Category: 13 – stages on life’s way

When a religious person speaks: On the love of selfishness

When [a religious person] speaks it is only a monologue; occupied only with himself, he speaks aloud, and this is called preaching; if there is anyone listening, he knows nothing about his relation to them except that they owe him nothing, for what he must accomplish is to save himself.  Such a right reverend monologue that witnesses Christianly, when in its animation it moves the speaker, the witnessing, because he is speaking about himself, is called a sermon.  World-historical surveys, systematic conclusions, gesticulations, wiping of sweat from the brow, a stentorian voice, and pulpit pounding, along with the premeditated use of all this in order to accomplish something are easthetic reminiscences that do not even know how to accentuate fear and pity properly in the Aristotelian sense.

. . .

The religious speaker who purifies these passions through fear and compassion does not in the course of his address do the astounding thing of ripping the clouds asunder to show heaven open, the judgment day at hand, hell in the background, himself and the elect triumphantly celebrating; he does the simpler and less pretentious thing, the humble feat that is supposed to be so very easy: he lets heaven remains closed, in fear and trembling does not feel that he himself is finished, bows his head while the judgment of the discourse falls upon thought and mind.  He does not do the astounding thing that could make his next appearance lay claim to being greeted with applause; he does not thunder so that the congregation might be kept awake and saved by his discourse.  He does the simpler and less pretentious thing, the humble feat that is supposed to be so very easy: he lets God keep  the thunder and the power and the honor and speaks in such a way that even if everything miscarried he nevertheless is certain that there was one listener who was moved in earnest, the speaker himself, that even if everything miscarried and everyone stayed away there was still one person who in life’s difficult complications longed for the upbuilding moment of the discourse, the speaker himself.

. . .

Therefore, says the religious person, if you were to see him in some lonely, out-of-the-way place, deserted by everyone and positive that he accomplished nothing by his speaking, if you saw him there you would see him just as inwardly moved as ever; if you heard his discourse, you would find it as powerful as always, guileless, uncalculating, unenterprising, you would comprehend that there was one person it was bound to upbuild – the speaker himself.  He will not become weary of speaking, for attorneys and speakers who have secular aims or worldly importance with regard to eternal aims become weary when what they accomplish cannot be counted on their fingers, when crafty life does not delude them with the illusion of having accomplished something, but the religious speaker always has his primary aim: the speaker himself. (Stages on Life’s Way, 463-465)

However one might interpret this suggestion more broadly I am coming to see it as a fair characterization of Kierkegaard’s authorship.  Through the various pseudonyms that he employs and often brings in conversation with each other (particularly in CUP) one is let in on what Kierkegaard was interested in no matter the audience.  No doubt he was affected by his literary reception or lack of it but I still get the impression he would have done this work even if he did not have the means to publish them or to the extent he could carve out time to do it.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that there is an appropriate ‘selfishness’ that is the best way we can possibly hope to love our neighbour.  This selfishness can keep us from objectifying our neighbour,  keep us from vanity, and allow us a creative productivity freed from external ends.  Life is never so uncomplicated but I see this route as far more inspiring, liberating and motivating than duty and law.  It is the appropriate inverse of what we commonly perceive as Jesus’s call.  Jesus called us to lose our lives that they might be found.  But what is life lost?  Might it not be the one constructed by local law, custom and structural power?  To lose it then is to find it in the selfishness of particularity and in the process see your neighbour through those new eyes.

Stages on Life’s Way

In many ways Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Stages is the easiest to summarize.  The book is framed as a collection of ‘found’ pieces published by Hilarius Bookbinder.  The pieces include ‘In vino veritas’, ‘Reflections on Marriage’ and ‘Guilty? / Not Guilty’.  These pieces all address particular relationships between man and woman, with man being the subject.  The first section is likened to a remaking of Plato’s Symposium.  Men gather around the banquet table drinking and making speeches about love.  This is a poetic account in which man, woman and love are abstracted and never engaged in particular.  The second second section is an ethical account of a man married to a woman.  It includes an exploration of love in terms or duties, natures and ideals.  Marriage is no abstraction.  It is the concrete and the temporal.  The third section explores a man’s internal processing of realizing that his engagement to a woman must be broken due to his internal movement or desire towards the religious.  He understands that the two of them do not fundamentally understand each other and to proceed with marriage would be of greater harm to the woman than to break off the engagement and so the man explores how best to break the engagement for the sake of the woman.  This section is framed as a series of journal entries.  There are morning and midnight entries.  The morning entries recollect events that occurred a year ago on that day while the midnight entries reflect on current circumstances.

All three sections have their moments in terms of literary expression or conceptual insight.  However, it is the ‘fourth’ section that really engages the movement of ‘stages’.  The final section is an account by the ‘author’ of the third section in which he reveals his intention in writing the piece which is to explore the phenomenon of the religious.  This is difficult because the movement of the religious cannot be secured externally.  In the case of his account there is nothing keeping the couple from having a happy marriage, no obstacle that is, except for an internal movement in the man.  The result of the inwardness is a qualitative misunderstanding that cannot allow for a happy marriage.  I would be curious to know more about the history of ‘understanding’ as it functioned in marriage relationships as it still crops up as reason to enough to end marriage (though Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish different sorts of ‘misunderstandings’).  Also, a clear critique could come in Kierkegaard giving a masculine priority to thinking about ‘important things’ rather than a feminine (esthetic) immediacy that he characterizes the woman as having.

At one point the author makes the comment, “The religious is simply and solely qualitative dialectic and disdains quantity” (443).  This abolishes the significance of the external (which is important for creating a level playing field) and demands an ongoing movement in which “the believer continually lies out on the deep, [and] has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him” (444)

However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore.  He can become more calm, more experienced, find a confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament – but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water (444).

The stages from esthetic to ethical to religious are not linear and final once ‘accomplished’.  The movement is always towards the qualitatively dialectic which is not determined by external conditions.  And as dialectic one can never ‘rest’ in having arrived at the religious.  There is such an emphatic emphasis on ‘inwardness’ that it is hard to not criticize it.  This emphasis is only amped up in the climax of his ‘first authorship’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  I continue to read Kierkegaard at his word that there is indeed a spiritual or religious subjectivity.  This subjectivity is then lived actually and this is what must continually be emphasized in Kierkegaard’s writing, namely that the whole push is for philosophical and religious thought to take existence into account.

Well I am pretty much at the mid-way point and staying on track!

The task I have assigned myself

It is the thought, not the incidentals of expression, that essentially makes an exposition unpopular. . . . Socrates was the most unpopular man in Greece because he said the same thing as the simplest person but meant infinitely much by it.  To be able to stick to one thought, to stick to it with ethical passion and undauntedness of spirit, to see the intrinsic duplexity of this one thought with the same impartiality, and at one and the same time to see the most profound earnestness and the greatest jest, the deepest tragedy and highest comedy – this is unpopular in any age for anyone who has not realized that immediacy is over.  But neither can what is essentially unpopular be learned by rote

This, then, is the task I have assigned myself: an unhappy love affair in which love is dialectical in itself (that is, there is no external obstacle to the love affair being happy) and in the crisis of infinite reflection acquires religious aspect.  It is easy to see how different this task is from any other unhappy love affair; it is easy to see if one looks at both parts at the same time – otherwise one will perhaps not see either of them.  Stages on Life’s Way, 415-416 (parenthesis added).

So rich is life

Every now and again this thought reflects a sneaking suspicion I have about the Bible.

It always happens that way – so charitable, so rich is life: the less one has, the more one sees.  Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read – ultimately you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

– Kierkegaard – Stages on Life’s Way, 364.