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.
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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.
Some hate for The Tree of Life; Or, my apparent obsession with AUFS
I wrote an initial comment over at AUFS on my first impression of The Tree of Life. And the more I think about it the more I can’t stand the film. This is a reflective position and not a commentary on aspects of the film. However, the movie lends itself to being processed in a larger cultural and political context and I think the context demands more of the movie than it offers. I think the movie can be viewed in part if not entirely as Jack processing his childhood. So Jack wakes up aloof from his beautiful wife (who I don’t think he says a word to). Lights a candle for his dead younger brother. Goes to work and sits atop a high tower. Calls the other alpha male (his father) to apologize for something about the dead brother. As I process the movie another conversation at AUFS comes to mind in which Brad states that the church has never been able to appropriate or face up to modernity. That may be true but why is there any need when you have a movie like this which causes modernity’s implosion in the psyche of the man who builds modernity (powerful ‘modern’ architect). This modern man traverses and encompasses all of evolution in order to find meaning for the death of his brother. Oh, and who was that middle child again?
I don’t think it is helpful to minimize the white middle-class male experience but how can this expression not invite scorn in our context? What if Jack was the First Nations man I encountered walking down the street a month ago. I suspect he might have a few more things to ‘process’ from his childhood experience but he has no high tower in which to brood. In this neighbourhood being young and native tends to invite things that do not allow for contemplation and so he is jumped and hit with an eight-ball over the head. He continues on down the street with blood flowing down over him. Oh wait, where was I again? Oh yes I was up to the dinosaurs. The AUFS view of this movie is all the more striking with its general tenor of liberation. There seemed to be nothing here that would change the modern capitalist man or system. He found his inner-peace. Isn’t this the kind of thing that gets disemboweled over at AUFS?
It’s funny I was actually planning to right a post on my ‘conversion’ experience that I attribute in part to the posts and related scholars and thought that floats around at AUFS. I am trying to shed vacuous and bankrupt theological language or at least press it for its implied meaning and implications. This is a good time as I am entering into the ordination process with my conference and need to comment on our confession . . . well, we’ll see how good it turns out.
In any event I am not trying to take some jab at the general thinking and expression at AUFS. I just find the engagement with this movie to be a little dissonant with the larger environment. I should also point out that many of the comments were not actually made by AUFS regulars. But as I mentioned in my comment over there I was really surprised it did not get a harsher review. I suppose it provided some good intellectual and aesthetic fodder . . . and maybe that is all that it amounts to though the movie and the conversation seemed to be pointing to more.
There were two audible responses to the movie in my theatre. First was a loud yawn. This was only a partially accurate review in my mind. I was sucked into the ‘evolution’ (but would have been just as happy to see it as an I-Max piece) as well as moved by many other visual landscapes. Some of the social and psychological commentary was suggestive and provocative (as Brad elaborates in his original post). The other audible review was probably more accurate. It was a sarcastic wow-wee. Of course this probably spouted by a white middle-class male.
A thorough, no, a systematic beating
Heading into Canada Day tomorrow I am about half finished Geoffery York’s The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada. I have known about this book for probably about 15 years and the cover alone has haunted me for almost that whole time. While I have known about most of the areas covered in Canada’s relationship with the First Nations people what I was not prepared for was to realize the layering and interrelatedness of injustice and abuse this people has faced at the hands of the nation of Canada. At nearly every intersection of contact First Nations were ploughed over.
Take the basic orientation of the relationship.
You are a damned people in need of our salvation.
You are in the way of us establishing ourselves and appropriating these rich and virgin resources.
What did these two motives result in? The attempted reform and actual fracturing of an entire generation in residential schools that wrought profound personal and social devastation. First Nations people are ‘granted’ reservations. I was not aware that many reservations leading up into the 1960s found significant economic models of sustainability (through traditional practices, crime rates were low and substance abuse at a minimum. But then in instances like Manitoba a hydro dam project unfolds in which a reservation receives peanuts for their land and false promises for their future and then their way of life is literally drowned. So in the future band leaders may want to take legal recourse but due to educational, financial, bureaucratic and prejudicial limitations they lack their own resources and cannot afford to hire someone so they are screwed. Some entire reservations were relocated three or four times in the course of a decade due to the government’s growing awareness and desire for particular resources. The shift is always with less opportunities and resources at the next site. And if a reservation is not relocated then mining and extraction companies would descend and kill off traditional sources of food and contaminate water supplies. If an individual or group wants to start a small business they would be unable to mortgage any property (reservation land is not their property) as an operating loan and they must jump through extensive bureaucratic hoops in order to receive funding that should rightly be theirs in the first place. And if they did get permission they often lived in a place with inadequate electricity to power an significant machines. I did not realize the web that this created or more accurately how thorough, how systematic, a beating this group of people has received. And the blows keep coming.
It is hard to imagine this sort of abuse and then we expect them to find their proverbial ‘boot-straps’. Really? Would I want to bend-over in the midst of a dominant culture that has expressed such consistent deception and hatred?
This book was published in 1990 and I do not know how many things have changed at the level of government support and bureaucracy but many of the same stories still surface in the daily newspaper. Insanitary conditions, displacement, land-claim stalling, death by housing fires, suicide, violence and the list goes on. To enter into this situation is at the very least to be overwhelmed as an entire culture has been continually overwhelmed at the hands of a political force that has never made a sustained expression of support and faithfulness to a people.
In as much as anyone wants to ask them to take responsibility for their lives those of us having received the privilege of this land must ask and express what our responsibility is.
And finally
I think what bugs me most about the last two posts is that I was not really saying what I wanted to. I think I wanted say it but it ended up coming out in a sort of ‘flowery’ language that a few helpful and honest individuals in the recent past have brought to my attention. I think it is a sort of default expression when I don’t really know what I am talking about. I was more than a little horrified when I realized how deep this sort of language went in how I expressed things about life. Hopefully some helpful rooting going on here.
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.
Feed for your reader
I have occasionally complained about the waning of theological discourse in the blogosphere as a number of the ‘big names’ have continued to track downward in frequency and substance over the years. There are still a number of notable sites which most people know of but I have come across a few I was not aware of that still seem to have a low profile. In any event I have enjoyed following the following;
Enjoy!
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!
A call for global everything specialists
I hate feeling at the mercy of other specialists. I am not thinking so much about my occasional visit to the doctor’s office. I am thinking particularly of the specialists who trade in information about the state of the world, the whole world that is. How does one become such a specialist? How does one negotiate the perspectives coming from the humanities, social and natural sciences as well as economics? All this to say that I have been sitting with an article from last Saturday’s Winnipeg Free Press in the back of my mind for the last couple of days. It is an op-ed piece entitled “The world is not running out of natural resources” (May 28) by Brian Lee Crowley. As the title suggests the article outlines the false notion that there is an imminent crisis in global resources. The main thesis of this position is that most accounts do not take seriously the ongoing capacity for humans to innovate and change course when necessary. This is the reason why past prophecies of collapse and destruction continue to miss their mark. This thinking reflects the first half of the article. I suspect this sort of voice is necessary to counter the type of mindless hysteria that may actually serve advertising firms more than other ‘good’ causes. But even here I really have no good idea. I trust soundbites and articles such as these. It is in the second half that my reservations begin to intensify.
The second half of the article makes a dramatic shift to the economic in stating that since 1800 global economic product has increased 50-fold and “this increase in human wealth has improved the state of humanity throughout the world.” This is of course patently false as I think it could be argued that it has not improved the state of the First Nations community in Canada (I will not try and speak beyond my borders). His point however is proved by statistics. Yes, I suppose statistical improvement is difficult to deny as it has the power to ignore the cost of the marginal who literally do not figure in. I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on statistics near the end of Stages,
With the help of statistical tables one can laugh at all of life. . . . After all, a person can shut his door on the poor, and if someone should starve to death, then he can just look at a collection of statistical tables, see how many die every year of hunger – and he is comforted.
Sorry. Off track. As Crowley begins to conclude things really come off the rails in my mind. Crowley holds wealthy nations as the beacon of what direction the world should be moving in. “The richer countries become, the cleaner their environment. So economic growth is the key factor allowing us to reduce most of the problems facing humanity. . . . [T]he right human institutions, such as private property, the rule of law, contract, incentives and human intelligence all work together reliably to solve those problems.” Is it just me or should it be hard to make such statements (at least without some gag-reflex kicking in). I have no doubt that I would be quickly silenced under the statistical ‘facts’ that Crowley would load on me if I tried to refute this thinking. And again, I have little hard evidence with which to enter this conversation. However, take the statement of correlation between wealth and environmental cleanliness. Is this not simply a matter of a nation’s ability to bring in and then off-load undesirable content and processes such as manufacturing, recycling and disposing of the junk wealthier nations desire for temporary pleasure? Can Crowley continue to say these things under the tenuous economic conditions that still (seem to) exist in the US? Is it possible to speak of an ‘improved state of humanity throughout the world’ by statistics? Seriously, I am no expert. Does it even make sense to enter this argument using the same methodology? I mean Crowley moves from the natural sciences to economics to existential well-being without any necessary transition, they are all seamless in his conception. Is this just the worst of ‘ivory tower’ thinking that does not live alongside those whose lives have gone from okay to shit while some larger global trend tracks in a rising graph according a ‘human well-being index’? Again, I don’t know. Any global everything specialists out there that can help me?
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.
David CL Driedger 