commonly called ‘objective guilt’ as opposed to feelings of guilt (‘subjective guilt’).

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self-respect. But closer investigation renders this view much more dubious. In what follows, I shall suggest there are interesting parallels between Kierkegaard and treatments of respect and self-respect in the Kantian tradition. I believe that Kierkegaard would see an important role for what Dillon calls ‘transformational self-forgiveness’. She argues that an adequate account of self-forgiveness requires an understanding of what kind of damaged self-respect needs to be restored (Dillon 2001: 65). Drawing on a well-known distinction by Stephen Darwall, she distinguishes between recognition and evaluative self-respect.18 The former centres on ‘respect for oneself as a being with the dignity that, on the Kantian view, persons as such have’ (Dillon 2001: 66) or, we could add, in the Christian tradition, the selfrespect that anyone is entitled to in virtue of being a ‘child of God’. Anti-Climacus stresses this in his parable of the mighty emperor who sends for a poor day-labourer whom he wants as a son-in-law. He spells out the implications thus: ‘Christianity teaches that . . . every single individual human being, no matter whether man, woman, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student or whatever . . . exists before God . . . is invited to live on the most intimate terms with God!’ (SKS11: 198–9/ SUD: 85). The second centres on what might prima facie appear to be a more dubious idea from a Kierkegaardian perspective: merit (‘based on the quality of our character and conduct, and which we earn or lose through what we do and become’ (Dillon 2001: 66)). Recognition self-respect is grounded in equal dignity, moral agency, and individuality. First, all persons have equal basic moral worth, which entitles each to respect from all (including oneself). Second, properly appreciating oneself as a moral agent includes taking seriously one’s responsibilities as a person, especially of manifesting the dignity of human personhood, such as by avoiding degrading thoughts, feelings, and acts. Third, individuality involves ‘appreciating the importance of being one’s own person by striving to live according to a conception of a life that defines and befits one as the particular person one is’ (Dillon 2001: 66, my emphasis). We can find agreement with all these ideas in Kierkegaard. The idea of the equality of all before God is a perennial theme in Works of Love and elsewhere, while the comments on agency resonate with the Kantian strains of that text. On dignity specifically, Kierkegaard’s remarks on the ‘inner glory’ (SKS9: 93/WL: 88) of all humans are apposite. The importance of individuality emerges when we are told that God gives in such a way that ‘the receiver acquires distinctiveness . . . so that the creature in relation to God does not become nothing even though it is taken from nothing and is nothing but becomes a distinctive individuality’ (SKS9: 270/WL: 271–2, my emphasis). This point is especially strong in ‘An Occasional Discourse’, where Kierkegaard claims that ‘at every person’s birth there comes into existence an eternal purpose for that person, for that person in particular. Faithfulness to oneself with respect to this is the highest thing a person can do, and as that most profound poet has said, “Worse

18

Darwall 1977 calls evaluative respect ‘appraisal’ respect.

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than self-love is self-contempt” .’ (SKS8: 198/UDVS: 93). It also relates to Anti-Climacus’s idea that: Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self is certainly angular, but that only means that it is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth, not that it is to utterly abandon being itself out of fear of men, or . . . not to dare to be itself in its more essential contingency. (SKS11: 149/SUD: 33)

In other words, as well as universal ethical duties, each of us has specific tasks and potential.19 Such thoughts already provide at least the beginning of a bridge between recognition self-respect and evaluative self-respect. We should not let a knee-jerk reaction against any talk of ‘merit’ prevent us from seeing that the latter too has an important value. For Dillon, the person who possesses it ‘stands back to reflect on herself, asking whether she has merit’ (Dillon 2001: 67). But note how she glosses such merit: ‘is she living congruently with her normative self-conception? . . . it matters to her that she be able to “bear her own survey” ’. (Dillon 2001: 67) In other words, this is not self-glorification or an objectionable kind of pride. Rather, Evaluative self-respect contains the judgment that one is or is becoming the kind of person one thinks one should be or wants to be, or more significantly, that one is not or is not in danger of becoming the sort of person one thinks one should not be or wants not to be. To have a normative self-conception is to stake oneself on how one stands in light of it, so self-evaluation and concern for evaluative self-respect are integral to it. The disposition to appraise and regulate oneself in its light is essential for moral self-development . . . and pursuit of one’s important goals. (Dillon 2001: 67, my emphasis)

For Kierkegaard, many such goals would be related to the unique, God-given tasks, and potentialities referred to above. Such concerns seem an integral part of the ‘selfexamination’ Kierkegaard values so highly, for him glossed in terms of looking at oneself ‘in the mirror of the Word’. If part of our moral self-identity is considering how we stand in light of our normative self-conception, then in this way, we see ourselves both as we think we are and as we think we should be. This recalls Judge William’s remarks about the ideal and actual self: The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself. (SKS3: 246–7/EOII: 259)

It also echoes the logic of taking Christ as the ‘pattern’ or ‘prototype’ (Forbillede) for one’s life: 19 On the connection between love as universal duty and particular calling, see Evans 2004: 170–9; see also John Davenport’s chapter in this volume.

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Christ came to the world with the purpose of saving the world, also with the purpose—this in turn is implicit in his first purpose—of being the prototype, of leaving footprints for the person who wanted to join him, who then might become an imitator. (SKS12: 231–2/PC: 238)

But how does this connect with self-forgiveness? Evaluative self-respect is crucial to the negative stance towards oneself (the idea that one doesn’t come up to scratch) which ‘transformative self-forgiveness’ (the ability to get beyond this) can overcome (Dillon 2001: 63). Another contemporary Kantian, Linda Radzik, offers a valuable account of forgiveness to which reconciliation between the affected parties is crucial, and a related account of self-forgiveness in which reconciliation with oneself plays a crucial role. What Radzik means by moral reconciliation in the latter context is that the wrongdoer ‘accepts that he is an agent with intrinsic moral value and equal to all other persons’ (Radzik 2009: 139), neither superior in moral status to those he has wronged nor rendered devoid of moral status by his having done wrong. (In other words, I’m a neighbour too.) He also ‘regains confidence in his own goodwill and his ability to follow the norms of morality’ (Radzik 2009: 139). This may be a lengthy and agonizing process, and we would quite reasonably be suspicious of one to whom it came too easily. But Kierkegaard goes to great lengths to stress this ability to trust in and hope for people,20 and an implication of the focus on equality is that this includes oneself. Yet as Kierkegaard’s position also enables us to see (witness the Justus et peccator discussion above), self-forgiveness does not necessarily exclude all self-reproach. As Dillon notes, in self-forgiveness, one can both value oneself enough to get on with life and yet rightly continue to carry a burden of guilt and shame. And as she adds, the closer to the core the violated standards, the more reason there is not to lay down that burden. But . . . to go on like this can be to have forgiven oneself. Selfforgiveness does not require extinguishing all self-reproach, for it is not really about the presence or absence of negative feelings and judgments; it’s about their power. Forgiving oneself means not that one no longer experiences self-reproach but that one is no longer in bondage to it, no longer controlled or crippled by a negative conception of oneself and the debilitating pain of it, no longer alienated from oneself, so that one can now live well enough. This is possible even if one retains a measure of clear-sighted self-reproach, overcoming it without eliminating it. (Dillon 2001: 83, my emphasis)

But when is a wrongdoer’s self-forgiveness appropriate? In particular, is the victim’s forgiveness of the offender a necessary prerequisite to self-forgiveness? Some thinkers—both religious and secular—have argued that only the victim has the right to forgive the wrongdoer, or—a more moderate view—that self-forgiveness requires the forgiveness of the victim before the wrongdoer can legitimately forgive himself. What difference does Kierkegaard’s Christian view of forgiveness make here?

20 See especially ‘Love believes all things’ (SKS9: 227–45/WL: 225–45) and ‘Love hopes all things’ (SKS9: 246–62/WL: 246–63).

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A Christian position such as Kierkegaard’s will surely place a different emphasis to a secular Kantian like Radzik. They will agree about the importance of respecting the victim’s view, of apology, atonement, making amends to and seeking reconciliation with, those one has wronged. But they will disagree on the victim’s authority. Radzik claims that the victim’s ‘forgiveness and readiness to reconcile should guide self-forgiveness and self-reconciliation’ (Radzik 2009: 149). She may be right about this, but to guide is not the same as to determine. I have not failed to respect you if I—respectfully!—disagree with your evaluation of whether the wrong I have done you warrants forgiveness. (It may appear crass and arrogant explicitly to point this out, but then self-forgiveness does not require me to do so.) In other words, if I have wronged you, I should care about your view in the sense that I consider your opinion to have considerable weight: indeed, probably more weight than that of a neutral observer. But it does not follow from this that my self-forgiveness is necessarily dependent upon, and thus can only rightly follow, your forgiving me. I may care about your opinion to such an extent that I hugely regret that you are unable to forgive me, and experience deep and prolonged sorrow and anguish over this. But I may still ultimately judge the incident to be an instance in which your withholding forgiveness is unreasonable (or even maliciously vengeful). In other words, Radzik’s case for the ‘victim’s prerogative’ (Radzik 2009: 145) is weaker when judged from a Christian standpoint. Christians should certainly avoid the response of Charles Colson, one of the chief figures in the Watergate cover-up who converted to Christianity whilst in prison. Asked whether he felt the need to apologize to those whose lives he had damaged, Colson replied ‘No, I have made my peace with God’ (Lipstadt in Wiesenthal 1998: 194). But, if God forgives me, then the importance of being forgiven by the wronged party cannot ultimately be determinative. As Hugh Pyper notes: ‘The New Testament’s model is consistently contrary to the common view that forgiveness has to be a transaction between one who asks forgiveness and the offended party’ (Pyper 2002: 12). From this perspective, one cannot share Radzik’s view that the victim ‘has the role of ratifying the wrongdoer’s atonement and determining whether her standing as a trustworthy member of the moral community (with regard to the moral issues in question) is to be restored. The victim deserves this role because of his epistemic and other forms of authority’ (Radzik 2009: 149). From a Christian point of view, Kierkegaard would surely argue, all this gives to the victim and the community a role that is ultimately God’s. If God forgives me, the refusal of my victims to do so—while it should certainly be taken seriously and may continue to occasion profound and genuine sorrow and regret on my part—should not prevent me from accepting divine forgiveness and extending to myself the self-forgiveness that this acceptance makes possible. (Though as noted, this self-forgiveness would be one that still has room for remorse and self-reproach.) That said, Radzik’s view that forgiveness is primarily about reconciliation, and that self-forgiveness is about achieving such reconciliation with oneself, is consistent with a Kierkegaardian perspective on forgiveness provided one recognizes the crucial role of sin and grace— oneself as a sinner and yet one whose sins have been forgiven—in allowing and legitimizing self-forgiveness.

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IV. Connecting Forgiveness and ‘Narrative Unity’ We are now in a position to consider the capacity for forgiveness as a test case of a virtueterm the grammar of which raises some serious questions about the value of ‘wholeheartedness’ as discussed in Section II. I shall argue that built into the very nature of an important variety of forgiveness—both of others and oneself—is an important ambivalence that a ‘wholeheartedness’ account cannot readily accommodate. Consider first the case of forgiveness of others, and two common metaphors for forgiveness: ‘wiping the slate clean’ and ‘turning the other cheek’. Christopher Bennett suggests that as well as ‘redemptive’ forgiveness—which can be earned by a wrongdoer doing enough (through apology, contrition, and making amends) to ‘wipe the slate clean’, there is also a ‘personal’ forgiveness which depends upon the forgiver rather than the wrongdoer (Bennett 2003). The latter can be granted without the wrongdoer’s prior repentance, perhaps in the hope of inspiring it. Such ‘turning the other cheek’—a version of the ‘forgiveness as gift’ picture we noted in Kierkegaard above—‘involves having sufficient [moral] confidence in your own status . . . that you are prepared to make yourself vulnerable to further insult in order to reach out to the wrongdoer in some way—for instance in the hope of encouraging his return to the moral community’ (Bennett 2003: 139). But, importantly, such forgiveness does not imply that the slate has been ‘wiped clean’, and can be offered in such a manner as ‘to make it clear that I do not regard [the wrongdoer] as vindicated or excused’, such that the relationship re-established is ‘tentative’, even ‘mistrustful’ (Bennett 2003: 141). (Consider again the case of forgiving a spouse their adultery.) The important point here is that there is a kind of forgiveness that continues to incorporate blame. It is possible to ‘put the wrong behind you’ without accepting that the slate has been ‘wiped clean’, as if the wrong had never occurred. Moreover, we need such a kind of forgiveness to address the valid concern (noted near the start of Section III) that it is possible to forgive too easily. My claim is that a distinction between ‘wholeheartedness’ and ‘ambivalence’ will not do justice to such a case. If we were forced to describe such a situation using one of these terms, it would be closer to ambivalence since, if we are to be true to the moral phenomenology of such cases, we would recognize that this will be something about which we are likely to have recurrent doubts. (Bennett recognizes this in his talk of ‘tentative’, ‘mistrustful’ relationships.) An analogous situation holds in the case of self-forgiveness. Akin to the forgiveness that retains blame is the self-forgiveness that includes continuing self-reproach. The person who, after a long internal struggle, has managed to forgive himself in the sense Dillon described cannot readily be described as ‘wholehearted’. Yet neither is he ‘ambivalent’ in the sense that troubles Frankfurt and Davenport: it is not that his will is so divided that his life is ultimately incoherent.

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Another example may shed light on this. In an important criticism of Frankfurt’s valorization of wholeheartedness, David Velleman (Velleman 2006b) discusses the case of Freud’s Rat Man, a case of ‘split personality’ resulting from a battle between love and hate for his father. Rather than experience these emotions as mixed, according to Freud, he repressed the hatred. This for Freud explains his symptoms, such as his repeatedly doing and undoing various actions (Freud 1955: 90). Velleman suggests that although it looks at first as if ambivalence is the problem, a closer look reveals that the problem was not ambivalence itself but rather his response to it, namely repressing the hatred and acknowledging only the love (Velleman 2006b: 343). What matters for our purposes is that this repression involved continual selfmisinterpretation (cf. objection (3) in Section II), such as euphemistically describing his regular thoughts of harm befalling his father as mere ‘trains of thought’ rather than hostile wishes (Freud 1955: 178). Consequently Velleman claims that he suffered not from the disease of ambivalence but from something like Frankfurt’s cure. What made him ill was his effort to dissociate himself from one of his emotions, which is just what Frankfurt prescribes for cases of ambivalence. (Velleman 2006b: 343)

In his reply, Frankfurt denies this, claiming that the Rat Man’s problem is that ‘he became ill because he tried to achieve dissociation through repression’, and that Frankfurt’s own prescription—‘taking a decisive stand against certain feelings’ (Frankfurt 2002: 126)—is wholly different. Frankfurtian ambivalence involves not just mixed feelings but a divided will. The Rat Man should have resolved which side he is on: ‘come to stand decisively against the hatred and behind the love’ (Frankfurt 2002: 126). But is there such a difference between Frankfurt’s recommendation and repression? As Velleman notes, Frankfurt expresses this in very strong terms: becoming wholehearted ‘involves a radical separation of the competing desires, one of which is not merely assigned a relatively less favoured position but extruded entirely as an outlaw’ (Frankfurt 1988: 170). Velleman also notes an important piece of folk wisdom about dealing with mixed emotions: when angry with someone we love, the first step towards dealing with our anger is to let it mingle with, and be modified by, our other emotions toward the same person. Isolating our hostility from our other feelings is a way of not dealing with it, of allowing it to remain undigested, a lasting source of inner strife and outer impulsiveness. (Velleman 2006b: 346)

This strategy is also surely part of the process of forgiveness of others and of oneself. In cases of self-forgiveness, such as we have described, the ‘wholeheartedness’ advice— ‘embrace the forgiveness; condemn (and try to expel) the blame’—is simplistic. Velleman’s recommendation to the Rat Man to accept himself as ambivalent means, in part, recognizing the presence of hostile as well as loving feelings towards his father. Frankfurt’s reply would doubtless be that this is not enough to count as ambivalent in his sense: his will would have to be divided, and provided he has resolved ‘once and for all’ to forgive himself, then he counts as wholehearted. But I can make no sense of such a ‘once and for all’ resolution in a concrete case like those we have been concerned with here. Those doubts that I will

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feel, in any actual such case of self-forgiveness conceived as a difficult moral task, are in significant part doubts about whether my (higher order) will to forgive myself is warranted. Thus the options seem to be, first, a case where my iron will to forgive myself comes down ruthlessly on any moments of self-doubt, which are judged as weaknesses, and ‘expelled as outlaws’. Or, second, where the will is in some sense divided (that is, where I sometimes doubt my higher-order resolution to forgive myself). The latter sounds more true to genuine cases of self-forgiveness as a moral task. But, contrary to the worries of the friends of wholeheartedness, such an internally torn will does not have to be debilitating. Dillon’s description is apt: ‘it is not really about the presence or absence of negative feelings and judgments; it’s about their power’. The first option—the iron will coming down hard on moments of self-doubt—sounds dangerously close to the attitude that was so damaging to the Rat Man. In short, what I am claiming is that ‘wholeheartedness’ is the wrong way to describe the ‘manageably torn’ nature most of us feel in such cases of forgiveness and selfforgiveness. ‘Ambivalent’ sounds like just the term we need (which is presumably why Dillon picks it). The point is that in such cases, in forgiving myself, I must continue to view that ‘inner opposition to the will’—to continue to blame myself—as mine, as part of me. If I don’t, for the reasons Dillon gave, I let myself down qua moral agent. Velleman brings out quite neatly the kind of concerns Quinn expressed in Kierkgaard After MacIntyre: The Rat Man chose to regard his hatred as foreign because he was afraid of letting it into his emotional life, even though doing so was his only chance of domesticating it. All of us are like the Rat Man at least to this extent, that we feel threatened by various emotions that would introduce conflict into our lives. We consequently wish that our commitments were not tinged with regret, that our projects were not fraught with doubts, that our loves were not complicated by hate. We wish . . . we could be wholehearted. (Velleman 2006b: 346, my emphasis)

But Velleman doubts this wish is healthy, in so far as we may simply be aiming to defend ourselves against our own emotions. ‘Hence our affinity for Frankfurt’s ideal may not indicate that he’s right about the constitution of the self; it may indicate no more than our own defensiveness.’ (Velleman 2006b: 346) Perhaps, then, willingness to live with a degree of paradox can be a better option. Living with paradoxes and creative tensions is surely a recurrent theme in Kierkegaard’s thought (cf. e.g. Ferreira 1991), and has as much claim to be considered Kierkegaardian as does a picture that places arguably too great a reliance on ‘purity of heart’.

V. Summary In this chapter, I have sketched aspects of the relationship between Kierkegaard and several recent and contemporary moral philosophers. Central importance has been given to Alasdair MacIntyre, and the debate that has followed his much-discussed critique of

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Kierkegaard before, in, and since, After Virtue. I have outlined aspects of the intriguing attempt of some Kierkegaard scholars to show connections between Kierkegaard’s work and contemporary work on ‘narrative identity’, while also outlining some objections to this project. But this disagreement should not be allowed to overshadow a wider agreement, for both sides of this debate are agreed on the value of Kierkegaard for work on the virtues. I have suggested that future work in this field needs to attend more closely to Kierkegaard’s distinctive contribution to this area, which would include exploring virtues (both standard and peculiarly Kierkegaardian) from the Christian tradition, rather than just those neo-Aristotelian virtues that have tended to dominate ‘virtue ethics’. In an attempt to contribute to this task, I have traced links between Kierkegaard’s account of forgiveness and self-forgiveness and discussions of these topics in some contemporary Kantian moral philosophers, aiming to show both how Kierkegaard’s position challenges the ‘victim’s prerogative’ and how questions about the ‘grammar’ of forgiveness and self-forgiveness connect us back to the ‘narrative unity’ debate. As MacIntyre put it, ‘May the conversation continue!’ (MacIntyre 2001: 355).21

References Bennett, Chistopher (2003). ‘Personal and Redemptive Forgiveness’, European Journal of Philosophy 11: 2, 127–44. Burgess, Andrew J. (1999). ‘Kierkegaard’s Concept of Redoubling and Luther’s Simul Justus’, in Robert L. Perkins, (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 39–55. Christman, John (2004). ‘Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood’, Metaphilosophy 35: 5, 695–713. Darwall, Stephen (1977). ‘Two Kinds of Respect’, Ethics 88: 1, 36–49. Davenport, John J. (1995). ‘The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: a Response to MacIntyre’, Southwest Philosophy Review 11, 73–108. ——– (2001). ‘Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre’, in Davenport and Rudd (eds.), Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue, 265–323. ——– (2011). ‘Life-Narrative and Death as the End of Freedom: Kierkegaard and Anticipatory Resoluteness’, in Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben (eds.), Kierkegaard and Death (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 160–83. ——– (2012). Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: from Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard (New York: Routledge). ——– and Rudd, Anthony (eds.) (2001). Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue (Chicago: Open Court). Diamond, Cora (1991). ‘Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 309–18. Dillon, Robin S. (2001). ‘Self-Forgiveness and Self-Respect’, Ethics 112: 1, 53–83.

21

I am very grateful for comments from John Davenport, George Pattison, Anthony Rudd, and Patrick Stokes on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Evans, C. Stephen (2004). Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ferreira, M. Jamie (1991). Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——– (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Frankfurt, Harry G. (1988). ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 11–25. ——– (2002). ‘Reply to J. David Velleman’, in Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (eds.), Contours of Agency: Essays on themes from Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 124–8. Freud, Sigmund (1955). ‘Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. x, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth). Gouwens, David J. (1989). Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of the Imagination (New York: Peter Lang). Griswold, Charles L. (2007). Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Khan, Abrahim H. (2007). ‘The Good and Modern Identity: Charles Taylor and Søren Kierkegaard’, in Roman Králik et al. (eds.), Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers, Acta Kierkegaardiana, vol. 2, 161–72. ——– (2012). ‘Charles Taylor: Taylor’s Affinity to Kierkegaard’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 11: Tome III, Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy—Anglophone Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate). Korsgaard, Christine (1996). The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lamarque, Peter (2004). ‘On Not Expecting Too Much from Narrative’, Mind and Language 19: 4, 393–408. Lippitt, John (2005). ‘Telling Tales: Johannes Climacus and “Narrative Unity” ’, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2005, 71–89. ——– (2007). ‘Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative’, Inquiry 50, 34–69. Macintyre, Alasdair (1964). ‘Existentialism’, in Daniel John O’Connor (ed.), A Critical History of Western Philosophy (New York: Free Press), 509–29. ——– (1967a). A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). ——– (1967b). ‘Kierkegaard’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (London: Macmillan), 336–40. ——– (1985). After Virtue, 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth). ——– (2001). ‘Once More on Kierkegaard’, in Davenport and Rudd (eds.), Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue, 339–55. Marino, Gordon D. (1996). ‘The Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics’, Kierkegaardiana 18, 49–64. Martens, Paul (2012a). ‘Iris Murdoch: Kierkegaard as Existentialist, Romantic, Hegelian, and Problematically Religious’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 11: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy (Tome III—Anglophone Philosophy) (Aldershot: Ashgate). ——– (2012b). ‘ “Can the Knight of Faith be Like an Inspector of Taxes?” The Black Prince as a Rendering of Fear and Trembling’, in Mark Luprecht (ed.), Iris Murdoch: Influence and Influences (Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press). Mehl, Peter J. (1986). ‘Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy’, Journal of Religious Ethics 14: 2, 247–78.

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Mehl, Peter J. (2005). Thinking Through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Mooney, Edward F. (1996). Selves in Discord and Resolve (New York: Routledge). Murdoch, Iris (1953). Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes & Bowes). ——– (1970). The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge). ——– (1992). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus). ——– (1997). Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin). Pattison, George (2002). Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, Theology (London: Routledge). Podmore, Simon D. (2011). Kierkegaard and the Self before God (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Pyper, Hugh S. (2002). ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable: Kierkegaard, Derrida and the Scandal of Forgiveness’, Kierkegaardiana 22, 7–23. Quinn, Philip L. (2001). ‘Unity and Disunity, Harmony and Discord: A Response to Davenport and Lillegard’, in Davenport and Rudd, Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue, 327–37. Radzik, Linda (2009). Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ricoeur, Paul (1992). Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Roberts, Robert C. (1995). ‘Forgivingness’, American Philosophical Quarterly 32, 289–306. Rudd, Anthony (1993). Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon). ——– (2001). ‘Reason in Ethics: MacIntyre and Kierkegaard’, in Davenport and Rudd, Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue, 131–50. ——– (2007). ‘Kierkegaard, MacIntyre and Narrative Unity: Reply to Lippitt’, Inquiry 50, 541–9. ——– (2008). ‘Reason in Ethics Revisited: Either/Or, “Criterionless Choice” and Narrative Unity’, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2008, 179–99. ——– (2012a). Self, Value and Narrative: A Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ——– (2012b). ‘Alasdair MacIntyre: A Continuing Conversation’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 11: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy (Tome III—Anglophone Philosophy) (Aldershot: Ashgate). Schectman, Marya (1996). The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). ——– (2007). ‘Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defence of the Narrative View’, in Daniel D. Hutto (ed.), Narrative and Understanding Persons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 155–78. Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2012). Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 11: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy (Tome III—Anglophone Philosophy) (Aldershot: Ashgate). Stokes, Patrick (2010a). Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision (London: Palgrave). ——– (2010b). ‘Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selfhood in Kierkegaard’, Inquiry 53: 4, 356–82. ——– (2012). ‘Is Narrative Identity Four-Dimensionalist?’, European Journal of Philosophy 20: s1, e86–e106.

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Strawson, Galen (2004). ‘Against Narrativity’ Ratio 17: 4, 428–52. Swanton, Christine (2003). Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Taylor, Charles (1975). Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (1979). Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). ——– (2007). A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Turner, Jeffrey S. (1991). ‘To Tell a Good Tale: Kierkegaardian Reflections on Moral Narrative and Moral Truth’, Man and World 24, 181–98. Tutu, Desmond (1999). No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider). Velleman, David J. (2006a).‘The Self as Narrator’, in Self to Self: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 203–23. ——– (2006b). ‘Identification and identity’, in his Self to Self: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 330–60.

Suggested Reading Davenport (2012). ——– and Rudd (eds.) (2001). Evans (2004). Ferreira (2001). Lippitt, John (2013). Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ——– (2007). Macintyre (1985, 2001). Roberts, Robert C. (1997). ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and a Method of “Virtue Ethics” ’, in Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 142–66. Rudd (2012a). Stewart (2012). Stokes (2010a). Tietjen, Mark A. (2010). ‘Kierkegaard and the Classical Virtue Tradition’, Faith and Philosophy 27: 2, 153–73.

chapter 27

k ier k ega a r d as theologi a n: a history of cou n terva ili ng i n ter pr etations l ee c. barrett

I. Introduction Kierkegaard has been hailed as one of the most significant theological writers of the modern era, often ranked with such luminaries as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth. However, the exact nature of that theological significance has been vigorously contested by his interpreters. Kierkegaard’s expositors have portrayed him as the precursor of almost the entire spectrum of modern theological movements from neo-orthodoxy to postmodern apophaticism. Sometimes Kierkegaard has been lauded as the anti-ecclesial champion of the autonomous religious individual, but at other times he has been praised as the defender of normative Christian orthodoxy and apostolic authority. Sometimes his writings have been read as a celebration of self-constructed religious subjectivity, and at other times as an apologetic for objective revelation and sovereign grace. His literature has been seen as the valorization of a criterionless fideism, as well as a reasoned argument for the superiority of the Christian way of life. According to some interpreters his goal was the clarification of the meaning of theological concepts, while according to others it was the exposé of the fatal instability of any comprehensive theological system. Still other commentators, less sympathetic to the theological enterprise, have even claimed that his work cannot support any theological reading at all, for his texts are nothing but ironic gestures, lacking the univocal meaning that doctrinal assertions require. As we shall see, this sheer variety of interpretation spawns the suspicion that each particular construal of Kierkegaard’s corpus may be nothing but a function of the particular author’s own theological predilections or phobias.

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This cacophony of interpretations is understandable, for if Kierkegaard was a theologian, he was a theologian of a very curious sort. His texts are so saturated with elusive images, shifts in authorial voice, fractured narratives, and structural disruptions that they frustrate the expectation that theological writing should present a logically ordered system of propositions that transparently refer to transcendent realities. If theology is supposed to be cohesive and clear, then Kierkegaard was a poor theologian indeed. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s corpus is saturated with the vocabulary of the Christian faith, and traditional doctrinal motifs are never far from the surface of his pages. For over a century and a half readers have been prodded by Kierkegaard’s works to wrestle more deeply with the significance of religion in general and Christianity in particular. His unconventional writing introduces a new way of doing theology as a battery of provocations. Unsurprisingly, provocations can produce many different responses. This essay will attempt to untangle the diverse and seemingly conflicting strands of theological appropriation, and will highlight certain perennial interpretive tendencies. As we shall see, debates about the nature of what could be called Kierkegaard’s theological method have informed and motivated debates about the substantive content of his theological claims. Differing understandings of what theological goal Kierkegaard was trying to pursue have provided the impetus for the divergent interpretations of his specific treatments of Christian doctrines and concepts. A central issue has been the relation of his analysis (or evocation) of subjectivity to his exposition of objective doctrinal teachings. This question is intimately related to traditional theological debates about the relation of nature and grace, as well as the relation of general revelation and special revelation. In general, the conversation has revolved around the question of whether his understanding of Christianity was governed by a philosophical anthropology independent of Christian theological convictions, or whether his attention to subjectivity was governed by an authoritative Christian conceptuality, or whether the two existed in some sort of dialectical tension. This issue is connected with the cognate question of whether, in his view, Socratic or general religious subjectivity, what Johannes Climacus calls ‘religiousness A’, logically or chronologically must precede Christian pathos, ‘religiousness B’. The possibility that his work suggests a sequential ordo salutis, with the achievement of authentic selfhood or ‘Socratic’ spirituality serving as the foundation for Christian faith, has been hotly debated. This, in turn, raises questions about the distinctiveness of Christian concepts. More radically, another debate has developed around the issue of whether his ironic rhetorical strategies are designed to deconstruct all theological positions, or whether they are intended to make it more likely that theological concepts will be appropriated with the passion that is essential for their meaningful use. These concerns frame the ways in which particular interpreters have construed his remarks about such traditional theological loci as the paradox of the Incarnation, the relation of faith and works, the relation of freedom and grace, the interaction of divine and human agencies, the relation of justification and sanctification, the connection of Christ as saviour

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to Christ as exemplar, the nature of Christian love, and the significance of the Christian community.

II. Kierkegaard as Radical Critic of Theology An early and recurrent strand of interpretation has regarded Kierkegaard as an exponent of the radical critique of Christian orthodoxy. Typically, these authors have identified Kierkegaard’s analysis of subjectivity as the key to his entire project. ‘Subjectivity’ here has been interpreted as a type of self-validating interiority, usually associated with self-constitution untrammelled by immediately given communal norms. Accordingly, Kierkegaard’s uncompromising critique of Christendom has been read as a rebellion against heteronymous traditionalism in the name of autonomous subjectivity. This trajectory, beginning with Georg Brandes in Denmark and popularized by Christoph Schempf in Germany, concludes that if Kierkegaard had pursued the logic of his own intellectual development to its terminus, he should have burst through the constraints of traditional Christian theology (Schulz 2009: 307–419; Tullberg 2009: 3–120). For Brandes, the Danish author and literary critic, Kierkegaard’s discovery of the centrality of the individual and his rejection of Christendom logically should have led to a break with orthodoxy (Brandes 1877). Sadly, however, Kierkegaard failed to free himself from the Christian doctrinal tradition. Schrempf, the German translator and editor of Kierkegaard’s works, agreed that the principle that ‘subjectivity is truth’ should have promoted scepticism about all doctrinal claims, particularly the conviction that Jesus was the incarnation of God (Schrempf 1907). These works eventually inspired the popular view of Kierkegaard as a Nietzschean rebel against closed authoritarian systems, a radical humanist whose thought should have pointed to the end of theology. In a markedly less anti-ecclesial way, the ‘death of God’ and ‘secular’ theologians of the 1960s like William Hamilton, Harvey Cox, and Thomas Altizer appropriated selected elements of this way of reading Kierkegaard. Although they did not regard the logic of Kierkegaard’s thought as subverting authentic Christianity, they did take Kierkegaard’s ‘subjective turn’ and his attack upon Christendom to be the core of his project. These ‘radical’ theologians traced their own rejection of classical theism and its transcendent God to Kierkegaard’s critique of referring to God as some sort of supernatural object and his concomitant undermining of a metaphysically grounded faith. Their own efforts to develop a purely secular way of speaking about the divine was deeply indebted to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s celebrated notion of ‘religionless’ Christianity, and therefore to his appropriation of Kierkegaard’s attack on bourgeois piety (Bonhoeffer 1959). In the 1980s Don Cupitt in Great Britain popularized similar themes, contending that Kierkegaard’s account of subjectivity should lead to the recognition that faith is not a response to an external reality (Cupitt 1984).

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III. Kierkegaard and the Constitutive use of Subjectivity in Theology Another variety of theological interpreters also identified the controversial analysis of subjectivity as the fulcrum of Kierkegaard’s work, but they saw Kierkegaard as putting it to more traditional theological uses. According to these expositors, Kierkegaard had developed a general philosophical anthropology, complete with structures of selfhood, dialectical tensions, stages of development, and a teleological dynamic, that served as the foundation and the unifying interpretive framework for his constructive theological proposals. In most cases this way of reading Kierkegaard has involved a privileging of the pseudonymous literature and a relegation of the edifying literature to a subordinate status. The resultant ontology of selfhood, articulated piecemeal in The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death, and the ‘subjectivity is truth’ portions of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is taken to be independent of the special doctrines of any particular historical religion, including Christianity. Consequently, this philosophical anthropology could function as a type of natural knowledge of human being and implicitly of the human/divine relationship that is its basis. Such knowledge could then provide a lens to interpret special revelation and determine its significance. For example, the analysis of anxiety and despair could be used to reinterpret all aspects of the doctrine of sin, even those which Kierkegaard himself had not treated. Moreover, this anthropology could be used for apologetic purposes by identifying points of contact between the human yearning for unification and fulfilment and God’s offer of grace. Implicitly, for these interpreters, Kierkegaard’s description of human existence served as an analogue to the doctrine that grace completes nature, or at least that grace addresses the unresolved issues inherent in nature. The tendency to interpret Kierkegaard in this manner developed quite early and has been remarkably resilient, appearing in many different guises. Theologians who had some affinity either with pietism or religious liberalism found this foregrounding of subjectivity to be congenial, for both traditions tended to use the human experience of guilt and estrangement as the prism for viewing all Christian teachings. For them, Kierkegaard’s subjective turn was an appropriate elucidation of the experiential core of the drama of salvation, of the movement from feeling alienated from God to being reconciled to God. In principle Kierkegaard was engaged in a variant of the same project that had been pursued by Philip Spener and, in a different way, by Friedrich Schleiermacher, which was the clarification of Christian self-consciousness. In a manner typical of theological liberalism, the philosopher of religion and defender of Darwinian evolutionary theory, Niels Teisen, insisted that Kierkegaard was not subverting genuine faith, but was only opposing dead orthodoxy and abstract doctrinal concepts in the name of the inward deepening that genuine faith requires (Teisen 1903). In the 1920s and 1930s the influential Danish ethicist, Eduard Geismar, whose lectures helped introduce Kierkegaard’s thought to the United States, similarly argued that the

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theme of ‘subjectivity is truth’ was only used by Kierkegaard to combat the intellectualist distortion of faith. Throughout his work Geismar argued that Kierkegaard’s enemy was the scholastic tendency to reduce faith to assent to cognitive propositions (Geismar 1926–8). This conviction led Geismar, and many like him, to emphasize the continuities of ‘religiousness A’ and Christian faith. Christianity is a further deepening of the sense of uncertainty and weakness that is already found in general religious experience, and a concomitant intensification of reliance upon God. Christianity preserves and builds upon natural religiosity. Like Geismar, the widely read German interpreter, Emanuel Hirsch, emphasized the continuity between generic religious subjectivity and Christianity, seeing no unbridgeable gap between human and Christian existence (Hirsch 1930–3). The liberal Swedish theologian, Torsten Bohlin, agreed that Kierkegaard had developed a theology based on an analysis of religious experience, but lamented that Kierkegaard had compromised that theological vision by contaminating it with an incompatible cognitive emphasis on the Incarnation construed as a metaphysical paradox (Bohlin 1918; 1925). According to Bohlin, this tension in Kierkegaard’s thought between theology practiced as the articulation of religious experience and theology practiced as the elaboration of metaphysical propositions also led Kierkegaard to regard sin in a contradictory manner as both a responsible act and as an inherited condition. In a more cautious way, this appreciative interpretation of Kierkegaard’s constitutive use of subjectivity in his theological project has been continued by some evangelical theologians in the United States (Barrett 2009: 229–68). They recognized that the standard evangelical strategy of exacerbating feelings of guilt and desolation in order to foster receptivity to grace seemed to parallel Kierkegaard’s efforts to prod his readers into a deeper consciousness of anxiety and despair. They also recognized that their own insistence that the individual’s heart must be converted, and not just the person’s beliefs and behaviour, resembled Kierkegaard’s focus on the centrality of subjectivity in the Christian life. By the 1950s, Kierkegaard was beginning to be perceived as a kindred spirit by many ‘neo-evangelicals’ who struggled to mitigate the influence of positivistic fundamentalism in their own religious family. Edward John Carnell, the influential president of Fuller Seminary, regarded Kierkegaard as an ally in his own efforts to correct the Protestant scholastic view of faith as assent to precisely formulated, biblically warranted, and rationally demonstrable doctrinal propositions (Carnell 1965). For Carnell, Kierkegaard correctly realized that faith is the fruit of passion and commitment, and not the result of rational arguments, not even the so-called proofs from the fulfilment of prophesy. This tentative appropriation of Kierkegaard has recurred whenever evangelical theologians have sought to return to their Pietist roots and distance themselves from rationalistic supernaturalism. In the 1990s Stanley Grenz and other ‘post-conservative’ evangelicals applauded Kierkegaard’s rejection of any apologetics based on the alleged probative power of historical evidences for faith. Accordingly, Kierkegaard’s work has been mined for arguments to combat the fundamentalist attempt to provide objective, rational foundations for faith (Grenz 1986). Many of the theologians who have appreciated the theological value of Kierkegaard’s ‘subjective turn’ have employed his analysis of subjectivity to clarify or reinterpret the

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meanings of Christian doctrines, often in the name of Christian existentialism. For example, Rudolf Bultmann used what he took to be Kierkegaard’s account of the human quest for authenticity and self-transparency to make sense of the Christian tradition’s eschatological language (Bultmann 1962). Biblical talk about eschatology does not refer to a cosmic future in ordinary space and time, but rather announces the possibility of a new way of life and a new self-understanding generated by the existential decision of faith. Kierkegaard’s analysis of estrangement provided support for Bultmann’s claim that the kerygma, if embraced, triggers a new quality of subjectivity that liberates the individual from bondage to the alienating aspects of the past and present. For Bultmann, ‘grace’, God’s simultaneous negation and affirmation, is understood in terms of its subjective appropriation. Bultmann’s program of demythologization, which rejected a historical point of departure for faith and the objectification of the kerygma, relied upon Kierkegaard’s argument that faith in God’s gracious address to the individual is not dependent upon the establishment of historical facts about Christ’s life. Paul Tillich, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, similarly appropriated certain features of Kierkegaard’s analysis of subjectivity in order to reinterpret Christian doctrines so that they did not seem to refer to specific events occurring in space and time (Tillich 1951–63). Moreover, Kierkegaard’s suspicion of objectifying language prevented the description of God as a special sort of supernatural being. For Tillich, Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to the experiential dimensions of human estrangement served as a much needed corrective to German idealism’s more sanguine and less traumatic understanding of the dialectic of essential and existential being. Most importantly, Tillich used Kierkegaard’s exploration of anxiety to interpret the doctrine of original sin as a symbol of the universal human transition from essence to estranged existence. Tillich, inspired by The Concept of Anxiety, saw the fall as motivated by the anxiety that arises from the dialectical tensions intrinsic to human being. Tillich’s celebrated colleague at Union Seminary, Reinhold Niebuhr, likewise appropriated Kierkegaard’s writings in order to develop a Christian psychology that could make sense of original sin without having recourse to historical claims about Adam and Eve, or to metaphysical theories concerning the relation of subsequent human beings to their alleged prehistoric progenitors (Niebuhr 1941). Niebuhr also used The Sickness unto Death to reconceptualize the doctrine of the imago Dei in human nature not as reason and will, as it had often been defined in the Reformed tradition, but as the capacity for self-transcendence made possible by the need to integrate the poles of the infinite and the finite in human selfhood. For Niebuhr, the simultaneously tragic and yet culpable fact that the self ’s efforts to synthesize these poles will inevitably fail subverts liberalism’s optimism about human progress through education and social engineering. The instability of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite makes trust in God’s grace, and not confidence in human virtue and ingenuity, necessary for human flourishing. Consequently, Kierkegaard was enlisted to support the claim that the Christian hope is ultimately directed to an eschatological fulfilment beyond history. Some interpreters who have emphasized the theological benefits of Kierkegaard’s ‘subjective turn’ have argued that Kierkegaard put this philosophical anthropology to

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apologetic purposes. These theological readers have claimed to detect in his writings a teleological momentum in the movement from one ‘stage’ of existence to another, culminating in Christianity as the most satisfactory resolution of the dialectical tensions in human existence. A consequence of this is that faith, far from being an utterly irrational commitment, is a justifiable way of integrating the self. In this view, the desire for blessedness that motivates the movement through Kierkegaard’s stages is the functional equivalent of Augustine’s restless heart. Although often unconscious and repressed, the drive to be transparently grounded in God is the most basic entelechy of human nature. According to American philosopher Mark C. Taylor’s early work, Kierkegaard saw Christianity as the synthesis of possibility and actuality, the telos of a non-necessary dialectic (Taylor 1975). Similarly, John Elrod regarded Kierkegaard’s account of Christianity as the resolution of the tension between the finite self and the infinite ideal (Elrod 1975). In a parallel manner Stephen Dunning discerned in Kierkegaard’s depiction of the stages a view of human nature in which the polarities of self/other and inner/outer could only be unified through faith in the Incarnation (Dunning 1985). The effort to see Christianity as the fulfilment of human subjectivity has been evident in some of the literature concerning Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christian love. While such luminaries as Martin Buber and even Karl Barth claimed to detect a sharp dichotomy between the natural loves and Christian love in Kierkegaard’s works, the type of exposition we are now considering has discerned strong continuities between natural human loves and Christian love in those same texts. These scholars resist the suggestion that the implication of Kierkegaard’s authorship is that Christian love is a heteronymous imposition on human nature, and combat the view that Kierkegaard’s theology was asocial and lacked appreciation of the natural world. According to Danish theologian, Johannes Sløk, Kierkegaard depicted love as growing in scope and inclusiveness from self-love to preferential love and finally to non-preferential Christian love for the neighbour (Sløk 1978). For Sløk, all love for another has an inherent tendency to transcend the self-centeredness of preferential love. Arne Grøn similarly contends that Kierkegaard presents a socially mediated notion of subjectivity in which the intersubjective structure of all experience and the dialogical structure of the self attains fulfilment in Christian love (Grøn 1997). Pia Søltoft also stresses the way in which Kierkegaard’s account of Christian love preserves the dialectical theme that the self is not constituted by its relation to the other, but does find continuity and self-realization through its relation to the other (Søltoft 2000). Sharon Krishek has claimed that the covert implication of Kierkegaard’s writings on love is that all love, including romantic love, requires faith, which involves the ability to embrace resignation while also joyfully affirming finitude (Krishek 2009). In very different ways, all of these authors developed an interpretation of Kierkegaard in which human longing finds its appropriate resting place in Christianity or some form of faith. Significantly, most of them relied heavily upon the portrayal of human pathos in the pseudonymous literature, particularly upon the pseudonymous authors’ explicit anthropological assertions. At the same time, many of those who

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concentrated on Kierkegaard’s treatment of love have typically found support in his upbuilding and more devotional literature.

IV. Kierkegaard as Proponent of God’s ‘Otherness’ An alternative strand of Kierkegaard interpretation has stressed the radical disjunction of ordinary human experience and Christian faith in his works, minimizing the role of any foundational analysis of subjectivity. For these expositors, Climacus’s assertion in Concluding Unscientific Postscript that ‘subjectivity is untruth’ is more characteristic of Kierkegaard’s project than is Climacus’s earlier claim that ‘subjectivity is truth’. For this group of expositors, Kierkegaard did not present Christianity as a more profound deepening of generic religious subjectivity. Moreover, he did not use a logically prior analysis of subjectivity to reconceive Christian doctrine. In this interpretive trajectory Kierkegaard is often regarded as a precursor of the ‘dialectical theology’ or ‘theology of crisis’ of the 1920s. The early Karl Barth, familiar with German translations of The Moment, appreciated Kierkegaard’s disjunction of God and humanity, the celebrated ‘qualitative difference’, and praised Kierkegaard’s refusal to allow the Gospel to be assimilated to the norms of bourgeois culture (Barth 1933). The Barth of the Commentary on Romans resonated to Kierkegaard’s description of the absolute otherness of God, the yawning abyss between God and humanity. Kierkegaard’s strident disjunction of human culture on the one hand and authentic New Testament Christianity on the other supported Barth’s own critique of liberalism’s elision of experience and revelation, and its valorization of divine immanence. The early Barth’s Kierkegaard was the uncompromising Danish iconoclast, the implacable foe of all domestications of transcendence, and emphatically not the Kierkegaard who was the champion of subjectivity. However, Barth was never entirely uncritical of Kierkegaard and later came to see Kierkegaard’s ‘negative dialectic’ as a subtle form of natural theology and a seductively disguised perpetuation of the anthropocentrism running from pietism through Schleiermacher to the existentialists (Barth 1963). Emil Brunner, Barth’s one-time theological compatriot, was even more continuously and profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard. Brunner, like Barth, saw Kierkegaard as emphasizing an enormous gap between humanity and God, a chasm that could only be bridged by God (Brunner 1937; 1941). According to Brunner’s reading of Kierkegaard, the only point of contact between humanity and God is the despair that creates a receptivity to grace. For Brunner, Kierkegaard’s anthropology furnished a needed prolegomenon to dogmatic theology by exposing the discontinuities of nature and grace, and thereby generating a yearning for grace. (It was Brunner’s contention that the despairing recognition of discontinuity is a kind of necessary preparation for grace that motivated Barth to excoriate Brunner’s negative ‘point of contact’ and to become suspicious of a similar dynamic in Kierkegaard.)

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The neo-orthodox theologians were not alone in emphasizing the discontinuities of nature and grace and of experience and revelation in Kierkegaard’s writings. Most types of confessional theologians, and even philosophers with strong confessional commitments, were sensitive to the ways in which sin causes an epistemic liability, a distortion of self-perception, and therefore tended to minimize the alleged constitutive role that an analysis of human subjectivity had played in Kierkegaard’s thought. Accordingly, these authors emphasized the differences between ‘religiousness A’ and ‘religiousness B’, and the differences between Socratic spirituality and Christianity. The influential Danish theologian K. Olesen Larsen, born in 1899 and publishing in the mid-twentieth century, stressed the pivotal role that bondage to sin played in Kierkegaard’s writings as well as the priority of grace in becoming a Christian (Olesen Larsen 1966). Walter Lowrie, one of Kierkegaard’s English-language biographers, also claimed that Kierkegaard’s disenchantment with notions of spiritual progress and his deep sense of depravity led to the sharp differentiation of Christianity from generic religiosity (Lowrie 1938). The Lutheran philosopher David Swenson, Kierkegaard’s early American translator, echoed this theme of Kierkegaard’s disjunction of Christianity and all religions of immanence (Swenson 1941). According to Swenson, Kierkegaard’s advocacy of God’s transcendence undermined all general revelation and natural theology, requiring a new point of departure in God’s gracious agency. This habit of stressing the disjunction of God and humanity, common among the theologians of crisis and the confessional expositors, has been continued in a different guise through the influence of postmodern theory. Many of these authors are innocent of any obvious neo-orthodox influence or confessional motivation. The writings of Mark C. Taylor in the 1980s, often based on Kierkegaard’s use of irony and multivocity to destabilize meaning, suggested a sacred alterity so radical that it eludes all discourse (Taylor 1987). In a way, this appropriation of Kierkegaard could be regarded as a resurgence of the apophatic strand of theology. In fact, David Law has interpreted Kierkegaard as an apophatic theologian who negated all positive terms predicated of God, thereby making genuine openness to God possible (Law 1993). According to Law, in Kierkegaard’s works God remains hidden even after God’s self-revelation in the Incarnation. God’s transcendence in Kierkegaard’s texts was even more apophatic than in the works by negative theologians of the Middle Ages, for they perpetuated the Neoplatonic hope for a participation in the divine mystery. Some theologians have agreed with the view that Kierkegaard stressed the disjunction of humanity and God, as well as the cognate distinction of ordinary human experiential capacities and revelation, but located the source of this differentiation more in Kierkegaard’s soteriology than in his religious epistemology. For this category of interpreter the root dichotomy in Kierkegaard’s work is the contrast between justification by grace and self-salvation. Generally they argue that ‘religiousness A’ does not function as a preparation for grace and is not the human contribution to the process of salvation. By so doing they have painted a very Lutheran portrait of Kierkegaard who basically adhered to the doctrines of sola gratia and sola fide. M. Holmes Hartshorne argued that Kierkegaard’s ironic language of the ‘leap of faith’, which sounds like an unaided human

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act, was designed to indirectly subvert Pelagian confidence in the heroic effort to cultivate faith (Hartshorne 1990). The sensitive reader should recognize that faith as described in Philosophical Fragments is not the sort of thing that an individual could generate through sheer will power. Ideally the discovery of personal incapacity should encourage an awareness of the need for grace. Tim Rose similarly contends that the ‘offence’ in Kierkegaard is not primarily a response to the metaphysical puzzle of the union of the finite and the infinite in the Incarnation, but is most crucially the sinner’s feeling of revulsion over God’s display of humility in the assumption of human suffering (Rose 2001). The kenosis of the divine contradicts all our preconceived notions of how God should behave, for our natural concepts of God are the projections of our own yearning for power. Likewise Murray Rae, assimilating Kierkegaard to the later Christocentric Barth, argues that the prospect of God as a lowly servant confounds our desires for omnipotence (Rae 1997, 2010). Grace disrupts our cultural presuppositions, calling us to live in the light of a new reality that has already been accomplished. Faith is a gift of grace, involving a transformation of the entire person, and is not a human achievement or an actualization of a human potential. Amy Laura Hall, reading Kierkegaard as an advocate of the Lutheran ‘second use of the law’, suggests that Kierkegaard’s impossibly high ideal of love triggers a confession of incapacity and a receptivity to grace, which paradoxically generates the possibility of actually loving the neighbour as ‘other’ (Hall 2002). Other theologians have concurred that Kierkegaard dichotomized God and humanity as well as Christian faith and general ethico-religious experience, but they have done so in order to expose Kierkegaard’s alleged theological inadequacy. Shortly after Kierkegaard’s death H. L. Martensen, Kierkegaard’s former theology tutor and by then Primate of Denmark, initiated this trajectory by maintaining that Kierkegaard’s insistence that the faith of the Christian individual must approximate New Testament ideals, and that it is the fearful responsibility of the individual to insure this, negated the nurturing role of the Church and other human communities in the economy of salvation (Martensen 1867). According to Martensen, Kierkegaard, in effect, drove a wedge between creation and redemption, divorcing the Christian ideal from its connection to human nature as created by God. The much more secular Georg Brandes and Harald Høffding also criticized Kierkegaard’s view of Christianity for being too other-worldly, eschatological, and ascetic, giving encouragement to the view that Kierkegaard’s theology was asocial and acosmic (Høffding 1892). In the middle of the twentieth century, Knud Ejler Løgstrup summarized many of these accusations by portraying Kierkegaard as a life-denying Pietist who reduced love for the neighbour to helping the neighbour to grow in love for God (Løgstrup 1950, 1968). According to Løgstrup, Kierkegaard failed to show that Christianity is the fulfilment of humanity’s created nature. As we have seen, the reasons for stressing the centrality of God’s otherness in Kierkegaard’s writings have been various. The purpose could be to foreground the difference between God’s holiness and all cultural values, or to preserve God’s radical transcendence in the face of immanentist ideologies, or to highlight the counter-intuitive quality of revelation, or to emphasize the gratuity of God’s grace. But whether the intent

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is to praise Kierkegaard as a poet of unmerited grace or to critique him as a despiser of created human nature, this reading strategy claims to uncover a profound diastatic dynamic operating throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship.

V. Kierkegaard and the Dialectic of Experience and Revelation Another variety of Kierkegaard interpreter has proposed that the relation of religious subjectivity to authoritative revelation and the relation of nature and grace are more complex in Kierkegaard’s corpus. According to this way of construing his texts, Kierkegaard saw general religious subjectivity and Christianity neither as being entirely continuous, nor as being completely discontinuous. While they all wanted to discern some sort of connection between nature and grace in Kierkegaard’s writings, these authors differed concerning exactly how that connection should be understood. Gregor Malantschuk, the influential Ukrainian-Danish Kierkegaard scholar, argued against Torsten Bohlin’s earlier contention that Kierkegaard’s work suffered from contradictory dynamics, one governed by the objectivity of revelation and the other by the features of subjective religious experience (Malantschuk 1968, 1976). In opposition to this view Malantschuk maintained that Kierkegaard operated with two different points of departure, one from experience, and the other from the revealed paradox of the Incarnation, and that both converged in the phenomenon of faith. Faith can be described simultaneously as a response to the utterly unanticipated self-revelation of God, and the welcomed resolution of the human struggle to deal with guilt. Malantschuk’s proposal neither reduced Christian faith to an intensification of humanity’s religious quest nor severed it from all human longings. In the 1960s the American Lutheran theologian, Paul Sponheim, admitted that a diastatic dynamic (the juxtaposition of God and human nature) existed in tension with a synthetic dynamic (the complementarity of God and human nature) in Kierkegaard’s work. But Sponheim went on to argue that a point of contact between these two theological dynamics does exist in the corpus: the sheer attractiveness of Christ’s life of humility provides the connection with human yearnings (Sponheim 1968). Near the end of the twentieth century Arnold Come, another American theologian, also suggested that while Kierkegaard fully appreciated the epistemic and ethical discontinuity between humanity and God, he did implicitly presuppose a kind of natural revelation and a kind of ordo salutis (Come 1997a, 1997b). For Kierkegaard the self ’s relational structure, something that exists apart from grace and something that can be known apart from revelation, is the imago dei that mirrors the Trinitarian life of love. This bond of continuity provides the basis for humanity’s receptivity to the grace that makes genuine love, and therefore the fulfilment of our created natures, possible. Appropriately, Come’s lengthy magnum opus on Kierkegaard’s religious thought was divided into two volumes, the first on Kierkegaard as a ‘humanist’

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and the second on Kierkegaard as a Christian theologian. The fact that the second volume completes and fulfils the first, without being deducible from it, reflects the relation of nature and grace that Come detected in Kierkegaard’s thought. Both Malantschuk and Come were representative of the tendency of authors in this trajectory to rebut the accusation that Kierkegaard viewed God as being austerely unknowable by arguing that Kierkegaard foregrounded the theme of God as transcendent love and saw this love revealed, albeit in an ambiguous way that involved an element of concealment, in Jesus Christ. Parallel to this more dialectical interpretation of Kierkegaard’s treatment of nature and grace has been the effort to avoid construing him as an advocate of an arbitrary and unmotivated ‘leap’ into Christianity, as the existentialists often had seemed to do. Frequently this voluntaristic account of coming to faith had been linked to the contention that faith for Kierkegaard was irrational, or at least not amenable to any sort of rational justification. Against the rising tide of the crudely popularized existentialist interpretation of Kierkegaard, an alternative understanding of Kierkegaard’s account of faith developed. As early as the 1930s, David Swenson argued that Kierkegaard did not regard faith as being anti-rational at all (Swenson 1941). Rather, faith in an other-worldly source of meaning is one appropriate response to life’s uncertainty and suffering; its status as a legitimate and reasonable option is not jeopardized by the fact that the contents of Christian faith cannot be objectively demonstrated. More recently the influential American philosopher of religion, Jamie Ferreira, has also argued that Kierkegaard was not a radical voluntarist, for he described faith as having both active and passive dimensions, involving the development of certain desires, appetites, and attractions. Faith is a shift in perspective, a transformation of the imagination, and is not purely the product of discretely willed acts (Ferreira 1991). Given the development of the relevant dispositions and ways of seeing, the positive response to grace and the commitment to the Christian life make retrospective sense, but are not logically necessary. In much the same way Steven Emmanuel has argued that faith is a paradigm shift, for which only a very loose pragmatic rationale can be developed (Emmanuel 1996). David Mercer reiterates the contention that faith is not necessary but is motivated, for the doubtfulness of the incarnation makes a free rejection possible, while at the same time the attractiveness of the life of servanthood draws the heart (Mercer 2001). Similarly, by reading each pseudonymous work in the light of its non-pseudonymous companion piece, Glenn Kirkconnell argues that for Kierkegaard receptivity to divine salvific action is made possible by the recognition of human spiritual limitations; the cultivation of Socratic selfknowledge is a preparatory pedagogy for openness to grace (Kirkconnell 2008, 2010). However, the sinfulness discovered by the individual also pridefully resists the offer of unmerited love, generating a profound ambivalence. All of these authors argue in their different ways that faith is not a criterionless choice, for a pragmatic justification for faith can be given in terms of the dynamics of human selfhood. However, these expositors refrain from asserting that this pragmatic justification of faith amounts to an apologetic objectively demonstrating the superiority of Christianity to other life options. Most of them restrict their claims to the

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conclusion that certain aspects of human nature described by Kierkegaard, if cultivated properly, provide motivations that make the ‘leap’ understandable. Paradoxically, at the same time, these aspects of human nature may motivate the individual to recoil from the offer of grace. The reaction against reading Kierkegaard as dichotomizing nature and grace, or as seeing them as unduly continuous, has also had implications for the way in which the relation between natural human loves and Christian love in Kierkegaard’s works has been understood. This issue lies at the very heart of Kierkegaard’s understanding of growth in the Christian life and therefore at the heart of what is classically treated by theologians under the rubric of the doctrine of sanctification. Jamie Ferreira has argued that for Kierkegaard the command to love the neighbour does not rule out preferential love or reciprocity, but rather stabilizes our intrinsic need to love and be loved (Ferreira 2001). Christian neighbour love can inform and transform our natural loves, so that the ordinary love for the preferred beloved is purged of the desire to control and idolize. However, this Christian love for the neighbour cannot be regarded as an intensified form of human love or as the inevitable product of the development of more ordinary loves.

VI. Kierkegaard as Expositor of Christian Concepts Another type of interpreter agrees with the preceding category that Kierkegaard was intent upon preserving both the uniqueness of Christian teachings and the centrality of pathos in the Christian life. However, these scholars do not focus as much on the relation of Kierkegaard’s analysis of subjective experience and objectively given Christian concepts. They tend to avoid regarding the relation of ‘religiousness A’ (or Socratic subjectivity) to ‘religiousness B’ (or Christianity) as an instance of the relation of nature and grace. Rather, this group concentrates on the way that Kierkegaard sought to clarify traditional Christian doctrines, and regards his attention to the appropriate forms of subjective pathos as part of that project. Consequently, Kierkegaard is treated as an expositor of the basic convictions of a particular form of Christianity. The Swedish theologian, Valter Lindström, set the stage for this in the post World War II era by contending that Kierkegaard was basically an orthodox Lutheran, or at least firmly faithful to the Augustinian heritage (Lindström 1956). Lindström did admit that Kierkegaard’s later writings undermined any strongly corporate understanding of the Church, but regarded this anti-ecclesial animus as the unfortunate fruit of Kierkegaard’s increasing identification of the Christian life with the imitation of the suffering of Christ. Since that time many German scholars have situated Kierkegaard in his Lutheran context, analysing the ways that dogmatic concepts function in his works. For example, Christine Axt-Piscalar has examined Kierkegaard’s treatment of original sin in order to determine how he sought to preserve the twin themes of original sin’s inevitability and its culpability that

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Luther and most Protestants had inherited from Augustine (Axt-Piscalar 1996). Kierkegaard, like Julius Müller, sought to preserve the radical nature of original sin without implicitly exempting the individual from responsibility by describing it as an inheritance from Adam and Eve. In a similar manner Heiko Schutz has analysed Kierkegaard’s appropriation and adaptation of the traditional doctrine of providence (Schulz 1994). However, not all of these expositors find Lutheranism to be the most fruitful context for interpreting Kierkegaard. For example, Vernard Eller argued that Kierkegaard’s theme of the imitation of Christ parallels the Anabaptist theme of radical discipleship, and his suspicion of the Established Church should have led him to embrace an Anabaptist-like view of the Church as a gathered community of committed, responsible believers (Eller 1968). Similarly, Bradley Dewey proposed that the centrality in Kierkegaard’s work of following the pattern of Christ’s life suggests an affinity with any tradition that foregrounds sanctification and the pursuit of holiness, such as the Wesleyan heritage (Dewey 1968). Even possible convergences with Catholicism have been suggested and explored. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, such Catholic writers as Theodor Haecker (Haecker 1932, 1947) and Heinrich Roos (Roos 1954) detected a proclivity for Catholicism in Kierkegaard’s valorization of detachment from the world and his emphasis of divine love. These authors correctly noted that Kierkegaard sought to balance the historic Lutheran emphasis of justification by faith with an intensified concern for loving works, an orientation that was perceived as being the basis for a rapprochement with Catholicism. Other Catholic theologians like Louis Dupré have seen Kierkegaard as synthesizing the Protestant emphasis of trust in God’s prevenient grace with the Catholic emphasis of the imitation of Christ (Dupré 1963). Dupré also regarded Kierkegaard’s concern for the role of free human agency in the acceptance of grace as a point of contact with post-Tridentine Catholic teachings. More recently Jack Mulder has discerned a partial agreement between Kierkegaard and the Catholic tradition concerning the entelechy of human nature toward love as the highest good (Mulder 2010). Mulder proposes that Kierkegaard, in very un-Lutheran fashion, described the individual’s relationship with God in terms of reciprocal love and mutual delight rather than in terms of trust in God’s parental benevolence. However, according to Mulder, Kierkegaard’s Luther-like deficient appreciation of the positive relation of nature and grace prevented him from fully exploring the implications of this theme. Another type of interpreter also has seen Kierkegaard as primarily clarifying the basic concepts of the Christian tradition, but rather than considering the relation of authoritative doctrines to human experience in terms of nature and grace, they choose to regard the relation in terms of form and content. Paul L. Holmer (1978), D. Z. Phillips (1993), and to an extent John Heywood-Thomas (1957), pioneered this approach by reading Kierkegaard at least partly through the lens of the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein. The mid-century debate in Anglo-American philosophy of religion about the logic of ‘God-talk’ motivated their approach (Pattison 2009). Holmer, an American philosophical theologian, popularized the view that the doctrines of Christianity are descriptions of the ‘grammar’ that governs the Christian

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form of life, shaping the experiential content of the appropriate attitudes, passions, dispositions, and emotions. Because the rules of grammar do not apply themselves automatically to speech, but require agreement in the practices of skilled language speakers, the meaning of a theological concept can only be clarified by showing its appropriate use in the communal context of the Christian life. In the view of interpreters like Holmer and Phillips, Kierkegaard’s attention to subjectivity was a clarification of the way that religious concepts come to have meaning in Christian practices. The theological teachings of Christianity can only function as meaningful discourse when they are situated in the appropriate existential contexts and used for the appropriate edifying purposes with the requisite passions. Authors like Holmer and Phillips who used Wittgenstein to interpret Kierkegaard’s way of clarifying Christian theological concepts were never in absolute agreement. According to Phillips, Christian theological language in Kierkegaard’s writings functioned as the clarification of an existential possibility; it remained unclear whether that possibility involved truth claims about realities existing independently of the passions of faithful communities of believers. Phillips’s denial that realism and anti-realism are coherent concepts made it difficult to see exactly what sort of referential force he might be ascribing to Kierkeaard’s religious language. Holmer, particularly in his later work, maintained that Kierkegaard’s Christian concepts did refer to realities beyond the self. Kierkegaard’s point was that felicitous reference requires the proper passional context in order to be intelligible. According to Holmer, Kierkegaard foreshadowed contemporary suspicions about the transparency of the referential use of theological concepts without implying any type of anti-realism. This intrinsic connection between Christian grammar and Christian pathos is common to a variety of other authors. Many of them have been influenced not only by Wittgenstein but also by other philosophical traditions, ranging from pragmatism to continental post-structuralism. Whatever their orientation, they share the convictions that the grammar of Christian faith authorizes a unique type of pathos and that the acquisition of this appropriate pathos is part of learning the grammar. The prolific C. Stephen Evans, schooled in pragmatism, analytic philosophy, and Reformed epistemology, has argued that Kierkegaard limns the contours of Christianity by stimulating the requisite passions, and thereby links Christian knowledge to the process by which it is acquired (Evans 1992). The British Old Testament scholar Hugh Pyper, somewhat influenced by Derrida, has articulated a similar theme that Christian discourse is like a language that modifies the individual’s passional capacities (Pyper 1994: 129–45). In different ways, many of Holmer’s students, including Bradley Dewey, Andrew Burgess, Robert C. Roberts, Timothy Polk, David Cain, Abrahim Khan, David Gouwens, and the present author have continued this interpretive tradition. These writers point out that the existentialist portrait of Kierkegaard as the champion of the centred, selflegislating individual is faulty, for it ignores the constitutive role of the language of the Christian community in his writings. Kierkegaard did not reject the Church and its traditions, but only the culturally compromised and passionless form in which he found it. According to David Gouwens, who is the most exhaustive theological expositor of

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Kierkegaard in the tradition of Holmer, Kierkegaard steers a middle course between understanding doctrines as objective propositions and understanding them as expressions of religious subjectivity (Gouwens 1996). For Kierkegaard, the subjectivity of the Christian life is a response to objective teachings, but those objective teachings only acquire efficacy as they are subjectively appropriated. This concern for the efficacy of subjective appropriation is the key factor that decisively differentiates Kierkegaard from the later Barth. Gouwens proceeds to defend Kierkegaard from the Barthian accusation that Kierkegaard’s practice of theology was hopelessly anthropocentric. Gouwens argues that although for Kierkegaard the understanding of doctrinal concepts requires the transformation of pathos, the meaning of these concepts is not established through a logically prior analysis of human experience. Andrew Burgess agrees that Kierkegaard’s attention to the ‘how’ of faith, the quality of pathos, does not reduce the ‘what’ of faith, the doctrinal content, to a set of subjective states (Burgess 1975; 1997). Timothy Polk similarly argues that Kierkegaard’s insistence that Scripture only comes to have Christian meaning as it is used to nurture love does not undercut Scripture’s authority as an objective canon (Polk 1997). Rather, the willingness to employ a hermeneutic of love is a condition for reading Scripture aptly. Polk discerned similarities between Kierkegaard’s exegetical practice and the ‘canonical criticism’ of the Old Testament scholar Brevard Childs, as well as the literary theory of the reader-response critic Stanley Fish, for in both cases the reading strategies of an interpretive community, saturated with special purposes, concerns, and passions, are necessary to establish sound readings.

VII. Kierkegaard as Rhetorical Theologian Many such interpreters who see Kierkegaard as clarifying the core theological concepts of a Christian tradition add the proviso that careful attention must be paid to the rhetorical qualities of his texts in order to grasp that theological content. These authors take the evocative and often destabilizing literary aspects of Kierkegaard’s texts seriously, as essential dimensions of their meaning. They are reluctant to conflate passages from different parts of the authorship without taking the divergent rhetorical purposes, authorial voices, constructed ideal readers, and passional moods into account. Many are sensitive to the likelihood that indirect communication pervades the entire Kierkegaardian corpus, including the veronymous texts. However, these authors do not conclude that these literary dimensions of his writings generate an indeterminacy so extreme that they subvert all theological meaning. Rather, Kierkegaard’s seemingly ambiguous rhetorical strategies actually promote his specific theological purposes by encouraging certain types of response in the reader. Along these lines Robert C. Roberts claims that Kierkegaard uses both rhetorical and dialectical strategies in order to provoke the reader to discover the incompatibility of

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Christianity and the Socratic paradigm, thereby making the encounter with grace possible (Roberts 1996). Part of Kierkegaard’s strategy is to encourage the reader personally to feel the inadequacy of the Socratic approach. Sylvia Walsh advocates an entire programme of reading Kierkegaard this way, interpreting Kierkegaard as a pioneer of a kind of poetics that is essential to Christian faith (Walsh 1991, 2005, 2009). According to Walsh, Kierkegaard nurtures the reader’s imagination so that the reader can envision new religious ideals and creatively give those ideals concrete form in particular contexts. The present author admits the indeterminacy of Kierkegaard’s elusive and often seemingly contradictory theological assertions, but sees this resistance to closure as a function of Kierkegaard’s appreciation of the genuine tensions that have always been implicit in the historical doctrines themselves (Barrett 2010). For example, Barrett sees the juxtaposition of active and passive language to describe the development of faith (faith construed as the human task to become as nothing before God and faith construed as a divine gift of grace) not as an opposition of mutually exclusive polarities, but as complementary but non-synthesizable vocabularies that reflect the dialectical tension of human responsibility and divine grace. Kierkegaard’s literary strategies stimulate the reader to develop imaginative skill in determining when to use which vocabulary; the synthesis is not achieved through the formulation of a logically ordered doctrinal system but through the cultivation of a coherent life. In a different way, George Pattison has also stressed the ways in which Kierkegaard’s literary strategies are integral to his theological purposes, for they resist immediate or self-generated meaningfulness and provoke the reader to empty herself of self-mastery and be open to the advent of grace and live in the particularities of the present moment (Pattison 1997). Because subjectivity is a crucial aspect of the religious life, the communication of religious truth must encourage the development of the appropriate form of subjectivity, which includes the acceptance of uncertainty, risk, and responsibility. For Pattison this encouragement of personal responsibility is vital because the words and symbols of the theological tradition do not unambiguously or immediately point to transcendent realities. Steven Shakespeare, critically appropriating Derrida, sees Kierkegaard as using literary techniques to subvert any theological metanarrative, while resisting a one-dimensionally non-realist interpretation of language about God (Shakespeare 2001). The paradoxicality of the general relation of divine grace and human response actually undercuts Kierkegaard’s assertion that Christ alone is the absolute paradox, and invites the reduplication of Christ’s life of love. For all of these interpreters, in differing ways, sensitivity to Kierkegaard’s rhetorical stimulation of the reader’s imagination and the consequent encouragement of a certain type of pathos are integral to his theological project. They may differ from one another concerning the degree to which Kierkegaard’s texts resist closure and the degree to which they encourage a determinate type of pathos. However, they agree that Kierkegaard refused to provide neatly predigested nuggets of Christian truth, for he sought to goad individuals to grapple with the significance of Christianity for their own lives, convinced that such a personal struggle is vital for growth in the Christian life.

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VIII. ‘Unconcluding’ Postscript As we have seen, Kierkegaard’s writings are sufficiently saturated with irony, indirection, and elusiveness to sustain a variety of theological responses. Each of the trajectories that we have examined can legitimately claim some textual support; none of them are utterly ridiculous. Moreover, each of them has exhibited a remarkable resilience through the decades, and none have disappeared without a trace. Just when a particular way of reading Kierkegaard theologically seems to be dying out, it reappears in a new guise. The earliest controversies and disagreements concerning the relation of subjective experience and objective doctrines have had a tendency to reassert themselves in surprising new idioms. Consequently, Kierkegaard has always been seen as advocating many different patterns of relating experience and revelation, nature and grace, and creation and redemption, and probably always will be. Given the amenability of Kierkegaard’s corpus to such a variety of interpretations, it is unlikely that any consensus about Kierkegaard as a theologian will ever emerge. Perhaps this is as it should be. Each of the interpretive traditions captures a theologically important dimension of his authorship. Those who saw Kierkegaard as a critic of orthodox theology were sensing the intensity of his discomfort with objectifying discourse and passionless adherence to tradition. Those who regarded his account of subjectivity as a prolegomena to Christianity and as a foundation for faith were rightly recognizing the centrality of his insistence upon pathos, and the significant overlaps of Christian pathos with other forms of passion. Those who stressed the otherness of God were aware of the surprising gratuity of grace and the distinctiveness of the Christian life in his texts. Those who portrayed nature and grace as being dialectically related were appropriately cognizant of Kierkegaard’s frequent tendency to distinguish the two without absolutely divorcing them from one another. Those who viewed Kierkegaard as clarifying the grammar of faith (and its pathos) were correctly heeding the extent to which his account of Christian pathos requires the shaping power of unique Christian concepts. Finally, those who have drawn attention to the rhetorical aspects of his theological writing have aptly discerned how his language serves a performative function, stimulating the pathos without which theological language makes no sense. Although each interpretive tradition is in touch with something important in Kierkegaard’s corpus, they nevertheless defy any easy synthesis or amalgamation. In fact, often they seem to be mutually exclusive rather than complementary. This, however, may be a symptom of Kierkegaard’s chief theological merit. His texts’ resistance to easy interpretive closure reflects Kierkegaard’s conviction that Christianity itself contains dialectical tensions, and that the Christian life involves countervailing passions and dispositions. Kierkegaard presents the polar themes of nature and grace, divine sovereignty and human responsibility, justification and sanctification, and faith and works, and treats each of these poles as an essential dimension of Christian pathos. According to Kierkegaard’s practice theological writing must preserve these tensions and leave the

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reader to negotiate the inevitable strains and tugs. Only by struggling to figure out when and how each pole should be enacted in the individual’s own life can that individual grow in blessedness. Ultimately the nurturing of practical theological wisdom is necessary in order to live out these tensive themes in specific circumstances. For Kierkegaard, theology is not done through the development of a doctrinal system on paper, but through the assumption of interpretive responsibility (and consequently the assumption of moral and religious responsibility) in the living of one’s life.

References Axt-Piscalar, Christine (1996). Ohnmächtige Freiheit. Studien zum Verhältnis von Subjectivität und Sünde bei August Tholuck, Julius Müller, Sören Kierkegaard und Friedrich Schleiermacher (Tübingen: Mohr). Barrett, Lee C. (2009). ‘The USA: From Neo-Orthodoxy to Plurality,’ in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Tome III: The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate), 229–68. ——– (2010). Kierkegaard (Nashville: Abingdon Press). Barth, Karl (1933). The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press). ——– (1963). ‘Dank und Reverenz’, in Evangelische Theologie 23: 7, 337–42. Bohlin, Torsten (1918). Sören Kierkegaard (Uppsala: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bökforlag). ——– (1925). Kierkegaards dogmatiska åskådning i dess historiska sammanhang (Uppsala: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bökforlag). Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1959). The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (Macmillan: New York). Brandes, Georg (1877). Søren Kierkegaard. En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Brunner, Emil (1937). Der Mensch im Widerspruch: Die christliche Lehre vom wahren und vom wirklichen Menschen (Zürich: Zwingli). ——– (1941). Offenbarung und Vernunft. Die Lehre von der christlichen Glaubenserkenntnis (Zürich: Zwingli). Bultmann, Rudolf (1962). Das Evangelium des Johannes, 10th edn. (Göttengen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht). Burgess, Andrew (1975). Passion, ‘Knowing How,’ and Understanding (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press). ——– (1997). ‘The Bilateral Symmetry of Kierkegaard’s Postscript’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 7) (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 329–45. Carnell, Edward John (1965). The Burden of Søren Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans). Come, Arnold (1997a). Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering Myself (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press).

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——– (1997b). Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering Myself (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press). Cupitt, Don (1984). Taking Leave of God (London: SCM). Dewey, Bradley (1968). The New Obedience (Washington: Corpus Books). Dunning, Stephen (1985). Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Dupré, Louis (1963). Kierkegaard as Theologian (New York: Sheed and Ward). Eller, Vernard (1968). Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Elrod, John (1975). Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Emmanuel, Steven (1996). Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (New York: State University of New York Press). Evans, Stephen (1992). Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Ferreira, M. Jamie (1991). Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——– (2001). Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Geismar, Eduard (1926–1928). Søren Kierkegaard. Hans Livsudvikling og Forfatterskab, vols. 1–2 (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad). Gouwens, David J. (1996). Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Grenz, Stanley (1986). ‘The Flight from God: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Universal Ethics’, in (ed.) Staney Grenz and Kenneth Wozniak, Christian Freedom: Essays in Honor of Vernon C. Grounds (Lanham, MD: University Press of America), 69–85. Grøn, Arne (1997). Subjektivetet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Haecker, Theodor (1932). Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Sören Kierkegaard (Innsbruck: Brenner). ——– (1947). Der Buckel Kierkegaards (Zurich: Thomas). Hall, Amy Laura (2002). Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hartshorne, M. Holmes (1990). Kierkegaard, Godly Deceiver (New York: Columbia University Press). Heywood-Thomas, John (1957). Subjectivity and Paradox (London: Blackwell). Hirsch, Emanuel (1930–1933). Kierkegaard Studien (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann). Høffding, Harald (1892). Søren Kierkegaard som Filosof (Copenhagen: Philipsen). Holmer, Paul L. (1978). The Grammar of Faith (San Fransisco: Harper & Row). Kirkconnell, Glenn (2008). Kierkegaard on Ethics and Religion: From ‘Either/Or’ to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (London: Continuum). ——– (2010). Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation: From ‘Philosophical Fragments’ through ‘The Two Ages’ (London: Continuum). Krishek, Sharon (2009). Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (New York: Cambridge University Press). Law, David (1993). Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Lindström, Valter (1956). Efterföljelsens teologi (Stockholm: Diakonistyrelsens). Løgstrup, Knud Ejler (1950). Kierkegaard und Heideggers Existenzanalyse und ihr Verhältnis zur Verkündigung (Berlin: Blaschker).

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Løgstrup, Knud Ejler (1968). Opgør med Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal). Lowrie, Walter (1938). Kierkegaard (London and New York: Oxford University Press). Malantschuk, Gregor (1968). Dialektik og Eksistenshos Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel). ——– (1976). Den kontroversielle Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Vinten). Martensen, Hans Lassen (1867). Om Tro og Viden, et Lejlighedssktift (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Mercer, David E. (2001). Kierkegaard’s Living Room: Between Faith and History in ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press). Mulder, Jr. Jack (2010). Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Niebuhr, Reinhold (1941). The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (New York: Scribners). Olesen Larsen, K. (1966). Søren Kierkegaard læst K. Olesen Larsen, ed. Vibeke Olesen Larsen and Tage Wilhjelm (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad). Pattison, George (1997). Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK). ——– (2009). ‘Great Britain: From “Prophet of the Now” to Postmodern Ironist (and after)’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Tome I: Northern and Western Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate), 237–69. Phillips, D. Z. (1993). ‘Authorship and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein and Religion (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Polk, Timothy (1997). The Biblical Kierkegaard (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Pyper, Hugh (1994). ‘The Lesson of Eternity: Christ as Teacher in Kierkegaard and Hegel’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 7) (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press), 129–45. Rae, Murray (1997). Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation (Oxford: Clarendon Press). ——– (2010). Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T.& T. Clark). Roberts, Robert C. (1996). Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press). Roos, Heinrich (1954). Søren Kierkegaard and Catholicism, trans. Richard M. Brackett (Westminster, MD: Newman Press). Rose, Tim (2001). Kierkegaard’s Christocentric Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate). Schrempf, Christoph (1907). Sören Kierkegaard. Ein unfreier Pionier der Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag). Schulz, Heiko (1994). Eschatologische Identität. Eine Untersuchung über das Verhältnis von Vorsehung, Schicksal und Zufall bei Sören Kierkegaard (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter). ——– (2009). ‘Germany and Austria: A Modest Head Start’, in (ed.) Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Tome I: Northern and Western Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 333–4. Shakespeare, Steven (2001). Kierkegaard, Language, and the Reality of God (Aldershot: Ashgate). Sløk, Johannes (1978). Humanismens Tænker (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel). Søltoft, Pia (2000). Svimmelhedens Etik. Om forholdet mellem den enkelte og den anden hos Buber, Lévinas og især Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag).

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Sponheim, Paul (1968). Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence (New York: Harper & Row). Swenson, David F. (1941). Something about Kierkegaard (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press). Taylor, Mark C. (1975). Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). ——– (1987). Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Teisen, Niels (1903). Om Søren Kierkegaard’s Betydning som kristelig Tænker (Copenhagen: J. Frimodt). Tillich, Paul (1951–1963). Systematic Theology, vols. 1–3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Tullberg, Steen (2009). ‘Denmark: The Permanent Reception—150 Years of Reading Kierkegaard’, in (ed.) Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Tome I: Northern and Western Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 3–120. Walsh, Sylvia (1991). Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press). ——– (2005). Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press). ——– (2009). Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Suggested Reading Barrett (2010). Come (1997). Gouwens (1996). Rae (1997, 2010). Walsh (2009).

chapter 28

k ier k ega a r d a n d moder n eu rope a n liter atu r e l eonardo f. l isi

I. Introduction: A Literary Kierkegaard With the possible exceptions of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, there is probably no modern philosopher who has had a greater influence on European literature than Søren Kierkegaard. Unquestionably, this fact is closely connected to the literary qualities of Kierkegaard’s own production. Indeed, during his earliest reception Kierkegaard frequently appears to have been perceived primarily as a literary figure. Already in the 1840s, for example, Norwegian students in Kristiania celebrated Kierkegaard as a Byronic eroticist of sorts, while the first independent appearance of his works in Norway is found in an 1846 collection of model texts for use in schools, in which Kierkegaard’s contribution to the formation of a linguistic and aesthetic norm was represented by three of his most literary works: Either/Or, Prefaces, and Stages on Life’s Way (Dyrerud 2009: 124–5). In one of the earliest references to Kierkegaard in Germany, Johann Georg Theodor Graeße’s Geschichte der Poesie Europas [History of European Literature], the author similarly points to Either/Or as among ‘the best products of modern Danish literature’, and places Kierkegaard alongside the likes of Thomasine Gyllembourg, H. C. Andersen, and B. S. Ingemann (Gräße 1848: 979).1 A more substantial account of Kierkegaard was to arrive in Germany in 1873, in Adolf Strodtmann’s Das geistige Leben Dänemarks [The Cultural

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. With the exception of Kierkegaard’s works, all titles that are not proper names have been translated in parenthesis after their first occurrence.

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Life of Denmark], seemingly written in close collaboration with the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes (Malik 1997: 228). While Strodtmann insists that Kierkegaard is not a poet ‘in a strict sense’ but rather a ‘psychologist’, he nevertheless classifies him as the greatest Danish ‘language-artist’ [Sprachkünstler] and the last of the German Romantics, and dedicates most of his discussion to Kierkegaard’s literary style (Strodtmann 1873: 97, 99, 102–3). The passion and fire of the latter, Strodtmann tells his readers, finds no rival anywhere, and as proof he provides nine pages of translation from the ‘Diapsalmata’, followed by five more from ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, both from Either/Or, and a final three from Stages on Life’s Way—a total number of pages that spans well over half of his entire discussion (Strodtmann 1873: 103–21). In the Netherlands Kierkegaard had made his first appearance in 1846, in an article in the literary journal De tijd entitled ‘The Danish Literature of the Present Age’ that praised his ‘original and literary qualities’, and apparently not much else. Thirty years later the second Dutch mention of Kierkegaard again occurs in a literary context, Johannes van Vloten’s Beknopte geschiedenis der nieuwe letteren [Brief History of New Literature] of 1876, where it is once more Kierkegaard’s ‘brightness and literary style’ that are emphasized (Verstrynge 2009: 274–5). Equally important is the fact that it was not Kierkegaard’s more strictly philosophical or theological writings that tended to be translated first. In Czech, Spanish, Portuguese, for example, it was ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ or ‘In Vino Veritas’ from Stages on Life’s Way that was the first to appear (Brezinova 2009: 206; de Sousa 2009: 1; Vidal and Oubiña 2009: 28. ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ was also the first translation of Kierkegaard of any major size to appear in English (Dewey 1973: 138), while ‘The Unhappiest One’ from Either/Or joined these texts as the earliest of Kierkegaard’s works to be published in Italian (Basso 2009: 81, 83). Two of the three works by Kierkegaard first to appear in Russian were ‘In Vino Veritas’ and ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages’ from Either/Or (both translated especially for Leo Tolstoy), followed by ‘The Unhappiest One’ and ‘Diapsalmata’ in 1908. The latter, moreover, were commissioned by the printing house Shipovnik, ‘the herald of the Modern Style in Russia’, and produced by the symbolist poet Jurgis Baltrušaitis who also translated Ibsen (Loungina 2009: 247–8, 252). In Poland only ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ had been published at the beginning of the twentieth century, along with a few excerpts from Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Moment (Szwed 2009: 213), while in Finland ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ was translated already in 1907, by the poet Veikko Antero Koskenniemi, ‘one of the most prominent figures in Finnish literature of the first half of the twentieth century’ (Kylliäinen 2009: 199). The first Bulgarian translation of Kierkegaard saw the light of day in 1914, and consisted of an excerpt from the ‘Diapsalmata’. ‘The Unhappiest One’ followed in 1920, produced by the poet Ljudmil Stoyanov and published in the modernist magazine Vezni, which ‘played a very important role on the Bulgarian literary scene at that time and was considered a great authority on literature’ (Töpfer-Stoyanova 2009: 286). Georg Lukács’ influential essay, ‘The Foundering of Form against Life: Sören Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen’, was initially published in Hungary in 1910 in the literary periodical Nyugat, ‘the most significant forum for progressive writers and poets of literature in the Hungarian Golden Age’,

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confirming a literary interest in Kierkegaard in that country that may have stretched as far back as the 1840s and which resurfaced in the years prior to the Second World War and again in the 1960s (Nagy 2009: 156–7, 158, 164, 169). If this brief catalogue of the earliest reception of Kierkegaard suggests the extent and pervasiveness of its literary dimensions, it also makes clear the difficulty of any systematic overview. Not only does the dissemination of Kierkegaard’s works occur in a plethora of different cultural and linguistic contexts, but any adequate response to the question of Kierkegaard’s influence on literature must ultimately be grounded on a close reading of each unique work in order to establish the precise terms in which Kierkegaard has been absorbed, put to use, modified, and reinvented in a specific textual universe. Needless to say, it is not possible to do justice to such a task in the current context.2 In an attempt nevertheless to capture both the commonality of the literary interests in Kierkegaard and the differences that define them in each case, I have divided the material into four types of reception, each treated in a separate section: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious, and the biographical. In sections one to three, I discuss those authors who have derived formal elements, themes, allusions, or quotations from, respectively, Kierkegaard’s primarily aesthetic, ethical, and religious works and concepts, while the fourth section deals with works that draw their material or literary principles from Kierkegaard’s historical existence. Naturally this division lays no claim to being anything close to exhaustive. There are many more relevant works and authors than can be treated in this context, and several of those that are discussed could be placed in more than one type of reception, or in wholly other ones not considered here. But the advantages this method yields are at least twofold: first, it gives some order to the field by deriving the criteria for organizing the material from within Kierkegaard’s own work rather than from the vast array of uses to which it has been put; and second, it allows for the examination of some similarities and differences among authors responding to related aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought.

II. Aesthetic Receptions One of the earliest instances of an aesthetic reception of Kierkegaard’s work by a literary author can be found in the 1857 novel Phantasterne [The Dreamers], written by his Danish contemporary Hans Egede Schack. In the first half of the novel we follow its narrator, Conrad, as he leads a life devoted to the imaginary world of kings, honour, and love at the expense of his engagement with reality. That this is an echo from Kierkegaard’s aesthete, likewise fascinated with pure possibility, is visible in the combination of different literary styles as well as the recurrence of a number of related themes. Similarly to A in the ‘Rotation of Crops’ essay in Either/Or, for example, Conrad escapes a lecture’s boredom 2 For a more detailed study, see Stewart 2011. At the time of writing, this work is still in production and it has accordingly not been possible to consult it in preparation for the present chapter.

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by making the speaker’s nose the focus of his attention (Schack 1972: 199–200; SKS2: 288/ EO1: 299). References to Don Giovanni together with Conrad’s diary account of a seduction further strengthen this connection (Schack 1972: 256, 144–8). Distinct from his predecessor, however, Conrad’s aesthetic existence culminates in a crisis that makes him realize the need to change (his friend, Christian, who fails to do so, ends up in an insane asylum). Mirroring the shift in volume two of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, the novel’s second half accordingly recounts Conrad’s renewed commitment to a mundane and bourgeois life, in which he achieves growing social success. In a development that would have thrilled Judge William, the world of the everyday even ends up proving itself to be more marvellous than the imagination’s extravagant constructions, when the girl that Conrad falls in love with turns out to be a Spanish princess. Schack’s novel in this way takes seriously the suggestion offered by the editor of Either/Or, Victor Eremita, that the two parts may well constitute two moments in a single life: ‘the reader could easily be tempted by the pun that when one has said A, one must also say B’ (SKS2: 20/EO1: 13). The importance of Phantasterne lies not least in its subsequent influence on another Danish author, J. P. Jacobsen, who together with Kierkegaard held an enormous fascination for European literature at the turn of the twentieth century. In Jacobsen’s most famous text, the novel Niels Lyhne, from 1883, the title character suffers from a propensity for escapist dreaming similar to that of Conrad. Unlike Schack’s hero, however, and closer to Kierkegaard’s aesthete, no marvellous reality arises to save Niels, and Jacobsen’s novel persists in representing the unforgiving contradiction between ideals and actuality. The influence of Kierkegaard’s elaboration of this same opposition is arguably most visible in Niels Lyhne’s depiction of self-alienation. As the character Fru Boye puts it at one point, in a phrase that Rainer Maria Rilke picked up again in a crucial scene of his 1910 novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge] (Rilke 1966: 808), ‘How strange it is to long for oneself!’ (Jacobsen 1893: 87). The sentence alludes to Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way, where Quidam makes an almost identical statement while meditating on the very contradiction between ideal and real that fuels Jacobsen’s text: ‘As for me, I feel homesick for myself, for daring to be with myself. It is shattering to have an imagination and an actuality so contrary to each other’ (SKS6: 305–6/SLW: 328). Jacobsen’s familiarity with Kierkegaard goes back at least as far as 1867 (Jacobsen 1974: 137), and finds further expression in his earliest collection of poems, Hervert Sperring, from 1868. In the poem ‘Saa er nu Jorden en Kobbertyr’ [‘The world, then, is a copper bull’], for example, Jacobsen draws on the myth of Phalaris that appears in the first of the diapsalmata of Either/Or. As in the latter, the poet’s existence is linked to that of the king’s victims whose screams the bull converts into beautiful music (Jacobsen 1973: 55–6; SKS2: 27/EO1: 19). Jacobsen takes the analogy a step further by making God himself into Phalaris. Moreover, where the speaker in Kierkegaard’s text is presented as a passive victim who concludes by stating that he would ‘rather be a swineherd out on Amager ( . . . ) than a poet’, Jacobsen’s persona asserts his active participation in the painful process. At the end of the poem, in a forceful crescendo of devastation, the poet’s singing engulfs the surrounding universe, destroying the sun, moon, stars, time, hell, and heaven, down to God and the poet himself.

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Another interesting use of Kierkegaard’s primarily aesthetic writings during these early years of his reception can be found in Ibsen’s 1862 Kærlighedens Komedie [Love’s Comedy], where the character Falk paraphrases passages from the first volume of Either/Or (Ibsen 2008: 209). It is in the years immediately preceding the First World War, however, that this line of influence reaches a more pervasive form. In 1914, works by and on Kierkegaard began appearing with a breathtaking frequency in the literary journal Der Brenner, which championed authors such as Georg Trakl, Herman Broch, and Else Lasker-Schüler, and counted among its prominent subscribers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Martin Heidegger. Der Brenner’s often overtly aesthetic interest in Kierkegaard resonates with that of other influential literary figures of the day, such as Rudolf Kassner and Georg Lukács, both of whom published works that presented Kierkegaard as a poet first and foremost. Another central modernist author, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, likely encountered Kierkegaard’s writings during this same period and would have found a precedent in the Dane for his own extensive use of pseudonyms (cf. de Sousa 2009: 4, n. 13). Similarly, Thomas Mann’s great meditation on modernist art, his novel Doktor Faustus, draws on the theory of music found in Either/Or (Kamla 1979). Possibly, however, one of the most interesting appropriations of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic writings in the twentieth century is found in the works of Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Already in her earliest international success, the collection of short stories Seven Gothic Tales from 1934, Dinesen quotes directly from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or at several points (Dinesen 1961: 51, 384). In ‘Carnival’, originally intended for inclusion in Seven Gothic Tales, Kierkegaard even makes a direct appearance in the form of one of the costumes worn by the characters in a complicated literary game of masking, cross-dressing, illusion, and race. The setting itself has strong similarities to that of ‘In Vino Veritas’, and the narrator introduces Kierkegaard as ‘that brilliant, deep, and desperate Danish philosopher of the forties, a sort of macabre dandy of his day’ (Dinesen 1977: 57). Annelise, the young lady dressed up as Kierkegaard, is both a poet and a beauty who speaks in blank verse and exclaims in disapproval at the mention of sin (Dinesen 1977: 68, 76). Her motivation for dressing up as Kierkegaard, we learn, is to communicate to her admirer, Tido, her offer to spend one night of love with him: She had put on her costume tonight to accentuate the situation. For all students of Soren [sic] Kierkegaard will know his deep and graceful work The Seducer’s Diary. ( . . . ) The modern young woman had been at one with the old poet in the fundamental principle ( . . . ) that with one night the cup of love is emptied, the rest is dregs. But she had her own views upon the book, and had maintained, and lectured to [Tido] upon, the idea that the triumph of Johannes is not complete as long as he keeps Cordelia in the dark as to his prospects of leaving her forever at daybreak, and that the name of seducer is falsely assumed where you are in any way deceiving your partner. More honest than Kierkegaard’s seducer, she had presented her problem straight to him, this night of love was à prendre ou à laisser. (Dinesen 1977: 82–3)

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Annelise’s ‘Kierkegaardian’ conception of the virtue of explicit seduction and the primacy of intense and circumscribed experience in fact underlies the narrative situation as a whole, as the characters proceed to play a game of lottery in which each participant pledges his or her entire wealth to the winner for one year. The ways in which the outcome of the narrative probes this existential stance are too complex to deal with here, but what is clear is that Annelise’s role contains a challenge to Johannes’s strict ontological distinction between men and women and his confinement of the latter to a prereflexive sphere (cf. SKS2: 418–19/EO1: 430–1). A similar strategy can be found in Dinesen’s story ‘Ehrengard’. Although Kierkegaard does not explicitly appear in the text, its central character, the (to an Italian ear) conspicuously named painter Herr Cazotte, is clearly associated with Johannes the Seducer of Either/Or. Like the latter, Cazotte presents seduction as a modality of the aesthetic and is linked not only to Don Juan but also to Faust and the ‘demonic’ (Dinesen 1985: 13, 10, 56–7, 19). Further still, the text makes reference to such Kierkegaardian tropes as the ‘Venusberg’ (from ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages’ (Dinesen 1985: 32; SKS2: 94/EO1: 90)) and the formulation ‘Fear and Trembling’ (Dinesen 1985: 77). What is notable in ‘Ehrengard’, however, is the shift the story performs in the relation between seducer and seduced. To Cazotte, his seduction of the young Ehrengard must manifest itself in her blush (Dinesen 1985: 35), but in the text’s climatic scene this relation is inversed when it is Cazotte who turns red while the young girl retains her pallor (Dinesen 1985: 109). The dependence of the aesthete on the femininity that he pretends to rule is here made clear by Dinesen. The 1914 novel Niebla [Fog], by the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno offers a further reversal of the dynamics of ‘The Seducer’s Diary’. While Unamuno’s intense and extensive engagement with Kierkegaard has primarily been related to his philosophical works, in particular Del sentimiento trágico de la vida [On the Tragic Sense of Life] from 1912, Ruth Weber has suggestively examined a number of parallels between Kierkegaard’s ‘novel’ and that by Unamuno (Weber 1964). Both texts make use of pseudonyms, begin in similar ways, have male characters that are said to live poetically and who embark on their adventures of seduction by winning over their victim’s aunt; in both the motif of chance is prominent, and the heroines of each text have similar backgrounds. In this respect, as Weber points out, the crucial difference emerges when in Niebla it is finally the hero, Augusto, who is seduced and manipulated by the heroine, Eugenia, depriving him of the authorial control central to Johannes the Seducer. This shift, indeed, is endemic of Augusto’s situation, which is subject not only to Eugenia’s explicit coercion, but also to that of Rosario and the novel’s author (Unamuno 1996: 204, 242–3). While Niebla’s meta-fictional structure is complex, it is clear that the novel’s thoroughly comic nature lies behind this reversal, which always asserts a higher perspective from which Augusto is ridiculed. Augusto’s love story might thus be described as a re-imagination of ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ from the perspective of Don Quijote, where Augusto and Eugenia are versions of the hidalgo and his Dulcinea as much as of their Danish counterparts. Interestingly, such a combination of Cervantes and Kierkegaard would not be unique in Unamuno’s oeuvre, since previous scholarship has also suggested that his 1905 Vida de

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Don Quijote y Sancho [Life of Don Quixote and Sancho] draws heavily on the Knight of Faith in Fear and Trembling (Palmer 1969). The particular fascination that Kierkegaard’s seducer has held for modern European literature is further exemplified by a more recent adaptation. In the play ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, from 1992, written by the Hungarian András Nagy, Kierkegaard’s characters appear in a new guise. Most notably, Johannes the Seducer and William are now halfbrothers, and the latter is no longer a judge but rather a priest in Jutland, recalling the Parson of the ‘Ultimatum’ in volume two of Either/Or. In addition, the name of William’s wife is Agnete, which links him to the merman of Fear and Trembling (SKS4: 183–8/FT: 94–9).3 Edvard in turn appears as Johannes’ friend and roommate, and the two independently pursue Cordelia before realizing that they share the same object of affection. Johannes and Cordelia’s engagement comes to an end when he rejects her invitation to have sex and (drawing on Kierkegaard’s biography) escapes to Berlin. Playing on Hungary’s social upheavals at the time of writing, Nagy furthermore displaces the narrative to the revolutionary years of 1848–9, at times framing the story of Cordelia’s seduction as an allegory of the political struggle (Nagy 1996: 51). What is most notable about Nagy’s work, however, is the shift in medium, from Kierkegaard’s novelistic text to the dramatic form. The latter makes it possible to represent other characters, especially Cordelia, as much more developed and independent individuals than Kierkegaard’s first person narrative allows. On the other hand, the change in medium also means that the detail and nuance in the process of seduction that the novelistic form facilitates, and on which Kierkegaard is focused, largely disappears. Arguably, this is due no less to the play’s apparent lack of interest in Johannes as a seducer, and its focus instead on his religious or ethical role. In the absence of any description of Johannes’ seductive methods, plans, projects, or intentions, the impossibility of ultimately marrying Cordelia is rather motivated by his inability to commit to an ethical duty, or by the analogy of their relationship to Abraham’s binding of Isaac (Nagy 1996: 49, 73). The play, that is, subordinates the aesthetic in Kierkegaard to narrative logics that exceed it, and thereby points to ethical and religious appropriations of his work.

III. Ethical Receptions Direct evidence of influence from Kierkegaard’s more strictly ethical works and topics are more difficult to identify, although indirect analogies abound. Arguments have been made, for example, about the importance for Ibsen’s prose plays of the theory of choice developed most extensively in volume two of Either/Or (Anz 1999: 218), and the art critic Michael Fried has shown the relevance of William’s conception of time and the everyday for the narrative form of Theodor Fontane’s Effie Briest (Fried 2002: 141–66). A more explicit use of Judge William can be found in Kristian Gløersen’s 3

The Hong translation changes Agnete’s name to Agnes.

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Sigurd, a Bildungsroman first published in 1877. The novel follows the title character from his pietist upbringing in rural Norway, through his university years in the capital Kristiania, to his ultimate return home. In the book’s middle section, Sigurd’s diary recounts how he reads Either/Or in one straight sitting, culminating with the experience of ‘joy, joy filled with anticipation: Here you will find the solution to the great riddle, the answer to the great question, the password that admits you into the great temple of life, beauty, spirit’ (Gløersen 1897: 178). The passage’s location close to the novel’s exact numerical centre strongly suggests that the hero’s development will be determined by his reading of this text. The entry, however, does not indicate which section of Either/Or makes such a strong impression on Sigurd or what his particular interpretation of the book might be. It is tempting to assume that Sigurd favours the aesthetic parts, given that the chapter immediately following this entry, ‘Symposium’, is clearly modelled on ‘In Vino Veritas’, with each of the gathering’s participants providing a speech on woman, just as in Kierkegaard’s text. Further still, when Sigurd meets the love of his life, Bergliot Eng, it happens while ‘playing quoits [ring]’, the same game Cordelia and Johannes play in ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ (Gløersen 1897: 256–7; SKS2: 420–1/ EO1: 433). Yet in the ‘Symposium’ chapter, Sigurd’s speech rejects seduction as ethically unjustified (Gløersen 1897: 188–91), and in the game of quoits it is rather his friend Holm who resembles Johannes (significantly Sigurd only recognized Bergliot once the game is over). At the same time, it is also clear that Sigurd’s development does not follow a religious path, even if the opening of The Sickness Unto Death is later invoked (Gløersen 1897: 254). On the contrary, when Sigurd finally returns home, he decides to take a job as school teacher, which his father tells him will not be available to his tutor Niels Vik because the latter has become too influenced by Gustav Adolph Lammers (Gløersen 1897: 320), a famous Norwegian pietist strongly influenced by Kierkegaard’s late attack on Christendom (cf. Dyrerud 2009: 128–31). Instead it seems appropriate to view Sigurd’s position as akin to the ethical, a similarity confirmed by the clear echo of Judge William’s point of view in Sigurd’s definition of first love [forliebelse] as merely the premonition of and preparation for the true love [kjærlighed] that realizes its potential (Gløersen 1897: 199–203; cf. SKS3: 37–8/EO2: 30). The importance of the encounter with Either/Or would therefore appear to lie with the solution it provides to the task Sigurd himself defines as the fundamental problem of his life, namely the unification of the aesthetic and religious (Gløersen 1897: 158). In tune with William’s own pronouncements, the ethical achieves this through a teleological process of education that maps perfectly onto the plot-structure of the nineteenth century Bildungsroman (cf. SKS3: 246–7, 259/EO2: 258–9, 272–3). More complicated use of William’s letters occurs in the Swiss Max Frisch’s novel Stiller, from 1954. The text consists of the first person narrative by a man who denies being the artist Anatol Ludwig Stiller, contrary to overwhelming evidence and the claims of everyone around him. At the end of the resulting court proceedings, the narrator is convicted of being Stiller and in the afterword written by his friend, the public prosecutor Rolf, we hear how he accepts this fate and moves back in with Stiller’s wife. At the beginning of Frisch’s text stand two short quotations from volume two of Either/Or:

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This, you see, is why it is so hard for individuals to choose themselves, because the absolute isolation here is identical with the most profound continuity because as long as one has not chosen oneself there seems to be a possibility in one way or another of becoming something different. (SKS3: 208/EO2: 217)

And . . . when the passion of freedom is aroused in him–and it is aroused in the choice just as it presupposes itself in the choice–he chooses himself and struggles for this possession as for his blessedness, and that is his blessedness. (SKS3: 207/EO2: 216, trans. modified)4

The precise status of these quotations in the novel is not easy to determine. Towards the end of the book we learn that Rolf sent Stiller a volume by Kierkegaard, ‘on the basis of a conversation about melancholy as a symptom of the aesthetic attitude towards life’ (Frisch 1958: 519), which strongly points to William’s discussion in Either/Or (SKS3: 180ff./EO2: 185ff.). On this background we may associate Stiller, the failed sculptor, with such an aesthetic attitude, while Rolf ’s professional kinship with Kierkegaard’s pseudonym would place him in a position analogous to William’s. This link between Rolf and William could be further supported by the former’s notions of ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘selfacceptance’, which echo William’s idea of choice. As Rolf explains, modern man suffers from self-alienation because we are subject to an excessive discrepancy between our consciousness and our emotional life, making the latter incapable of living up to the image of ourselves generated by the former. Echoing the first of the two quotations from Either/Or that head the novel, Rolf asserts that true striving towards a self instead would consist of, first, recognizing who we really are (our emotional selves), and second, accepting this self in a way that is more than mere resignation. For Rolf this means that self-acceptance must be grounded on a faith in God as the ultimate guarantor of this real self (Frisch 1958: 423–7). This position clearly recalls passages in Either/Or where William describes the process of choice as that in which we will our empirical attributes and view them as a gift and task from God (SKS3: 213, 239–40, 53, 63/EO2: 222–3, 251, 47, 57). When, at the novel’s end, Stiller still fails to achieve happiness in spite of having accepted the actuality imposed on him, to Rolf this is accordingly due to his failure to proceed to the religious grounding of the self that makes the ethical more than a merely regulative ideal (Frisch 1958: 536–7, 571). From another perspective, however, Stiller does in fact achieve something like an ethical unification of the self, and does so precisely through his narrative. What the notebooks provide is Stiller’s account of the same events from a number of different perspectives (Julika’s, Rolf ’s, Sibylle’s, Wilfried’s, etc.), on the basis of which the reader can reconstruct Stiller’s life and context. In the second to last of Stiller’s entries, we are thus provided with the missing link—the story of Stiller’s botched suicide—which motivates his decision not to accept the identity attributed to him (Frisch 1958: 503). In this way, even the part of Stiller’s character which refuses that identity is inscribed in a 4

Frisch quotes from Schrempf ’s 1922 translation into German (Kierkegaard 1922: 185, 184).

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narrative sequence that justifies the presence of each attribute within a causal chain. The ultimately successful labour of synthesis and interpretation, in which the reader engages in order to reconstruct a coherent whole out of the confusing narrative, recalls the activity that William attributes to the ethical view of life: to possess one’s attributes in such a way ‘that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control—in short, to produce an evenness in the soul, a harmony’ (SKS3: 250/EO2: 262). The construction of identity here follows an aesthetic or narrative set of principles, and authenticity and truth are measured by conformity with these (SKS3: 259/EO2: 272–3). Yet the novel also points to the insufficiency of such purely formal criteria for authenticity in so far as Stiller’s narrative is explicitly said to be unreliable by Rolf in spite of its compliance with those criteria (Frisch 1958: 545). The doubt whether the identification of the narrator with Stiller might not be mistaken after all, and even if his story forms a harmonious whole, never fully disappears. This impossibility of achieving certainty indicates the text’s departure from William’s aesthetics of identity and towards the kind of inconclusiveness and lack of final meaning that Stiller himself at one point identifies as life-like (Frisch 1958: 82). Arguably, this struggle and openness is captured in the second quotation from Either/Or at the beginning of Frisch’s novel, and so would still constitute a modality of the ethical, but in Kierkegaard’s own work it is in the religious that it finds its full and proper exploration. As Concluding Unscientific Postscript puts it, the religious teaches that ‘the truth is only in the becoming, in the process of appropriation’ and ‘that consequently there is no result’ (SKS7: 78/CUP1: 78).

IV. Religious Receptions It is notable that the earliest literary engagements with the religious dimensions of Kierkegaard’s work almost exclusively approach them in terms of their ascetic or pietistic aspects, frequently under the influence of Kierkegaard’s late attack on the Church. Most famously, Ibsen’s 1866 poem Brand has been associated with this side of Kierkegaard’s thought. The work’s title character is a priest on Norway’s western coast, whose commitment to his religious calling is guided by the uncompromising maxim, ‘all or nothing’. Sacrificing his mother, his son, his wife, and finally himself in the service of God, Brand’s example reveals through stark contrast the hypocrisy and pusillanimity of state officials and common people alike, who live by the principle of compromise. Brand’s unrelenting Christianity has been associated with Kierkegaard ever since the text’s first publication, when Georg Brandes proclaimed Ibsen ‘Kierkegaard’s poet’ on the basis of this work (Brandes 1916: 24). Famously, however, Ibsen himself always denied having read or understood much Kierkegaard (Ibsen 2005: 262), although he did admit to having derived inspiration for Brand from the pietist G. A. Lammers (Meyer 1971: 243), who, as mentioned earlier, was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard’s late work. It is therefore possible to speak at least of an indirect echo of this aspect of Kierkegaard’s writings in the poem.

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The interpretation of Kierkegaard’s theology in terms of its world-denying demands still resonates in Scandinavian literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Dane Henrik Pontoppidan, for example, opposes Kierkegaard to the more worldly and social Grundtvig in his major novels Forjættelsens Land [The Promised Land] (1891–5) and Lykke Per [Lucky-Per] (1898–1904). Another influential Scandinavian author who engaged repeatedly with Kierkegaard’s religious thought is the Swede August Strindberg. The most explicit reference to Kierkegaard in Strindberg’s artistic writings occurs in Ett drömspel [A Dream Play], from 1901, which recounts the descent to earth of Indra’s daughter to experience the sufferings of mankind. Towards the end of the second act, the character of the Lawyer approaches the Daughter and proclaims: ‘Now you have seen most of it, but you have not yet tried the worst’, which he proceeds to define simply as ‘Repetition!’ (Strindberg 1988: 76). Strindberg uses the Danish word ‘Gentagelsen’ for repetition, making clear the allusion to Kierkegaard’s work. Significantly, in the discussion that follows, the noun is used in at least four different ways. First, the Lawyer links it to the mental condition of recollecting preceding events. While these were ‘beautiful, pleasant, witty’ when actually experienced, they become ‘disagreeable, repulsive, stupid’ when repeated in memory (Strindberg 1988: 77). Second, the concept is used to describe the fact that we must continually repeat any progress we achieve, since it is always immediately destroyed (Strindberg 1988: 78). Third, the Lawyer also uses the word to describe the process of having to learn these two lessons time and again (Strindberg 1988: 76). Notably, all three of these initial uses are highly negative, and seem to share little with the religious meaning of the term in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. The fourth meaning given to the concept nevertheless departs from the previous three. Following the Lawyer’s explanation of the Sisyphean fate of repetition, the Daughter exclaims: ‘I won’t return to the degradation and filth with you!—I want to go up there where I came from, but—first the door must be opened so that I can find out the secret . . . ’. To which the Lawyer replies: ‘In that case you must retrace your steps, go back the same way, and endure all the trials’ repulsiveness, repetitions, reiterations, recurrences . . . ’. (Strindberg 1988: 79). Even disregarding the more specific implications of this exchange it is clear that the notion of repetition has here been transformed from a state of existence to a process, a means towards something other than itself. In the play’s final act, this process is enacted when all the preceding locations and characters are gone through once again, leading us back to the opening scene. This retracing of the narrative steps is also a process of spiritual purgation, in which the Daughter gradually frees herself from her worldly bonds until she can ascend back to heaven. In a letter about his earlier play Til Damaskus [To Damasacus], which employs a similar formal and thematic device, Strindberg describes how he associates this structure in particular with Kierkegaard (quoted in Sjösted 1950: 158). It is therefore tempting to compare the emphasis on the Daughter’s process of return to her heavenly abode in act three of Ett drömspel to Constantin Constantius’s description of repetition as a redintegratio in statum pristinum (SKS4: 21/R: 144, et passim). In this way, the play’s transformation of the first three, negative kinds of repetition into the fourth, positive one, could be seen to be analogous to Kierkegaard’s project, although the Gnostic overtones of

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Strindberg’s text would fit uneasily with Kierkegaard’s discussion of the category as a form of mediation between ideality and reality in both Johannes Climacus (JC: 171–2) and The Concept of Anxiety (SKS4: 325–7/CA: 17–19). Kierkegaard’s religious writings also found strong resonance outside of Scandinavia during the years of European modernism.5 Among the most famous of such instances is Franz Kafka, who records reading the selection from Kierkegaard’s journals published under the title Das Buch des Richters [The Book of the Judge] as early as 1913. As Kafka writes in his diary: ‘As I suspected, [Kierkegaard’s] case, in spite of substantial differences, is very similar to my own, at least he is placed on the same side of the world. He confirms me as does a friend’ (Kafka 1998a: 232–3). Four years later, however, the initial proximity to Kierkegaard is qualified when Kafka tells Oskar Baum that he has read Fear and Trembling and describes its author as ‘a star, but one that shines above a region almost inaccessible to me’ (Kafka 1998b: 190). This shift is elaborated later, when Kafka makes clear that the positive principle embodied by Kierkegaard’s Abraham is one that he simultaneously admires and profoundly dislikes (Kafka 1998b: 235–6). More important still, according to his friend and literary executor Max Brod, the Sordini-episode in Kafka’s novel Das Schloß [The Castle] is to be read as a response to Kierkegaard’s analysis in Fear and Trembling (Brod 1998: 352). To Brod, the similarity rests on the fact that Sordini, who serves as a representative of the divine embodied by the Castle, demands an immoral action of his inferiors. But in an important sense the analogy to Kierkegaard’s text extends to the novel as a whole, given that the central crux of Das Schloß—the question whether K. has in fact been called by the Castle and what the meaning of that calling is—is the same as Kafka elsewhere imagines for Abraham in a clear variation on Kierkegaard’s theme (Kafka 1998b: 333–4). The link between Das Schloß and Kierkegaard was reasserted by another famous figure of twentieth-century literature, the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus, in the appendix to Le mythe de Sisyphe [The Myth of Sisyphus], from 1942 (Camus 2006a: 304–15). Camus’s claim rests on his analysis of the experience of the absurd as the irresolvable confrontation of our human desire for meaning and order with the chaotic and irrational world. The similarity of Das Schloß to Kierkegaard is grounded on the fact that both, according to Camus, solve this predicament by negating the legitimacy of the human desire and instead glorifying the chaotic and incomprehensible. Both Kafka and Kierkegaard thus ultimately escape the condition of absurdity by simply removing one of its constitutive poles (Camus: 2006a: 244–9, 312–14). The themes explored in Le mythe de Sisyphe are also central to Camus’s fictional oeuvre, and the position associated with Kierkegaard more specifically finds its echoes there as well. In the 1947 novel La peste [The Plague], for example, the Jesuit priest Paneloux puts forward the view that ‘perhaps we should love what we cannot understand’ (Camus 2006b: 184), and preaches the same negation of our human demands for meaning that Camus attributes to Kierkegaard (Camus 2006b: 188–92). Tellingly, Paneloux does not survive the plague. 5 For an analysis of the relation between Kierkegaard’s theology and modernist form more generally, see Lisi 2012.

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The other two famous figures of the existentialist movement, Simon de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, also drew on Kierkegaard for the formulation of their overarching intellectual project. De Beauvoir did so not only in Le deuxième sexe [The Second Sex], written in 1949, where she criticizes the frequent misogynist passages in Kierkegaard’s work, but also in the 1947 Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté [The Ethics of Ambiguity], where she makes use of Fear and Trembling to define her own position (de Beauvoir 2003: 165). Sartre, for his part, offered an extensive engagement with Kierkegaard in his contribution to the 1964 conference Kierkegaard vivant, in which he identifies Kierkegaard’s originality with his claim that subjectivity is irreducible to cognition (Sartre 1966: 23–46). To Sartre, this position is exemplified by the discussion of Christ in Philosophical Fragments, which he reads as applicable to all human beings: to ask whether there can be a historical point of departure for an eternal blessedness, as Kierkegaard does, is to probe the trans-historical, non-objective dimension of experience (Sartre 1966: 22). Such an ascription of the structure of the Incarnation to the human condition in general conflates Kierkegaard’s notions of historical faith and faith proper (SKS4: 285/PF: 86–7), or faith sensu laxiori, and faith sensu eminentiori (SKS7: 187ff., 295/CUP1: 204ff., 323–4), and clearly serves to place him in closer proximity to Sartre’s own philosophical project. It is thus clear that Sartre and de Beauvoir would likewise have associated Kierkegaard with concerns that also stand at the heart of their literary production, but the precise nature of this influence is more difficult to establish in the absence of direct references and allusions in the latter corpus. In another contribution to the same conference that Sartre spoke at, a further connection between Kierkegaard and existentialist literature was asserted by the Catholic dramatist and philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Beginning by dismissing Kierkegaard’s influence on his thought as ‘practically nonexistent’ (Marcel 1966: 64), Marcel nevertheless ends by pointing out that the relation between drama and philosophy that he sees as central to his work would be impossible without the Dane (Marcel 1966: 78–80). More specifically still, Marcel suggests parallels between Kierkegaard and some of his own plays, such as La grâce [Grace] and Palais de sable [The Sand Castle], both published in 1914, as well as L’iconoclaste [The Iconoclast], from 1921. To Marcel, the kinship with Kierkegaard in these cases rests on a shared insistence on the transcendence of the divine and a conception of character as encompassing distinct modes of existence without homogenizing them in what he describes as a Hegelian Aufhebung (Marcel 1966: 73–6). An elaboration of the existentialist preoccupation with Kierkegaardian themes in an explicitly Christian context has also been provided by the English poet W. H. Auden. Auden’s engagement with Kierkegaard began as early as 1937 and continued throughout his life in a variety of different contexts. One of the most interesting is found in The Sea and the Mirror, Auden’s sequel to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and his most complex poetic exploration of the relation between art and life. In the text, Auden’s Prospero 6 For further discussion of this conference, see the contributions by Clare Carlisle and Steven Shakespeare in this volume.

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begins by discussing his imminent separation from Ariel and the world of art and aesthetics that the latter represents: Now our partnership is dissolved, I feel so peculiar: As if I had been on a drunk since I was born And suddenly now, and for the first time, am cold sober, With all my unanswered wishes and unwashed days Stacked up all round my life ( . . . ). (Auden 2007: 409)

The spirit of art is here clearly identified with deceit and illusion, in terms that resonate with Kierkegaard’s critique, and a few stanzas earlier Prospero even appears to allude to The Concept of Anxiety when he describes how under Ariel’s influence, ‘the uncontrollable vertigo,|Because it can scent no shame, is unobliged to strike’ (Auden 2007: 406). In Kierkegaard’s work, vertigo is repeatedly linked to the experience of anxiety (cf. e.g. SKS4: 365/CA: 60), which is also closely related to shame. Both are ultimately grounded in the encounter with our own freedom, making the protection that art is said to grant us in The Sea and the Mirror a separation from ourselves. Prospero’s rupture with Ariel is in this way both painful and uncertain, but also provides the precondition for a new mode of existence that resembles Kierkegaard’s religious stage in a number of ways: When the servants settle me into a chair In some well-sheltered corner of the garden, And arrange my muffler and rugs, shall I ever be able To stop myself from telling them what I am doing,— Sailing alone, out over seventy thousand fathoms—? Yet if I speak, I shall sink without a sound Into unmeaning abysses. Can I learn to suffer Without saying something ironic or funny On suffering? I never suspected the way of truth Was a way of silence ( . . . ). (Auden 2007: 409)

The seventy thousand fathoms are a direct quotation from Kierkegaard, who makes repeated use of the phrase to describe the condition of faith (e.g. SKS6: 411/SLW: 444; SKS7: 187/CUP1: 204). Further, this mode of experience is envisioned by Prospero to occur in midst of the everyday, similar to the way Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling imagines the Knight of Faith to ‘express the sublime in the pedestrian’ (SKS4: 136/FT: 41). Like Abraham in that work, moreover, Prospero will be forced to remain silent about his mode of experience, which is located beyond the universal structure of language and which, if expressed at all, can only take the form of irony (SKS4: 172–207/FT: 82–120). Although some disagreement exists among critics as to whether Prospero’s commitment to the religious is to be seen as genuine or not, it is clear that Auden here, like Kierkegaard, places it after and above the aesthetic.

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V. Biographical Receptions A tradition of biographical reception of Kierkegaard can be traced as far back as 1840, when H. C. Andersen mocked him in his vaudeville En Comedie i det Grønne [An Openair Comedy]. A more famous and persistent fascination with Kierkegaard’s biography is found in Rainer Maria Rilke, who had his interest roused by Henriette Lund’s biographical essay on Kierkegaard and went on to translate his correspondence with Regine Olsen. From the references to Kierkegaard in Rilke’s private writings, it is clear that he viewed Kierkegaard primarily as a literary author defined by his unhappy love (an image Lund’s particularly sentimental portrait would easily have encouraged). In a letter to Georg Brandes from 1909, Rilke in this way enthusiastically describes André Gide’s recently published La porte étroite [The Strait Gate] as providing a parallel to Kierkegaard: ‘I go so far as to assume that this book in some way steps out of the rotation of French conceptions of love and, under the influence of a profound force of gravity, attempts a new curvature of its own into the open. ( . . . ) (Would Kierkegaard not have recognized these notes and honoured them?)’ (Brandes 1966: 491–2). The particular interest Rilke might have had in Gide’s novel has been usefully described by George Schoolfield: ‘Rilke had felt, he said, a certain “Wesensverwandtschaft” with the novel, and any reader of Malte will know what he means; Alissa in Gide’s book, like Abelone in Rilke’s, is one of those women—so much better than men—who are capable of carrying out “der Liebe ganz große Aufgabe”, in possessionless love’ (Schoolfield 1978: 180). Kierkegaard’s relation to Regine Olsen suited Rilke’s lifelong fascination with figures like the Italian poetess Gaspara Stampa or the Portuguese nun Mariana Alcoforado, whose letters he likewise translated a few years later. The celebration of unhappy lovers such as these is a central theme of Rilke’s poetry, which views them as embodying a more authentic mode of being. As the first of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien [Duino Elegies] puts it: For have you thought sufficiently of Gaspara Stampa, so that some girl who lost her beloved, can feel at the heightened example of this lover: that I might be like her? Should these oldest of pains not finally become more fruitful to us? Is it not time, that, loving, we free ourselves from the beloved and quivering endure it: as the arrow endures the bowstring, to be more than itself together in the release. For staying is nowhere. (Rilke 1955: 686–7)

The view of Kierkegaard as an instance of this notion of ‘intransitive love’ points to his centrality for Rilke’s poetic project as a whole. A more limited use of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Regine Olsen is found in the novel Kjærlighetens gjerninger [Works of Love], from 1997, written by the Norwegian Finn Jor. Set in 1896, the novel is narrated by Regine

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Olsen and focuses on the story of her engagement to Kierkegaard. Although Jor draws on a number of scenes and topics from Kierkegaard’s oeuvre and biography (the father’s curse of God, the minuet from Don Giovanni on the streets of Copenhagen, etc.), the novel’s strength clearly lies in the one aspect that does not derive from the Kierkegaardian corpus, namely the representation of Regine’s point of view. The emphasis here is repeatedly placed on Regine’s struggle with the ultimate obscurity of Søren’s character, although, significantly, her failure to fully understand her lover is not a consequence of a lack of proper information. On the contrary, the novel repeatedly emphasizes that Søren is most himself in her company (e.g. Jor 1997: 43–4, 52–3, 59), and it is due to this openness that she witnesses those aspects of his personality incompatible with his external role of dandy. For example, in a scene drawn from a well-known passage in Kierkegaard’s journals, Søren confesses to Regine that he feels the urge for suicide the moment he returns home from a successful soirée (Jor 1997: 69; Pap. I A 161 (JP5: 5141)). In an inversion that would surely have delighted Kierkegaard himself, the privileged access provided by Regine in this way reveals those sides of Kierkegaard’s character that have become part of the historically available corpus, converting the external, published record into the internal, subjective realm. One of the most striking features of this structure, however, is that Regine’s account is governed by her interpretation of Søren’s interpretation of events. Coupled with the multiple layers of narration (Regine tells the story of telling the story of her engagement to her maid Susanne), the status of Kierkegaard’s thought and life is inscribed in a perspectival game that deprives the archival record of its claim to objectivity. The Portuguese Agustina Bessa-Luís provides a further fictionalization of Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine in her play Os estados eróticos imediatos de Sören Kierkegaard [The Immediate Erotic Stages of Søren Kierkegaard], from 1992.7 The text is something of a pastiche of Kierkegaard’s writings, heavily based on direct quotations or allusions to familiar passages and topoi. In the opening dialogue, Kierkegaard cites the statement from The Point of View that he is ‘a genius in a market town’ (Kierkegaard 1982: 142/PV: 95), which is immediately followed by definitions of irony, melancholy and the nature of engagement and seduction (Bessa-Luís 1994: 12–14). The remainder of the play recounts Søren’s relation to Regine in terms closely patterned on ‘The Seducer’s Diary’, with the characters repeatedly drawing from that text as well as others, and Don Juan himself making frequent interventions. Another ambitious attempt to narrate Kierkegaard’s life occurs in Klaas Huizing’s 2003 novel, Der letzte Dandy [The Last Dandy]. The novel sticks closely to the main events of Kierkegaard’s biography (his early education, the engagement with Regine Olsen, his trips to Berlin, the Corsair-affair, and so on), liberally augmented with anecdotal details from his writings and the mythology surrounding his character (his early aestheticism, the notorious visit to a brothel). This biographical narrative is framed, on the one hand, by conversations between Kierkegaard and Thomas Mann in an unspeci7 I have not been able to obtain access to the Portuguese edition of this text and therefore quote from the Danish translation.

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fied afterlife, and, on the other, polemical interventions on contemporary German affairs by ‘Victor Eremitus’. Following a scholarly approach popular in the early years of Kierkegaard studies, Huzing’s novel establishes causal relations between Kierkegaard’s particular experiences and his works and philosophical concerns: Regine’s nod in church triggers the idea of repetition, his sense of duty towards his father stands behind the argument of Fear and Trembling, his opposition to Hegelian mediation is grounded in the experience of melancholy (Huizing 2003: 156, 131, 50). What is striking about this representational technique is the way it frequently fails to provide motivations for transitions between aesthetic, ethical, or religious modes of behaviour in Kierkegaard’s character, or how the invocations of categories and ideas from his works often remain difficult to integrate into the narrative. Indeed, the desire to include references to the entirety of the Kierkegaardian corpus arguably generates the effect that Kierkegaard himself ascribed to Andersen’s Kun en Spillemand [Only a Fiddler], where each part remains distinct from all the others without a positive relation to a whole (SKS1: 35ff./ EPW: 80ff.). What the novel’s limitations suggest, that is, is that the principle of linear temporality that realism favours may be insufficient on its own to productively relate and organize the totality of Kierkegaard’s polyphonic life and thought. The need for a different aesthetic model that this implies is naturally also of profound philosophical importance. The preceding examples indicate the breadth of Kierkegaard’s influence on modern European literature, both in terms of the number of authors touched by his work and the variety of uses to which it has been put. The fertility of these encounters testifies to the unique nature of Kierkegaard’s project, its own continual blending of philosophy and literature, which invites the contribution of literary works to the exploration of his thought. The persistent fascination that this task has held for literary authors also suggests that Kierkegaard offers a challenge and provocation different from that found in other sources. If Kierkegaard’s reception has been particularly fruitful in the literary context, this might therefore be because his oeuvre provides an aesthetic model different from those traditionally found in European culture, with different formal, philosophical and cultural implications to explore.

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Strindberg, August (1988). Ett Drömspel. August Strindbergs Samlade Verk, vol. 46, ed. Gunnar Ollén (Stockholm: Norstedts). Strodtmann, Adolf (1873). Das geistige Leben in Dänemark. Streifzüge auf den Gebieten der Kunst, Literatur, Politik und Journalistik des skandinavischen Nordens (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel). Szwed, Antoni (2009). ‘Poland: A Short History of the Reception of Kierkegaard’s Thought’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome II: Southern, Central and Eastern Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Farnham: Ashgate), 213–43. Töpfer-Stoyanova, Desislava (2009). ‘Bulgaria: The Long Way from Indirect Acquaintance to Original Translation’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome II: Southern, Central and Eastern Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 285–300. Unamuno, Miguel de (1996). Niebla, ed. Germán Gullón (Madrid: Espasa Calpe). Vestrynge, Karl (2009). ‘The Netherlands and Flanders: Kierkegaard’s Reception in the DutchSpeaking World’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome I: Northern and Western Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 271–306. Vidal, Dolors Perarnau and Óscar Parcero Oubiña (2009). ‘Spain: The Old and New Kierkegaard Reception in Spain’, in Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome II: Southern, Central and Eastern Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 17–80. Weber, Ruth House (1964). ‘Kierkegaard and the Elaboration of Unamuno’s Niebla’, Hispanic Review 32: 2, 118–34.

Suggested Reading Lisi, Leonardo F. (2012). Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (New York: Fordham University Press). Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2009). Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tomes I–III. (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Stewart (2012). Thulstrup, Niels and Maria Mikulova Thulstrup (eds.) (1981). The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard. Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 8 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel). Poole, Roger (1998). ‘The unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-century receptions’, The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ziolkowski, Eric (2011). The Literary Kierkegaard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press).

chapter 29

k ier k ega a r d a n d english l a nguage liter atu r e h ugh s . p yper

Kierkegaard’s influence on English-language literature in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries is both direct and indirect, as befits the master of indirect communication. There are writers who explicitly refer to Kierkegaard’s books in their own works or who become fascinated by his biography and use him as a character. Two examples of the latter are Loving Søren (2005), Caroline Coleman O’Neill’s retelling of the story of Kierkegaard’s broken engagement from Regine Olsen’s point of view as a Christian romance and Ellen Brown’s Master Kierkegaard: Summer 1847 (2011) which subtly mimics Kierkegaard’s stylistic virtuosity by inventing the journal of his servant Magda. Other authors may be less explicit, but betray the fact that they have read and responded to his work. This influence may be on the themes and plots of their writings, or involve the use of what might called Kierkegaardian characters, either based on Kierkegaard himself or on the characters from his writings. In other cases, the influence may be more at a formal level. The complex interplay of pseudonymous voices and multiple genres in Kierkegaard’s writings is reflected in the style, structure, and rhetoric of works he influenced as much as in their themes. Not all those who do refer to Kierkegaard have necessarily read many of his writings, however. Writers may react to him secondhand, picking up biographical details or general impressions of his literary works from other sources. Sometimes this may simply be at the level of popular clichés such as the ‘melancholy Dane’. In this sense, misreadings and oversimplifications of Kierkegaard may be more influential than what he actually wrote. The Kierkegaard that becomes part of the cultural stock-in-trade of Englishspeaking cultures is a mythical figure, interpreted after the event as the father of existentialism and proponent of irrationalism and individualism with a strange and unhappy life story and doomed love affair. Indeed, his name in practice can be invoked as a shorthand label for a pathological or immature self-obsession.

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Moreover, any writer in English who responds to Ibsen, Kafka, or Sartre, to name but a few examples, is going to be indirectly influenced by Kierkegaard, however we might assess the adequacy of the reaction of any of these figures to his writings. Looked at in this way, Kierkegaard’s influence on English literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is far-reaching, but, by its nature, elusive and hard to chart. In this chapter, I propose to concentrate on writers who have more explicitly engaged with Kierkegaard and who have contributed in their own way to the subsequent reception of Kierkegaard in English literature through the reactions that their own work has provoked. This cannot be an exhaustive review of every literary work in English literature that mentions Kierkegaard. By focusing on a select group of writers, some better known than others, I hope to illuminate what writers have found in Kierkegaard and what a recognition of Kierkegaard’s influence can add to the appreciation of such writers. Intriguingly, my study of this reception has suggested that one of Kierkegaard’s most significant literary legacies may be the identification of a particular character type: the reader of Kierkegaard. There are reasons for this. Kierkegaard’s concern with the reader is evident throughout his work. Time and again he invokes ‘my reader’, explicitly in his Edifying Discourses, inviting anyone who picks up one of his works to ask themselves ‘Am I that reader?’ There is an implication that Kierkegaard’s writings are not for everyone and act as their own gatekeepers. There is a secret invitation that each reader may take as directed to him or herself and which can seduce the reader into a closer engagement with the text, which is coupled to a self-questioning dialogue with it: ‘Could it be me to whom he is speaking? If so, what is he saying and what do I need to learn from him? Is he finally the one who can address my most personal questions?’ A reader of Kierkegaard has to persist in following him through an obstacle course of misdirection and indirection and will only do so if they can appreciate the artistry and artifice with which the labyrinthine ironies of his authorship are constructed. Yet at the same time, there is the vast resource of his journals where the reader can have the illusion of being made privy, in copious detail, to the psychology of this extraordinary man and to the process of the production of his prodigious output. We should not forget that Kierkegaard stands as an example and a reproach to almost any other writer in terms of the sheer fluency and industry of his production. Even Kierkegaard’s name may have contributed to the attraction. There is something exotic to the English eye in the two ‘k’s, the double ‘a’ and the ‘ø’ of Søren and a certain elitist self-satisfaction is open to those who come to know that the final syllable did not rhyme with ‘yard.’ Those who were seeking a source of wisdom or at least a kindred spirit who seemed out of the ordinary could be drawn to explore his works. The titles of his books themselves act as filters. Not every reader is going to be drawn to works entitled The Sickness unto Death or Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. In this regard, it is notable that it is the pseudonymous works that these archetypal readers are concerned with, together with the self-revelation of the Journals. The edifying works written in Kierkegaard’s own name are seldom referred to by any of the authors who discuss his influence. From Kierkegaard’s point of view, this

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means that the reception of his work is partial at best and liable to be seriously misleading, but this is a risk any author runs. The stereotypical Kierkegaardian reader, as we will see below, has a sense of being set apart from the norms and obligations of ordinary life. This manifests itself in a paradoxical combination of a sense of profound inadequacy or even a conviction of some fundamental flaw in one’s being, combined with a temptation to view the life of socalled ordinary people with contempt for its superficiality and complacency. ‘Normal’ existence can appear as both a paradise of stability and acceptance from which the reader feels excluded and a nightmare of stifling and narrow-minded conventionality that feels as if it would suffocate the authentic individual life which he or she craves but also dreads. Any given reader will have his or her particular version of this syndrome and may be more or less pathologically involved with it. The sense of difference may have many different origins and there are many ways of compensating for it. Some of those who feel set apart by a particular talent, which is also a ‘thorn in the flesh’, may be self-deluded, as any talent competition can attest, but even those with genuine gifts may have delusions about their implication. The reception of Kierkegaard is, tautologically, mediated through Kierkegaardian readers. Those writers who are most influenced by him themselves show features of the stereotype above although most also share Kierkegaard’s. In turn, the readership they appeal to is likely to share elements of this syndrome. Indeed, this in itself offers an opportunity to writers at the level of characterization. If a character is represented as reading Kierkegaard, that serves as a signal to the reader that he or she may be prey to the sense of specialness and privilege because of gifts that so-called ordinary people cannot share. In the necessarily brief discussion which follows of writers who specifically acknowledge the importance of reading Kierkegaard for their own work, I hope that these points are borne out.

I. Early Reception For most readers and writers in English, any direct engagement with Kierkegaard had to wait for the publication of English translations of his works, beginning in the 1930s, but there are traces of his influence earlier. The story of the reception of Kierkegaard in the English-speaking world is well told elsewhere (see Barrett 2009; Pattison 2009; Poole 1998). In strictly literary circles in the earlier decades of the twentieth centuries, the most likely source for any knowledge of Kierkegaard was through reading Ibsen. This seems to have been the root of the occurrences of his name and ideas in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake where, for instance, the etymological and phonetic links between Kierkegaard and ‘kirk-yard’ or cemetery are played upon in a characteristic way (Christiani 1965: 63). The main reception of Kierkegaard was not through literature, but through philosophy and theology. Those writers who were likely to come across his work were those

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who had an interest in reading in these areas. To simplify a complex process, there were two main channels through which Kierkegaard’s work came to wider attention. One was through the German tradition, either by way of Heidegger and Jaspers, or, most influentially, through the apparently contrasting theological appropriations by Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and later, Paul Tillich.1 In the aftermath of the First World War, such writers found in Kierkegaard an implicit critique of the unthinking conformity and self-confidence of the bourgeois social order that seemed to them to have failed catastrophically. As their works became more available in English in the 1930s, they spoke to the anxiety of those who felt trapped between the rise of Fascism and Communism as totalitarian systems but could see no alternative in the equally impersonal collectivism and conformity of bourgeois capitalism. In the USA, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was a particularly important proponent of such a stance in books such as The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941) where he draws gratefully on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread to elucidate the meaning of sin. The other was through the French tradition, latterly especially through the works of Sartre, Camus, and other members of the existentialist school. They promoted an atheist interpretation of Kierkegaard’s concept of dread. At the same time, the influence of the French Christian existentialists such as Marcel, also dependent on Kierkegaard, should not be forgotten. In this atmosphere, Kierkegaard came to be seen as a prophet and champion of the importance of the individual and of individual freedom as well as an uncanny diagnostician of the despair and frustration of those who felt at odds with the world; one that rang true to a public already familiar with Freud and Jung. Along with Dostoevsky and, later, Kafka, he was enlisted as a prophetic spokesman for an anxious generation. This common association gave him a place not just as a philosopher but as a writer. Granted that these rather varied receptions of Kierkegaard represent a series of misreadings of his work, he was recognized as a key common precursor to a range of influential and competing intellectual tradition. At the same time he retained the allure of a rather mysterious and complex figure writing in to what to most English-speakers was an obscure language. Not surprisingly, there was a ready market for the English translations of his work that now began to appear. Alexander Dru’s selection from the Journals (1938), the translations of individual works by David Swenson, and most importantly, Walter Lowrie, together with Lowrie’s substantial biography of Kierkegaard (1938) and its later shorter version (1942) were to be the entrée into Kierkegaard’s world for English-speaking readers. Indeed, Lowrie made it his mission to bring Kierkegaard to the attention of the American public. These publications coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War where Kierkegaard’s prescient analyses of the human condition took on an especial relevance, as the foremost political theologian of the time in the US, Reinhold Niebuhr, had already begun to argue. Kierkegaard rapidly became part of the intellectual discourse of the day on both sides of the Atlantic. It would be an odd writer who would not have come across his name in the 1940s. 1

See the articles by Paul Martens and Lee Barrett in this volume.

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A key figure in this reception was Charles Williams who was not only the publisher responsible for seeing Dru and Lowrie’s works through Oxford University Press in his capacity as an editor but was himself a highly original novelist and writer with wide connections in the literary world (Paulus 2009). This dual role means that Williams has a particular place in the specifically literary reception of Kierkegaard. It was through Williams, for instance, that Kierkegaard came to the attention to other writers, in particular W. H. Auden (1907–73), on whom Kierkegaard’s works had a profound effect and who himself became a significant factor in his wider reception.

II. W. H. Auden Auden’s engagement with Kierkegaard is explored in some detail in Edward Mendelson’s biography Later Auden (1999). Mendelson sees as pivotal Auden’s experience in a Germanlanguage cinema in Yorkville in early December in 1939. Auden had left Britain to escape the stuffy morality and the possibility of being drafted. There he witnessed the applause with which an audience who he described as ‘quite ordinary, supposedly harmless’ Germans greeted a newsreel where the Nazi conquest of Poland was hailed as a national triumph. The audience’s enthusiastic cries of ‘Kill the Poles’ struck at the heart of all that Auden believed, and, more importantly, had been brought up to assume that everyone else believed. No longer could he argue that the rise of dictatorship was the product of a perversion of the masses’ longing for freedom and justice. Instead, it reflected a deep human instinct for hatred and destruction. Kierkegaard, so Mendelson argues, provided Auden with a way forward from this revelation. Although Auden may have known of Kierkegaard before this, it was the few pages on Kierkegaard in Charles Williams’s The Descent of the Dove that seems to have awakened him to what then became a serious engagement with Kierkegaard’s writings (Mendelson 1999: 129). Williams’s book, as well as Williams himself, deeply impressed Auden. Williams quoted a passage from The Point of View and the lesson he took from Kierkegaard is that the ills of the modern era stemmed from the attempt to live without the unconditional. Kierkegaard’s insistence that ‘before God we are always in the wrong’ became, for Auden, the way to show that Nazi values had no validity. We may all be in the wrong, but extremists of all kinds have a conviction of their own correctness that is incorrigibly wrong. Those who acknowledge their own shortcomings, or even sinfulness, are at least potentially right in that acknowledgment. Auden’s subsequent literary engagement with Kierkegaard was multifaceted. Most directly, he edited an influential anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings entitled The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, dedicated two essays to assessing his significance, and reviewed some of the translations of his work. Less directly, but perhaps of more consequence, Kierkegaard became an important conversation partner in the development of his later poetry, although increasingly Auden felt the need to balance the

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stern individualism and call to repentance that Kierkegaard represented to him with voices that spoke for the need for community and the role of human relationships in the religious as well as political life. In his anthology, for instance, he explicitly omits any extracts from the Attack on Christendom, arguing that it is the least important of Kierkegaard’s books for the reader just because it is the book that Kierkegaard regards as the most personally important. In the introduction to The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, Auden takes issue with the common comparison of Kierkegaard with Dostoyevsky and instead suggests that his affinities are with John Henry Newman; both of them are concerned with the problem of communicating the Christian message to a secularized society, which retains a nominal Christianity but has evacuated the vocabulary of the great themes of theology. For many readers, Auden’s post-war poetry has less appeal than his earlier work precisely because he now sees himself in this line and his concern with communicating a Christian message gives his poetry a didactic edge. Others, however, see this as enriching the sometimes rather brittle brilliance of his earlier period. As Peter Schilling has argued, Auden uses Kierkegaard and the idea of the three categories of existence—aesthetic, ethical, and religious—in his wartime poems New Year Letter, For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Age of Anxiety, to structure his argument that the responsibility and guilt that all share for the war cannot be dealt with by aesthetic and ethical approaches to life (Schilling 1994). The centrality of the concepts of anxiety, dread, and despair is an index of the influence of Kierkegaard’s work on him, although mediated through Niebuhr. In these works, Auden develops a discussion of freedom that is not conceived in the political terms of his earlier poetry but instead is rooted in Kierkegaardian concepts of the way in which sin is related to our dread of possibility. The horrors of the war thus become an outcome of a potential we all share, not to be bracketed off as some aberration merely of Nazism. Yet that darkness can also be an assurance of the possibility of salvation, but one that cannot be reasoned through, systematized or collectivized. As with many readers of Kierkegaard, however, Auden found that he needed to move beyond the stark summons to self-awareness to find a place for the restored community of the Church. In the rather different post-war climate, where, especially in the United States, Christianity became co-opted to the political status quo as the bulwark against Russian communism, Kierkegaard’s Christian radicalism became less appealing and relevant. In ‘A Knight of Doleful Countenance’, a review first published in 1968 of the then new Hong edition of Kierkegaard’s Journals, which he subtitled ‘Second Thoughts on Kierkegaard’, Auden concludes that Kierkegaard was unreasonable in his demands of the Church and failed to realize just how particular his own temperament and circumstances were (Auden 1989: 189–97). However, he commends Kierkegaard as an inescapable and necessary teacher for those who have talent. Their temptation is to see their talent as somehow a mark of superiority absolving them from normal duties and to see the arena of their talents as the only truly important human activity. Auden himself refused to entertain exaggerated notions of the importance of poetry, which

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would lead people away from the need for concrete action to promote justice and to live religious lives.

III. Walker Percy The novelist and writer Walker Percy (1916–90) is another literary figure who made no secret of his debt to Kierkegaard. Percy came late to his career as a novelist, originally training as a medical doctor until he contracted tuberculosis. He confessed later that he found it hard to avoid the sense that this was some kind of punishment and began to lose faith in the scientific humanism that had been his credo to that point. In an interview with the philosopher Bradley Dewey on the influence of Kierkegaard on his writings (Dewey 1974), Percy cites Either/Or as the first volume of Kierkegaard’s writings he read, sometime in the early 1950s, although elsewhere he speaks of having read the discourse ‘On the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’ some years before that. He had already studied quite extensively both French and German existentialism and was drawn to ‘The Diary of a Seducer’, which he imagined from the title would be as easy to read as the plays of Sartre and Marcel. Kierkegaard’s book, however, proved a very much tougher nut to crack, to the extent that he abandoned it and tried again with Sickness unto Death and Repetition, with no greater success. Almost as a last try, Percy turned to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which proved to be much more amenable, not least because of the resumé of his own writings which Kierkegaard provides there. Percy recorded that his reading of Kierkegaard proceeded through repeated frustrated attempts to deal with the pseudonymous writings. In this process, the Postscript acted as an ‘oasis’ to which he would return before setting out once more to deal with the other works. This was, he recalled, hard work over many years and was never completed. Yet, Percy notes, the very fact that reading Kierkegaard was such an effort gave a particular potency to his ideas once they had been grasped. Percy’s own view of the lasting effect of Kierkegaard on his work was that he felt confirmed in his conviction that scientific humanism left something essential out of its description of human life. Kierkegaard’s jibe that Hegel was like a man who erects a great palace but ends up living in a hut beside it rang true for him. More than that, however, Kierkegaard offered Percy an intellectually rigorous alternative to the mechanistic or scientific world view which went beyond a vague plea to emotion and the arts. Percy recounts how Kierkegaard’s insistence on the importance of the individual struck him, particularly as it was combined with a seemingly paradoxical insistence on the transparency of the individual before God. What Kierkegaard gave Percy was a way to proceed: ‘I saw for the first time through Kierkegaard how to take the alternative system seriously, how to treat it as a serious thinker, as a serious writer’ (Dewey 1974: 282). Ideas that Percy had previously formulated were confirmed and new insights sharpened. Here the similarity to Auden’s

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experience is clear. A key theme for Percy had been his awareness of a malaise in society and individuals of which they themselves were not conscious. In Kierkegaard’s intricate dissection of the varieties of despair in The Sickness unto Death, he found the idea of the despair that does not know it is despair. He acknowledges that his debt to Kierkegaard is that he provided a theoretical framework within which Percy’s own insights could be brought to clearer expression. Percy goes on to reveal how far the Kierkegaardian influence runs in his novels. The key text for Percy is again the discourse on the genius and the apostle. His first published novel The Moviegoer (1961) is structured round this opposition in the career of the young hero Binx, but the same structure is reused in several of his novels. Characters in more or less conscious despair attempt to search for themselves through what Percy calls a ‘vertical’ search, courting experience in order to amass the data for some intellectual synthesis. This is the work of the genius, which is characterized by the fact that it can be done anywhere, at any time. In its concern with variety and interest, it is rooted in the aesthetic stage. Binx becomes aware that this is ultimately unsatisfying. He is no hero, and his search leads to dire consequences for himself and his family. The apostle, however, arrives at a given time and place to impart news that only he can give and which has to be accepted or rejected. Such structural cues drawn from Kierkegaard run through Percy’s oeuvre. His later novel Love in the Ruins (1971), for instance, is an experiment in the dialectic between comic and the religious as set out in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Percy was well aware of areas where he found Kierkegaard wanting, however. His reading of Kierkegaard found him [Kierkegaard] too cerebral and isolationist, lacking in a sense of what human relations might entail. As an antidote to Hegel, and by extension to any over-systematic human thought, Kierkegaard fell into the trap of subjectivism. His handling of his engagement Percy saw as folly, but as lovable folly, something that humanized Kierkegaard but made him a poor mentor for those wrestling with the issues of sexuality and the religious importance of the family. For Percy, the thought of Martin Buber was a necessary counterweight in making relationship and community integral to the development of the self. Percy’s own researches into the intersubjective nature of language were part and parcel of this different understanding of relationship. Here the limits of Percy’s reading of Kierkegaard become apparent. Given his interest in signs and in the concreteness of the news of Jesus, it is surprising that he admits that he probably never read Training in Christianity. Percy could also not follow Kierkegaard in his scepticism about the content of any religious truth claim. For the Gospel to be news, it has to be a serious statement that can be classified within a wider system of information. Here Kierkegaard’s Protestantism, in Percy’s view, leads him to a vision of the religious life as an existence in suffering and solitude. In Percy’s novels, however, there is a place of rest to be found in the community of the Church. Although there are certainly major divergences between the two, Percy himself was not keen to discuss these disagreements. ‘Who was it said that what you do with a

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writer is to take what is useful to you about him and thank God for that[?] I don’t worry about what Kierkegaard said that I couldn’t use, that I didn’t like’ (Dewey 1974: 298). That is a maxim worth bearing in mind as we consider Kierkegaard’s influence on creative literature. Writers are not exponents of their sources, but are stimulated by them to rework and reword the expression of their own insights and owe their loyalty to the work they are producing, not to the preservation of the work of others, however influential.

IV. John Updike The same caveat could be applied to the work of John Updike (1932–2009), a prolific and prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, together with reviews and essays. It was a crisis in his own life in the 1950s that led him to Kierkegaard, as he explained when asked to contribute to a newspaper feature on ‘A Book that Changed Me’. It was Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling that he chose (Updike 1992). As a new young husband and father recently moved to New York, his responsibilities seemed overwhelming and he was obsessed with the thought of his own death and the power of death over the universe. Kierkegaard’s pitiless insistence on the outrage of the story of Abraham and Isaac struck him as strangely reassuring, he reports, and he was led to the realization that faith was not a matter of calculation but an act of will and of courage. Here was a companion who could speak to his sense of solitude and Updike found solace in Kierkegaard’s voice in the series of his works that were published over the next few years. Finding Kierkegaard led him to Barth, whose work remained a point of reference for Updike. This encounter with Kierkegaard is explored explicitly in some of his early short stories in the collection Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962), as Susan Crowley has explained (1977). His most celebrated series of novels, the Rabbit sequence, ranges over four decades of American history following the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom. The name of his hero itself has a Kierkegaardian ring; it could be taken to mean ‘a stream of angst’. Updike himself described this series as an exercise in point of view. There is a Kierkegaardian dimension to his stylistic virtuosity in these works which make extensive use of presenttense narrative and uses the limited viewpoint of this flawed hero. Harry is a complex character developed over several volumes, but one thing he is not is limited by the conventional morality and social conformity of his environment. Nor is he conventionally religious, but there are episodes in the novels where he seems to share the author’s sense of a God who is not to be found by rational deduction or by living the good life but who breaks in terrifyingly to the world in acts of both judgement and salvation. Throughout this series of novels, the tension between the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood and the nagging sense of dissatisfaction plays out through the changing background of American society as Rabbit ages. He is caught somewhere between the lifestyles represented by the Seducer and the married Judge William in Kierkegaard’s

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Either/Or, evading the decision in a way that is mostly destructive, but at times comes close to the transcendence of that decision that is characteristic of the religious phase in Kierkegaard’s understanding. In a different mode, Updike’s novel Roger’s Version (1986) enacts questions over the nature of God and the adequacy of different theological visions through the various encounters between Roger, a middle-aged professor of theology who is a comfortable Barthian and Dale, an earnest young computer scientist who is convinced that he can demonstrate the existence of God from the specificity of physical constants if only he designs the right programme. Intertwined with the theological debate which deals with the very Kierkegaardian problem of how one tells the difference between a wholly Other God and a non-existent one is a complex narrative of competing sexual desires, fantasies, and suspicions as Roger becomes involved with his half-sister’s daughter and obsesses over the possibility that Dale is sleeping with his wife. Not only in subject matter, but also in its treatment, Kierkegaard’s influence is strong as once again Updike tells his story from the fallible viewpoint of Roger whose reliability and ability to distinguish truth from fantasy are called in question by the narrative. Updike was quite open that he was using the novel to explore theology, but in a way that he learned from Kierkegaard he states the different positions and leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions, though tantalizingly leaving ambiguities that are not easily resolved. Apart from his novels, Updike has written directly on Kierkegaard. He contributed a specially commissioned foreword to the publication by Princeton University Press of The Seducer’s Diary, extracted to form a separate work from the Hong translation of Either/Or. This is quite revealing as to his reading of Kierkegaard. Updike characterizes the text as a ‘curiosity’ in ‘the vast literature of love’, which represents ‘a feverishly intellectual attempt to construct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast, a breast blackened to aid a weaning’ (1997: p. xiv). He makes a point of insisting on the connection between Johannes Climacus and Kierkegaard’s treatment of Regine Olsen in a curiously direct way, reminiscent of Lowrie’s explanation in his biography of Kierkegaard. This seems oddly crude, given his own stylistic sophistication, but it may also relate to the role of the erotic, even pornographic, in his own work. Misunderstanding or not, Kierkegaard, for all his own oddities in this area, offered in the ‘Diary of a Seducer’ a kind of exploration of the erotic that was very different from Updike, but which gives it a voice in the interplay of discourse in his best novels. Yet it may be that the point of rapprochement and difference between Kierkegaard and Updike is finally in their vocation as writers. Updike is one of the few writers who can be set beside Kierkegaard in terms of his productivity. The difference is in genre. Kierkegaard is not a novelist, novelistic though his writing may be. If he entertains and seduces, it is ultimately with a pedagogical and polemical purpose. His writing has a claim to authority for all his personal disavowal of authority. Updike, as a novelist, claims no such authority for his work, for all his personal theological investment. For both of them, the act of writing itself has a religious dimension but, for both of them, there is

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something illegitimate in the very attempt to capture the otherness of God in writing. Yet what is a writer to do but to attempt and fail.

V. Richard Wright In the development of the cultural atmosphere of America during and after the Second World War, an element that cannot be ignored is the development of what would eventually become the Civil Rights movement, as Black Americans sought to rethink their own identities in this new and ideologically fraught world. Kierkegaard’s analysis of the problems of defining individual identities spoke specifically to young Black writers. The career of Richard Wright (1908–60) is one that demonstrates Kierkegaard’s role in this development. Born in rural Mississippi, the grandson of a slave, Wright overcame the disadvantages of education and opportunity that confronted him, but was left with lasting memories of the racial and religious repression that he had experienced. He showed an early interest in writing and, forced to leave school early, read widely in order to maintain his education. He moved to Chicago and then to New York, having built links to the Communist Party, and continued journalism. It was there that his first widely appreciated books appeared which gave him a prominent if controversial position among black writers. In Native Son (1940) he depicted his hero Bigger Thomas as able to assert his identity in a racist society only through an act of murder but remaining trapped by the economic and sociological conditions of his life. It was at this time that Kierkegaard’s works began to appear. Looking back, Wright boasted to C. L. R. James as he showed him his collection of Kierkegaard’s works that he had known everything in Kierkegaard’s books before he read them (James 1984: 196). Yet there is a marked change in his writing in the works that appeared after his encounter with Kierkegaard. This was no doubt a product of his decision to move permanently to France, where he became friendly with Sartre and other prominent members of the Parisian intelligentsia. Yet it is also clear that Kierkegaard has an effect on his thinking. As with Percy or Auden, Kierkegaard provides categories and vocabulary that allowed Wright to express his insights in a new way. This is manifest in his novel The Outsider (1953) where his hero, Cross Damon, a name suggestive of an inversion of Christianity, has the opportunity to reconstruct his own life after he is erroneously supposed to have died in an accident. This allows him to escape a complex web of social and relational disasters that have crowded in on him, described in the first section of the book which is entitled ‘Dread’ and prefaced by an epigraph from The Concept of Dread: ‘Dread is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has one a will to do so; for one fears what one desires.’ The novel is structured by a progression from dread to despair to decision. Damon is more aligned to Sartre than to Kierkegaard in that he is unable to accept that religion is anything more than a comforting illusion, although he envies his mother her belief, damaging as it has been to him.

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Wright’s move to France and turn to existentialism led to mixed reactions at the time and affected his subsequent reputation. Wright’s later work has often been interpreted as a decline from the raw anger of his first novels. He himself argued that he wanted to explore a universal human condition, rather than restrict himself to dealing with issues of race. Some saw this as a betrayal, while others concluded that he was allowing philosophical ideas to interfere too much with the development of plot and character in his works. In so far as Kierkegaard was one important influence that allowed him to make the claim that he was dealing with a general malaise, it is a moot point as to whether this was a benign outcome.

VI. Iain Crichton Smith The importance of Kierkegaard for writers who were struggling with asserting a distinctive cultural identity may account for particular affinity that several writers of the so-called Scottish Renaissance reveal for him. One could speculate that the Calvinist tradition of Scotland, with its very different theological and social agenda from the Anglican tradition, south of the border, had something to do with this attraction. There are also parallels in the situation of writers in a small country writing in full awareness of a powerful southern neighbour, respectively England and Germany, with a literary, linguistic, and philosophical tradition which could seem overwhelming. As Scottish writers began to explore what it meant to write as a Scot and to seek ways of recovering and preserving the threatened heritage of both Gaelic and Lowland Scots as literary languages in the face of a Church establishment which, in some quarters, frowned on any secular writing, Kierkegaard’s work seemed recognizable. It certainly had an effect on the readiness with which Scottish theologians engaged with the work of both Barth and Bultmann, which led them almost inevitably to an interest in Kierkegaard. This influence also appears in literary circles. Although he himself was no supporter of Calvinism, the Orcadian poet and translator Edwin Muir, working in tandem with his wife Willa, was crucial in introducing the English-speaking world to the writings of Franz Kafka. Muir himself alluded to Kafka’s debt to Kierkegaard (Muir 1930). Muir’s own poetry is not notably influenced by Kierkegaard, but he was significant in drawing him to his fellow writers’ attention. Here is another similarity to Kierkegaard’s situation. Just as he wrote in the context of a small intellectual circle in Copenhagen, all of whom were known to each other, whatever their disagreements, so the Scottish writers after the war, for all their differences, were a small and self-aware group. Of these, the most explicitly engaged with Kierkegaard was Iain Crichton Smith (1928–98). One of the most distinguished Scottish writers of the twentieth century, he was prolific in both Gaelic and English producing poetry, short stories, novels, and essays. Brought up on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, he knew the tension between the Gaelic of his home and the English of his education and the tension between the

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rigid Calvinism of his environment and his own imaginative life. Auden, along with Robert Lowell, was an acknowledged influence which he combined with a love of the Greek and Latin poets, but Kierkegaard was a constant companion throughout his work. He recognized the quest for authenticity but also the sense of exile in the midst of community that Kierkegaard represents. His early collection The White Noon contains a poem entitled ‘Kierkegaard’ which aphoristically sums up in four tight-packed stanzas the pain and sacrifice he sees behind Kierkegaard’s achievement. It ends The crucifixion of the actual by necessary acceptance brought him through to where his father standing calm and new cutting his head and life made one from two. (Crichton Smith 2011: 30)

Crichton Smith’s own life was marked by periods of depression and his rejection of the dogmatic rigidity of his upbringing is coloured by the unhappiness and illness he experienced as a child. In that sense, he is a prime example of the reader of Kierkegaard, but characteristically, one of his short stories is a darkly comic cautionary tale about that very state (Crichton Smith 2001). Entitled ‘The Exorcism’, it is narrated by a Professor of Theology in Edinburgh, rather similar to Updike’s Roger. As part of his course, he feels obliged to introduce Kierkegaard to his students, though he confesses to a temperamental dislike for him, a sense that his haunted biography intrudes too much and that there is some element of fakery in his nature that is hard to pin down. He is struck by the effect that this study of Kierkegaard has on one of his students, Norman MacEwan, an intense, socially inept, and not particularly able young man from a harsh Hebridean background. MacEwan’s dress is transformed, and his essays begin to show an uncharacteristic wit. The professor’s unease reaches a head when MacEwan takes up with a young girl, daughter of a councillor, and then abruptly breaks off the relationship with a letter. The Professor goes round to MacEwan’s flat and asks him to accompany him to the woods. He then accuses him of deliberately seeking out the girl to play a part in a scenario of his own devising. He warns him of the danger of possession by a flawed saint, or by that part of the saint which is a devil. To his own bewilderment, the professor finds himself shouting out: ‘Kierkegaard, come out of this man! Leave him to his own life. He is not like you, he doesn’t have your terrible gifts. Leave him alone’ (Crichton Smith 2001: 147). The young man is torn by violent sobs but eventually when he looks up, his face is calm. In final paragraphs of the story the professor looks at the young man and is left wondering whether he has been responsible for the destruction of a second Kierkegaard, imposing his own limited lifestyle on another. The final lines encapsulate the dilemma of the exceptional: ‘I looked down at him white and exhausted. The exorcism was over. He would now follow his own unexceptional destiny’ (Crichton Smith 2001: 148). Here the danger and attraction of Kierkegaard as an influence is made explicit, as is the tension over accepting or rejecting the limitations and compensations of the unexceptional life.

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VII. R. S. Thomas There are a number of intriguing parallels and contrasts between Crichton Smith’s work and that of the other notable British poet who has engaged with Kierkegaard, R. S. Thomas. Thomas was also very aware of writing from a complex and threatened identity. In a talk given in Welsh on his own situation as a Welsh poet writing in English, he used Kierkegaard to provide the question for discussion: has a man the right to let himself be killed for the truth (Thomas 1997)? His rather extraordinary claim is that Englishspeaking writers in Wales are put in a position where they are expected to commit suicide as writers by writing less than the best they can. They are expected to pander to their audience and more plaudits are gained simply for the fact of writing in Welsh than for writing a good poem. That Thomas resorts to Kierkegaard in this context is a measure of his particular brand of fierce but beleaguered individualism. A practicing clergyman of the Anglican Church in Wales, in his poetry he makes a constant attempt to express the inexpressibility of an absent but inescapable God. In an interview in 1983, Thomas surmises that it might simply have been the strange name that drew him to buy a copy of Either/Or as a young curate and subsequently to build up a collection of Kierkegaard’s work (Lethbridge 1983: 55). It was, he says, Kierkegaard’s thought on the individual that he found congenial although he found no room in Kierkegaard for poetry as such. He recommends re-reading Concluding Unscientific Postscript every few years. William V. Davis, in his analysis of the impact of Kierkegaard on Thomas, points to the importance for Thomas of the Kierkegaardian metaphor of being out over seventy thousand fathoms, to be found in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Davis 2007: 131). Kierkegaard’s injunction to hold fast to the objective uncertainty of God is crucial to Thomas’s theology. Aside from that, however, Thomas has devoted a number of poems specifically to Kierkegaard where the parallels between his own life and that of Kierkegaard become at times linked to the Passion narrative. These range from the early poems ‘Kierkegaard’ (Thomas 1993: 162) and ‘A Grave Unvisited’ (Thomas 1983: 183) to the later ‘Synopsis’ (Thomas 1993: 357) and ‘Balance’ (Thomas 1993: 362). In his late collection No Truce with the Furies, a poem simply entitled ‘Fathoms’ (Thomas 2004: 214) is accompanied by his most extended and perhaps most profound engagement with Kierkegaard in the enigmatically titled ‘S. K.’ (Thomas 2004: 219). This poem falls into four sections. The first, in couplets, uses imagery from the nativity to contrast but also compare Kierkegaard’s life to Christ’s. As with Christ, Thomas begins, we know little of his childhood, except that there were no royal visitors bearing gifts ‘although myrrh would have been fitting’ (Thomas 2004: 219). From God, Kierkegaard learnt the art of anonymity, which leaves his readers groping for meaning just as they grope for meaning in reading God’s world. The core metaphor of reading recurs here with the claim that to be a reader of Kierkegaard is a training in reading the world.

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The second section, in three four-line stanzas, refers to Kierkegaard’s courtship of Regine, which is likened to a dangerous game which injures both players. Kierkegaard’s wounds, unlike Regine’s, could not be staunched. His apparent gaiety in her presence is a ‘nettle shirt’ to him when he is alone. This is followed by the third section in nine threeline stanzas which begins by claiming Kierkegaard as the first surrealist. As in the paintings of Dali, Thomas points out, the apparent limpidity and naturalism of the elements that are used to construct the work are necessary for the illusion to occur, but what we see is illusion. The concentration of these stanzas defies paraphrase, but Thomas uses a series of startling metaphors around the illusory afterglow that can occur in the darkness that follows a blinding explosion to express the way in which Kierkegaard’s dazzling emphasis on the self actually may reveal the presence of God as shadow. ‘Either way was terror’ for Kierkegaard, he concludes. Behind him lay the incident where his father cursed God on the Jutland heath; ahead, the danger of outrunning himself. This leads to the final section: one stanza that contains three complex questions and one statement. Is all Kierkegaard’s work simply a repetition of the story of the Fall in Eden, where he is tempted by the serpent in the form of the self? Is all that is open to genius a relapse into soliloquy? Characteristically, Thomas ends with a particularly convoluted question which both raises and problematizes the possibility of encounter with God as other in the act of prayer, a glass in which we may, eventually, see the reflection of a face ‘other than our own’. Once again, we see Kierkegaard provide a framework for a deeply conflicted but profound questioning of the nature of selfhood, of freedom and of the possibility of relationship with an unfathomable God.

VIII. David Lodge The exception that proves the rule that works about Kierkegaard are produced by writers who themselves are readers of Kierkegaard is David Lodge’s novel Therapy. In his presentation on the novel to a conference on Kierkegaard held in Copenhagen, Lodge confessed that he had not read Kierkegaard before embarking on the novel, apart from Lowrie’s short biography (Lodge 1997: 35). While writing the novel, he admits to reading only a few of Kierkegaard’s books and skimming a few others. What led him to any interest in Kierkegaard was his own experience of depression and his increasing awareness of how prevalent and yet unspoken a problem this was (Lodge 1997: 35). He thus began to explore this through his main character, Laurence ‘Tubby’ Passmore, a middle-aged, slightly overweight television writer whose comfortable but humdrum life is disrupted by a threat to his job and his wife’s departure. These events bring to a head what has been a deeper sense of unease permeating his life, which has manifested itself in an unidentifiable pain in his knee. Tubby’s own encounter with Kierkegaard is, however, the archetypal reaction of the Kierkegaardian reader. Asked by a friend ‘How’s your Angst?’ he looks up the word in

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the dictionary. This leads him to the word ‘Dread’, which he latches on to as identifying the nameless and apparently causeless feeling that grips him in the dead of night. The definition mentions ‘Existentialism’ and following this lead takes him to a short entry on Kierkegaard in a biographical dictionary. That leaves him cold, but what grips him are the titles of the books listed at the end of the entry: I can’t describe how I felt as I read the titles. If the hairs on the back of my neck were shorter, they would have lifted. Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Dread—they didn’t sound like titles of philosophy books, they seemed to name my condition like arrows thudding into a target. Even the ones I couldn’t understand, or guess at the contents of, like Either/Or and Repetition, seemed pregnant with hidden meaning designed especially for me. And, what do you know, Kierkegaard wrote a Journal. I must get hold of it, and some of the other books. (Lodge 1995: 64–5)

The very titles of Kierkegaard’s works seem to speak straight to Tubby’s sense of dissatisfaction and that seems to single him out; Tubby’s reading of Kierkegaard proceeds slowly, but he persists. Lodge records that this reflects his own experience. What particularly struck him was the endearing contradiction between Kierkegaard’s insight into the ways in which human beings arrange for their own unhappiness and the way in which he behaved in his own life. Through Tubby’s reading, the frustrations and moments of insight that Kierkegaard’s readers experience are amusingly and intelligently portrayed. Tubby, in a simile that Lodge endorses, likens it to flying through heavy cloud: mostly bewildering, with flashes of sunlight. Lodge gives an intriguing account of how his fiction and Kierkegaard’s writings interacted in ways in which he had not expected or planned. He includes a character, Maureen, who is some kind of equivalent to Regine for Tubby, in that he reflects on his callous rejection of her for another woman in whom he had nothing but a sexual interest. He comes to the conclusion that this relationship is at the root of his problems. In the course of reading up on Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine, however, he came across the story of her marriage to Johan Frederik Schlegel and his later intervention to prevent Kierkegaard from resuming any contact with his wife. This inspired the invention of a similar character in the novel which was not part of the original plan. The influence of Kierkegaard on Lodge’s novel is not confined to character and plot, however. Tubby himself is a writer, and the forms and devices of Kierkegaard’s authorship are mimicked in the book. The basic structure is that of a journal kept by Tubby, but this is interrupted by other material. The second of the four parts of the novel consists of a series of reactions to Tubby’s predicament and growing obsession with Kierkegaard from other characters. Some critics found this device puzzling and disruptive but seem to have missed the way in which Lodge is imitating Kierkegaard. As a text Therapy is reminiscent of the bewildering collection of genres and invented sources that make up a work such as Either/Or, where the journal form of ‘The Diary of a Seducer’ is countered by the different view of Judge William. Repetition is another example where the journal of Constantin Constantius alternates with the different viewpoint of the Young Man.

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Importantly, the encounter with Kierkegaard is as much as anything an education in writing for Tubby as he records himself the way in which his journal is turning itself into a book. From the present tense of a journal or, indeed, a script such as he has spent his professional life writing, his storytelling moves to the novelistic past tense, which is a sign, he considers, that he is now telling a story that has an end, from a vantage point beyond the end. For Lodge, this is one of the main elements of the novel. Tubby finds consolation in the very act of writing and in the development and maturation of his literary persona. His private self-obsession becomes sharable and positive. That, so Lodge concludes, was something that Kierkegaard knew and something that he himself, as a writer of fiction, has also found.

IX. Haven Kimmel The final work that we will consider here is the best-selling debut novel by the North American writer Haven Kimmel (1965–) entitled The Solace of Leaving Early (2002), the first part of what became a trilogy. Kierkegaard figures prominently in the reading of both the main characters in the novel: Langston Braverman, a young woman who has returned home after walking out of her oral examination for a PhD and the pastor of a local church, Amos Townsend. Both exhibit many of the symptoms of the stereotypical Kierkegaardian reader. Langston is, at least on first acquaintance, an insufferable intellectual snob who regards the normal life of her family and the small town as not only beneath her notice but a deliberate slight on her rarified sensibility. Amos is caught between his deeply questioning reading of Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Whitehead and the seemingly banal needs of a small-town congregation. Gradually we learn that both characters are coming to terms with profound grief in their lives and come to understand the damage that has been done to them which leads them to damage themselves and others. They are thrown together by a horrific murder when Langston’s best friend is killed in front of her children by the husband whom Amos counselled her to leave and whom she manages to kill before she dies. The two little girls are left to the joint care of Langston and Amos who are then faced with dealing with the girls’ conviction that the Virgin Mary has appeared to them in a neighbouring tree. Kimmel here manages to bring convincingly into her plot the decisive role of revelation in Kierkegaard’s thought. Both characters are brought to reveal both the angelic and the demonic in themselves through their attempts to show love. The distinction between genius and apostle that was so important to Walker Percy is worked out in a remarkable way as the two learn to support each other in their common work of love, and learn how their undoubted talents have led them into delusions about themselves and each other. Kimmel makes use of and subverts the stereotype of the reader of Kierkegaard by opposing two such readers to each other. This forces them into the social and communal

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responsibilities from which they feel set apart and where, it turns out, Kierkegaard’s insights help them more than might be expected.

X. Conclusion Kierkegaard’s influence on English literature is considerable, if the broader category of existentialism in all its varieties is included. His prominence in the cultural life especially of the USA during the late 1930s and 1940s means that any one with an interest in current cultural trends could hardly avoid encountering his name and something of his work, even if only at secondhand. The same was true, to perhaps a lesser degree, in the United Kingdom, although, as we have seen, the Scottish and Welsh reception differs from the English. A fuller study of Kierkegaard, however, is something that attracts a certain kind of reader, by Kierkegaard’s own design. The complexity of his authorship and the differing availability of his works as translations are completed mean that he is open to misinterpretation or partial readings. For those readers who do identify with his radical vision of the importance of the individual and his sense of being fated to be somehow dislocated from the norms of society, he can be a uniquely powerful voice. More readers identify with his diagnosis of the human condition than with his uncompromisingly Christian solutions, however, and fascinating though his life and thoughts may be, few find him a viable model to follow, or are capable of following him even if they wish to. Some key concepts, often oversimplified, such as the leap of faith, the three modes of existence (aesthetic, ethical, and religious), and the virtuosic use of pseudonyms and genres in his authorship do find wide currency. So too does the story, again often misunderstood, of his relationships with his fiancée and with his father.2 Yet his most lasting legacy for writers may be the way that the act of writing itself accompanies and at times threatens to overwhelm the struggle to find and present an authentic self in his life and work. In that is the fascination and, at times, the danger, of an encounter with his work. The critic Gabriel Josipovici comes to a suggestive conclusion in this regard when he considers why Kierkegaard himself was not a novelist, despite his interest in and proficiency at writing and his genius for inventing characters and literary forms to explore and communicate his ideas: One could say that Kierkegaard’s personal tragedy lay in the fact that he was not enough of a writer to trust in the writing process itself (though he appears to have taken a great deal of pleasure in it) but too much of one ever to be a Knight of Faith. But then that too could perhaps be seen as the best way of defining all those modern writers whom, like Kierkegaard, we may call essential writers, to distinguish them 2

See the Introduction to this volume.

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from the scribblers, even the highly talented scribblers, who will always be with us. (Josipovici 2006: 148)

Kierkegaard, for Josipovici, in his writing offers a model of a writer who knows the limits of writing and the inevitable gap between what is written about or read and what is lived as experience. His implication is that Kierkegaard offers a recognizable companion in dissatisfaction to a certain class of writers who wrestle with the same dilemmas over the relationship between writing and life. If one’s response to the existential challenge that Kierkegaard seeks to offer through his writings is to write a novel or a poem, is that not in itself a way of evading rather than embracing the challenge? Perhaps the true fount of the legacy of Kierkegaard in English literature is Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de silentio, the writer of Fear and Trembling whose reaction to the scandalous biblical episode of the sacrifice of Abraham is to write a book to explore his own incomprehension.

References Auden, W. H. (1952). The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (New York: David Mackay Co.). ——– (1989). Forewords and Afterwords, selected by Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage International). ——– (1991). Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber). Barrett, L. C. (2009). ‘The USA: From Neo-Orthodoxy to Pluralism’, in J. Stewart (ed.) Kierkegaard’s International Reception. Tome 3: The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (London: Ashgate), 229–68. Brown, E. (2011). Master Kierkegaard: Summer 1947 (Eugene: Cascade Books). Carson, B. D. (2008). ‘To make a Bridge from Man to Man: Existentialism in Richard Wright’s The Outsider’, The Indian Review of World Literature in English 4, 28–39. Christiani, D. B. (1965). Scandinavian Elements of Finnegan’s Wake (Chicago: Northwestern University Press). Crichton Smith, I. (2001). ‘The Exorcist’, in The Black Halo: The Complete English Stories 1977–98, ed. K. MacEwan (Edinburgh: Birlinn), 132–48. ——– (2011). New Collected Poems, ed. Matthew McGuire (Manchester: Carcanet). Davis, W. V. (2007). R. S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press). Dewey, B. R. (1974). ‘Walker Percy Talks about Kierkegaard: An Annotated Interview’, The Journal of Religion 54, 273–98. Hadfield, A. M. (1983). Charles Williams: An Exploration of His Life and Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press). James, C. L. R. (1984). At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Alison and Busby). Josipovici, G. (2006). ‘Kierkegaard and the Novel’, in The Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991–2004 (Manchester: Carcanet), 130–48 at 148. Kimmel, H. (2002). The Solace of Leaving Early (London: Flamingo). Kirsch, A. (2005). Auden and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press). Lethbridge, J. B. (1983). ‘R. S. Thomas Talks to J. B. Lethbridge’, Anglo-Welsh Review 74, 36–56. Lodge, D. (1995). Therapy: A Novel (London: Martin Secker and Warburg).

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——– (1997). ‘Kierkegaard for Special Purposes’, in N. J. Cappelørn and J. Stewart (eds.), Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference ‘Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It’, Copenhagen, May 5–9, 1996 (Berlin: de Gruyter), 34–47. Mendelson, E. (1999). Later Auden (London: Faber and Faber). Muir, E. (1930). ‘A Note On Kafka’, The Bookman 72, 235–41. O’Neill, C. C. (2005). Loving Søren (Nashville: Broadman and Holman). Pattison, G. (2009). ‘Great Britain: From “Prophet of Now” to Postmodern Ironist (and after)’, in J. Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard’s International Reception Tome 1: Northern and Western Europe (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8) (London: Ashgate), 237–70. Paulus, Jr, M. J. (2009). ‘From a Publisher’s Point of View: Charles Williams’ Role in Publishing Kierkegaard in English’, in Suzanne Bray and Richard Sturch (eds.), Charles Williams and his Contemporaries (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Percy, W. (1961). The Moviegoer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). ——– (1971). Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Poole, R. (1998). ‘The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth Century Receptions’, in A. Hannay and G. Marino (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Schilling, P. (1994). ‘Søren Kierkegaard and Anglo-American Literary Culture of the Thirties and Further’. Unpublished PhD, Columbia University. Thomas, R. S. (1993). Collected Poems: 1945–1990 (London: J. M. Dent). ——– (1997). ‘The Creative Writer’s Suicide’, in Autobiographies, trans. and ed. Jason Walford Davies (London: Phoenix), 19–24. ——– (2004). Collected Later Poems: 1988–2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe). Tolson, Jay. (1992). Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (New York: Simon and Schuster). Updike, J. (1986). Roger’s Version (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). ——– (1991). ‘In Response to a Request from The Independent on Sunday for a Contribution to their Weekly Feature “A Book That Changed Me” ’, in Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism (New York: Alfred Knopf), 843–4. ——– (1995). Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, rev. edn. (London: Everyman’s Library). ——– (1997). ‘Foreword’, in S. Kierkegaard, The Seducer’s Diary, trans. and eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. vii–xv. Williams, C. (1939). The Descent of the Dove: The Influence of the Holy Spirit in the Church (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy). Wright, R. (1953). The Outsider (New York: Harper).

Suggested Reading Cotkin, G. (2003). Existential America (Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Medcalf, S. (2007). ‘Eliot, David Jones and Auden’, in Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elizabeth Jay (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 523–42. Williams, R. (2003). ‘Suspending the Ethical: R. S. Thomas and Kierkegaard’, D. W. Davies (ed.) Echoes to the Amen: Essays after R. S. Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press), 206–26.

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Index

Aarhus 52–3 acedia 242

actuality 69, 70, 72, 75, 76–8, 80, 87, 101 possibility 73–4, 79, 423–4 Adams, Robert 220 Adler, Pastor Adolf Peter 77n13, 99, 161, 214 Adorno, Theodor W. 46, 63 aestheticism 46, 47, 48 aesthetic life 88 critique of 67 aesthetic/ethical debate 312–14, 506–8 afterlife 374–8 Agacinski, Sylviane 346, 473, 474 Albeck, Gustav 96 Alcoforado, Mariana 564 Allison, Henry E. 394 Alter, Robert 192n3 alterity 474, 476, 536 selfhood 233 Altizer, Thomas 530 Ammundsen, Valdemar 17–18 Anaxarchus 133 Andersen, Hans Christian 28, 96–7 and genius 98 and Golden Age of Denmark 39 Only a Fiddler, Kierkegaard’s review of 97–9, 260–1 Anderson, R. Lanier 416n15 Anscombe, Elizabeth 484 Anselm of Canterbury 299 anxiety 276–9 see also Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, The Concept of Anxiety Anz, Heinrich 556 Aquinas, Thomas 81, 143, 336 Arbaugh, George B. 214n2 Arbaugh, George E. 214n2 Aristophanes 133n14, 355

Aristotle 131–6 (passim), 140n35, 225, 236, 336, 338 on contemplation 134 on emotions 138–9 on friendship 144 on kinesis 133, 425 on love 144 on moral conviction 137–8 on moral virtues 226 Arndt, Johann 175–6 Arnold, Matthew 252n2 Assistens Churchyard 59–60 Atomists 133 atonement 299–300 Auden, W. H. 562–3, 574–6 Augustine, Aurelius, Bishop of Hippo 143, 172, 173, 177, 178, 505 criticism of 182 on self-deception 310 Aumann, Antony 203 Axt-Piscalar, Christine 540–1

Baader, Franz 65n4 Baggesen, Jens 95 Bakhtin, Mikhail 195 Balle, Bishop Nicolai Edinger 37 Baltruŝaitis, Jurgis 551 Bang, Frederik Ludvig 38 baptism 119 Barfod, Hans Peter 20 Af Søren Kierkegaard’s Efterladte Papirer (1969–81) 13, 14–15 catalogue of Kierkegaard’s papers 12, 13, 17 Barrett, Lee C. 157, 292, 298, 300, 301, 532, 544, 572 Barrett, William 131n6 Barth, Karl 5, 159, 162, 528, 534, 535, 573

592

index

Bärthold, Albert 405 Basso, Ingrid 551 Bauckham, Richard 160, 161 Bauer, Bruno 36 Baum, Oskar 561 Beabout, Gregory R 155, 234n7 Beaufret, Jean 421 Beck, Frederik Andreas 347n2 Becker, Ernest 369 Behler, Ernst 95, 102 Beiser, Frederick C. 107 Bennett, Christopher 521 Bernard of Clairvaux 121n6, 181, 183 Bessa-Luis, Agustina 565 Beyrich, Tilman 451, 452 Bible, and Kierkegaard 118–19 complex relationship with 150 contextualizing his biblical interpretation 161 distraction of commentaries 156–7 engagement with at University 151–3 father’s influence on approach to 150–1 focus on New Testament 161–2 historical truth of the Gospels 500 importance in writings 150, 153–5 influence on biblical scholarship 159–60 lifelong study of 152–3 limits of the role of biblical text 161 loss of hermeneutic community 160–1 metaphors for: as love letter 157–8 as mirror 156–7 as royal decree 158 Old Testament 161–2 programmatic vision of 155–9, 170 resistance to academic forms of interpretation 151 straightforward message of 158, 170 theological foundation of understanding of 156 see also theology Bigelow, Pat 475–6 Blicher, Steen Steensen 98 Blixen, Karen 13, 28, 554–5 Bloch, Oscar 368 Bloechl, Jeffrey 451 Bloom, Harold 194, 199n12

Boesen, Emil 11, 24 Bohlin, Torsten 532, 538 Bohr, Niels 28 Böhringer, Friedrich 178, 181 Boisen, Elise Marie 38 Boisen, Peter Outzen 38 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 530 Booth, Wayne 349–50 boredom 83–4, 103, 466 Börne, Ludwig 58 Bradley, Francis Herbert 491 Brandes, Edvard 15 Brandes, Georg 3, 13, 15, 404–5, 530, 537, 551, 559, 564 Bremer, Frederikke 49, 51–2 Der Brenner (journal) 554 Bretschneider, Carl Gottlieb 151 Brezinova, Helena 551 Brobjer, Thomas H 404, 405 Broch, Herman 554 Brøchner, Hans 15, 365 Brod, Max 561 Bromiley, Geoffrey 167–8 Brorson, Hans Adolph 407n6 Brown, Ellen 570 Brunner, Emil 535 Bruun, Niels W. 151, 258n4 Buben, Adam 367n3 Buber, Martin 5, 232, 534 Bukdahl, Jørgen 3 Bultmann, Rudolf 159–60, 162, 533, 573 Buntzen, Thomasine 34 Burgess, Andrew 516, 542, 543 Butin, Gitte 452 Byron, Lord 96

Cain, David 542 Camus, Albert 561, 573 Capel, Lee 346n1, 468 capitalism, and postmodernism 465 Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 115n3, 299, 301, 407n7, 408n8 Caputo, John 446, 453, 473–4, 477 Carlisle, Clare 424n3, 436 Carnell, Edward John 532

index Carstensen, Georg 49–51 Cavell, Stanley 484, 493–4, 504n1 chatter 50, 478 Childs, Brevard 543 Chrétien, Jean Louis 454 Christ: imitation of 304 in Kierkegaard’s theology 297–301 atonement 299–300 knowledge of 299 as prototype for human beings 300–1, 518–19 as sign of contradiction 121 see also atonement, Christianity, Christian life, Kierkegaard, Søren, writings Philosophical Fragments, Practice in Christianity. Christensen, Peter Vilhelm 22–3 Christian life 283–5, 303–6 Christian love 304–5 faith 304 imitation of Christ 304 joy 57, 266, 305–6 suffering 305 Christian VIII, King of Denmark 45 Christiani, D. B. 572 Christianity: baptism 119 Christian identity 254 Christian love 106, 227–8, 304–5, 337, 534, 540 confidence in God 115 divine commands as foundation of moral obligation 219–23 as an existence-communication 293, 499, 500 faith 304 formation of Christian identity 265–70 Heiberg on 34–5 historical study of 169–70 historical truth of the Gospels 500 Incarnation 86–7, 169, 297, 298 indirect communication of 294 the individual 119–20 as missionary 223 nature of 293 paradox of 284, 298–9

593

reintroduction of Christianity into Christendom 292–3 significance of divine authority 214–15 straightforward meaning of 158, 170 suffering 120–1, 305 understanding of 529 Wittgenstein on 499–500 see also Bible; Christ, Church; Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, Practice in Christianity; theology Christman, John 509 Chrysippus 139–40 Chrysostom, John 178, 181 Church: attack on 40, 267–8, 270, 323–4 baptism 119 church-going 54–6, 112, 113–16 criticism of church-goers 113–14 criticism of prestigious churches 114 regularity of 113 communion 116 complex relationship with 112 as congregation (ecclesia or congregatio sanctorum) 112 critique of 118–20 conception of 126–7 criticism of Grundtvig’s view of the Church 116–20 disenchantment with 55–6, 113 and the individual 114–15, 116–17, 118, 119–20 institution of 112 confrontation with 123–6 recommends separation of Church and State 126 sermons 115 struggle with 125–6 understanding of worship 116 uses of the term ‘Church’ 112 see also Bible; Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, Practice in Christianity, Discourses at Communion on Fridays; theology Cicero 131 Clausen, Henrik Nikolai 117, 151, 172 Clement of Alexandria 173, 174, 177, 182 Cobb, William S. 141n39 Colson, Charles 520 Come, Arnold 292, 440, 538–9

594

index

communication 202 and freedom 207 indirect 106–7, 203, 294, 491 objective and subjective 202–4 paraphrase 204 problem of philosophical 490–2 Socratic subjective 204–5 theatre and freedom 205–6 Conant, James 494–5 concern 275 Connell, George 367n5, 369n8 Cooper, John M. 131 Copenhagen: character of 48–9 churches 54–6 daily walks by Kierkegaard 26, 45 graveyards in 59–60 Heiberg’s criticism of 45–6 importance for Kierkegaard 44–5 as market town 45, 52–3 Østergade 51–2 theatre 49 Tivoli gardens 49–51 Copenhagen, University of, and Kierkegaard’s papers 13 The Corsair (satirical journal) 2, 3, 53 countryside 56–9 courage 275, 290 Cousin, Victor 77, 82n16 Cox, Harvey 530 Crary, Jonathan 47 Crichton Smith, Ian 581–2 critical realism 472 Crouter, Richard E. 94 Crowe, Benjamin D. 99, 100 Crowley, Susan 578 culture 263–5 context of conception of 260–3 and formation of identity 253–4 as Christian 265–70 Christian identity 254 individualization 253 narrative identity 254 socialization 253 inattention to 252 range of meanings 252–3 references to 252

self-formation 255–9 Cupitt, Don 478, 497, 530 Cyprian of Carthage 179 Czakó, István 366n2

Dahlstrom, Daniel 442 Dalferth, Ingolf U. 441 Dalrymple, Timothy 153, 305, 408 Damgaard, Iben 154 Danish Society for Language and Literature 18 Danto, Arthur C. 416n13 Darwall, Stephen 517 Davenport, John 212, 231n3, 232, 236n11, 240n15, 247n23, 373n13, 506, 507, 511–13 Davis, William V. 583 de Beauvoir, Simone 562 de Blois, Louis 175, 177 de Sousa, Elisabete M. 551 death 281, 365–7, 378–80 the afterlife 374–8 as aid to understanding life 367 family mythology of early death 365 Hegelian controversy over 366 in his writings 366–7 reasons for concern with 366 reluctance to talk about 367 see also Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, At a Graveside; The Concept of Anxiety; Concluding Unscientific Postscript deconstruction 470 deconstructive reading of Kierkegaard 471–7 language of otherness 475–7 Dehs, Jørgen 256 Deleuze, Gilles 477–8 democratization, and Denmark 30 Denmark: Danish Romanticism 95–7 Golden Age of (1800–1850) 28 cliquish nature of 37–8 first generation of (1802–25) 31–3 political and military context 28–30 second generation of (1820s–1830s) 34–6 third generation of (c1840) 39–42

index Derrida, Jacques 431n9, 451–2, 453–4, 465, 477 deconstruction 470 Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling 476 Kierkegaard’s use of irony 351–2 privileging of speech over writing 473 writing 473 despair 80–1, 82, 107, 140 sin 302–3 sorrow 287 translation problems 394–6 types of 246–7 see also Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, The Sickness Unto Death Detering, Heinrich 417 Deuser, Hermann 403, 441, 443, 445 Dewey, Bradley 152, 541, 542, 551, 576 Diamond, Cora 197, 494–5, 510n9 Dillon, Robin 516–19, 523 Dilman, Ilham 484 Dinesen, Isak (Karen Blixen), see Blixen, Karen Diogenes Laertius 135, 139n32–3, 141n39, 144n45, 372 Disse, Jörg 440 Dooley, Mark 445, 451, 470, 476 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 212, 216–17, 575 doubt, and Greek philosophy 136–7 Drachmann, Anders Bjørn 15–16 Dreyer, Carl 1 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 394n5, 446 Dru, Alexander 390, 400, 573 Drury, M. O’C. 485 Dummett, Michael 484 Dunning, Stephen 534 Dunstan, J. Leslie 153, 155 Dupré, Louis 541 Dyrerud, Thor Arvid 550, 557

earnestness 89, 216, 225, 230, 281, 372–3, 380, 513 Edwards, Paul 506 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von 94 Eleatics 133, 136 Eller, Vernard 159, 541 Ellis, Theresa 328, 341

595

Ellul, Jacques 323 Elrod, John 233, 236–7, 238, 534 Emmanuel, Steven 159, 539 emotions: Greek philosophy 138–41 Stoicism 139–40 Empedocles 135n23 English language literature: Auden, W. H. 574–6 Crichton Smith, Iain 581–2 early reception of Kierkegaard in 572–4 influence on 570–2, 587–8 Kimmel, Haven 586–7 Lodge, David 584–6 Percy, Walker 576–8 Thomas, R. S. 583–4 Updike, John 578–80 Wright, Richard 580–1 Epictetus 130, 132, 135n23, 139–40 Epicurus 372 Erdmann, J. E. 172 Eriksen, Niels Nymann 104n9 eschatology 533 ethics 211, 230 alternatives to God as foundation of moral obligation 216–18 individual 216 reason 216–17 social agreement 217–18 criticism of Hegel’s ethics 87–8 divine commands as foundation of moral obligation 219–23 aesthetic/ethical debate 312–14, 506–8 ethical as stage or sphere of existence 211–13 first and second 76 in Greek philosophy 131, 132, 225–6 history of 283 love of neighbour 221–3, 267, 288–9, 305, 335–41 requirements for foundation of moral obligation 218–19 requirements of ethical life 212 significance of divine authority 214–15 source of the ‘ought’ 215–18 and time 282–3

596

index

ethics (cont.) virtues 224–8 centrality of 225 see also Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, Concluding Unscientific Postscript; Either/Or; Fear and Trembling; Stages on Life’s Way; moral philosophy European literature 550–2 aesthetic receptions 552–6 biographical receptions 564–6 ethical receptions 556–9 influence on 550, 552, 566 reception as literary figure 550–2 religious receptions 559–63 translations of 551–2 evangelicalism 532 Evans, C. Stephen 130n1, 212, 246n21, 298, 472, 518n19, 542 existence 63, 70–1, 77–8, 280–1 interest in itself 78 inwardness of 72 irony 67, 68 selfhood 280 stages or spheres of 173, 211–12, 254, 312 existentialism 6 individual as ground of moral obligation 216 self 232 existentialist thought, and Greek philosophy 132, 133–4, 138, 225–6

Faedrelandet (The Fatherland) (newspaper) 125 Fahrenbach, Helmut 74 faith 224, 539 in the Christian life 304 and Greek philosophy 137–8 and history 284–5 inwardness of 320–1 and passion 318 as trust 246 feeling 103, 104 longing 104 Fénelon, François 176–7 Fenger, Henning 18–21, 96, 260

Fenves, Peter 478 Ferreira, M. Jamie 6, 305, 337, 342, 367n4, 452, 497, 505, 513n15, 523, 539, 540 Feuerbach, Ludwig 36 Fichte, I. H. (‘the younger’) 65n4 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 62–4, 81, 88–9, 96, 102, 103, 107, 132, 173, 379 Figaro (journal) 51 Firchow, Peter 105, 106 Fish, Stanley 543 Fishburn, Janet Forsyth 157 Flynn, Thomas R. 132n10 folk tales, and Romanticism 96 Fontane, Theodor 556 forgiveness 423–4, 513–23 Frank, Manfred 101, 102, 103, 105–6 Frankfurt, Harry 504, 505, 511, 512n12, 522 Frankl, Victor 242 Frederick VI, King of Denmark 49 freedom: communications 207 irony 356, 357 selfhood 238 theatre 205–6 French Revolution 29 Freud, Sigmund 522 Fried, Michael 556 Friedman, Rudolph 3 friendship, and Aristotle 144 Frisch, Max 557–9 Furtak, Rick Anthony 130n2, 135n21, 140n36, 144n45, 352

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1 Garde, Annelise 20 Gardner, Sebastian 491 Garff, Joakim 3, 18, 21, 94, 256, 258, 365, 366, 404n4, 467, 471 Geismar, Eduard 531–2 Gellmann, Jerome I 6 genius 98, 107 Steffens on 31 genres, and variety of Kierkegaard’s writing 198–201 change and changelessness 199–200 temporality 199

index German Idealism: as background to Kierkegaard’s thinking 62 Kierkegaard’s critical debate with Hegel 64–8, 71–80, 84–6, 324 Hegelian dialectic 85–6 Kierkegaard’s critical distance from 62 Fichte, J. G. 88–9 influence on Kierkegaard 62 inner and outer 71–2 Kierkegaards productive appropriation of 62, 68, 70, 71, 73, 78 Kierkegaards relations to 62–5 ambivalence of 62–3 Danish context 64 multiple nature of 64–5 scarcity of explicit references to 63–4 Schelling’s lectures on ‘philosophy of revelation’ (1841–42) 68–71, 75–6 see also Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Hegel, G. W. F.; Schelling, F. W. J. von Gerrish, Brian A. 186 Gide, André 564 Giødwad, Jens Finsteen 23–4 Glahn, Henriette 38 Glenn, John 231n3, 235–6, 238 Gløersen, Kristian 556–7 God: apprehension of 489 in Kierkegaard’s theology 294–7, 535–8 Lévinas, Emmanuel 452–3 and love 329, 330, 332–3 Marion, Jean-Luc, on 453 in postmodernity 465 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 330–1 on providence 417–18 Golden Age of Denmark, see Denmark, Golden Age of Goldschmidt, Meir Aron 14, 40, 253 Golomb, Jacob 5 Gonzáles, Darío 77n14, 441, 442 Görres, Joseph 175 Göschel, Karl Friedrich 366 Gottsched, Hermann 13 Gould, Josiah 140 Gouwens, David 138n31, 141, 158–9, 292, 505, 542–3

597

governance 408–11 Graße, Johann Georg Theodor 550 Greek philosophy 129 derision towards certain thinkers 132–3 doubt 136–7 emotions 138–41 ethics 131, 132, 225–6 existentialist thought 132, 133–4, 138, 225–6 faith 137–8 Greek conception of philosophy 130–2, 145 influence on literary style 135–6 love 141–4 role models 130 Scepticism 134, 136–7, 139 significance for Kierkegaard 129, 144–6 Stoicism 139 disagreements with 140–1 study of 129–30 wisdom 138 see also Aristotle; Heraclitus; Plato; Socrates Green, Ronald 214, 328, 341 Grenz, Stanley 532 Greve, Wilfried 74 Griswold, Charles 514, 516 Grøn, Arne 79, 265, 440, 441, 442, 457, 458, 534 Grube, G. M. A. 143n42 Grundtvig, Nikolai Frederick Severin 33, 38 on baptism 119 on concept of the Church 118 Kierkegaard’s critique of 117–19 and Romanticism 96 guilt: and anxiety 279 and forgiveness 516 Gyldendal (publishing house) 25 Gyllembourg, Carl Frederik 34 Gyllembourg, Thomasine 35 novel cycle 97 Two Ages 50 Kierkegaard’s review of 99, 100

Habermas, Jürgen 233 Hacker, Peter 484 Hadot, Pierre 130, 132n10, 135n21, 138n31, 225

598

index

Haecker, Theodor 3, 405–6, 541 Hall, Amy Laura 537 Hamann, Johann Georg 130 Hamilton, Andrew 45 on Bishop Mynster 54 on Østergade 52 Hamilton, William 530 Hannay, Alastair 131n5, 132n11, 134, 137n28, 138, 196, 231, 234, 236, 240, 241, 337, 387, 394, 406, 426 Hansen, Aage Laerke 253 Hanson, Jeffrey 440, 444 Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis) 104 double-reflection 102–3 and Romanticism 95, 96 and sacred texts 107 Harris, H. S. 101 Hart, Kevin 446, 451 Hartshorne, M. Holmes 536–7 Hartung, Gerald 402 Hauch, Johannes Carsten 96 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Aufhebung 316 ethical life 312 German language 393 historical particularity of ethical norms 312–13 on immortality 366 influence on Heiberg 34 Kierkegaard’s critical debate with 65–8, 71–80, 84–6, 324 Hegelian phenomenology in Kierkegaard 441 The Sickness Unto Death 442–3 Works of Love 443–4 Plato 311 on religious faith 319 Schelling’s criticism of 70 on science 319 on spirit 236 on tragedy 72–3 Heger, Christiane 37 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1791–1860) 64, 71, 101, 174, 375 on afterlife 366 and Christianity 34–5 criticism of Copenhagen 45–6

criticism of middle class 35 as cultural figure 260 family background of 34 Hegel’s influence on 34 Kierkegaard’s view of 261, 262, 263 marriage of 35 as promoter of Parisian style 49, 51 review of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or 261–2 review of Kierkegaard’s Repetition 262 theatre 49 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig (1854–1928), 15–16 Heiberg, Johanne Luise 35, 260, 366 Heiberg, Peter Andreas (1758–1841) 34 Heiberg, Peter Andreas (1864–1926) 3, 16–17 Heidegger, Martin 5, 63, 159, 246, 369, 421, 554 ambivalent attitude towards Kierkegaard 433, 448–50 and Christianity 428–9 and comparison of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard 406 on death 370, 431–2 early appropriation of Kierkegaard’s thought 428–34 Being and Time 429–34 influence on interpretation of Kierkegaard 422 on Kierkegaard as religious writer 422 Kierkegaardian themes in later work 434–8 moment of vision 432 phenomenology and Kierkegaard 446–51, 457–8 philosophical task of 430 repetition 433–4 single thought of great thinkers 422 Heine, Heinrich 95 Heinesen, William 387 Hennigfeld, Jochem 82 Henry, Michel 454 Heraclitus 131–2, 193 Hertel, Hans 96 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 6 Heywood-Thomas, John 541 Himmelstrup, J. 16

index Hirsch, Emanuel 68, 387, 532 historical theology, see theology history 273–90 critical importance of 274 ethics 283 faith 284–5 gaining a history 278–9 love 331 sin and sinfulness 278 Høffding, Harald 15, 537 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 554 Hohlenberg, Johannes 3 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 101 Holm, Anders 117n4 Holmer, Paul L. 541–2 Holst, Hans Peter 115 Holstein, Duchy of 29 Homer 191 Hong, Edna H. 392–3, 399 Hong, Howard V. 392–3, 399 Hong, Nathaniel J. 153 Horn, Robert Leslie 366 Howland, Jacob 134n17, 137n28, 145n46, 352 Hugo, Victor 96 Hugo of St Victor 177 Hühn, Lore 63, 68, 69, 70, 76, 85 Huizing, Klaas 565–6 humility 145, 146 Husserl, Edmund 444–6, 455 hylomorphism 234, 235, 236 Hyman, John 497 Hyppolite, Jean 421

Ibsen, A. 16, 18 Ibsen, Henrik 35, 386, 554, 556, 559 identity: Christian identity 254 formation of 253–4 as Christian 265–70 context of conception of 260–3 in Fear and Trembling 264–5 individualization 253 narrative identity 254 in Repetition 263–4 socialization 253

599

narrative-based views of practical identity 506–13 self-formation, in Either/Or 255–9 ideology critique 309 in On the Concept of Irony 310–1 in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: definition of 309 in Either/Or 311–14 in Fear and Trembling 317–18 hermeneutics of suspicion 309–10 in Practice in Christianity 325 sources of ideological thinking 323 academy 324 clergy 323–4 press 323 in Two Ages 321–4 immortality 320, 366, 374–8, 489 Incarnation, see Christianity individual 63, 103, 269–70 and Christianity 119–20 in Church 114–15, 116–17, 118, 119–20 as ground of moral obligation 216 Ingemann, B. S. 550 instant, the 85 intelligible action 508 irony 344–64 (passim) centrality of 345 as characteristic of modernity 255 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 344 negative freedom 356, 357 negative function of 344, 362 not the truth, but the way 356–7 as rhetorical tool: disparity between meaning and words 345–6 indirect communication 346 understanding of irony 345–52 in Romanticism: authoring a self 358–60 On the Concept of Irony 357–8, 467 rejection of Romantic irony 467 Schlegel on 102, 106, 350–1 Socrates and 66–8, 311, 346, 352–7 use in writings 344, 346–7 difficulty in identifying 350 expression of the inexpressible 350–2 indirect communication 350

600

index

playful negativity 347–8 pseudonyms 348–50, 361–2 see also Kierkegaard, Søren, writings, On the Concept of Irony

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 130 Jacobsen, Jens Peter 553 Jaegle, Dietmar 417 Jahanbegloo, Ramin 6 James, C. L. R. 580 James, William 208 Jameson, Frederic 465 Janiaud, Joël 451 Janicaud, Dominique 451, 456 Janke, Wolfgang 79, 83, 441 Japanese reception of Kierkegaard 6 Jaspers, Karl 63, 232n4, 405, 421, 429, 447 Jaspert, Bernd 159 Jegstrup, Elsebet 476 Jensen, Finn Gredal 11, 132n8, 151, 258n4 Jewish philosophy 5–6 Johnson, Luke Timothy 160 Johnson, Richard 231n3 Jor, Finn 564–5 Jordan, Mark D. 199n12 Josipovici, Gabriel 587–8 joy 57, 266, 305–6 Joyce, James 572

Kabell, Aage 14 Kafka, Franz 5, 554, 560–1, 581 Kahn, Charles H. 132n8 Kamla, Thomas A. 554 Kangas, David J. 88, 107n14 Kant, Immanuel 107, 130, 486 categorical imperative 217 love 336 metaphysics, critique of 487 reason 217 transcendental idealism 491 Kassner, Rudolf 5, 554 Keeley, Louise Carroll 367n4 Kempis, Thomas à 180, 181 Kenny, Anthony 484 Khan, Abrahim H. 505, 542

Kierkegaard, Michael Pedersen 150–1, 365 Kierkegaard, Peter Christian (brother) 11 appointed bishop 38 Kierkegaard’s posthumous papers 11–12, 13, 406–7 marriages 38 and N. F. S. Grundtvig 117 relationship with brother 12 Kierkegaard, Søren: on actuality 69, 70, 72, 76–8 on the aesthetic life 67, 88 and aesthetics 47, 48 on being an author 262–3, 270–2 childhood 2 church-going 54–6 death of 11, 126, 365 distinctive contribution to philosophy 422–8 epitaph 380 as expositor of Christian concepts 540–3 family background 39–40 religion 150–1 funeral of 59, 126, 365–6 God-relationship 88, 107, 220, 221, 230, 245, 294–7 Golden Age of Denmark 28–43 historical study, critical attitude towards 168–70 humility 146 the instant 85 Journals of 25–6 last will and testament 12 life-development 97 life-view 97, 98, 134, 140 misreadings of 4 as missionary 223 personality 1–2 factors affecting 2–3 and poetry 466 posthumous papers, brief history of 11–13 and psychiatry 7 and his secretaries 22–4 self-development 104 role of authorship in 270–2 self-posited by God 82 self-realization 81

index seriousness 89 single thought of 422 ways of reading 309 working processes 22–6 Kierkegaard, Søren, writings 1 ‘At a Graveside’ 59, 281, 371–4 The Book on Adler 99, 141, 161, 214–15 Christian Discourses 56–7, 170, 275, 295, 376, 377 The Concept of Anxiety 75–7, 174, 230, 242–3, 276–8, 301, 375, 376, 427–8, 431 On the Concept of Irony 65–8, 173, 310–1, 344–8, 353–5, 357–8, 467 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 51, 66, 77–8, 118–20, 134, 152, 169–70, 213, 270, 280–1, 293, 297, 302, 319–20, 344, 367–71, 375–7, 426, 431 The Crisis and A Crisis in the Life of an Actress 49 De Omnibus Dubitum Est 168–9 Discourses at Communion on Fridays 115–16 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 274–6, 333 Either/Or 71–5, 212–13, 227, 239–42, 255–9, 261–2, 277–8, 282–3, 311–14, 329–31, 466, 506–8 ‘Faustian Letters’ 56 Fear and Trembling 74, 153–5, 213–14, 246, 264–5, 278, 314–8, 331–3, 476 From the Papers of One Still Living 260 ‘Gilleleie Journal’ (1835) 56 Judge for Yourselves! 13 Kierkegaardian Papers: The Engagement, publication of 12 The Lily of the Field and the Bird Under Heaven 57, 417 A Literary Review 99, 124, 226–7, 321–4, 466 major Danish editions: Af Søren Kierkegaard’s Efterladte Papirer (1969–81) 13–15 Søren Kierkegaard’s Papirer (1909–48, 1968–78) 16–21 Søren Kierkegaard’s Samlede Vœrker (1901–6, 1920–36) 15–16

601

Søren Kierkegaard’s Samlede Vœrker (1962–4) 19 Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter (1997) 7, 21–2 The Moment (periodical) 25, 113, 125, 356 On My Work as an Author 24, 25, 26, 406 Philosophical Fragments 136, 152, 169, 175, 284, 297–8, 333–5, 426, 434 The Point of View for My Work as an Author 12, 223, 270, 271–2, 403–4, 406–11 Practice in Christianity 45, 120–3, 268–9, 284–5, 298–9, 325 Prefaces 474 Repetition 56, 174–5, 262–4, 425–6 For Self-Examination 155–8, 170 The Sickness Unto Death 25, 79–80, 83, 230, 233–8, 241–2, 245–7, 279–80, 301, 361–2, 442–3, 514–15 Stages on Life’s Way 24, 60, 153, 212 ‘The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’ 107, 215 Two Ages see A Literary Review Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 56, 155, 303, 517–18 Works of Love 106, 215–18, 267, 286–9, 295, 304–5, 335–41, 357, 422, 443–4 Writing Sampler 47 Kimmel, Haven 586–7 Kirkconnell, W. Glenn 151–2, 539 Kirmmse, Bruce H. 3, 12, 99, 151, 317, 347 Kisiel, Theodore 429n6, 433, 447, 448, 449, 450 Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne 367, 375 Klein, Louis 23 Kleinert, Markus 66n6, 68, 417 Kloeden, W. von 151 Knapp, Georg Christian 151 Koch, Karl Henrik 101 Kondrup, J. 253 Korsgaard, Christine 215, 217, 509 Kosch, Michelle 70n9, 96n2 Koskenniemi, Veikko Antero 551 Kotz, Menahem Mendel of 6 Kripke, Saul 484, 490 Krishek, Sharon 6, 333, 337, 534 Kuethe, John George 155

602

index

Kuhr, Victor 16–17 Kütemeyer, Wilhelm 66n6 Kylliäinen, Janne 551

Lacoste, Jean-Yves 454 Laing, Ronald David 7 Lamarque, Peter 509 Lammers, Gustav Adolph 557, 559 Lange, Hans Ostenfeld 15–6 Larsen, K. Olesen 536 Lasker-Schüler, Else 554 Lauridsen, Helga Vang 260 Law, David 292, 298, 536 Laycock, Steven W. 446 Legitimation, crisis of 469 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 118, 152 Lethbridge, J. B. 583 Levin, Israel 12, 23, 24 Lévinas, Emmanuel 5–6, 232, 336–7, 421, 452–3 liberalism, rise of 30 Lincoln, Ulrich 441, 443 Lindberg, J. C. 23 Lindström, Valter 540 Lippitt, John 352, 478, 487, 509, 511n11 Lisi, Leonardo F 561n5 literary criticism: approaches to 97 critique of personality 99 Kierkegaard 97–100, 260–1 use of exemplary individuals 99–100 literature, see English language literature; European literature Llewelyn, John 108, 451 Locke, John 233n5 Lodge, David 584–6 logic, movement in 76–7 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 537 Long, A. A. 132n10, 139n33, 140 longing 104 Loungina, Darya 551 love 328–9, 342 belief in 287 and change 286 Christian love 106, 227–8, 304–5, 337, 534, 540

in Either/Or 329–31 ethical obligations 215–16 expression of 221 in Fear and Trembling 331–3 God 296, 329, 330, 332–3 Greek philosophy 141–4 Aristotle 144 Plato 141–2 Socrates 142–3 ‘Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins’ 333 marriage 330, 331 nature of 287 neighbour 221–3, 267, 288–9, 305, 335–41 as only thing worth living for 328, 338 paradox of 329, 332, 334, 336–41 in Philosophical Fragments 333–5 relation of self and other 290 Schlegel 105–6 theology of 306 time 286–90, 331 in Works of Love 335–41 Löwith, Karl 72, 405, 433, 448 Lowrie, Walter 2n1, 387, 388, 392, 394, 400, 536, 573 Lukács, Georg 6, 551, 554 Lund, Ane Sørensdatter 365 Lund, Henriette 12, 564 Lund, Henrik 11, 17, 26, 366 Lund, Johan Christian 13 Luno, Bianco 23, 25 Luther, Martin 175, 183, 303, 339, 516 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 317 Legitimation, crisis of 469 postmodernism 465

McCarthy, Vincent A. 440, 446 McCutcheon, Felicity 498 McDonald, William 103n8, 105, 106, 368n7 McDowell, John 485 McGrath, Alister 167, 168, 185 MacIntyre, Alasdair 4, 212, 215, 504, 506–9, 513, 523–4 Mackey, Louis 66n6, 130, 471, 472 McKinnon, Alastair 4, 161 McPherran, Mark L. 137n28, 145n46 Magurshak, Dan 427

index Malantschuk, Gregor 243n18, 538, 539 Malcolm, Norman 484, 486 Malik, Habib C. 551 Mann, Heinrich 554 Mann, Thomas 554 Marcel, Gabriel 232, 421, 562, 573 Marcus Aurelius 132, 139n34, 140n38 Marino, Gordon D. 369n8, 379n16, 507 Marion, Jean-Luc 453–4 Marks, Tamara Monet 374, 376 marriage 256 Martens, Paul 157, 505 Martensen, Hans Lassen 38, 64, 97, 114, 366, 537 career of 35–6 Kierkegaard’s criticism of 125 as Kierkegaard’s theological tutor 172 translation into English 5 Marx, Karl 309, 311–12 May, Rollo 7 Mead, George Herbert 233 Mehl, Peter J. 505n3, 507 Meillassoux, Quentin 479 Melville, Herman 193, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201 Mendelson, Edward 574 Mercer, David 539 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 457 metanarratives: modernity 317 postmodernism 465 metaphysics: Kant’s critique of 487 Kierkegaard’s critique of 487 meaning of 486 Wittgenstein’s critique of 487–8 Meyer, Michael 559 Meyer, Raphael 12 Milbank, John 478–80 Miles, Thomas 404 Milton, John 233n5 Minear, Paul S. 150, 153, 162 Mjaaland, Marius Timmann 366n1, 367n6, 451 modernity, and metanarratives 317 Möhler, Johann Adam 166 Møller, Poul Martin 129, 375, 376 on immortality 366 Romanticism 96

603

Monk, Ray 485 Mooney, Edward F 140n38, 191n1, 195n9, 196n11, 205n15, 208n18, 369, 370, 506 moral obligation: alternatives to God as foundation of 216–18 individual 216 reason 216–17 social agreement 217–18 compelling reasons for action 219 divine commands as foundation of 219–23 motivations for action 219 objective nature of 218–19 requirements for foundation of 218–19 source of the ‘ought’ 215–18 universality of morality 219 moral philosophy 504–6, 523–4 connecting forgiveness and narrative unity 521–3 forgiveness 513–20 narrative-based views of practical identity 506–13 see also ethics Morelli, Elizabeth 234 Morimoto, Paul S 150, 153, 162 Muench, Paul 131, 352, 367–8, 370n10 Muir, Edwin 581 Mulder, Jack 541 Mulhall, Stephen 416n15, 494–5 Müller, Julius 541 Müller, Mogens 151, 152 Münter, Friedrich 38 Münter, Maria Frederica Franzisca (‘Fanny’) 38 Murdoch, Iris 145, 504, 505, 506 Mylius, Johan de 256 Mynster, Jakob Peter 32–3, 36, 37 charismatic personality 54 Kierkegaard’s criticism of 40, 114, 125, 268 view of church-going 54–5

Nagel, Thomas 486 Nagy, András 6, 552, 556 Napoleon I 29 narrative-based views of practical identity, 241, 243, 246, 506–13 nationalism, rise of 30

604

index

nature 56–9 Neander 181 Nehamas, Alexander 130, 145, 353–4 neighbour, and duty to love 221–3, 267, 288–9, 305, 335–41 Nelson, Christopher A. P. 306 neo-evangelists 532 Newman, John Henry 575 Nicander, C. A. 59 Niebuhr, Reinhold 533, 573 Nielsen, Rasmus 12–13 Nietzsche, Friedrich 134n18, 232 The Antichrist 417 The Birth of Tragedy 404 Daybreak 415 Ecce Homo 404, 414–16 The Gay Science 411–13 Human all too Human 414 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 414 and Kierkegaard: comparing with 404–6 knowledge of 405 on modernity 309 nihilism 405 providence 403, 411–17 self-portrayal of 415–16 nihilism 405 nihilistic devaluation 83 Norris, Christopher 467, 470 Novalis, see Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis) Nun, Katalin 100 Nussbaum, Martha 138n30, 139, 143n42, 144n45, 225, 506 Nygren, Anders 143

objectivity 319–20 Oehlenschläger, Adam 31–2, 33, 37–8 Romanticism 95, 96 Olesen, Tonny A. 69, 75 Olsen, Regine 2, 564–5; see also Schlegel, Regine Olsen, Terkild 25 Olshausen, H. 151 O’Neill, Caroline Coleman 570 Ong, Yi-Ping 135n21 Origen 181

Ørsted, Anders Sandøe 38 Ørsted, Hans Christian 28, 31, 38 Østergade 51–2 Oubiña, Óscar Parcero 551 Overbeck, Franz 185

paganism 85–6 Paludan-Müller, Frederik 96 Paradiso-Michau, Michael R. 446, 451 paraphrase 204 Parmenides 136 Pätges, Johanne Luise, see Heiberg, Johanne Luise Pattison, George 5, 68, 84, 96, 105, 106, 151, 155, 237, 243, 245, 246, 348, 432, 441, 445, 446, 454, 455–6, 467, 541, 544, 572 Paulus, Jr, M. J. 574 Pedersen, J. 158 Pelagius 173 Pelikan, Jaroslav 166, 167 Percy, Walker 576–8 Perseus (journal) 97 persona 106 personal identity theory 509 Pessoa, Fernando 554 Peterson, Elaine 155 phenomenology 233, 440–63 and God-relationship 440–1 Hegelian influences 441–4 Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology 446–51 ambivalent relation to Kierkegaard 448–50 commonalities with 457–8 theological objections 450–1 as universal phenomenological ontology 446–8 Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology 444–6 semiotic phenomenology of the invisible 456–7 theological turn in French phenomenology 451–4 Philipsen, Philip Gerson 25 Phillips, D. Z. 484, 495–6, 497, 504n1, 541, 542 Pietism 175–6, 180 Pippin, Robert B. 411

index Plato 132, 133, 137n27, 191, 196n10, 208, 311 love 141–2 reflection 321 Plotinus 132 Plutarch 226 Podmore, Simon D. 305, 367n3, 367n5, 513n15 Pöggeler, Otto 430n7 Pojman, Louis 440 Polk, Timothy Houston 153, 154, 155, 162, 542–3 Pons, Jolita 151, 153, 154 Pontoppidan, Henrik 560 Poole, Roger 66n6, 387, 468, 480, 572 Possen, David 142n41, 352, 371 possibility, and actuality 73–4, 79, 423–4 postmodernism 6, 317, 464–5 beyond postmodernism 477–80 critiques of postmodern reading 465–8 conflation of postmodernism and deconstruction 469–70 Either/Or 466 deconstruction 471–7 legitimation, crisis of 469 meaning of 465 questionable value of term 464 repetition 473–4, 476, 477–9 poststructuralism 478–9 Pott, D. 151 press, Kierkegaard’s critique of 323 Price, A. W. 144n45 primitivity 225, 265, 278 providence: and autobiographical literature 403 existential-anthropological models 403 Goethe on 417–18 Kierkegaard 403 governance 408–11 in The Point of View 407–11 use by 416–17 Nietzsche 403, 411–17 Schopenhauer 412–13 science 402, 403 pseudonyms, and Kierkegaard’s use of 191–3, 224 authorial responsibility 195–7 and freedom 207 and genres 198–201 and identity 195–6, 197

605

and irony 348–50, 361–2 as key to interpretation 192 and multiple identities 193–4 objective and subjective communication 202–4 powerful presence of 194 primacy of texts 192 and Socratic subjective communication 204–25 and the sublime 194–5 theatre and freedom 205–6 psychiatry, and Kierkegaard 7 Purkarthofer, Richard 417 Purver, Judith 94 Putnam, Hilary 485, 499 Pyper, Hugh 157, 520, 542 Pyrrho 136

Quinn, Philip 510, 513, 523 Quist, Wenche Marit 448

Radzik, Linda 519–20 Rae, Murray 160, 298, 537 Rahbek, Karen Margrethe, ‘Kamma’ 34, 37 Rahbek, Knud Lyne 34 Rapic, Smail 74, 88 Rapp, George 177n5 Rasmussen, Joel D. S. 155 reason 226–7 moral obligation 216–17 reflection 100–1, 226 double-reflection 102–3, 107 meanings of 321–2 Plato 321 Rehm, Walther 407n7 Reitzel, C. A. 23, 25 repentance 283 repetition 422–7 The Concept of Anxiety 427–8 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 426 Heidegger 433–4 Philosophical Fragments 426, 434 postmodern reading of Kierkegaard 473–4, 476, 477–9 Repetition 425–6

606

index

Ricoeur, Paul 310, 378, 509 Rilke, Rainer Maria 553, 554, 564 Roberts, Robert C. 138, 139, 514n16, 542, 543–4 Rogers, Carl 7 Rohde, H. P. 82n16, 172n2 Rohde, Peter P. 19 Romanticism: ambivalent attitude towards 94 appropriation of key concepts 104–5 authoring a self 358–60 boredom 83–4, 103 On the Concept of Irony 357–8 Danish Romanticism 95–7 fascination with Middle Ages mythology 96 inception of 96 explicit references in writings 95 feeling 103, 104 longing 104 indirect communication 106–7 irony 102 rejection of Romantic irony 467 literacy criticism 97–100 The Book on Adler 99 development of own ideas 100 review of Andersen’s Only a Fiddler 97–9 self-criticism 99 Two Ages 99, 100 use of exemplary individuals 100 love 106 Middle Ages folk tales and mythology 96–7 reflection 100–1 double reflection 103, 107 role as poet 107 Romantic subjectivity 83 critique of 67 self-consciousness 103 subjective meaning 103–4 troubling nature of 358 Roos, Heinrich 541 Rorty, Richard 470, 485 Rosas, L. Joseph 153 Rose, Tim 298, 537 Rosenhoff, Claudius 59 Rosenkranz, Karl 64

Rosenmüller, Ernst 151 Rosenzweig, Franz 6 Rückert, L. J. 151 Rudd, Anthony 212, 374, 377n14, 467, 468, 469–70, 494, 496, 506, 507, 508, 510n10, 511 Ruhr, Mario von der 378 Russell, Bertrand 484 Ruysbroek, Jan van 181

Sæding (village) 52 Safranski, Rüdiger 404n4 Šajda, Peter 5 Sandel, Michael J. 233 Sartre, Jean Paul 212, 232, 421, 562, 573 importance of Kierkegaard 464 Kierkegaard’s use of irony 349, 351 Scanlon, Michael J. 453 Scepticism 133, 134, 136–7, 139 Schack, Hans Egede 552–3 Scharling, C. E. 151 Schechtman, Marya 509n8, 512n13 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph: criticism of Hegel 70 Essay on Human Freedom 81, 82, 83 lectures on ‘philosophy of revelation’ (1841–42) 68–71, 75–6 love 105–6 negative philosophy 69, 73, 84 Philosophy and Religion 81 positive philosophy 69, 76, 84 possibility and actuality 69–70, 73–4, 78 principle of fundamental difference 72, 84 quid sit/quod sit distinction 69, 70 self posited by God 82 Treatise on Human Freedom 75 Schempf, Christoph 530 Schilling, Peter 575 Schlegel, August 97 Schlegel, Frederik 12 Schlegel, Friedrich 104n11, 358, 359 ancient and modern poetry 101–2 Brief über den Roman (Letter on the Novel) 105 concept of novel (Roman) 105 on the interesting 101, 102

index on irony 102, 106, 350–1 literacy criticism 97 characteristics 99–100 critique of personality 99 literary arabesque 105 on love 105–6 Lucinde 105, 106 Romanticism 94 On the Study of Greek Poetry 101–2 Schlegel, Regine (née Olsen) 12, 26; see also Olsen, Regine Schleiermacher, Friedrich 94, 95, 129, 528, 531 Confidential Letters on Lucinde 106 Schleswig, Duchy of 29–30 Schlette, Magnus 402 Schmidinger, Heinrich M. 88 Schmidt, Jochen 451 Schönbaumsfeld, Genia 485–6, 496 Schoolfield, George 564 Schopenhauer, Arthur 84, 404, 411, 412–13 Schrader, George 214n2 Schrag, Calvin 233n6, 440 Schreiber, Gerhard 417 Schrempf, Christoph 530 Schulz, Heiko 387, 405, 410n11, 442, 530, 541 Schwab, Philipp 63, 66, 68, 69, 78, 79, 107 Scopetea, Sophia 138n30 Scribe, Augustine Eugène 261 self-consciousness 102–3, 107 selfhood 239 self-deception 310, 323, 509–10 selfhood 230–2, 531 alterity 233 becoming ourselves 279–80 The Concept of Anxiety 242–3 dialogical selves 232 Either/Or 239–41, 242 existence 280 existential telos 238–44 existentialism 232 experience and choice 232 formation of identity 253–4, 260–70 intraspective dimension of individuality 232–3 irony 255 narrative-based views of practical identity 506–13

ontology of in The Sickness unto Death 233–8 freedom 238 self-thesis 234, 235–6, 237 spirit 236–8 religious sense 245–9, 360 Romanticism, authoring a self 358–60 self-consciousness 239 self-formation, in Either/Or 255–9 spirit as striving will 238–44 temporality 275, 276–7, 279 unique potential 245–6 will 239 self-realization 81 self-respect 516–18, 519 Seneca 225 seriousness, see earnestness Sextus Empiricus 132, 136, 139n34 Shailer-Hanson, Kathryn 96 Shakespeare, Steven 478, 479, 544 Shakespeare, William 191, 194, 407n5 Sheehan, Thomas 429, 433, 447, 448, 449, 450 Sheil, Patrick 451 Sherman, Nancy 140n35 Shestov, Lev 5–6, 446 Sibbern, F. C. 96, 129 Romanticism 95–6 Simmons, J. Aaron 6, 451 Simonsen, Carl Ludvig 23 sin 278, 423, 425 anxiety 301–2 consciousness of 302, 303 definition of 302 despair 81, 302–3 forgiveness 303, 513–20 The Sickness Unto Death 302–3 sinfulness 278 theology of 81–3, 301–3 Sinclair, Isaak von 101 Sjösted, Nils åke 560 Sløk, Johannes 130n1, 269, 534 social agreement, and moral obligation 217–18 Socrates 208 criticized by Kierkegaard 133 doubt 136–7

607

608

index

Socrates: (cont.) as exemplary figure for Kierkegaard 131, 137, 143–4, 352 faith 137 immortality 320 Kierkegaard’s interpretation of 134, 357 On the Concept of Irony 66–8, 353–5 as negative character 352–5 love 142–3 significance for Kierkegaard 352 Socratic ignorance 310–1 Socratic irony 311, 346, 356–7 Socratic subjective communication 204–5 Söderquist, K. Brian 66, 94, 95, 133n14, 145n46 Solger, Karl 94 solidarity 233 Søltoft, Pia 367n4, 534 Sommer, Andreas Urs 416n14 Sophism 136 Sorabji, Richard 141n39 Sorainen, Kalle 18 Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre 21 Søren Kierkegaard Society (Denmark) 18 Sørensen, Villy 19 sorrow, and despair 287 Sparshott, Francis 134n19 Spener, Philip 531 spirit 236–8 as striving will 238–44 time 277 Sponheim, Paul 538 Stampa, Gaspara 564 statistics 58–9 Steere, Douglas 390 Steffens, Henrik 31, 38 inception of Danish Romanticism 96 Romanticism 95 Stegmaier, Werner 416n13 Stern, David 490 Stewart, Jon 4, 6, 64, 65n4, 66n6, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 95, 132n10, 171n1, 366, 427, 441, 504n1 Stoicism 133, 139 emotions 139–40 Kierkegaard’s disagreements with 140–1 Stokes, Patrick 101n4, 237n12, 367n4, 369n8, 370n9, 373, 379n17, 505, 509

Stoljar, Margaret 98, 102, 104n10–11, 105, 107 Stolzenberg, Jürgen 88 Stoyanov, Ljudmil 551 Strathausen, Carsten 105 Strauss, David Friedrich 36, 366 Strawson, Galen 509 Strindberg, August 560–1 Strodtmann, Adolf 550–1 Struve, Wolfgang 405 subjectivity 319, 320, 442, 491, 499, 530 constitutive use in theology 531–5 Swammerdam, Jan 402 Swanton, Christine 504–5 Swenson, David F. 387, 392, 394, 536, 539, 573 Szwed, Antoni 551

Tauler, Johann 177 Taylor, Charles 208n18, 367, 504, 505, 506 Taylor, Mark C. 230–1, 440, 465, 475, 505, 534, 536 Tegner, Esaias 104 Teisen, Niels 531 teleology 477 Tennemann, W. G. 129 Tersteegen, Gerhard 177–8, 180 Tertullian 172–3, 175, 177, 179 Thales 133 theatre 49 theology 292–4, 528–30 dialectic of experience and revelation 538–40 historical theology 166–8, 183–6 Kierkegaard and history of 166–87 Kierkegaard as theologian 292–306 (passim), 528–46 (passim) Kierkegaard’s University studies of 171–3 subjectivity 530 constitutive use of 531–5 theology of love 306 upbuilding discourses 294 see also atonement; Bible; Christ; Christian life; forgiveness; sin Theunissen, Michael 79, 80, 83, 85, 89, 395, 441 Thielst, Peter 96 Tholuck, Friedrich 151

index Thomas, R. S. 583–4 Thulstrup, Marie Mikulová 18, 19, 178 Thulstrup, Niels 16, 18–19, 66n6, 172 Tieck, Ludwig, and Romanticism 94–6 Tillich, Paul 159, 533, 573 time 86, 273–91 and concern 275 and courage 275 critical importance of 274 definition of 277 in Either/Or 277–8 and eternity 277, 287–8 and ethics 282–3 and existence 280–1 expectation 274–5 experiencing 274–6 the future 274–5 and anxiety 276 love 286–90, 331 the moment 277, 280, 427 the past 275 patience 275–6 power of 286 the present 274 remembering 275 and selfhood 275, 276–7, 279 and spirit 277 Tivoli gardens 49–51 Tolstoy, Leo 369, 551 Töpfer-Stoyanova, Desislava 551 Torsting, Einar 16 tragedy 72–3, 424 Trakl, Georg 554 transition 76, 84, 85 translating Kierkegaard 385–401 diversity of styles and genres in his writings 387–8 ‘edifying’/‘upbuilding’ 393 influence of translations 390–1 misleading translations 391–2 modernizing the text 386 multiple translations 398–400 correcting mistakes 398–9 Philosophical Fragments 392 preserving ambiguity 393–8 recapturing style 385 retaining rhythm 388–9, 390

609

sensitivity to context 399 translator’s purpose 399–400 versions of Kierkegaard 387 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf 65n4, 77n14, 132 truth 133, 320 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 514 Tudvad, Peter 3, 6, 53, 471 Tullberg, Steen 530 Turner, Jeffrey S. 507, 510 Tutu, Desmond 514

Unamuno, Miguel de 555–6 UNESCO conference on Kierkegaard 421 Updike, John 578–80 Usteri, L. 151

Van Buren, John 425n4, 429, 436 van Vloten, Johannes 551 Velleman, David 522–3 Verstrynge, Karl 451, 551 Vidal, Dolors Perarnau 551 Vienna, Congress of (1814–15) 29 virtues in Kierkegaard’s thought 224–8, 513 centrality of 225 see also earnestness; forgiveness Vlastos, Gregory 144n45

Wahl, Jean 421 Walsh, Sylvia 108, 213n1, 294, 299, 300, 301, 304, 305, 306, 337, 341, 467, 468, 469–70, 472, 474, 544 Watkin, Julia 97 Weber, Kirsten 260 Weber, Max 402 Weber, Ruth 555 Welz, Claudia 6, 440, 443, 446, 451, 452, 454, 456 Westfall, Joseph 193n5, 200 Weston, Michael 423 Westphal, Merold 6, 230, 309–19 (passim), 324, 370–1, 451, 452, 457 Wette, Wilhelm 151 Whitmire, Jr, John F. 410n10

610

index

wholeheartedness 511–14, 522–3 Wild, John 137n27 will, and selfhood 239 Williams, Bernard 486, 506 Williams, Charles 574 Winch, Peter 484 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Christianity 499–500 comparative studies of Kierkegaard and 492–6 conceptual confusions 494–5 dialectical nature of thinking 494 grammar of concepts 493–4 importance and influence of 484–5 philosophy of religion 496–500 as post-Kantian philosopher 486 critique of metaphysics 486–8 primacy of practice 488–90

problem of philosophical communication 490–2 practical holism 489–90, 492 as reader of Kierkegaard 485–6 understanding concepts in context 493 Wood, David 6, 451 Wordsworth, William 2 Wright, Richard 580–1 Wyschogrod, Michael 233n6, 446

Yalom, Irvin 7 ‘Young Germany’ 95

Zahavi, Dan 445, 455

Zerlang, Martin 50 Ziolkowski, Eric J. 1–2 Žižek, Slavoj 475