Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  An important question remains unanswered. There is no doubt that Either/Or is set apart from the subsequent production. The Point of View – the explanation itself – says that Either/Or had been a poetic 'emptying' (Udtømmelse) which gets 'no further than the ethical'.10 How, then, are we to grasp the Point of View's claim that Kierkegaard had been a religious author in a sense which is specific enough to be of interest and also spans Either/Or and the later pseudonymous works? Indeed, I would like to widen that question just a little. Could Kierkegaard at the end of his career, given the changes in his attitude to the values defended in Either/Or, Part Two, honestly lay claim to having been the author of that work in the capacity of the religious author whose character he had now stepped into?

  1 In this essay I discuss several possible answers, some at least at first sight more plausible than others. Let me begin with what I call the Socratic answer. It is provided by Kierkegaard himself in the Point of View. In explaining the necessity of the 'deceit' of pseudonymity, Kierkegaard talks about 'going along with the other's delusion'.11 The aesthetic production, as he now calls it, is as a whole devoted to showing the way 'back' to the religious.12 Because the point is not to dogmatize about religion but to capture its living content, the aesthetic production deliberately adopts the aesthetic point of view as a heuristic device to show how the living content of religion is inadequately grasped from an aesthetic point of view, by those who live 'in aesthetic categories'.13 Accordingly, even if Either/Or's actual author experienced the work as a kind of poetical expurgation of the aesthetic from his system, its function for its readers, as it now turns out from the proffered 'point of view', proves to be that of showing them the way to the religious. If, as Kierkegaard himself says, Either/Or gets 'no further' than the ethical, it does at least get that far, and there is of course more to come. The Socratic aspect is further accentuated in the thought, as Kierkegaard puts it, that the aesthetic works are designed (as is now clear) to show the reader the way not so much to the religious as 'back' to the religious, as if religiosity were a feature of some uncorrupted state from which all-too-human nature separates a person and which the aesthetic point of view then distorts, but which can be regained, perhaps for the first time adequately once the aesthetic misunderstanding has

  been brought fully to consciousness. So the religious is lying there somewhere in the background waiting to be recovered if not to be rediscovered.

  It requires a considerable stretch of hermeneutic imagination, however, to read Either/Or as a work designed to uncover the religious. The direction of its manifest message is onward from the aesthetic to the ethical, upon which the religious as such, as yet indistinctly, and even indistinguishably, supervenes. With the debatable exception of the appended sermon, there is nothing in Either/Or that tends to reveal any defect in the ethical position as such. The crucial question for the Socratic explanation, then, is whether the sermon affords a Socratic bridge 'back' to the religious. At least on the surface it does not do that. Rather than being offered in any Socratic spirit, the sermon, sent on by Judge William to his young friend, A, the aesthete, is more like an afterthought, an insert even, or an advertiser's flyer, promising a new point of view but not putting the reader in a position to grasp its point existentially. Against this, it is clear that at least William himself regards the message of the sermon as a development from within his own universe, which is certainly compatible with a Socratic kind of advance. He recommends the sermon to A for saying 'more felicitously' (p. 594 [2, 337] )14 what he himself has tried to say to A. However, we should note that the terms in which William annexes the sermon to his own point of view argue sharply against its representing, for him at least, an advance to what later pseudonyms mean by a specifically religious point of view. In asking A not to 'sneeze at' the sermon just because the priest 'is confident that he will make every farmer understand it', William observes that the 'beauty of the universal consists precisely in everyone being able to understand it' (p. 594 [2, 328] ). But then it is clear that, at least in William's eyes, the sermon does not introduce what Climacus calls the 'doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox'.14 Neither the priest nor the farmers are presented as in Abraham's position of being denied that relief of speech which is that it 'translates me into the universal'.15 And if it is argued that Kierkegaard does not require us to read the sermon in William's way, Climacus, who does know how to distinguish the ethical from the religious, tells us unequivocally that Either/Or is 'ethically' and not 'religiously planned' and its categories are those of immanence.16

  It could be said that the same is true of Socrates, according to the Fragments' distinction between positions A and B. And it might be claimed that by following a procedure properly called Socratic you will never exceed the categories of immanence in any case, for immanence, as against the leap, is precisely what the A/B distinction turns on. Well, if that is true, the conclusion still follows. In Either/Or there is no Socratic advance beyond the ethical, and so no Socratic explanation of the alleged continuity between that work and the later pseudonyms. If it is not true, on the other hand, because the term 'Socratic' can mean something else, then the point again holds. What would be required is a maieutic advance out of the categories of immanence and into those of the paradox. But not only is nothing of the kind to be found in Either/Or, the argument can be strengthened in the light of what Climacus says about sermons in general. Sermons belong to

  'what is Christian'.17 If they speak from Christianity, they cannot very well be used to show someone the way back to it. Climacus also says that at the time of Either/Or the task of 'connecting Christianity with existence' had yet to be carried out, as it would be, by himself, in Fragments.18

  In fact, far from cracks appearing in the case for the ethical, William's 'enthusiastic' defence bears all the marks of a spirited apologia from the hand of Kierkegaard himself. If we are meant to see defects in the ethical view, it seems clear that the author would have us see our criticism not as the dawning of a specifically religious consciousness but as due to the continuing hold upon us of aesthetic values. No doubt, Kierkegaard himself, who had given up any plans to marry, had his personal premonition that the way to go was back to religion. But in order for the inadequacies of the ethical view to come more Socratically to light, we readers have to wait (though not very long) for Fear and Trembling and Repetition. Later the defects of William's view, as Kierkegaard comes to see them, become quite obvious; they are pointed out in very un-Socratic fashion in the section of Postscript entitled 'A Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature', from which the above references are drawn and where Climacus presents a survey of the pseudonymous authorship to date. William's creator is taken to task for assuming that to choose himself 'in his eternal validity' simply means finding himself 'in the despair', as if he could make the choice all on his own,19 whereas properly to despair is to give up the idea of there being any human platform from which, or any procedure whereby, to establish one's kinship in thought and action with God. Perhaps the work that best lives up to the Socratic interpretation is Stages on Life's Way; in that case, if the Socratic answer were the right one, we would rather expect that work, despite its literary weaknesses, or even Repetition, and not Either/Or, to have been part of the later package announcing Kierkegaard's career-spanning religious deed.

  2 Stages, however, offers support for what for many Kierkegaardians must seem another and indeed the most obvious answer to our question. In that work the ethical 'sphere' is described quite explicitly as a 'passage'.20 This conveys the plausible idea that the 'stages' form vantage-points from which alone insight into the next stage can be achieved. Just as religiousness A provides a moral-psychological platform of inwardness from which alone the structure of consciousness corresponding to religiousness B can be appropriated, so it can be said that the ethical provides some similar precondition for appropriation of the religious.

  This might be called the 'linear' view. And if we look at the stages
in this way we can see quite well how, even if Either/Or does not come as far as the religious, by getting as far as the ethical it does at least provide the point of view from which the religious can now be discerned. Indeed, if we judge the linear interpretation on its own and demand no Socratic component in the passage between, Kierkegaard himself offers a very good explanation in line with the linear reading. A journal entry talks of Either/Or providing something needed even before a Socratic maieutic can get started, namely an ethical strengthening.21 Either/Or

  can be read as a kind of propaideutic to the Socratic approach, and then the remainder of the pseudonymous production may be understood as complying with both the Socratic and the linear readings.

  For the linear interpretation it is not a problem that, or if, the concluding sermon fails to bring off a maieutic connection with the religious works. It is enough that the baton is, as it were, handed on to the next runner. Even if the Jutland priest's message that against God we are always in the wrong reads more like an advertisement for, or even a warning about, religion, it could still be described as indicating the way from the ethical to the religious. It does so by presenting the possibility that the religious is something other than the straightforward choice of the 'universal'. As for showing how the religious can be conceived in this way or why we should be interested in so conceiving it, all of this comes later with the problems which motivate a 'repetition', or a return to the universal from a higher point of view.

  One difficulty with the linear reading, however, has to do precisely with the idea offered in Stages of the ethical as a passage to the religious. When we read Stages we see quite clearly that what is offered there is not a development of the ethical point of view in Part Two of Either/Or but rather a reversion to the problem out of which the ethical was offered there as a solution but prematurely. This can throw new light on the sermon attached to Either/Or. We could read it as an admission of failure on the part of William and a generous offer to leave the matter in the potentially more mature hands of the aesthete. Where William has failed, his young friend, or some new version of him, may do better. At any rate what emerges in Stages is that the ethical proves to be an inadequately prepared anticipation of the task of realizing the universal because it fails precisely to give that task a properly religious dimension. A proper preparation requires one to go back to a development within and out of the aesthetic. From Stages we are led to understand that the manifest message of the subsequent works – picking up a theme on which William ends his second letter – follows Kierkegaard's own path as a social exception and thus a departure from the ethical paradigm. In any case, the ideas introduced in Fear and Trembling radically undermine the suggestion presented in Either/Or that life presents us with a radical and exhaustive choice between an aesthetic and an ethical view of existence. The ethical view is now presented as a limitation, as a kind of recourse, something one might even feel tempted to adopt in order to escape the rigours of true individuality, a comforting and self-satisfying reduction of life to what is intelligible, grasping at the relief of translatability into the universal. In this respect, then, there is no strict linearity in the progression through the stages. Although the ethical does represent an advance by virtue of, as it were, modelling the situation in which the universal is realized, as a view of life on its own terms it is no more than a failed solution to the problem of realizing it.

  Some might claim that the lack of linearity marked by Fear and Trembling is a matter of Kierkegaard's departure from the goal of realizing the universal. This, I suspect, is mistaken. What is new is not a positing of some alternative

  goal but a raising of the question of how this goal is to be evaluated in relation to those who have exceptional difficulties in realizing it. The difficulties involve precisely those concepts or categories that give meaning to religiousness. It may of course be too simplistic to put the matter in that fashion; we should really ask whether it is the manner in which the problems are posed that introduces the religious categories, thus leaving open the possibility of posing them in other ways that do not presuppose the religious categories, so allowing these to be part of what is chosen in the solution. It is at least not clear that the problems are of a kind that call for religious categories in their very definition. But this secondary question is a vast one which fortunately finds no place in the present discussion. What is of interest here is the fact that there is also a personal side to our question, which we must decide here and now whether or not to discount.

  3 We have already noted Kierkegaard's report that while presenting his conservative but comprehensive and to sympathetic ears convincingly sincere case for marriage in the wise counsels of William, he himself had already given up any plans to marry, or, as he puts it, 'of reducing life pacifyingly to marriage'. He tells us that 'religiously' he was 'already in the cloister', a fact 'concealed' in the very choice of the pseudonym 'Victor Eremita', and, 'strictly speaking', the cloister is where Either/Or is written.22 Now of course a sincere apologist for marriage need not himself be married. However, given the focus in the subsequent pseudonymous writings on the problem of exceptionality it is difficult to separate the personal from the systematic issue. This difficulty is often used as an excuse for discounting Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, for rejecting them on the grounds that they provide nothing but anecdotal interest or at best a richly documented case study of someone writing himself out of an existential dilemma. Others, myself included, would rather see in the close intertwining of matters of person and principle in these works their proper contribution to existential thought. For us, then, it will be a matter of much interest in unravelling the structure and intentions of his writings to follow Kierkegaard into and out of the cloister.

  I now offer, then, what I call a 'subtextual' explanation of the fact that Kierkegaard saw no discontinuity between Either/Or and the late religious works. It is based on the fact that when he was portraying William's way of life, he himself had already rejected it. It exploits this fact to suggest that the text of Either/Or already contains the later criticism of marriage, but implicitly, that is, not as part of its manifest message but as a latent message to be picked up by the discerning reader. This leaves several questions. If there is such a latent message, has it found its way there unconsciously, gratuitously even, so that it is to the embedding text we should look for the main import, or is the embedding text just an excuse for the latent message, an envelope for the telegram as it were? We do know, or are told, that Either/Or has a perlocutionary purpose, that it was written 'for her sake', that is, for Regine, 'in order to clear her out of the relationship',23 and the same question might arise here, whether the locutionary medium is to be taken merely as the occasion for the elaborate attempt

  to repel Regine, or whether repelling Regine was the occasion for making a start as a religious author. But that is not a matter for our discussion. Moreover, it was the 'either' that was supposed to repel Regine, not the 'or', and our question focuses on the latter. What the subtextual reading suggests is that in the 'or' there is a message to be decoded which is its real import.

  The subtextual reading exploits this possibility by noting the significance of the fact that the notions of the universal and of mutual understanding form corner-stones of William's defence of marriage, though lacking the implication later introduced by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling that they provide 'relief' from an enforced insularity or from the knight of faith's tragic inability to make himself understood. In William's universe the universal and mutual understanding are presented, at least on first appearances, as normal demands of human interaction, failures to fulfil which can typically be laid to the door of aesthetic egoism and romantic wishful thinking. William points in particular to the romantic misunderstanding that the 'particularity' of true love is incompatible with social ceremony, with marital vows, and with the establishment of household and family. According to William, the wedding ceremony 'offers … a survey of the genes
is of the human race, and thereby fastens the new marriage onto the great body of the race. It offers thereby what is general, the purely human, calls it forth in consciousness' (p. 428 [2, 89–90] ), and '[t]he great thing is not to be the singular, either immediately or in a higher sense, but in the singular to possess the universal' (p. 429 [2, 90] ). As for mutual understanding, William insists that partners to a marriage be able to fulfil demands of mutual frankness. This must be part of what Kierkegaard means when he later explained his choice of marriage as the theme of his original 'or' by saying that it struck him as being the deepest form of 'the revelation of life'.24 It is not a matter simply of telling true stories about oneself (p. 449 [2, 1189] ); marriage is an historical phenomenon and the partners' mutual understanding is therefore under 'constant development'. As William insists:

  It is the same as in an individual life. Just because one has arrived at clarity about oneself, has had the courage to be willing to see oneself, it by no means follows that the story is now over; it is now that it first begins, acquires for the first time a proper meaning through referring each lived moment to this total view. So too in marriage. The immediacy of first love founders upon this revelation, yet is not lost but assumed into the knowledge the marriage shares. With this the story begins, and the particular is referred to this shared knowledge, in this lies its felicity, an expression in which again the historical character of marriage is preserved, and which corresponds to the blitheness, or what the Germans call Heiterkeit, which first love has.