Category: kierkegaard

Kierkegaard on politics

In Kierkegaard’s Postscript to his treatise on authority and revelation, also known as The Book of Adler, Kierkegaard makes some telling political statements.  Kierkegaard is of course popularly criticized for his lack of politics but rarely is it mentioned that he is most often simply trying to maintain a rigorous qualitative distinction.  Some may simply disagree with his distinction but it needs to be clear that Kierkegaard is entirely intentional in what he develops.  Kierkegaard makes clear in his postscript that he this writing is ‘ethico-religious and has nothing to do with politics’.  The point of departure for the religious is from above, from God, “and the formula is this paradox that an individual is employed.”

Humanly understood, an individual, according to all reason, is infinitely nothing in comparison with the established order (the universal), so it is a paradox that the individual is the stronger. . . . When there are hundreds of men, what comes to pass is explained simply by the activity of the hundreds of men, but the paradox compels us (insofar as freedom can be compelled) to take notice of God, that he is taking part in it.

Kierkegaard then goes to talk about the political which comes from below, that is, how does politics attempt to change the established order.  I will include several excerpts as there are few times in all his published corpus that he speaks this directly.  The political as he understands it is being conceived and built now as a ‘monstrous multitude’.

“The multitude,” an absurd monster or a monstrous absurdity, which nevertheless is physically in possession of power, of outcries and of noise, and besides that has an extraordinary virtuosity in making everything commensurable for the decision of the hands upraised to vote or the fists upraised to fight.  This abstraction is an inhuman something, the power of which is, to be sure, prodigious, but it is a prodigious power which cannot be defined in human terms, but more properly as one defines the power of a machine, calling it so and so many horsepower: the power of the multitude is always horsepower.

This abstraction creates politics as a game and the game is played for the multitude whoever can win over the many legs.

This human mass becomes at last enrages by friction, and now demands – or rather it demands nothing, it does not itself know what it wills, it takes the threatening attitude only in the hope that something after all will come to pass, in the hope that the weaker side (the established government, the ruler) will perhaps become so much alarmed that it will go ahead and do something which neither the multitude nor those at the head of it, the stronger ones, the courageous ones (if there be any such), have the courage to speak out in definite words. . . . In alarm the king goes off and does something – and what the king does, that the human multitude then adores, maintaining that it had done it.

Kierkegaard then returns to the individual.

While the individual who truly connects himself with a religious movement [in the internal sense] must watch out and be ready to fight lest the dreadful thing should come to pass that this monstrous abstraction should wish to help him by going over with its legs to his side.

When the abstract of the multitude has finally taken the throne the result is idolatry.

Wherever this abstraction is set upon the throne there really is no government.  One is obedient only to the man whom he himself has boosted up, pretty much as the idolater worships and serves the god he himself has made, i.e. one obeys himself.  With the discontinuance of the rational State the art of statesmanship will become a game.  Everything will turn upon getting the multitude pollinated, and after that getting them to vote on his side, with noise, with torches and with weapons, indifferent, absolutely indifferent, as to whether they understand anything or no.

Kierkegaard’s politics are of course conservative but what I would want to further reflect on is the implications of his theology.  It will of course have political implications.  Is it necessary to label and criticize Kierkegaard’s politics as unduly conservative without considering the implication of what it would mean to be engaged in his aesthetic-ethical-religious movement?  For instance Kierkegaard, towards the end of his life, made the political gesture of abstaining from public worship on Sunday.  He sat outside at a cafe nearby the church so he would indeed be visible.  I am not convinced that Kierkegaard would have spoken out against various forms of progressive political theory. What seemed to be his concern was his perception that ‘these days everything is politics’.  This led for him inevitably to a herd mentality in which the ‘horsepower’ of the multitude would ultimately be wielded for destructive purposes.

I am hoping within the year or so to get into Hardt and Negri’s trilogy in which ‘the multitude’ is explicitly leveraged.  I am curious to see how that notion is developed.

A learned twaddler

I am into the thick of the final volume of my Kierkegaard reading project.  It looks like I may even finish ahead of schedule by a few days.  I already have an outline for my next reading plan as this one really seemed to focus my time and attention to accomplish an amount of reading I can’t imagine I would have been able to under ‘normal’ circumstances.  In any event part of the next reading project will include a stint in phenomenology.  I have for some time sensed a ‘call’ towards phenomenology.  If there is one thing I have learned about my style of critical engagement is that I can easily move into ‘poetic’ gestures or expressions.  I certainly don’t mean this comment to belittle the role of the poetic in communication only that for me it was a space I attempted to inhabit when I really did not know what I was talking about.  In communicating this way I hoped that the frills were distracting or persuasive enough to keep from further scrutiny.

My rudimentary view of phenomenology is of a process by which someone learns the simple task of description.  I don’t assume that description will be neutral of course only that a certain form of content can be developed and articulated that will provide a more decisive engagement and understanding of a given context or idea.  I am simply working at trying to be more specific and honest.  I think honesty does have potential currency to it, not in some heartfelt intention but in clarity.  When Kierkegaard responded to the real or imagined question ‘What do you want?’ in a local periodical he replied, ‘honesty’.  Much of his writings in his so-called ‘Attack on Christendom’ have to do with being honest about why Christianity exists as it does and how that relates to the text of the New Testament.

In The Book Adler Kierkegaard gives an aside with regards to how it often seems to easier for people to talk about immeasurably more complex topics than specific ones.  His sentiments reflect some of the motivation behind my own development.

A learned twaddler who at bottom knows nothing can seldom be got to deal with anything concrete; he does not talk of a particular dialogue of Plato, that is too little for him – also it might become apparent that he had not read it.  No, he talks about Plato as a whole, or even perhaps of Greek philosophy as a whole, but especially about the wisdom of the Indian and the Chinese.  This Greek philosophy as a whole, the profundity of Oriental philosophy as a whole, is the prodigiously great, the boundless, which advantageously hides his ignorance.  So also it is easier to talk about an alteration in the form of government that to discuss a very little concrete problem like sewing a pair of shoes; and the injustice towards the few capable men lies in the fact that by reason of the prodigious greatness of the problem they are apparently on a par with every Peer, who ‘also speaks out.’  So it is much easier for a dunce to criticize our Lord than to judge the handiwork of an apprentice in a shop. . . . But our Lord and his governance of the world is something so prodigiously great that in a certain giddy abstract sense the most foolish man takes part in gossiping about it as well as the wisest man, because no one understands it.

I am trying in my own way to be honest about what I know and what I do not know.  This is not about knowing completely but simply in how I can talk about specifics.  In this way much of the theology I currently touch on (and it is less and less these days) seems to fall under the final line in the quote above and I am left wondering if it is a wise or foolish person who is speaking.

Calculating rightly

Do you ever have stretches of time where life as life exerts itself on you as a force that pulls, strains or simply weighs down?  There are no immediate pressures in life that are causing the pressure, rather it seems to come as a whole.  I ask this seriously because while I see others express similar experiences I don’t assume that it is so for many people.  Sometimes I think this is a condition of privilege; that I have a certain leisure to sit with and entertain such thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes I think this is a condition of arrogance; that I can account for the variables of life and attempt to create and navigate a true course and understanding.  So in no ways do I assume this is a healthy experience or one that can be characterized as indicating some profound nature (though in saying this I of course am tempted to view it as such).  This was simply the best way that I could characterize much of last week.  I was absentminded and removed though in some ways more attuned to what was going on around me.  I looked out and saw meaningless, well, maybe not quite.  I saw arbitrary meaning.  I could not discern and adjudicate the possible meanings.  They swirled, arose, and died again around me.  They taunted me asking which meaning I would choose.  Is this a false option?  Is this an incorrect framing of the question and circumstances?

Towards the end of Kierkegaard’s final published writings he speaks at length about the Instant or Moment (depending on translation).  Kierkegaard believes that humans are a synthesis of the finite and infinite and therefore can never exist as settled.  To do so is to collapse (as if that were possible) or at least tune out the dialectic.  The Instant is the in-breaking of the eternal.  It is a qualitatively difference expression then what all the resources of the finite are able to muster.  But our applied resources are just that.  We cannot speak, think, or act beyond the finite.  So Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘leap’, though from what I can remember he does not use this expression (to leap) in his writings on the Instant.  Rather he says this,

The Instant is when the man [sic] is there, the right man, the man of the Istant.

This is a secret which eternally will remain hidden from all worldly shrewdness, from everything which is only to a certain degree.

Worldly shrewdness stares and stares and stares at events, at circumstances, it reckons and reckons, thinking that it might be able to distill the Instant out of the circumstances, and so become itself a power by the aid of the Instant, this breaking through of the eternal, hoping that itself might be rejuvenated, as it so greatly needs to be, by means of the new.

But in vain.  Shrewdness does not succeed and never will to all eternity succeed by means of this surrogate.

No, only when the man is there, and when he ventures as one must venture (which is precisely what worldly shrewdness and mediocrity want to avoid), then is the Instant – and the circumstances then obey the man of the Instant.

. . .

For the Instant is precisely that which does not lie in the circumstances, it is the new thing, the woof of eternity – but that same second it masters the circumstances to such a degree that (adroitly calculated to fool worldly shrewdness and mediocrity) it looks as if the Instant proceeded from the circumstances.

There is nothing worldly shrewdness so broods over and so hankers after as the Instant.  What would it not give to be able to calculate rightly!

– The Instant  no. 10

In some ways that comes close to framing my experience last week.  There is always this grasping.  But the nature of the grasping does not seem to understand what it is grasping at.  I continue to read and reflect on accounts that I admit to complexity but implicitly or explicitly render formulas for personal or social change.  Can I believe that circumstances will obey the person of the Instant?

To what extent is this experience also an internal condition to a particular strand of the Christian tradition, that is existential angst?  Is it helpful to even speak of a human condition on these matters?  Sure I could retire into the refrain of the Preacher of Ecclesiastes but how satisfying is that and how much does it reveal that I need to be satisfied in this process?  Is this simply by definition a transitional experience that happens prior to another stasis, or just a rhythm of a larger pattern?

I am not ringing the bell

From an article in a local Danish periodical Kierkegaard writes,

Would it be best now to ‘stop ringing the fire alarm’?  This proposal has been made to me.  However, I cannot in this respect humour anybody (supposing it is I who am ringing the bell); it would be inexcusable to leave off tolling as long as the fire is burning.  But strictly speaking it is not I who am ringing the bell, it is I who am starting the fire.

The problem of presence

It would seem that a work or ‘the works’ of a particular philosopher cannot be complete without addressing the question of presence.  Do we have access to some-thing?  This was first impressed on me when I was introduced to philosophical hermeneutics and the question of meaning.  This question seemed stretched to its logical conclusion in the work of Derrida who denied our ability to capture or lay hold of meaning explaining that the nature of language is to remain in motion always being deferred in relation.  Kierkegaard picks up this question in Practice in Christianity when raising the question of ‘reflection’.  He criticizes the pastoral movement in his time that encourages ‘reflection’.  I think this marks a shift in this thinking away from earlier formations of developing ‘inwardness’ as the arena of faith.  Or at least he is developing a corrective or preemptive claim.

To reflect means, in one sense of the word, to come quite close to something which one would look at, whereas in another sense it implies an attitude of remoteness, of infinite remoteness so far as the personality is concerned.  When a painting is pointed out to one and he is asked to regard it, or when in a shop one looks at a piece of cloth, for example, he steps up quite close to the object, in the latter instance he even takes it in his hands and feels it, in short, he gets as close to the object as possible.  But in another sense, by this very movement he goes quite out of himself, gets away from himself, forgets himself, and there is nothing to remind him that it is he that is looking at the picture or the cloth, and not the picture of the cloth that is looking at him.  That is to say, by reflection I enter into the object (I become objective), but I go out of or away from myself (I cease to be subjective).  . . .

For Christian truth, if I may say so, has itself eyes to see with, indeed, is all eye; but it would be very disquieting, rather quite impossible, to look at a painting or a piece of cloth, if when I was about to look I discovered that the painting or the cloth was looking at me – and precisely such is the case with Christian truth.

Kierkegaard is interested in contemporaneousness with Christ.  And it took me a little while to realize is how dramatically this must be distinguished from historical knowledge of Christ, that is reflection on Christ.  There are of course many questions to be asked about this distinction but it always pushes for, better or worse, is a subjective engagement.

As I was writing out this quote I was reminded of a recent art installation I happened across as my wife and I were walking in our neighbourhood.  The installation was inside the new Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art.  It was created by Lani Maestro and entitled ‘her rain’.  The installation was sparse and what I would call ‘conceptual’.  Below is a picture of one of the works that made up the four room installation.

This neon light filled a room accompanied by second mirrored piece which ran ‘NO BODY LIKE THIS PAIN’.  The works throughout the installation are ‘unframed’.  They are meant to immerse the space they inhabit which include the subjects and subjectivities that move past them.  What I appreciate about this installation is that it makes it difficult to both take it seriously and remain objective about the pieces.  One has the option of dismiss the installation as being ‘artsy-fartsy’ rubbish but one can hardly ‘admire’ it or ‘reflect’ on it in the Kierkegaardian sense above.  One moves through it and must make a subjective decision about it.  It is bodily but not framed and so it opens itself to touch other bodies.  It is subjective.  This word has been so maligned that I think it is time again to slowly build up its intended place, which is not only a place, but also and primarily its impact.

For the Barthians and Anabaptists

If you cannot endure contemporaneousness [with Christ], cannot endure the sight in reality, if you are unable to go out in the street and perceive that it is God in this horrible procession, and that this was the case for you to fall down and worship Him – then you are not essentially a Christian.  What you have to do then is unconditionally to admit this to yourself, so that above all you may preserve humility and fear and trembling with relation to what it means in truth to be a Christian.  For that is the way you must take to learn and to get training in fleeing to grace in such a way that you do not take it in vain.
– Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity

A lot of Barth and Bonhoeffer there, seems to me anyway.  And for the Anabaptists,

Christ’s life here upon earth is the paradigm.
– Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity

Though the interesting question here would be whether Kierkegaard’s critique of historical knowledge of Jesus would hold against Anabaptist appropriations.

Christian Discourses, Helplessness Blues, and the mechanics of liturgy

[This started as a simple update on my Kierkegaard reading then turned into something I wanted to edit and develop but I doubt that will happen any time soon so I thought I would throw it up in its disjointedness.]

As I mentioned in my last post, the first half of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses was firmly okay.  It was gently pastoral in tone while attempting to stir and provoke in content.  The second half entitled “Thoughts that wound from behind” promised to be more engaging.  The preface of the second half read,

The essentially Christian needs no defense, is not served by any defense – it is the attacker, to defend it is of all perversions the most indefensible, the most inverted, and the most dangerous – it is  unconsciously cunning treason.  Christianity is the attacker – in Christendom, of course, it attacks from behind. (162)

The final line is of course of utmost importance for what follows because Kierkegaard’s attack is against the notion that Christendom can implicitly produce Christians.  Kierkegaard begins by noting the role of circumstance in the power of a message how “the sickbed and the nighttime hour preach more powerfully than all the orators [because they] know this secret of speaking to you in such a way that you come to perceive that it is you who is being addressed, you in particular (164).  Kierkegaard relates this to his understanding of the ‘Lord’s house’ and how it is to be a place more terrifying than terror (for awakening that is) though pastors take it to be a place to preach for tranquilization.  The Lord’s house is by definition the space that a human encounters the truth, that is, encounters God.  This is a horror becuase it is an encounter with sin.

Here in God’s house there is essentially discourse about a horror that has never occurred either before or after, in comparison with which the most horrible thing that can happen to the most unfortunate of all people is a triviality: the horror that the human race crucified God. (172)

This discourse of terror is the first discourse and it is necessary.  The Christian is to use this discourse to win people – “but woe to you if you win them in such a way that you leave out the terror” (175).  So use this discourse to terrify people but “woe to you if you do not use it essentially to win them for the truth” (175).

While these discourses began with a pointed and promising account of attack or ‘awakening’ they settled into what (from a contemporary perspective) is a now familiar account of the need to ‘break from the herd’ in how you understand your own subjectivity and how it is formed.  I do not doubt the ongoing validity of this message it is only that the ‘herd mentality’ is now precisely in being unique and original.

How then does one break from the demand of uniqueness and become formed as an individual?

There is the already well commented on lines from Fleet Foxes recent single Helplessness Blues in which they harmonize on being some cog in a greater machine.

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

In that instance the strength of individuality is in its submission to something  beyond the scope of a single subjectivity.  I think this is a fair response.  The problem of course is that there is no such static machine in which humans function as the cogs and pulleys.  The response in HB is a sort of almost naive localism.

If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m raw
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store

I say almost because of the final lines of the piece.

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen

They recognize that this too, this honest labour, is the production of the entertainment industry.  It is the production of flat subjectivity that will not truly intervene in the existing order.  For Kierkegaard subjectivity is based around the primary human dialectic of being a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal.

It is the final section of Christian Discourses that offers some help in understanding how the Christian can engage in the practices of faith while attending to the internal dialectic of subjectivity.  This final section is a collection of discourses to be read at Friday Communion services.  As such they offer a rare glimpse into Kierkegaard’s direct and public communication on church liturgy.  There is no strength in the basic repetition of Communion as an act that builds an alternate imagination.  This would be to function as a cog some great machinery.  Rather one does indeed approach the Communion table and share in the elements but when you leave it is as if the Communion table followed you (273).  It is only possible to speak of real presence because there is continuity with the table and with Christ.  “Where he is, there is the Communion table” (273).  The Communion table becomes present not necessarily at the religious site but at the site of reconciliation that is called for prior to sacrifice (Matt 5:23-24).  “The task is to remain at the Communion table when you leave the Communion table” (274).  A sermon should ‘bear witness to him. . . . At the Communion table, however, it is his voice you are to hear” (271).  The point here is simple.  There must be continuity and congruence.  And the perhaps the solution for the church is just as simple, that is, to call individuals to both leave and remain at the Table.

From here is eternity

I have not posted recently on my Kierkegaard reading.  Things continue to progress more or less on target.  I am currently in the middle of Christian Discourses.  I continue to have a mild reception to most of his religious writings.  The first section of CD comes off as firmly okay.  It is essentially an exploration of how living in light of eternity creates a reversal of popular (temporary) understanding.  So wealth and poverty are inverted, gain is loss, strength is weakness, etc.  There is nothing wrong with this approach in itself and there are moments of insight in Kierkegaard’s thinking here.  For instance when Kierkegaard develops the inversion of wealth and poverty he does so by demonstrating the nature of wealth.

Riches are indeed a possession, but actually or essentially to possess something of which the essential feature is losableness or that it can be lost is just as impossible as to sit down and yet walk – at least thought cannot get anything in its head except that this must be a delusion.  If, namely, losability is an essential feature of riches, then it is obvious that no essential change has occurred when it is lost, no essential change occurs in it by being lost.  Therefore, it is essentially the same, but then it is indeed also essentially the same while I possess it – it is lost – because it must indeed be essentially the same at every moment.  Lost, it is essentially the same; possessed, it is essentially the same, is lost; that is, in a deeper sense it cannot be possessed. (28)

A key element of how Kierkegaard energizes this dialectic is the role of eternity.  Eternity for Kierkegaard is a mode or posture of approaching the world.  In one key passage Kierkegaard describes how eternity creates a way of being more present as opposed to a future or spiritualized orientation.  In this section Kierkegaard is referring to self-torment as the next day.

The one who rows a boat turns his back to the goal toward which he is working.  So it is with the next day.  When, with the help of the eternal, a person lives absorbed in today, the decisively he turns his back to the next day; then he does not see it all.  When he turns around, the eternal becomes confused before eyes and becomes the next day.  But when, in order to work toward the goal (eternity) properly, he turns his back, he does not see the next day at all, whereas with the help of the eternal he sees today and its tasks with perfect clarity.  But if the work today is to be done properly, a person must be turned in this way.  It is always delaying and distracting impatiently to want to inspect the goal every moment, to see whether on is coming a little closer, and then again a little closer.  No, be forever and earnestly resolute; then you turn wholeheartedly to the work – and your back to the goal.  This is the way one is turned when one rows a boat, but so also is on positioned when one believes.  One might think that the believer would be most distanced from the eternal, he who has completely turned his back and is living today, whereas the glimpser stands and looks for it.  And yet the believer is closest of all to the eternal, whereas the apocalypt is most distanced from the eternal, then the next day becomes a monstrous confused figure, like that in a fairytale.  Just like those daimons we read about in the book of Genesis who begot children with mortal women, the future is a monstrous daimon the begets the next day. (74)

Upbuilding as unedifying

Well it was a fairly quick tear through Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits.  Overall, as I mentioned in my last post, I was not impressed.  It was piece of simple and thoroughgoing introspection.  The basic thrust was that every individual is able to live joyously, but joy comes through suffering because suffering is the teacher of obedience and obedience of all things is necessary for joy.  I continue to grant Kierkegaard some margin on this stream of his thinking because it seems apparent that our contemporary subjective constitutions remain relatively flaccid.  However, where I see a necessary and critical rejection is in how this plays out in some of his examples.  Kierkegaard typically wants to drive a qualitative distinction between external influences and internal formation.  It is important for him that there is nothing external that can overcome an appropriate internal orientation (alone before God).

There are many assumptions inherent to this position.  It assumes a form of suffering based on recognition (i.e. people knew Kierkegaard was a genius, but perhaps also insane).  This assumes a rejection.  It does not explore the enmeshed relationship of abuse in which the very form of relating (and identity) can create a double-bind in the experience of the abused (an abusive spouse can express absolute need and revulsion in almost the same moments).  Kierkegaard concedes, in good Pauline literalist fashion, that if someone can choose their freedom then they should do so but then goes on and uses the actual example of a woman who bears “all the difficulties and caprices and insults of her husband” (I think you mean “shit” Kierkegaard . . . although I don’t know the original Danish) so that on the outside it looks like “a happy marriage”.  There is no redeeming the direction Kierkegaard takes this and in fact I would argue it goes against his very premise of individuality.  To “suffer meekly” in this instance is bind herself perversely to her husband and not “stand alone before God”.

Next is Works of Love.  I have read through it twice already.  I remember the second half holding the most engaging portion.  I am feeling the first signs of real lag in this reading schedule.  My pace is great but this last volume took a little wind out of my sails.  It did, however, raise an interesting conflict in my mind.  To what extent should I skim those works I am not interested in or agree with?  I know that is up to me and doesn’t really matter.  However, I have often given up reading something because it somehow attained lower worth.  Given that I have invested so much time in Kierkegaard (and have a thesis project with him on the horizon) it seemed important to practice the discipline of reading ‘unedifying discourses’ for the very purposes of understanding the logic that reacts against my thinking.

Kierkegaard’s privileged individual

I am about halfway through Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (UDiVS)and I have to say it is one of the least enjoyable reads so far.  Now perhaps the fault is my own and perhaps I should not even bother reading it.  Kierkegaard knew well that his ‘religious’ writings were not interesting and were not intended to be.  Most of them were written with the hope that perhaps an individual who was suffering might read them and through reading find some joy.  This is not my interest or posture in reading.  I am precisely looking for the interesting and innovative.

Now it is becoming clear to me that when Kierkegaard speaks of suffering he means very explicitly existential suffering.  The suffering people experience when they find themselves pulled and torn by paradoxes of life that result from humans being a synthesis of body and spirit.  There is a certain heaviness that hangs over humanity with some experiencing a greater darkness.  This suffering may be due to actual experiences of rejection or injustice but this sort of suffering comes to any who seek eternity in the midst of the temporal.  This is all sort of a paraphrase of how Kierkegaard talks about suffering.

I am also becoming more convinced that Kierkegaard probably really did suffer whether in some form of a clinical depression or just basic anxiety over life.  I read his ‘upbuilding’ discourses, like many of his other writings, as his own processing of belief and experience.  Faith speaks both of joy and suffering.  What could that mean?  This is the content of much of UDiVS.  Part of my increasing trouble with these discourses is the manner in which they are not interested and in fact reject any primacy in effecting change in external conditions.  So for instance,

Thus is one who is born a slave, in compliance with Apostle’s heartfelt admonition (for Christ did not come in order to abolish slavery, although this will follow and be a result of His coming), he is not concerned about it, and merely chooses freedom if it is offered: then he bears the heavy burden lightly.  How heavy this burden is, the unhappy slave knows best, and human sympathy understands it with him.  If he groans under the burden, as humanity groans with him, then he bears the burden heavily.  If he patiently submits to his fate, and patiently hopes for freedom, then he still does bear the burden lightly.  But the meek, who has had the courage really to believe in spiritual freedom, bear the heavy burden lightly: he neither relinquishes the hope of freedom, nor does he expect it (The Gospel of Suffering, 37).

What I can appreciate is that there may be a way of living in the midst of suffering that can actually alleviate the experience of suffering (that is, without changing conditions).  What I do not understand is why this can only be attained through the posture of resignation.  Isn’t the image of Christ one of resolute orientation (setting his face towards Jerusalem to encounter the crux of powers) towards the possibility of freedom?

So what I wonder about is the extent to which Kierkegaard’s message in his upbuilding discourses would offer comfort to those who already have a level of freedom and need to deal only with existential suffering or whether this message could actually help bring joy to someone in the midst of material and social bondage.  And if it did bring joy would this joy actually be an illusion?  For instance, would it teach the wife suffering domestic abuse to bear her burden with joy and patience?  Or would it create a strong base of individuality (that is a presence of being differentiated from the abuser) that could actually see the possibility of freedom that is before her and empower her to take it?  If the latter is not the case then I think Kierkegaard’s notion of the individual in these expressions needs further development.  I sense that the ‘individual’ is still a privileged individual who can be a ‘slave’ or ‘depressed’ (not to diminish these states) but who still carries a basic ‘ontological’ sense of their individuality as universal and valid.  Kierkegaard’s individual in these discourses still strikes me as basically a privileged individual.  And this would be in keeping with his biography as one who certainly suffered (internally and externally) but was always able to function with a certain autonomy and social power.

I don’t see this observation so much rejecting Kierkegaard’s overall aims but, as it is increasingly customary these days, it may be necessary to read Kierkegaard against himself and expose his ‘individual’ as not so much standing alone before God but as standing with a sort of minimum social power by which one is able to endure a level of psychological anguish.  The shift must be in making explicit the seizing of freedom that is available as the person enters into differentiated and empowered individuality.

And so with a great number of other readers I would have to say that Kierkegaard’s religious writings are certainly not among my favourite.