Category: kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony – Some Quick Thoughts on Method

The Concept of Irony is not recognized by Kierkegaard in his later work The Point of View on My Work as an Author.  Noteworthy, I think, is the fact that The Concept of Irony represents his first and last direct engagement with the academia.  Subsequent works were all published independently or jounralistically.  His writings had no backing or initiative from the academic institution.

While Kierkegaard received unanimous approval for his thesis it was not without qualification.  Nearly all critical comments were directed towards style and method. Kierkegaard himself notes this at several points and explicitly states in the conclusion of the first section how the whole treatise “departs somewhat from the now widespread and in so many ways meritorious scholarly method” (156).  What I take K to be referring to here is the subjective dialectic (or ironic method?) being employed.  K is trying to outline the Socratic as ironic but to do that he must wade through the mediated sources of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes.  This is no ‘Quest for the Historical Socrates’ (those scholars would have done well to read this).  Rather, Socrates is in some sense intuited by the misunderstandings of these three writers.  In a footnote K clarifies this mode,

Wherever, it is a matter of reconstructing a phenomenon by means of what could be a view in the stricter sense of the word, there is a double task: one must indeed explain the phenomenon and in so doing explain the misunderstanding, and through the misunderstanding one must attain the phenomenon and through the phenomenon break the spell of the misunderstanding (155).

This seems to me to be a healthy pre-Gadamer understanding of the situatedness of both the reader and the text.  And K presses forward pushing all scholarly boundaries by conceding that in all this he already had an ‘end’ in mind.

During this investigation, I have continually had something in mente [in mind], namely, the final view, without thereby laying myself open to the charge of a kind of intellectual Jesuitism or of having hidden, sought, and then found what I myself had found long ago.  The final view has hovered over each exploration simply as a possibility.  Every conclusion has been the unity of a reciprocity: it has felt itself drawn to what was supposed to explain and what it is supposed to explain drawn to it.  In a certain sense it has come into existence by means of reflecting, although in another sense it existed prior to it.  But this can scarcely be otherwise, since the whole is prior to its parts. . . . If I had posed the final view first of all and in each particular portion had assigned each of these three considerations its place, then I would easily have lost the element of contemplation, which is always important but here doubly so, because by no other way, not be immediate observation, can I gain the phenomenon (156). [emphasis mine]

This is not a simple admission that K found what he was looking for . . . eisegesis as the biblical scholars like to accuse.  Rather this seems at first to be a negative dialectic.  Perhaps it is already K’s attempt at Socratic irony.  However in the next part K says that he will shift methodology now incorporating ‘historical facts’ which he will treat in their ‘inviolate innocence.’  We’ll see where that goes . . .

The Concept of Irony – A Constructive Position?

I am still trying to outline the contours of SK’s initial approach to the Socratic method.  In relation to Christianity SK views Platonism as a negative to Christianity’s positive.

On the one hand, in Christianity that which is to be died to is understood in its positivity as sin, as  a realm that all too convincingly proclaims its validity to everyone who languishes under its laws; on the other hand, that which is to be born and is to arise is understood just as positively.  In the intellectual dying to [Platonism], that which is to be died to is something indifferent; that which is to grow during this dying to is something abstract. . . . The one says that we should refrain from unwholesome food, control desire, and then good health will come; the other says that we are to stop eating and drinking, and then one can have the hope of gradually becoming nothing.  Thus we see that the Greek is more of a rigorist than the Christian, but therefore this view is also untrue. (76-77)

I have mixed feelings about this basic distinction.  On the one hand it lends itself towards instrumentalizing Christianity.  But on the other hand it demands that Christianity remain articulated and engaged in the level of materiality.  I cannot imagine this will be SK’s unqualified word on the matter but I thought I would throw it up to keep a point of orientation.

As I read along a little further I wonder if irony in the Platonic (or Socratic) context informs that space in which the necessity and the nothingness of death are affirmed.  Kierkegaard writes,

In my view, that well-known epitaph by Wessel, “At last he could not be bothered to live,” contains irony’s perception of death.

And then he continues,

But he who dies because he cannot be bothered to live certainly would not wish for a new life either, since that would indeed be a contradiction.  Obviously the languor that desires death in this sense is a snobbish sickness found only in the highest social circles and in its perfectly unalloyed state is just as great as the enthusiasm that sees in death the transfiguration of life.  Ordinary human life moves drowsily and vaguely between these two poles.  Irony is healthiness insofar as it rescues the soul from the snares of relativity; it is a sickness insofar as it cannot bear the absolute except in the form of nothing, but this sickness is an endemic disease that only a few individuals catch and from which fewer recover (77-78). [emphasis mine]

The Concept of Irony

The Concept of Irony is Kierkegaard’s master’s thesis.  It is an examination of the socratic method as irony.  Kierkegaard’s articulation and clarification of Socrates based on Plato and not Xenophon is already fruitful for a person like myself with little classical background in philosophy.

Kierkegaard describes irony as follows,

One may ask a question for the purpose of obtaining an answer containing the desired content, so that the more on questions, the deeper and more meaningful becomes the answer; or one may ask a question, not in the interest of obtaining an answer, but to suck out the apparent content with a question and leave only an emptiness remaining.  The first method naturally presupposes a content, the second emptiness; the first is speculative, the second ironic.

Socrates took aim at the knowing subject considering it a god-given task to dismantle what others may have called wisdom to show it to be, in fact, ignorance.

Kierkegaard’s Early Polemical Writings

Well I have started out with a pretty healthy pace on the Kierkegaard reading finishing the first volume last night.  The volume is of course relatively short and much less demanding than what I will be tackling.  The volume is primarily a composition journalistic debate, an extended review of his school mate Hans Christian Andersen and then a fragmented play exploring various philosophical modes.

Most of the content was not particularly engaging, though the critical review of Andersen definitely had its moments.  Kierkegaard basically charges Andersen of an inability to allow his life to be invested in the process of writing but rather “he has utilized [writing] in a purely external manner.  If we now add to this the temptation to produce instead of developing himself, to hide an inner emptiness under motley pictures, to let himself be absorbed in generation without any reproduction . . . then it will certainly not surprise us that, instead of carrying through his reflection, he on the contrary encloses himself in a very small space of it” (74).

Kierkegaard goes on charge Andersen of lacking a ‘life-view’ which he defines as follows,

A life-view is more than a quintessence or a sum of propositions maintained in its abstract neutrality; it is more than experience, which as such is always fragmentary.  It is, namely, the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience, whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships (a purely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example), by which means it keeps itself from contact with a deeper experience – or whether in its heavenward direction (the religious) it has found therein the center as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence, has won the true Christian conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, no principalities, nor powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation will be able separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” . . . A life-view if really providence in the novel; it is its deeper unity, which make the novel have the center of gravity in itself.  A life-view frees it from being arbitrary or purposeless, since the purpose if immanently present everywhere in the work of art. (76, 81)

I just finished SK’s introduction to The Concept of Irony it looks to be both educational philosophically and engaging in terms of SK’s intellectual development.

Early Polemical Writings – The Opponent

The Kierkegaard Project has started off slow.  I feel like I am an amateur marathon runner tempted to sprint ahead but forcing myself to find a manageable pace.  I am reading the writings of a young Kierkegaard engaged in local journalistic debates that I do not have the inclination to learn more about at the moment.  One quote, however, seemed appropriate to throw up into the blogosphere.  The context could be characterized as a pre-blog comment thread;

When in a dispute the point is reached where the opponent says: I cannot understand you, although I have the best intentions – then that ends the dispute.  And although we shall willingly leave outside the whole dispute the question of whether or not his intentions are the best, because until the opposite can be proved we remain ever convinced of this, one must always respect such a move by the opponent.  But when instead he starts to attack the character of the person he is speaking to, accuses him of being a willful sophist etc., then it can at the most provoke a smile on the lips of the opponent, because the whole thing is nothing other than comic despair.

– Early Polemical Writings, 22.

2011 – A Year of Living Existentially

Seeing some prospective plans for 2011 and more impressively seeing some accomplished plans from 2010 (I’ll let you identify the theme) I thought I would set out my own grand vision for 2011 . . . a year of living existentially.  Kierkegaard in a year.  I will be following the trajectory of Princeton’s edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.  I do not have all volumes on hand so it is difficult to set a ‘pace’ but hell I thought I would throw this up in a fit of passion and triumph victorious by 2012 or let me good blogging name be sullied in the process.  Here is the list;

May God have mercy on my soul.

On My Arc Away From Liturgy

I left an annoying comment on Tony’s recent post about liturgy.  His post briefly explores the possibility of the Church Year as offering the foundation for an ‘irregular dogmatics’.  My comment was simply stating that I wish I could comment because at present the notion and validity of the Church Year and its structural liturgy is, at present, in upheaval.  I thought I might try and trace my thought trajectory so that I can see where it might be heading.

As I alluded to my last post I have been preaching Romans for Advent.  Paul, having little to say about the historical Jesus at the best of times, has no Christmas story.  There appears to be no value in recounting Jesus’s birth for the sake of churches he worked with.  This led to a sort of paradigm shift which began to view liturgical practices not so much as rhythms of resistance but as abstractions displacing what should be existentially integrated (did that make sense?).  So we set baby Jesus outside of us as opposed to attending to the blood, shit and pain that comes with childbirth.

This thinking was further crystallized by a comment Chris Rodkey made on a somewhat unrelated post at AUFS.  He states,

One thing I have been thinking about as I am constructing an outline for a collaborative project a colleague and I are gearing up to write together is Jacob Taubes’ critique of Christianity in his book Occidental Eschatology. Essentially my appropriation is this: The liturgical calendar and liturgical time prevents any sense of Parousia. [emphasis mine]

Perhaps I could be convinced that present liturgies are simply parodies but it hardly makes a difference.  The point is the manner in which our lives are presently and existentially engaged.  As it turns out Dan seemed to push my thinking even further with his recent post.  He writes,

This is the season of Advent and some of my friends are writing pretty words about this time of waiting, hope, anticipation and proleptic action.  They are saying the sort of thing I used to say not too long ago.  As for me, I am tired of waiting and tired of being a good little fellow and “waiting well.”  With all due respect to my friends, I say fuck that noise.  If there is a God out there, and that God is lingering, deciding to postpone an intervention, then I think the only way to wait is to act as if God is not coming or to try and force the coming of God.  Instead of finding ways to make our peace with our godforsakenness we should absolutely refuse to accept it.  Anything is better than that acceptance.  Better to risk everything on the wager that God cares enough to intervene (although that usually doesn’t work out well) than to sit back and make peace with this.  Better to spit at the back of God if that is what will bring God to act.  Besides, it is actions like these, and only actions like these, that actually take God seriously.  Anything else in the context of abandonment is either a pale imitation of worship or idolatry.

I am not quite sure how to take this.  At present I read it as a Psalm which is fully truthful if not entirely complete (is that an insult Dan?).  This leads me to my present reading in Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.  Goodchild looks at Henri Bergson’s work on time and freedom.  Bergson critiques ‘measured’ or ‘counted’ time.  Goodchild writes,

For synchronization to occur, real time must be replaced by an abstraction which has eliminated the essential quality of time – change.  Measurable, homogeneous time is an abstraction where nothing takes place.  In countable time, the living is measured in so far as it conforms to the behaviour of inanimate clocks. (105)

In brief, the representation of reality in both science and metaphysics is a commodification, replacing the thing with a quantifiable symbol fashioned for the purpose of exchange.

Bergson’s alternative is to place reason within the temporal process itself. . . . The experience of thinking replaces the object of thought.  Freedom must be encountered in the experience of thinking before it can become the object of thought. (107)

The question this raises is the extent to which liturgical practices actually undermine, overthrow or replace dominant social modes (empire, capitalism, etc.).  Or do they simply fall prey the near omnipotent work of commodification?  Does a flash mob singing the hallelujah chorus in a food court do anything more than make people feel good about their shopping experience?  Even the cultural liturgist Jaime Smith thinks not (I have not read his Desiring the Kingdom). (I also can’t help but cringe at Winnipeg’s attempt to piggy-back on this . . . apparently the press was there waiting for it ‘to happen’)

So that is a bit of the arch.  I still retain theological convictions of doxology as a sort of foundation for practice but as for present form of church liturgy I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied.  The issue remains the extent to which the acts and the structures produce abstractions or commodities that keep one from encountering and entering into the Gospel.  What is my alternative?  At present it is little more than an increasingly social form of (or socially aware) existentialism.  Or to be more naive . . . a biblical faith.  Hopefully, more to come.

Have You Seen This Dead God?

Lately it seems I cannot turn around without coming across the dead God.  I have been reading Zizek again and instead of simply being playfully amused by his counter-intuitive insights I have begun to see more clearly his hegelian reading of the Trinity.  God empties himself into Jesus and is split, de-centered from himself.  And dies.  The God of ‘beyond’ which can and does ground every ideology is emptied and the space of struggle, the Holy Spirit, is opened in this death.  Traditional theology will tend to keep God the Father above and beyond pulling the strings and maintaining order.  It is precisely that God that must be emptied into Jesus die for the purpose of salvation.

Man is eccentric with regard to God, but God himself is eccentric with regard to his own ground, the abyss of Godhead. . . . Christ’s death on the Cross thus means that we should immediately ditch the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology – Christ’s death on the Cross is the death of this God, it repeats Job’s stance, it refuses any ‘deeper meaning’ that obfuscates the brutal reality of historical catastrophes. – The Monstrosity of Christ

I also recently finished reading Ronald Osborn’s Anarchy and Apocalypse.  This is a relatively conservative appeal to the biblical resources of non-violence set within particular contemporary settings.  However, here the dead God surfaces in the form of post-holocaust Jewish thought, namely that of Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel sees God as the young child hung from his neck, dying and almost dead.  This becomes the straightforward,

ethical as well as a religious imperative: if we are to remain human we must refuse passivity, ease, complacency, and fight for the justice which God, in His captivity, in the time of His banishment, cannot bestow. – Anarchy and Apocalypse

And all the reminded me of an old post I wrote reflecting on Kierkegaard’s test for true love which is to love someone dead.  The dead is the absolute relationship.  If the relationship of love changes it must be because of you, the variable element (no blaming the dead for not understanding you).  To love one dead is love a non-being.

In order properly to test whether or not love is faithful, one eliminates everything whereby the object could in some way aid him in being faithful.  But all this is absent in the relationship to one who is dead, one who is not an actual object.  If love still abides, it is most faithful. – Works of Love

What is going on here?  Will a decade, more or less, pass after which we will look back at these silly caricatures of theology?  Or are these accounts already reflections and indictments of an already over-caricatured and debased theology and ecclesiology?  I would like to call this theme humanist in its apparent rejection of God but that does quite do it justice.  Death is something other than human or perhaps fully human; something that modern humanism (as I have encountered it) does quite seem to grasp.  Also these accounts remain in many ways thoroughly theological.  They are dealing with the dead God not with God as an illusion.  It is this possible realism in theology that I find intriguing and potentially attractive.

And for your listening pleasure he is Gash’s 1986 God is Dead


Following the Kick-Ass Jesus; Or, Caged Faith

I was recently made aware of what should be an unsurprising website Jesus Didn’t Tap.

Jesus Didn’t Tap was one of the first Christian based MMA clothing companies to hit the scene. In the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, to “tap” is to quit or give up. The message of the Jesus Didn’t Tap line is that Jesus didn’t quit after going through unimaginable suffering and pain when he was crucified on the cross. The company aims to represent both the competitiveness of MMA and honoring God in all of their designs and hopes it will help spread the Christian message of salvation to a whole new audience. (from the website)

This is unsurprising and, for me, now a surprisingly clear example of heretical faith.  It is not heretical because it is ridiculous.  It is heretical because it believes that faith can be expressed analogically.  I will briefly qualify that statement by saying that I am unqualified to speak about ‘analogy’ as it is used in systematic theology and so these comments may or may not relate to a larger discussion.  My observation is simple.  Faith cannot be analogical because faith cannot be reduced from entirety into examples of totality.  This website reflects a belief that the ‘kernel’ of faith can be translated into the medium of fighting.  As a sport I actually have a relatively high regard for certain forms of MMA but this is viewed from a larger complex of social, ethical and personal perspectives.  What is at issue is the belief that you can ‘close’ the door of cage and function faithfully and independently within a confined space.  This is not a new insight but it is claiming more ground in how I view faithfulness.  This is how I would understand the word ‘piety’ as it used by folks at AUFS and also Hauerwas’s criticism of American as too ‘spiritual’.  Piety or spiritualism reflect those actions and postures which assume some effectiveness despite the realities of a larger context.  As it is Thanksgiving in Canada ‘piety’ might mean thanking God for a prosperity that comes at the direct cost of others without the means to object.  It is an act isolated from its relations.

I do not have the book on hand but Kierkegaard in his preface to The Sickness Unto Death speaks of faith as that which fearlessly encounters all of life.  In this way I have become much more receptive to ‘secular’ and ‘materialist’ expressions that attempt to thoroughly examine the functions at play in religion and culture (a critique of ideology it is often called).  To the extent that an expression distracts or insulates from an identifiable aspect of life it must be deemed unfaithful because it rejects the basic theological premise that the whole earth is full of God’s glory.  The basic posture of the Christian must remain to see, to hear, to feel, to taste, to smell.  This connects to the reason I began a new blog.  The hope was to learn the discipline of description.  I am not sure how I feel about the idea of accuracy in description (and I certainly reject any notion of neutrality) only that we tend to go through our days bypassing the basic acknowledgment and engagement with our senses.  Our mind already has enough patterns to live by assumption and guesswork and not take the time to recognize the utter uniqueness of everything (a bit grand of a statement I suppose).  So when I see examples like the one above I am reminded not of how ridiculous they are but of how tempting it is to cage faith in containable expressions allowing other forces free play in the ‘real world’ the one in which people live, breath and die; the one fallen and full of the glory of God.

I came across this quote from the website as though it was looking to enhance my point.

When Jesus stepped inside the cage of life to take on the cross, human legs did not kicked his out from under him. It was not human hands that broke his arm during the arm bar of adversity. It was not a human fist that knocked him to the mat for our sins. It was not a human that kept him inside the triangle choke of suffering. It was not the fighter’s sent by Satan to tap him out that beat him.

God gave him strength while on his back being pounded in the face by the elbows of sin. Those same hands that formed the universe. Those same hands that held you and me before the foundation of the world.

Take a jog out to the mountain of the skull. Out to the cross where, with holy blood, the hand that placed you on the planet wrote the promise, “God would give up his only Son before he’d Tap Out on you.

Truly, Jesus Didn’t Tap! – Are you tapping out on him?

Religious Experience

For the past number of summers I have helped to organize some Friday night events for my church. We have abandoned the traditional model of ‘summer bible school’ were kids come during the day and learn verses, sing and do crafts. Instead we have hoped to create a more inter-generational experience gathering around a campfire for a less more formal time while still trying to be engaging across the ages.

In any event there is usually a small group time where people get together and share or work on a project. Last night people gathered to talk about an early and formative experience of God. After the small group sharing I asked if anyone wanted to share their responses with the whole group. There tends not to be a flood to the microphone. Three people did share (including myself) and I found the cross-section quite illuminating. One man shared about a road trip he took with his parents to Alberta. It was there that he saw the Rocky Mountains and Lake Louise. He said the experience almost moved him to tears as he wondered how something so beautiful existed and what that told him about the world and God. A woman shared about her experience at a youth conference. This was a bi-national event and so for worship there thousands gathered together. This experience also deeply moved her to reflect on things greater than herself. Finally I shared. My experience was from early grade school. It was the year they handed out those little red Gideon Bibles that contained the New Testament and the Psalms (I heard they still do this in some public schools). I remember being alone in my room and at the back of my Bible it talked about the commitment that God calls people to in the Bible. There was a place you could sign your name if you wanted to make that commitment. I can’t actually remember if I signed my name or not but I remember being alone and experiencing a sense of commitment. I have tried to neither under- or over-emphasize this event but the reality is that it remains fixed in my memory.

What I found interesting about the sharing is that one was focused on an experience in relationship to nature. The second was in response to a gathering of people. And the third was alone removed from nature and people. This was helpful for me because I tend to downplay and even be suspicious of people who talk highly of encountering God in nature. I have also found it intriguing that in the Mennonite churches in this area that I am in contact with I find that when I ask people about their faith they most often talk about the church (that is the people around them) as opposed to a relationship with God. Both of these expressions strike me as secondary as flowing from something more primary. It is easy to see now why Kierkegaard resonates so strongly with me. For him our very nature or selfhood is established in the God-self relationship. There is nothing prior to that and everything else flows from it. I suspect what I need to explore or be more open to is the manner in which this primary relationship is formed. Or is it even helpful to talk about a primary relationship. Is life too complex and layered to think that I can reduce or strip away other factors and influences so that I can be alone before God? Or is this God-self relationship a discipline in which I delineate the role of nature and neighbour to be secondary and therefore these influences are neither a cause of anxiety or fear when they appear threatening or uncertain and neither are they a false sense of security when they appear stable and generous.