Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
Page 17
(p. 449 [2, 118] )
The ability constantly to reveal oneself to one's partner is the other side of the coin of the 'secretiveness' in which the aesthetic content of first love is said to
be preserved (p. 439 [2, 10] ). Secretiveness here belongs to the particular, the exclusivity of the relation of love when one is 'in' love. William insists of course that this secretiveness cannot survive on its own ('on an uninhabited island'); part of the sense in which, in marriage, one is the 'singular' but possesses the universal is that the institution provides the social context in which the secretiveness is preserved in (or in spite of, amid the din of, perhaps even constituted in its opposition to) multiplicity (ibid.).
But there is a message clearly inserted in the text, and it should make us wonder whether the first appearances are to be trusted. If the demands of frankness cannot be fulfilled, 'when the complications of the individual life are such that it is unable to reveal itself', then one should not marry. Kierkegaard makes it clear he is thinking of himself.
If the history of your inner development contains something unutterable, or if your life has made you privy to secrets – in short, if in one way or another you have gorged yourself on a secret which cannot be dragged out of you without costing you your life, then never marry.
(p. 448 [2, 117] )
What should we make of this? Kierkegaard is not simply describing normal requirements of married life, and arguing that in satisfying these requirements the aesthete will find that the aesthetic content of his love is preserved and enriched, and indeed that this is the only way in which it can be preserved at all. He seems to be insisting on such strenuous demands of married life that one might suppose very few are able to fulfil them, not because they are specially gifted and self-centred misfits like the aesthete, but because these demands might even seem to call for too much even in a magnanimous person. Although we can hardly envisage the aesthete portrayed in the 'either' deciding to enter into marriage, it is easy to imagine him as someone who would see the point of the ideal demands the 'or' makes of such a step though preferring not to submit himself to them. But it might only require some minor adjustment to the well-adjusted William's biography to have even him fail to reach the altar.
So apart from being told under what conditions a dedicated aesthete will find the proper fulfilment of his aesthetic goals, we are also told very clearly under what conditions one should refrain from marriage. Might it not be, then, that, far from presenting the case in general for married and civic life, Kierkegaard is here making it subtly clear under what fairly normal conditions one should not marry? This might, as was earlier suggested, have a purely autobiographical significance. Kierkegaard could be more or less deliberately setting up as standards for such a life certain ideals which he himself conspicuously fails to satisfy, and thus paving his getaway into the cloister. Perhaps, in the spirit of 'Skyggerids' ('Shadowgraphs', or 'Silhouettes' in the Hongs' translation), he is trying to erase the traces of his past and its path towards marriage with Regine by the well-tried expedient of 'ambiguating' his footprints(their obliteration being precluded by the nature of the case).
Still, it need not be a purely personal matter. By presenting marriage as something for exceptionally good people, and at the same time suggesting that exceptional people are likely to be prevented from expressing their goodness, or providing a convincing revelation of life, in the normal way, Kierkegaard is already systematically opening the way to his later criticism and even denigration of the institution of marriage. At one level that is already implicit in the high demands which most people affecting marriage will not be able to measure up to owing to their mediocrity; they will be the kind of people who marry for the reasons William attacks in defending the intrinsic value of marriage (as a school for character, for the propagation of the race – he mentions also such banal reasons as having a home, or a refuge for old age, to inherit wealth, and so on, but considers these to be beneath his notice). At another level, however, the criticism includes William too in his enthusiastic 'ethical defence' of marriage. William turns out to be symbiotically dependent on his wife.25 If, as is suggested, this is a bad thing, marriage proper seems to become ever less possible. In that case the more 'marriages' there are, the less likely it will be that they are proper. Moreover, if those who intended to marry were as good as they should be, they would be more likely to encounter the difficulties that William mentions, and which, when insuperable, are a sufficient reason for not marrying. Finally, if the symbiotic relation exemplified by William and his wife disqualifies their marriage, because it shows that William has a motive for marrying that subverts the notion that the value of marriage is intrinsic (p. 448 [2, 63] ), then the conditions of independence (and spirituality) that William falls short of begin to look as though they implied that marriage is neither possible nor desirable in any case. For what is marriage, in the 'human' conception, if not a shared admission of mutual dependency?
If that is a cogent line of argument (defenders of the human conception will no doubt wish to distinguish between benign and malignant forms of symbiosis), the subtextual answer aims to establish a continuity in content between Either/Or and the later criticism of William and marriage. It claims that although the text seems to be offering a defence of marriage, it in fact conveys that marriage is really an ideal state for those few who have the spiritual strength to support it, but who precisely because of that strength are more prone to encounter (or, even worse, must have encountered and suffered) the kinds of difficulty that give rise to the problem of exceptionality. One notes that the theme on which William's defence of marriage ends (one might even choose to say 'in which it culminates') is precisely that of exceptionality, or uncommonness. William remarks on how he 'love[s] existence and being human far too much to believe that the path to becoming an uncommon man is easy or without temptations'. One can be an exception in 'this more noble sense'. Such an exception will nevertheless 'always admit that it would be more perfect still to take possession of the whole of the universal' (p. 589 [2, 332] ). So marriage is now an ideal. The later works, however, cease to treat the ethical framework of marriage, as portrayed and exemplified by William, as an ideal. The later pseudonyms will even stress that among the temptations the noble exception
must face is the lure of the ethical itself. Taken literally, William's description of the 'truly extraordinary man' as the 'truly ordinary man' (p. 586 [2, 328] ) even suggests that uncommonness in the relevant respects could be fairly common. And the possibility of the exception's being reconciled nevertheless with the universal 'through his sorrow at being uncommon' (p. 589 [2, 331] ) leaves the reader well on the way to seeing that the problem is not to choose marriage but to grasp and even have sympathy for what it is that makes such a choice impossible. We can note an entry in the journals from 1849 'where Kierkegaard says that the matter of 'the single individual' appears in every one of the pseudonymous works', and 'was already posed by the Judge in Either/Or in regard to being excepted from marrying'.26 The subtextual reading is by no means implausible.
4 To summarize so far. The Socratic explanation is tempting because it actually appears to require some kind of hiatus between Either/Or and the later works; it is the reader who is to test the adequacy of the categories of immanence and take the step beyond. There were difficulties with that explanation, which were however, to some degree overcome by the linear explanation, which sees the works as standing in a series of transitions the unity of which is simply that they conform with a programme which the reader can make out just by reading further. Against this in turn, however, were grounds for suspecting that the proper point of departure for the works subsequent to Either/Or is the 'either' and not the 'or', or at least a return to the 'either' in the light of the inadequacies of the 'or'. If so, then the progression is not straightforwardly linear, and that applies whether the course of the development is 'thickened' by adding a maieutic component or is left 'thin' enough to allow the Jutland p
riest's sermon to serve as a transition to the religious even if, as I myself would suggest, it lacks such an ingredient.
5 We have, however, still another way of testing the alleged continuity of the pseudonymous works. Rather than looking at the linkages between the stages and asking ourselves whether they support the kind of transitivity that would justify Kierkegaard's later claims to have been writing, as he might say, uno tenore, we can look in Either/Or for religiously relevant concepts, laid down and explicated there, and then see if they persist throughout the pseudonymous works and perhaps even provide a link between these and the views Kierkegaard champions in criticism of the 'present age', or even further, that is, in the direction of the later pseudonyms and even the final attack on the Church.
That difficulties arise in taking it that far is clear from a late entry in the journals (from 1852). There Kierkegaard remarks on the fact that in the aftermath of the success of Either/Or that title had become his own nickname. And suggesting that, at least at that date, he did indeed regard his best-seller as a folie de jeunesse, he writes:
What a series of ways I have run through of specifying what my Or means!
I marked out27 marriage as Or, but marriage was not my own life's Or; I am further still from that Either.
For that Either means gratification in the most licentious sense. Then there are all in-between positions: gratification but with an admixture of ethics. But that isn't where my Or is. Then comes gratification with an admixture of the ethico-religious; but this is still not my Or.
So there is only one Or left: Suffering, renunciation, the religious, becoming less than nothing in this world.
If I am a dialectician by origin, a dialectician by nature, then I can find rest only in the last Or, not in any intermediate Or; for only when one comes to rest in the last Or is the Either–Or exhausted.28
Not much room here for Williamesque ideals. Surely not marriage anyway. Well, let's not be too hasty; although the subtextual reading focused our attention on that part of William's portrayal of the ethical life in which he seems to be saying that a human being should be exceptional enough to be disposed to find marriage ethically a problem, marriage might still be the way to 'take possession' of 'the whole of the universal', and still be prized as the deepest form of revelation of life, however rare may be a marriage that actually performs that role. And although Kierkegaard's late remarks on marriage do sound as though he was willing to let that institution go the way of the 'human'-ethical because actual marriages are typically refuges for that vast majority of people who fail to live their lives in the category of spirit, it is still possible to envisage a marriage which is that more perfect state.
Kierkegaard seems nevertheless steadfastly to ignore that possibility and even to find Scriptural authority for doing so:
The New Testament puts it in this way: 'Give up all these trifles, this egoistic trifling with which people at large fill their lives, business, marriage, having children, being something in the world; drop it, make a complete break with it – and let your life be dedicated to loving God, to being sacrificed for the human race, "Be salt"!' This is what Our Lord, Jesus Christ, calls Christianity. If a man stands up and wants to marry, the invitation (cf. the Gospel) comes to him: Drop that – and become a Christian. When a man has bought six pair of oxen and is about to take them out to try them out, the invitation comes: Drop that – and become a Christian. [But] Christianity has now become the exact opposite; it has become the divine blessing upon all of finitude's trifling and grit-picking and temporal enjoyment in life. The lovers summon the priest – he blesses them: that is Christianity.29
There seems an obvious objection. How can your sacrifice be on behalf of humanity except by participating in the available modes of production and reproduction? Indeed, how could there be a humanity on whose behalf you could sacrifice anything at all unless people devoted themselves to just these pursuits?
One rejoinder is that Kierkegaard does not mean to say that life should not contain these things, only that it should not be filled with them. But a more compelling rejoinder is this: Kierkegaard here is no longer talking in his Williamesque vein of ideal marriages but talking of actual marriages, marriages entered into for any of the evasive or egoistic reasons mentioned in William's defence of the intrinsic value of marriage. We must recall that Kierkegaard has now (1854) emerged from the cloister and is confronting society as he finds it, a trifling, grit-counting and spiritless society. In the entry just quoted he is not specifying conditions under which some ideal of selfhood may be achieved and held fast to; he is observing how people refuse the challenge of selfhood and, worse, are encouraged in the name of Christianity to do the opposite of what the New Testament itself enjoined. So this Scripturally backed assault on, amongst other things, marriage need not be incompatible with William's ethically enthusiastic defence of it.
There is something unsatisfactory, however, in making marriage the normative hinge upon which the pseudonymous works swing. It is too specific an institution to do the job. After all, marriage was chosen because it was the 'deepest form of the revelation of life', and that indicates that there is some wider norm at work and thus a more likely candidate for our continuity-seeking project. So whether or not Kierkegaard's views on marriage changed, perhaps we ought really to be looking for the authorship's normative unity at some more embracing level. Let us try the ethical. We recall the remark in Fear and Trembling that relativizing the ethical (suspending it) does not imply that the ethical is done away with.30 May we not hope to find in this remark some indication of a continuity between this work and its predecessor? Perhaps Fear and Trembling, instead of marking a radical break with Either/Or as is often assumed, actually forms an ethical bridge between the latter 'pre-religious' work and its successors, extending even right on to the non-pseudonymous Church polemic. Given the strong, even analytical, relation that seems to obtain between ethics and the universal in Kierkegaard's texts, this invites the conjecture that the later Kierkegaard, whether as pseudonym or himself, would still accept that realizing the universal (pp. 586–9 [2, 330–2] ) was the proper form of the ethical, even if, as it seems, familial, social, political and even ecclesiastical institutions have to lose their constitutive roles in this respect.
Yet there are clear difficulties with this proposal. The universal as presented in Either/Or appears much too closely bound up with Williamesque ethics for the latter to be dropped without also dropping the former, and if we drop the ideal of realizing the universal, little if anything of the Either/Or project remains.
We might try to save the proposal by doing for realizing the universal what Johannes de silentio did for the ethical and envisage a teleological suspension of the
universal in which the goal of its realization is nevertheless 'not done away with'. There is indeed support for the idea in a late journal entry where, in a remarkable piece of conceptual acrobatics, Kierkegaard actually connects the idea of realizing the universal with being an exception: 'now at long last I see that the exceptional for me is what Christianity would call the universal, the normal, that Christianity insists on the single state and rather makes marriage the exception'.31 An obvious difficulty here, however, is that instead of providing the cohering link we are looking for, the idea of realizing the universal has here undergone such a radical change in its application that the problem only reappears as one about the inner coherence of the idea itself.
But let us not give up too soon. Another attempt can be made which preserves the idea's original sense. In the terms of William's concluding remarks, the priorities between 'mere' reconcilation with the universal and 'possession of the whole of the universal' could be reversed. Reconciliation with the universal after encountering the difficulties that present a person living in the category of spirit with compelling ethico-religious scruples against marrying can then be 'higher' ethico-religiously than such possession where the difficulties have not been encountered by someone living in that categor
y. This in turn will be higher than full possession of the universal in the case of one who fails to live in the category of spirit (for example, petit-bourgeois possession), though from the new point of view someone who fails to live in that category may well be thought incapable of possessing 'the whole of the universal'. Here the goal of realizing the universal is not done away with; it is merely reinterpreted within the requirements of the life of spirit, which thus takes priority, in the way that the particular individual does, for the first time explicitly, in Fear and Trembling. Indeed the position as outlined begins to look not unlike a simple reformulation of Fear and Trembling's 'paradoxical' hypothesis. 'Spirit' now becomes the structural pivot that bears the whole pseudonymous structure from the ethical to the ethico-religious. Or maybe 'choice of self' is that pivot, or it could be the idea of that self's 'eternal validity', or even 'revelation' of the self, in Either/Or's case a revelation to man and in the case of the subsequent works first of all to God.
Is this stretching things too far? Perhaps. The proposed normative basis does seem rather too abstract to provide a hinge strong enough to support the development which ends in Kierkegaard's own exhaustive either/or. If, for example, revelation were indeed the normative hinge, it is hard to unite William's notion of transparent ethical accountability with Kierkegaard's inward turn to transparency before God, just as hard as to unite the idea of realizing the universal in William's sense with that of realizing it through being an exception. In both cases we are buying coherence only at the cost of new incoherence lurking under a homonym. The same applies to the changing content in concepts like choice of self and even of 'eternal validity'. If we resort to too impoverished and abstract a structural axis, the door (the production as a whole) begins to turn the hinge and the door itself is left swinging in the wind. In that case its movements will be prone to explanation in terms of all sorts of factors external to the structure itself and the