The essays collected here are arranged in two sections. Those in this first section, which I have called 'Philosophy', based as they are on a fairly close reading of the texts, are both expository and interpretative; they take pretty well at face value what the texts seem to be saying on their surface, and since the language is predominantly that of philosophy, the result is something like an attempt to lay bare some of the anatomy of the concepts the texts employ: truth, subjective thinking, faith and history, humour, selfhood, despair. Two of the essays even try to link what Kierkegaard uses these concepts to say with philosophy as we know it. Chapter 2 tries within the format of a survey of relevant literature published in the decade before 1980 to construct from the pseudonymous works the anatomy of what I was then willing (on being asked) to call 'Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Mind'. Since then of course the literature has
expanded explosively, and it would be impossible to undertake an updating. On the other hand, the essay's point is not one that has become redundant. Its aim is to indicate ways in which Kierkegaardian concerns of the kind that are relevant to any comprehensive philosophy of mind can contribute to what currently goes by that name. In the period since 1983, when the survey in which the essay was included was published, not much in the philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology or cognitive science has altered the picture, except perhaps to indicate, as the very labels suggest, an increasing imperviousness to the kinds of topic in question. That the only slightly revised version published here is called simply 'Philosophy of Mind' is due to reasons already adumbrated in Chapter 1 for doubting that Kierkegaard would take kindly to the idea that, among his principal activities as a writer, had been the intention to deliver a theory of the mind. The idea of the essay is to bring the philosophy in Kierkegaard's writings, whatever his purpose in putting it there, into visible contact both with the tradition in which he wrote and with current philosophy, the latter with the intention of indicating ways in which it might benefit from an infusion of Kierkegaardian ideas. The final chapter in this section, having something like the same purpose, attempts to place one of these ideas in a context of current philosophy out of which it might seem to emerge quite naturally on its own.
As for the nature of Kierkegaard's own purpose with all this philosophy, it may help to note and also stress one life-long concern. Both the pseudonymous works and the journals overwhelmingly convey the conviction that religion and philosophy should be kept apart. This may seem normal enough. Most philosophers have deeply religious colleagues who prefer to keep religion out of their discipline. The point is that with Kierkegaard the position is the reverse: it is philosophy he wants to keep at bay, thus leaving room for religion, and the ethics he believed depended on it. The context of his concern is clear enough, his prime target being the Hegelian view that the language of philosophy supervenes upon that of religion. Although Hegel neither reduces religious language to that of philosophy, nor eliminates it because that cannot be done, it is philosophy that provides insight into the truths in the religious narrative. It is in the light of his polemic against this view, as well as weaker versions such as Kant's and also Schleiermacher's, in which religion has at least some token autonomy, that one must follow Kierkegaard's life-long concern.
The polemic is hardly one that survives today, but there are areas in philosophy where Kierkegaard's concern to preserve the autonomy of religion receives nods of approval. A Wittgensteinian language-game approach can seem a fruitful way of reading Kierkegaard's concern. Another area is philosophical anthropology, for here too religion remains a valid topic; or, again closer to Wittgenstein, the philosophy of language in its dealing with, among others, the special forms of religious judgement.3 Religion is treated here as part of the repertoire of specifically human responses and a legitimate topic for philosophy. What Kierkegaard would oppose in these developments is their confinement to the human point of view. Kierkegaard repeatedly insists that any religious reality genuinely confronted
exerts its own demands upon us. This may also be Wittgenstein's understanding. Once you invoke the world of which religious believing is true, you have no right to expect it to be designed just to satisfy human needs, even those needs you have evoked that world to satisfy. Such a world makes its own demands of humankind, though not in a sense that implies they are not, when properly grasped, also demands humans should make of themselves qua human. To grasp them in that way calls for a revision of common assumptions about what it is to be truly human, revisions that concern also reason. If the more-than-ordinarily-human-world is real and not just a figment of our minds, it is one that we must face without a prior assumption of our capacity to know it. It is 'other' analogously to the way in which the world of mores into which a child is socialized is 'other' until the child is socialized and has internalized the appropriate conventions. For a philosopher likeKant, of course, that would not be sufficiently 'other'; for him, and since the essence of morality is accessible to us in the medium of reason, the truly human being is one whose will freely conforms to the moral law. But Kierkegaard stretches things further. For him the religious view of reality is one we personally live in a direct relationship to the Godhead, not glimpsed dimly in the idea of a greatest good without which the institution of morality would not make sense.
This account is designedly rough and selective. But it does show one way of piecing together a Kierkegaard who stands in recognizable relationship to other thinkers who undeniably qualify as philosophers. This spirit of mutual identification is one way in which a focus on the philosophical content of Kierkegaard's writings can bear fruit.
Disturbingly, however, the focus ignores those special features of Kierkegaard's style of delivery that seem to be telling us that he does not want to be read in this way – for example, that his work is neither argumentative nor even in any ordinary way discursive, or if arguments occur they are cited rather than used, while the passages closest to being philosophical are interspersed with comedy and anecdote as well as the whole being couched in an ironic tone that seems designed to resist not only the attention of philosophers but also serious scholarly scrutiny of any kind. It would surely be a serious breach of scholarship itself to ignore such features, inseparable as they are from the texts in which we chiefly identify Kierkegaard. Indeed, plain common sense advises us to examine the possibility that the attitude and style of the writer are part of what must be understood in grasping just what sort of project he saw himself engaged in.
Some hint of what Kierkegaard took that project to be, and how that question might be answered affirmatively, may be gleaned from an addendum to a retrospective claim about what it was not. In 1849 he wrote under the heading 'On My Authorship' that rather than 'everything being translated into the objective' so as to give the misleading impression that 'what we have' here is 'a new doctrine', the reader of Concluding Unscientific Postscript should understand that its real topic is 'personality'.4
Personality, or personhood, was widely current as a Bildung concept in the philosophy of the time. As the locus of a proper view of things, as one might
say, it had its central place both in the Enlightenment version of that view of things and in that of the Romantic reaction. It is a concept Kierkegaard had inherited from his teacher and early mentor, Poul Møller, and a term that appears in both titles of the long sections forming the 'or' part of Either/Or. At the time cultivation of the person would be thought a valid task as well as topic of both literature and philosophy. The thought that philosophy might contribute to it in the form of 'doctrines' specifying the structure and composition of mature selfhood would not be alien. There might be some sense to an objective theory of personality, that is to say, a theory that can be arrived at by considering certain features of human existence in general and then notifying the individual of the theory along with the arguments for it, thus presenting the theory as a blue-print to which an individual life must conform.
Kierkegaard of course discounts any such theory as a
n evasion of the real task, which is to generate a sense of what fulfilled personhood requires from one's own experience. The task of selfhood is placed firmly upon the self, which also means upon his reader. In another entry from 1849 he writes, this time with the heading 'On My Authorship as a Whole':
In a sense it is a question of contemporaneity in the form of a choice; one must choose to make either the aesthetic into an all-embracing thought and then explain everything in that manner, or the religious. There is something of awakening in just this.5
We see then that, whatever the truth of its gestation, Kierkegaard conceives his work in retrospect as presenting its reader with a choice about how to carry on his or her life. And of course a choice of the form of one's own individual life is not something to which the presentation of a general doctrine, applicable to anyone or everyone, will contribute – unless you wish to forget the local habitation to which your own self is assigned, and the form you choose is that of submission to the authority of 'whatever stands to reason' – just the move Kierkegaard's writing seems most motivated to resist.
The essays in this section begin with Postscript and a good deal of the later discussion focuses on this work, as does much of it also on The Sickness unto Death. The reader will find that the terms and tenor are those of the universe of traditional philosophical discourse. Their topics are Kierkegaardian but not their tone or style. They follow Kierkegaard's criticism of the tradition, detail it and try to characterize it. One aim is to indicate why questions which philosophy has wrongly addressed as though they were capable of objective solutions can only be approached by individuals who grasp themselves as moral beings. I tend to think of this as a philosophical project. Would Kierkegaard still say 'Heaven forbid!'?
* * *
1
CLIMACUS AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS
Against some fashionable views to the contrary, I argue here that Concluding Unscientific Postscript is not in whole or part an elaborate joke. The work contains a serious though negative argument designed to locate the place of faith in relation to reason. Given that the text makes claims on our reason in this way yet its pseudonymous author describes himself as a humorist, the question of where the work's humour lies needs to be freshly confronted. After humour has been distinguished from comedy (as a point of view from which unconscious comedy in the enactment of life-views becomes visible), and both from absurdity, I conclude that a fundamental aim of Postscript, once the negative argument has been given, is to cast light self-referentially on the comedy of humour itself. The paper has three sections. The first asks in what way Postscript, given that its pseudonymous author is a self-styled humorist, nevertheless makes claims on our reason. Granting for contextual reasons that it does, the second asks where the humour lies. The final section asks what bearing Postscript's humour can have on whatever philosophy means to us today.
1 The fact that its pseudonymous author is a self-styled humorist, along with the light tone and occasional sheer comedy of what many regard as Kierkegaard's most substantial excursion into philosophy, has always discouraged a serious reading. Many conclude from the assumption that Postscript is an elaborate joke that there is no point in ploughing through its six hundred pages in search of an argument. But others have suggested otherwise. They claim that in order to share the joke we must do exactly that. For the joke is not just on the philosopher, it is also, remedially perhaps, for the philosopher. It lies in the fact that Postscript comically fails in whatever philosophical task a straightforward reading must assign to it, something only a philosopher is in a position to see. As for the target of the joke – well, we all know it is Hegel, or at least his local supporters at the time in Copenhagen.
The thesis appears recently in James Conant's claim for Postscript that 'the work as a whole represents an elaborate reductio ad absurdum of the philosophical project of clarifying and propounding what it is to be a Christian'.1 However, the locus classicus (in the English-language literature) for the view is Henry E. Allison's early essay, 'Christianity and Nonsense',2 and it is to the latter that my
comments will chiefly be addressed. Allison claims that the 'doctrinal content [of Postscript] must be regarded as an ironical jest, which essentially takes the form of a carefully constructed parody of the Phenomenology of Mind' (p. 290). The reason why it must be so regarded is that, to the trained eye, what purports to be the main argument is, or involves, a 'misologism'.
I do not deny there is parody in Postscript. I also accept that what is offered there in doctrinal trappings may not be meant to instruct or lay claim to truth. Moreover, a joke may be intended in the thought that this is just how people will read it. Nevertheless, what purports to be doctrine in Postscript, quite independently of its setting and of any quasi-literary intentions, either behind or in the work, is not itself a joke. Whatever comical uses it may be put to, the argument Allison points to is neither a reductio nor misologistic but constructive and rational.
Allison's case for the misologistic consequences of Postscript goes as follows: (1) The work presents objective reflection and subjective reflection as alternative methodologies for arriving at the truth. Objective reflection is shown to be inappropriate for truths that concern us personally; here the truth-seeker 'loses himself in his speculations' (p. 292), by the same token losing sight of what personally concerns him. Subjective reflection is then offered as an alternative that preserves and develops that concern in an appropriate manner. (Here one must note that the pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, makes no claim to be resorting to subjective thinking himself; his task is to give what purports to be an account of it – at least he goes through what look like philosophical motions of the kind that would be needed to make clear what the proposed alternative to objective reflection amounts to.) Now (2) since subjective reflection aims at truth (its 'wish' is to be 'truth's reflection' [være Sandhedens] ),3 it must supply a method for arriving at it. (3) The method is contained in the infamous thesis that truth is subjectivity; it says that (the) truth corresponds to the greatest possible degree of inwardness and then specifies the required degree as that caused by the intellectually repellent realization that the truth in question is absurd. Unlike any general methodology, which aims only to provide criteria for determining whatever truths come within its scope, this criterion evidently claims to pick out one truth in particular, namely (that of) Christianity. However, (4) the method proves unable to specify reflection's truth more narrowly than as the truth which a person continues to believe in the face of its absurdity, or even just as the state of mind itself of a person who so continues to believe. Therefore, (5) there is no provision for distinguishing Christianity as the one absurdity in which the believer should be continuing to believe. But if it is as nonsense that Christianity must be believed in for the believing to be true, and no distinction can be provided for between Christianity and any other kind of nonsense, then the project of showing the way to subjective reflection's truth signally fails. Since Postscript is to all outward appearances a philosophical critique of 'the Hegelian philosophy' and seems to be offering at the same time the basis of a better understanding of 'religious life' and a 'Christian apologetic' (p. 289), this appearance must be a sham and the explanation of that fact
must be that the argument has some quite different purpose. As for Postscript's real purpose, Allison's proposal is that the work is designed to stop people 'theorizing … in an "existential" sense about Christianity' (p. 290). Stephen Mulhall has generalized this conclusion by suggesting that Postscript's task is to indicate that existential challenges are, as such, not to be converted into intellectual problems.4
And yet the text, as Allison duly acknowledges, clearly does distinguish nonsense from absurdity, calling Christianity absurd not nonsensical. The word 'nonsense' is used in contexts where it is translatable as 'gibberish' (Vrøvl og Nonsens),5 and what is claimed is that nonsense cannot be believed against the understanding since to the understanding it is transparently nonsense
('thi Forstanden vil netop gjennemskue at det er Nonsens').6 So Postscript, in its doctrinal aspect, and in whatever way we are to treat that aspect, assumes there is a type of nonsense that is sheerly nonsensical and bears its meaninglessness on its face. Absurdity is something else: we find the word 'absurd' used appositively with 'inexplicable', 'unintelligible', 'incomprehensible' (det Uforståelige).7
Allison, seeing the anomaly, explains it by appeal to another. He finds an internal inconsistency between what the pseudonymous author says here and a claim made in the same pseudonymous author's Fragments. Appealing to one inconsistency to dispose of another may seem an odd way of pre-empting the verdict that Kierkegaard is 'muddleheaded' (p. 315), Allison's prime motive for concluding that Postscript is deliberate parody rather than a repository of unintentional howlers. But the appeal seems defective also for another reason. Allison says that on the earlier account of knowledge, doubt and belief are claimed in general to be a matter of will, so 'it seems rather difficult to see just how our understanding of anything, even nonsense, could "prevent" our belief' (p. 314). Surely, however, the admission of a sheerly transparent form of nonsense renders that view – the view that one can will oneself into believing it – implausible, and it would be just as reasonable to conclude that the earlier work's claim was not intended to include cases of the kind.
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 2
