It has been wonderful to cover a couple of Kierkegaard’s shorter volumes. Given my last post on my readings I was surprised at how social this volume was. This volume is actually an extended review of a contemporary piece of fiction entitled Two Ages. The two ages are the age of (the French) revolution and the present age. While the opening sections do deal directly with the content of the novel it is the longer third section that gets the most attention as it is Kierkegaard’s own appropriation of the novel for his context.
Category: kierkegaard
The corsair affair and yet another rejection of politics
Volume 13, The Corsair Affair, is a collection of texts (many of which not written by Kierkegaard) that helps readers to understand what came to be known by this volume title. The Corsair was a satirical journal that took aim at any culturally relevant figure in Denmark. While the journal was notable and feared for its lampoons Kierkegaard (or Victor Emerita) was first mentioned in praise for work Either/Or. Kierkegaard (Emerita) responded publicly by asking how he could be so insulted as to be praised in The Corsair. While there are many layers involved in understanding why this exchange escalated the way it did one aspect was the growing awareness of Kierkegaard as the author of his pseudonymous works. Once Kierkegaard’s indirect method became engaged directly he was skewered mercilessly for his own personal appearance, affect and mannerisms. It is said that the phrases ‘Soren’ or ‘Either/Or’ became pejorative terms hurled at him in the streets. He was also consistently compared to a local known as ‘Crazy Nathanson’.
What interests me is the extent to which this escalation reflects Kierkegaard’s vehement guard against directness. To what extent was The Corsair taunting him to see if he would show his cards and lose composure. Kierkegaard it seems never lost his composure though he appears to have been hurt considerably in the process. I admit that my reading of this volume was a little more superficial as I found the historical understanding more interesting than the texts themselves. I did however pause over an extended comment by Kierkegaard rejecting any notion that he is interested in changing externals (politics). It seems as though from the very beginning people were interested in leveraging a political theory out of him. I thought it worth offering his comments almost in full.
In Ursin’s Arithmetic, which was used in my school days, a reward was offered to anyone who could find a miscalculation in the book. I also promise a reward to anyone who can point out in these numerous books a single proposal for external change, or the slightest suggestion of such a proposal, or even anything that in the remotest way even for the most nearsighted person at the greatest distance could resemble an intimation of such a proposal or of a belief that the problem is lodged in externalities, that external change is what is needed, that external change is what will help us.
. . .
There is nothing about which I have greater misgivings than about all that even slightly tastes of this disastrous confusion of politics and Christianity, a confusion that can very easily bring about a new kind and mode of Church reformation, a reverse reformation that in the name of reformation puts something new and worse in place of something old and better, although it is still supposed to be an honest-to-goodness reformation, which is then celebrated by illuminating the entire city.
Christianity is inwardness, inward deepening. If at a given time the forms under which one has to live are not the most perfect, if they can be improved, in God’s name do so. But essentially Christianity is inwardness. Just as man`s advantage over animals is to be able to live in any climate, so also Christianity’s perfection, simply because it is inwardness, is to be able to live, according to its vigor, under the most imperfect conditions and forms, if such be the case. Politics is the external system, this Tantalus-like busyness about external change.
It is apparent from his latest work that Dr R. believes that Christianity and the Church are to be saved by ‘the free institutions.’ If this faith in the saving power of politically achieved free institutions belongs to true Christianity, then I am no Christian, or, even worse, I am a regular child of Satan, because, frankly, I am indeed suspicious of these politically achieved free institutions, especially of their saving, renewing power. . . . [I] have had nothing to do with ‘Church’ and ‘state’ – this is much too immense for me. Altogether different prophets are needed for this, or, quite simply, this task ought to be entrusted to those who are regularly appointed and trained for such things. I have not fought for the emancipation of ‘the Church’ an more than I have fought for the emancipation of Greenland commerce, or women, of the Jews, or of anyone else. (53-54)
Kierkegaard continues on in this letter to drive home with all clarity that external institutions and systems cannot essentially hinder or encourage Christian faith. The question I have with respect to contemporary forms of ‘liberation theology and thought’ is whether this reading and presentation within Kierkegaard’s larger project can truly be said to move towards the liberation of the individual, that is, beyond political/economic (Greenland), gender (women), or religious (Jew) boundaries.
Whether or not Kierkegaard is being completely ironic he concedes space for those who can understand and interpret the larger social systems (different prophets). I also think it is important that he encourages any who can improve on their surroundings to do so. I say this is important not because it is a minor concession by Kierkegaard but because it is assumed. If someone would try to critique him on this level he would likely ask how ignorant that person is in thinking that someone should not improve conditions around them only that something must transcend the quantitative value (and it still is value) that externals can play in life.
Total guilt
I am drawing close to the mid-way point of Kierkegaard’s writings. Appropriately enough this coincides with Concluding Unscientific Postcript which represents a sort of culmination of his earlier writings (which he actually attempts to integrate in one section of CUP). As I understand it this work was potentially to be his last and subsequent works are called his ‘second authorship’ many of which reflect a more ‘concrete’ engagement with social issues.
I want to offer an extended quote here as it helped to clarify certain lingering thoughts that have surfaced in various areas of my life namely the interplay of guilt and action. How does one reconcile (if that is the appropriate method) the call of the Gospel, the limitedness of humanity, and the unwieldy variables of life? In many ways I find my own experience partially reflected in a heightened and intensified way through recent posts by Dan O (here and here . . . in many ways it is the comments [particularly on the second site] that capture what I am talking about).
What I find intriguing in the quote is how it forms part of Kierkegaard’s attempt to shift guilt-consciousness towards a category of ‘totality’ rather than remain in an ethical category. To remain under the ethical is to remain under the numerical (I think I am getting this right). To remain under the numerical is to forever have the more hanging over our head that while aimed at being life-giving tends towards death-dealing in the one desiring to be a practitioner of the Gospel. This death comes in the externalizing of guilt-consciousness which can never be integrated directly into another individual and so becomes a law unto itself. There is no amount of ‘good’ that will resolve this guilt.
Now perhaps Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious domains are infinitely caught up in ‘beginning’ and never become as political as people want them to be but I think he should be well heeded in also acknowledging that running furiously in the wrong direction is also not much better . . . likely worse.
The second half of this quote gets a little diluted but the first half reads well in terms of the line between much guilt and total guilt. Particularly poignant is the line about the one bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes. There is a possibility that holds us even if the possibility continually perishes. The emphasis added belong is mine.
In the eternal recollecting of guilt-consciousness, the existing person relates himself to an eternal happiness, but not in such a way that he now has come closer to it directly; on the contrary, he is now distanced from it as much as possible, but he still relates himself to it. The dialectical that is present here, still within immanence, creates resistance that intensifies the pathos. In the relation that is the basis of the misrelation, in the intimated immanence that is the basis of the dialectic’s separation, he is closely bound up with happiness, by the finest thread, as it were, by the help of a possibility that continually perishes – for this reason the pathos, if it is there, is so much the stronger.
The guilt-consciousness is what is decisive, and one guilt joined together with the relation to an eternal happiness is sufficient, and yet it is true of guilt, more than of anything else, that it sows itself. But the total guilt is what is decisive; compared with it, making oneself guilty fourteen times is child’s play – this is also why childishness always keeps to the numerical. When, however, the consciousness of the new guilt is in turn referred to the absolute consciousness of guilt, the eternal recollecting of guilt is thereby preserved, in case the existing person should be on the point of forgetting.
If someone says that no human being can endure such an eternal recollecting of guilt, that it is bound to lead to insanity or to death, then please not who it is who is speaking, because finite common sense frequently speaks that way in order to preach indulgence. And this way of speaking rarely fails, provided three or four people are gathered together. I doubt that anyone in solitude has been able to deceive himself with this talk, but when a number of people are together an one hears that the others are behaving in this way, on is less embarrassed – how inhuman, also, to want to be better than others! Once again a mask; the person who is alone with the ideal has not knowledge at all about whether he is better or worse than others. So it is possible that this eternal recollecting can lead to madness or death. Well, now, a human being cannot endure very long on water and bread, but then a physician can discern how to organize things for the single individual, not in such a way, please note, that he ends up living like the rich man but that the starvation diet is so carefully calculated for him that he can just stay alive. Just because the existential pathos is not the pathos of the moment but the pathos of continuance, the existing person himself, who in pathos is indeed inspired and is not, spoiled by habit, peeking around for subterfuges, will seek to find the minimum of forgetfulness needed for enduring, since he himself is aware, of course, that the momentary is a misunderstanding. But since it is impossible to find an absolute certainty in this dialecticizing, he will, despite all his exertion, have a guilt-consciousness, once again totally defined by his never having dared to say that, in his relation to an eternal happiness, he had done everything he was able to do in order to hold fast to the recollecting of guilt. Concluding Unscientific Postscript 535-537
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.
On not talking about the change
I can’t say that I am happy with my last post. For a while now I have been trying to figure how to express what has changed in the last couple of months. Every time I write about it or talk to someone about it comes off sounding quite lame. I am beginning to wonder if this is implicit to the change. Talking about is largely insufficient or least how I have been talking about it. The change is an orientation that affects how I talk and act with regards to other things. But when I try to explain the change itself it seems to be annulled in its apparent insignificance. And so, this post will also feel a little lame to me (and likely to you if you care to read it). After I finished the last post I felt some anxiety. Is there a change? Don’t I need an exteriority to witness to the change? Thinking again of Kierkegaard the question is not about whether truth will manifest externally but whether the external offers the essential materials for expressing truth. Kierkegaard rejects this because in trying to orient truth and subjectivity in this manner is to go beyond what is possible for humans. We are not capable of wielding the external variables in a manner that would make truth evident. I think this is an underrepresented element in his thought. In many ways it is safer to go beyond because in going beyond one sheds the engagement with actuality and so hides in piety or in ‘radical’ theory. Again, this is not about rejecting a social critique or structural engagement only about failing to form subjectively. Also, I think Kierkegaard would easily admit that positive social change can happen through ‘subjectively impoverished’ individuals, this also is not the question. How Kierkegaard informs me is in the necessary continuity and ongoing-ness of life that always draws on something. I suspect I should start pushing his thinking further but I have been patient particularly knowing that CUP is the culmination of his ‘first authorship’ and some of the volumes to come become much more ‘directly’ engaged. For now he continues to offer a valuable way of interpreting my own subjectivity.
Inwardness, actuality, dogmatic policing, and conversion
I would have to say that Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments was the most anticipated volume in my Kierkegaard reading tour. So far I have not been disappointed. While it is penned under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus I really feel Kierkegaard ‘pouring it on’ in this volume (and as far as I understand this was to be last and climactic work). There is no ‘imaginative construction’ to set the stage in so many of his other works. From the gate Kierkegaard pours forth his account of Christianity as the truth of subjectivity; or, truth as subjectivity. Throughout my reading of Kierkegaard I have tried to monitor just how he develops inwardness. I wondered the extent to which I could accept his account given the temptation of introspection as a pretext for a spiritualism that does not take social structures and actions seriously. I always held out on the side of Kierkegaard because of his insistence on actuality as opposed to abstraction. I felt that the extent to which Kierkegaard’s thought would veer towards an isolated spirituality then in fact it would betray his commitment to existence (which demands particularity be taken with utmost seriousness). This being said Kierkegaard’s notion of inwardness was always a little opaque. Then I encountered this line about halfway through CUP,
The actuality is not the external action but an interiority in which the individual annuls possibility and identifies himself with what is thought in order to exist in it. This is action. (339)
To risk putting this in a certain therapeutic language I would say this refers to being congruent. For instance there remains Christian language about loving the sinner and hating the sin. However, we all know this ends up looking a lot like hating the sinner even if it only sounds like hating the sin. There remains a fundamental incongruence here. Kiekergaard advocates famously in another place that purity of heart is to ‘will one thing’. All possibilities become annulled in passionate clarification of existing in the actuality of love. And so hating the possibility of hating the sin is annulled in the actuality of loving the sinner.
I frame this response to Kierkegaard due to my own recent conversion experience. For years I have tried to reflect on how the Gospel calls individuals to orientate themselves towards peace and justice. This led to significant life decisions in terms of where I lived, how I acted and what I studied. It was only recently however that I have come to realize that I carried along with this commitment a certain dogmatic policing that continually annulled the actuality of the sort of life I sought. This dogmatic policing continued to hold people in judgment while outwardly I tried to work for liberation (in what was of course limited and often naive ways). I still harboured ambiguity around how I could support those in same-sex relationships. I remained largely blind or at least unresponsive to the gender prejudice that swarmed around in many of my contexts. I did not integrate the significance that the basic lack of resources can have on people’s lives.
I was not functioning congruently. In what felt like a very short time something simply fell away. I felt somehow released to love (yes I will let that stand for all its possible cheesiness). I don’t have more answers and I don’t know how to act differently. I don’t actually think anyone would notice the difference. But I know I am living differently and I know this will effect my ethical posture. I just know something changed (as I also now it can change for the worse). Perhaps I am stretching Kierkegaard’s account of actuality but if I am, I don’t think it is by much. My notion of’ ‘peace and justice’ was largely situated in a field policed by a dogma contrary to peace and justice and so I was given free reign to explore it within those bounds. This is abstract and speculative thought according to Kierkegaard and the further that path is traveled the further away one is from existence.
Now the comedy
There is a man who says he has faith, but now he wants to make his faith clear to himself; he wants to understand himself in his faith. Now the comedy begins. – Concluding Unscientific Postscript (211)
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.
David CL Driedger 