2 So Postscript's argument, though negative, is serious. But doesn't Climacus call himself a humorist? Where then is the joke?27 To answer this question it helps not to assume from the start that the humour of Postscript is to be found in the form of jokes in the text, in the telling, so to speak. Climacus describes humour as a capacity to detect comedy, not to be comical, though as we shall see, that does not mean that humour may not be able to detect comedy in itself.
The comical, says Climacus, is 'present in every stage of life'28 but it takes humour, and also, at a lower level, irony, to see it. While irony occupies the boundary area between the aesthetic and the ethical, humour is 'the confinium between the ethical and the religious'.29 The difference between irony and humour is that where both of them 'level' everything in the cause of an abstraction, irony does so 'on the basis of humanity in the abstract' while the humorist does so 'on the basis of the abstract God-relationship'. But they both form a kind of barrier to taking the next step into, in irony's case, actual ethical practice and, in humour's case, an actual God-relationship. The humorist is, then, one who, on reaching the point at which the God-relationship makes sense, turns away at the last moment and 'parries with his jest'.30
But, then, aren't those right after all who see Postscript in its entirety as an elaborate joke? Isn't it the jest that Climacus parries with? But the work also says so much about humour that it might be read as much as a disquisition on humour as a humorous disquisition. Far from being in its entirety a joke, it
might, on the contrary, be an entirely serious work explaining with suitable examples what it means to be in a position to detect unconscious comedy.
Climacus dignifies the comic with the professional label 'contradiction'. He says that 'wherever there is life there is contradiction, and wherever there is contradiction, the comical is present'.31 This makes good sense when we note that the so-called contradictions occur not in thought but 'in life'.32 What the ethicist-not-yet-humorist lacks which the humorist-not-yet-believer has is the Christian conception of God, a conception that brings everyday life conceived in terms of human autonomy, the ethicist's position, into comic relief; what is our autonomy once we stand individually in relation to God? Other comedies come to view to those who see things from other levels, for instance what to everyday common sense (den endelige Forstandighed) seem the comically short-sighted enthusiasms of 'immediacy'. Sensible people see this as amusing, but from Climacus's position the commonsensical resolution of the contradiction appears to be (and, because the position is privileged, is) 'even more comical'.33
The position on which that of the humorist borders is 'hidden inwardness'. But because it is hidden, this position (called Religiousness A) offers none of the visible incongruities Climacus's eye is trained to discern. Briefly, by prescinding from earthly goals, the religiosity of hidden inwardness deprives itself of the opportunity to make a fool of itself. Knowing what humour is, it knows how deliberately to avoid such contrasts. Indeed, avoiding them by retreating inwards is exactly hidden inwardness's way of life. Although hidden inwardness is, to quote Climacus (in a piece of almost pure Hegel – parody or tongue partly in cheek?), 'eo ipso inaccessible to comic [and accordingly to the humorist's own] apprehension', humour is something religiosity has 'brought to its own consciousness' and possesses in itself as 'what is lower'. So the comedy ends here, where the religiosity of hidden inwardness (A) is 'armed absolutely against the comical, or is by means of the comical secured against [it]'.34
But not quite, for the comedy uncovered from Postscript's stance carries over into the stance – and thus, after all, into Postscript as a whole – unconscious comedy, that is, which is now recognizable even if the humorist, far from being armed against the comical, is still in its grip, though, as a humorist, he is equipped nevertheless to see that this is so.
What is the comedy of the humorist's position? Defining the comic as it appears from his own point of access, Climacus contrasts its contradiction as 'painless' to that of the tragic as 'suffering'. Humour takes no account of difficulties involved in actually adopting the 'way out' from suffering offered by religion; it just keeps the solution in mind (in mente) in the literal sense of confining it to the level of thought. Tragedy concludes, for its part, from actually trafficking with the difficulties, that there is no ('human') resolution to the contradiction, no possibility of doing what the humorist sees is required. So tragedy is to confront the 'contradiction' as an actual challenge but at the same time see no way of meeting it.35
Just keeping the contradiction in mente (even more so just having a concep
tion of God, or even having a conception of God at all) is itself a comically inappropriate way of 'dealing' with the project whose nature it has nevertheless been the privilege of the humorist to uncover. Climacus, as a thinker with the self-awareness needed to see that the humorous position from which the comedy becomes visible is also a visibly comical one, is able in a postscript (Tillæg) to Postscript ('for an understanding with the reader') not only to 'revoke' the work but also to announce that it is 'superfluous'.36
The philosophical apparatus and the discursive appearance of the text would lead a reader, at that time, to suppose that the philosophy in Postscript was the philosophy of Postscript, an account of the way to the truth offered as an alternative to Kant or Hegel, except that here the truth is subjective. But all the reader gets is a series of philosophical-looking assertions that go against the traditional grain of philosophy itself, and if there is anything that might be called Postscript's own 'philosophy', it is that, with regard to what a human being may hope for or expect, the familiar is destined to become foreign. However, to say even that, let alone spell it out, is to create an illusion of understanding and familiarity. So once Postscript has said what the obstacles are, and thereby presented its radically untraditional point of view, there is nothing more it can do. There is no point in staying around to make things clearer or to defend theses or distinctions, not if you are really interested in the truth. If, on the other hand you are a philosopher … well ….
So much for the comedy of Postscript itself (as distinct from the comedy implicit in much of its tone). It is just one more 'contradiction' of the kind that Climacus's disengaged concern is designed to uncover – except that this time, in uncovering it, the humorist sees that he has both come to and represents the limits of his own position. What Climacus has disclosed is the 'ultimate' contradiction – being detached about something deadly serious. This is not just the usual distinction between theorizing and practice, since in the usual way of things nearly any practice can benefit from some theorizing. But here theory can enhance the practice only negatively, by making practitioners (advantageously for their faith?) aware that to understand what they are doing is to misunderstand it.
It is easy to misread 'absurd' and think that in advancing from hidden inwardness (A) to the so-called paradoxical religiousness (B), the believer exposes himself once more to Climacus's sharp eye for the comical – his special(ized) 'sense' of (or for) humour. In B, after all, inwardness is now no longer totally enclosed; it is directed outwards to an event that, if described as it must be to sustain the believer's interest in truth, is unthinkable. One might assume, therefore, that this absurdity is reflected in a corresponding absurdity in the believer himself, and therefore in the form of some comical contrast in his life. Further, if the comedy really did stop short at hidden inwardness, Postscript would become redundant at that point and not, as our earlier discussion about the need for dialectical consolidation implied, at the close of this move into the Absolute Paradox. But although absurdity is conventionally associated with comedy, here it is a logical not a literary notion. There may be room for rueful irony in the
thought that the truth that matters most is absurd in the logical sense – and not least amusement in the idea that this, in another manner of speaking, 'makes nonsense' of Hegel. But there is no hint that the absurdity Climacus points to is meant to amuse; no t
herapeutic purpose could be served by laughing at the absurdity of what Christians have to believe.37
Since the humorist's humour depends neither on the comedy of the humorist's own stance nor on the absurdity of Christianity, Postscript's final pages may be read as simply the completion of Climacus's 'dialectical' survey. The portion assigned in Postscript to B is in fact quite short, a final twist to the achievement of religious inwardness (A). B is said to preserve the inwardness of Religiousness A (so B 'presupposes' A, just as B presupposes humour).38 Here, in terms of the dramatic or literary notion of absurdity, it is Climacus who becomes the more absurd by persisting in his intellectualizing of the existential, not the believer the conditions of whose faith he persists in negatively defining.
None of this precludes parody as forming some part of Postscript's rhetorical armoury. Indeed the work's subtitle suggests it does: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition. Parody is a time-honoured function of mimicry. That the work is indeed a parody is suggested by the delicious irony in Kierkegaard's use of the Phenomenology's scenario to travel in virtually the opposite direction – ending up with no concepts for the truth instead of finding it in the Concept. But we should be careful here. The exploitation of the scenario need not in itself be parodic. Kierkegaard may just have borrowed the scenario to put it to another use.
3 If parody is indeed found in Postscript, we might be a trifle complacent in supposing someone so 'foreign' as Hegel to be its sole target. The same might be true about unconscious comedy. What, for example, if we too were part of the comedy Climacus uncovers? The possibility suggests a dilemma. Either we have nothing to fear from Climacus because he has nothing to say to us; or Climacus has something to say to us but then we are laughable. We are laughable in either case since if Climacus has nothing to say to us, why are we discussing him? The situation deserves scrutiny.
First, it has to be said that few if any of us are would-be Christians doing something that might pass, though laughably, as a misguidedly intellectual way of grasping the Christian truth. Nor are we 'town-criers of inwardness'.39 We do not trumpet the cause of an unostentatious sincerity, even if we sometimes speak of that whereof we should be silent. We are in general rather cool customers interested in fairly abstract questions. The greater comedy occurs, so evidently to us and without Climacus's help, when our engagement in abstract topics sometimes arouses us to such extraordinary heights of passions.
A case might be made for our immunity to Climacian humour. In early journal entries Christianity itself is described as humorous. From this it might be inferred that Climacus's own humour is due simply to his speaking for a view that Kierkegaard calls 'intrinsically' humorous. Those who do not have that view in their sights can then safely assume they are not among its targets. But what is it
about Christianity that is humorous? And to whom? Christianity is humorous because its claims appear incongruous to common sense, such claims as, for instance, that its truth lies 'hidden' in the mysteries instead of being revealed there, something that 'humorizes' worldly wisdom to 'the highest degree'. In other words, Christianity makes nonsense of common sense. Similarly, by 'professing its own wretchedness' while having the form either of a 'noble pride' or of a 'haughty isolation from the ordinary course of events (the historical nexus)', Christian humility is a polemic 'against the world'. What makes Hamann Christianity's most humorous representative is his self-induced Socratic ignorance: 'forcing oneself down to the lowest position and looking up (that is, down) at the common view, yet in such a way that behind this self-degradation lies a high degree of self-elevation'.40
Thus the humour of Christianity lies in what to common sense are its patent incongruities. They are, if you like, absurdities in the view itself when seen in a worldly perspective. They include others, such as, for example, Christianity's claim to speak for the whole world and yet also and at the same time for each individual singly. If such incongruities offend common sense, they must also offend philosophy. For what is philosophy but well-edited common sense, or human wisdom in its most articulate form?
But the incongruities which it was Climacus's sense of humour to be able to recognize as comedy were seen, as it were, from the top-down. It was through his having the Christian conception of God that Climacus was able to see comedy in the ethicist's notion of personal autonomy; just as one could say it is by having a notion of personal freedom that the ironist can see comedy in bourgeois self-importance, and the possession by the bourgeois of a notion of respectability that makes the short-sighted enthusiasms of 'immediacy' look comical to them. In talking of the humour inherent in Christianity, Kierkegaard seems to be looking in the other direction. The humour is due to a deficiency, an inability to make sense of the required conception of God. It is when one looks up from a lower position than it that Christianity appears in an incongruous light.
It would, however, be a mistake, I believe, to talk here of two different directions. Seeing why gives us a grip on the position Climacus occupies in the authorship and throws light on the relationship of Postscript's text to philosophy.
Climacus speaks not for the Christian truth but about it. He is not a Christian, nor a fortiori is he a subjective thinker. He does not think in the way he knows and tells us that the individual must in order to become a Christian. Subjective thinking is a private and personal affair involving silence as much as utterance. What utterances do emerge from subjective thinking will be indirect and possibly humorous, the humour providing the kind of cover that Climacus calls an 'incognito'. But since he is only fictional and has no hidden inwardness to protect, Climacus himself has nothing to hide. He is, one might choose to say, 'cover-an-sich', an abstracted part of what it would be to be a being capable of subjective thought. Humour, as it belongs to what we have of Climacus, attaches to him in two related ways: he speaks of Christianity in the language of worldly wisdom, and thus in full
cognizance of its incongruities. That is what he must do if he is to talk about Christianity. So he too is looking up from a position lower than Christianity. Indeed, in spite of what was said above, its incongruities are really only visible from below. For an engaged Christian they vanish from view, not overcome in a new vision but simply put out of sight. People who say Christianity is humorous are not so engaged and of course need not be Christians, though even Christians when not engaged can see the humour in the position. But when, in talking about Christianity, Climacus says that its themes are matters for subjective thinking, he is saying something important but also saying it in the language of objective thinking, the language his readers are used to finding employed with deadly seriousness in philosophical tracts about truth.
From one angle we could view the unorthodox style of Postscript as a kind of incognito; the protection provided by treating matters lightheartedly is against what is said, and said seriously, being misread as just another philosophical tract about truth. But there is another angle, that of the higher view itself as seen from below. To make the point one might say, a little exaggeratedly, that what Climacus realizes is that, 'humorizing' worldly wisdom as it does to 'the highest degree', philosophy is from a Christian point of view no longer an organon but just a play-thing. Truth requires something quite different. Not only that, truth is something quite different. Nevertheless philosophy's language can be used to show how the kind of thinking appropriation of the truth requires bears no traces of that worldly wisdom at which philosophy is traditionally acknowledged to excel.
Whether we say the serious use of the language playfully concealed is philosophical or the playful use betokens something other than philosophy may seem to us, if not to Kierkegaard's contemporaries, a distinction without a difference. In a time inured to the idea that philosophy can be designed just as much to edge us away from false ideas as to urge us in the direction of true ones it matters little whether we read Climacus as an innovative philosopher or deny that the critical thinking he engages in is philosophy. No one can seriously deny, however, that he th
inks, and does so seriously. One way of putting what Climacus does is to say that he is positioning the subjective thinker in the space of philosophy. However humorous that project may appear when looking up from below or below from above, it requires thought, 'objective' thought. It is doubtful, however, if Postscript has some one main purpose, that this is it. On the background of the authorship it looks more as though it were intended as a necessary prolegomenon to subjective thinking, the philosophy serving the purpose of keeping the subjective thinker on his or her toes, and ensuring that the thinking is properly subjective.
Yet it would be a paradoxical result of any investigation into God's truth that only philosophers or intellectuals are in a position to appreciate what that truth requires, particularly if seeing what the truth requires is necessary for its appropriation. And it would be strange to have to attribute to Kierkegaard or his pseudonym, both of whom mostly write as though the Hegelian philosophy were a quite unnecessary evil, the view that the human situation generally must be understood from the point of view of Hegel aufgehoben, as if Hegel's
language were necessary for formulating a falsehood one has to appreciate in order to grasp something essential to being human.
So we may look with a good conscience for ways of making Kierkegaard's Climacus more than a creature of his context. One way would be to read the conceptual apparatus of Postscript as 'adverbial' to the primary concern, which is to rescue the category of personality from oblivion. The following from the journals can serve as chapter and verse for the general gist of this essay's argument. Kierkegaard writes:
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 4
