Category: kierkegaard

Closeted transcendence

Over at AUFS they have just concluded a book event engaging Adam Kotsko’s recent work Politics of Redemption.  Adam has just posted a response to the event and in it engaged one of the topics raised which is the highly debated but perhaps hardly debatable question of transcendence/immanence.  I thought the response was quite diplomatic without interest in any sensational jabs (the jabs were quite under-stated but still present . . . well fine perhaps ‘jab’ isn’t even the right word).  In any event I thought of commenting directly there but it would not have been in keeping with the event as a whole and since I am still waiting for a copy of the book I don’t have much to contribute.

I did, however, want to pick up on one line.  Adam writes,

Even at its best, though, I can’t see how one can argue for divine transcendence — it’s always going to be an argument from authority, because it’s fundamentally an argument in favor of authority.

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Dreadfully deceived and unacquainted with the terror

This perhaps one of Kierkegaard’s more famous quotes and well-known for good reason.  Here we see with pointed clarity the difference between knowledge and understanding; between objective and subjective.  It is taken from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions.  Note that Kierkegaard does not assume that knowledge deceives but that that being deceived by much knowledge is dreadful.

If you actually are further along, then do not let yourself be delayed, but if not, then consider that one is dreadfully deceived if one is deceived by much knowledge.  Let us imagine a firstmate and assume that he has passed with distinction all the examinations but as yet has not been out to sea.  Imagine him in a storm:  he knows exactly what he has to do, but he is unacquainted with the terror  that grips the sailor when the stars disappear into the pitch darkness of the night; he is unacquainted with the sense of powerlessness the pilot feels when he sees that the helm in his hand is only a plaything for the sea; he does not know how the blood rushes to the head when in such a moment one must make calculations – in short, he has no conception of the change that takes place in the knower when he is to use his knowledge (36).

A preface to Kierkegaard’s preface of Prefaces; And, create me and let me begin

Well it has been a relief from the dense and demanding Concept of Anxiety into the satirical Prefaces.  The book is what the title suggests.  Prefaces is a collection of prefaces with no books.  The author of these prefaces believes it is high time for the preface to push back from being ‘elbowed aside’ so that it might finally ‘liberate itself’. (4)

The preface as such, the liberated preface, must then have no subject to treat but must deal with nothing, and insofar as it seems to discuss something and deal with something, this must nevertheless be an illusion and a fictitious motion (5).

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The Concept of Anxiety

The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin is often considered Kierkegaard’s most difficult work.  The work is ‘psychological’ in that psychology is in the best position to describe anxiety.  Anxiety itself however gives way only to a dogmatic (religious) orientation; psychology is required but can only go so far.

The following may not make any sense (as I am trying to sort this out myself) but I thought I would try and unpack a few key quotes in Kierkegaard’s concept.

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I do not dance

I just finished Philosophical Fragments (PF).  I wanted to get a few observations down while they are fresh in my mind.

First, while I get Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship this is the first one where it makes real sense to me.  Either/Or is also blatantly clear but it strikes me as too much of an abstract experiment.   PF still comes as an experiment.  The experiment being whether it is possible to go beyond Socrates and what that might look like in philosophical discourse.  However, Kierkegaard comes off as more invested in this venture, more curious about how this will actually play out.

Second, it is important to note that these are fragments.  In his original manuscripts they were actually called ‘pamphlets’ which he also refers to them as within the book.  The significance of this is brought fully to bear in the final section.  Here he talks about the possibility of a ‘second pamphlet’.  He writes,

If I ever do write a second section – because a pamphlet writer such as I am has no seriousness, as you presumably will hear about me – why, then, should I now in conclusion pretend to seriousness in order to please people by making a rather big promise?  In other words, to write a pamphlet is frivolity – but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. (109)

The ‘system’ of course is Hegelianism.  What I find intriguing about this passage is  the notion that perhaps the more ‘serious’, thoroughgoing, complete even social and political approach can actually end up being the most individualistic and self-serving.  This is partially a critique of academia as well as what could now be termed an ideological centralizing of power by ‘men who talk about important stuff’ as I have heard it put.  This final section really bookends well the intro to PF, which did not make a great deal of sense to me originally.  The preface begins,

What is offered here is only a pamphlet, by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense, without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy. (5).

Kierkegaard goes on in the Preface to consider what it might mean to have social (world-historical as he puts it) significance.  No one would consider a pamphlet to have such significance.  So what is Kierkegaard’s opinion on the matter?

Do not ask me about that.  Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is.  To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. (7)

There is a certain tone of liberation thought in the Preface and conclusion to PF (which hardly alludes to the book’s actual content in many ways!).  The critique is of those wielding socially constructed and maintained forms of power who believe that they can function as the benefactors of truth.  The framing of this book, which has just dawned on me, is making me rethink how I interpreted the bulk of the work.  Hopefully I can post a reading of PF that reflects its preface and conclusion.  Here are the final words of the preface.  I thought they were pretty.

I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life – not with another’s.  I am capable of this, the only thing I am able to do for thought, I who have no learning to offer it, ‘scarcely enough for the one-drachma course, to say nothing of the big fifty-drachma course’ (Cratylus).  All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears.  Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.  Every human being is too heavy for me, and there I plead per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods]: Let no one invite me, for I do not dance. (9).

Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Well I just caught up with my (rough) Kierkegaard reading schedule having finished Fear and Trembling and Repetition.  Both were re-reads and I found Repetition a much more illuminating re-read.  I think Fear and Trembling has had so much press that despite how arresting it can be it may need another form in order to achieve ‘repetition’ which leads me to Repetition.

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The violent religious man of faith . . . and Abraham

Kierkegaard’s religious self, that is his conception of the self in a religious stage, has a few qualifications.  By nature it can bar no one entry on the basis of external achievement.  There is no aesthetic mood, ethical act or intellectual understanding that can stand as a gatekeeper to faith.  The movement of faith is qualified internally.  This continues to be a troubling prospect.  I still maintain that most criticisms of Kierkegaard as some demon of individualism are misguided and lack a substantial understanding of his work.  However, I am struggling with repeated refrain of Fear and Trembling which is that “the single individual is higher than the universal.”  This is the story of Abraham as told by Kierkegaard.  The ethical is the universal and must be intelligible and communicable to all or else it is not universal.  If there is faith then it must be in absolute duty to God and as such related to the individual and as such is then elevated above the universal.  But because it is now above the universal it also now rendered unintelligible by others.  Kierkegaard asks whether it was ethical for Abraham to withhold his plans from his family.  Kierkegaard ends by asserting that for the expression to remain in the realm of faith Abraham could not express his plans to anyone.  To render them intelligible would be to make them universal and therefore return them to the domain of ethics and foreclose the movement of faith.  Faith becomes paradox and Isaac restored by virtue of the absurd.  Abraham’s act is faithful but as such it demonstrates ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical.’

Dorothy Soelle in Suffering has criticized this reading of Genesis 22.  She characterizes K’s readings as advocating that,

There are situations in which the ethical orientation breaks down, situations in which people carry out a religiously based suspension of the ethical.

She notes acts of protest which were essentially ‘ineffective’ as belonging to this category (Edith Stein’s choice to go to the gas chamber when she could have escaped).  Though she says these do not point to the ‘absurd’ will of God.  She then goes on to say,

God is not the one who desires or commands such sacrifices, even if we admit that in certain situations such sacrifices exhibit clearly the truth of God beyond the sphere of the ethical.  This explanation of the story contains a masochistic understanding of humanity, or perhaps more accurately, an understanding of devotion that can go all the way to the sacrifice of one’s own life.  A theory about suffering derived from this explanation will seek in all suffering conscious and obedient sacrifice.

While I just happened to be reading this work by Soelle alongside Fear and Trembling (and have benefited from it) this seems to be a clear misreading of Kierkegaard (though perhaps not of his interpreters).  First of all Soelle assumes that description of the ethical and the religious are both equally possible.  Kierkegaard denies this.  Second, Kierkegaard is not interested in determining situations in which it is appropriate to go beyond the ethical (to do so is to remain in the ethical).  Third, Kierkegaard paints no picture of the ‘knight of faith’ as some masochist suffering.  Kierkegaard is quite clear that a person of faith may well look like some ‘bourgeois philistine’ (hardly the prototype for self-inflicted sufferer).

Going beyond Soelle it is possible to add further clarification that would keep zealots from reading F&T and then go off and shoot people.  Kierkegaard’s next work is Repetition.  Repetition occurs not in recollection or replication but in perpetual restoration.  The common example is the married couple trying to ‘re-ignite’ the passion by re-creating their first date.  To the extent that they replicate this event to the tee it will likely not end in repetition.  To re-ignite the passion there would have to occur a situation in which the same resulted from a difference.  In any event, we now have the cultural understanding and prototype of the crazy religious nut who does things because God told him to.  Its been done.  To do it again is recollection and not repetition.  A faithful act will always be that which rises above the universal and therefore can only be considered in retrospect (a theology of scripture?).  To even attempt to ‘send a message’ by such an act is to disqualify it.

This leads me to another line of thinking as I am working through Kierkegaard.  To what extent is he just extremely gifted in ass-covering (using faith as the foil)?  It seems like there would always be a way out when someone would claim to have properly critiqued him (ie his claims to the intellectual inaccessibility of faith).  And that I suppose it part of the point in that his aim is not convince but to create movement where movement is possible.

Soren K meet Chuck D; Or, How you sell soul to a soulless people who sold their soul

Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses have not always been engaging but they have offered what I think is a helpful corrective or supplement to much of my contemporary reading.  I hope to post more on some earlier discourses but I am now about halfway through the eighteen and have come across his reflections on the soul, namely how to gain and preserve your soul in patience.

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Did you wish . . . could you wish

Either / Or concludes with Judge William offering the transcript of sermon he received from a friend who is a minister.  William is convinced that this sermon reflects what he had been straining towards in his letter (which is what all of vol 2 is considered).  The minister has yet to preach this sermon but believes in time that he will be able to have his entire congregation understand it “for the beauty of the universal consists precisely in the fact that all can understand it.”

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