Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  make by using the word – still recognizably moral, its telos, or 'excellence', the formation of a genuinely social intention, while Nietzsche's is not that. The two notions have different metaphysical structures. That the metaphysical frameworks differ means that most seeming parallels are at bottom illusory. Thus Nietzsche's recommendation that one 'avoid chance and outside stimuli, a kind of walling oneself in belongs among the foremost instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy',22 although sounding rather like Religiousness A, is, where it counts, totally different. In Kierkegaard one does not guard oneself against chance and outside stimuli but rises to a position where they simply bounce off.

  Dialogue? Had Nietzsche read Kierkegaard he might certainly have included him in his list of 'historical' philosophers, that is to say, those who write themselves into their times, as against the 'unhistorical' philosophers, whose 'thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of a soul', or in whose work 'there is nothing … that would make a novel, no crises, no catastrophes or death-scenes', and whose thinking is therefore 'not at the same time an involuntary biography of a soul'.23 In Kierkegaard, indeed, he might have found someone whose thinking was at the same time a voluntary biography of a soul. Kierkegaard, for his part, would surely have found quite a lot to agree with in Nietzsche. But then Kierkegaard, as he admitted, tended to read other authors only to get something out of them for himself. His readings were bent in his own direction, unless of course he was already disposed to disagree with them, in which case he would bend them the other way. Maybe that is what we all do, as also in the case of this essay. I feel sure Kierkegaard would have recognized in Nietzsche a genuinely moral thinker. Indeed Nietzsche has much more to say about morality than does Kierkegaard, just as Kierkegaard has much more to say about religiousness, and perhaps also the powers of deception, which later he seems clearer about than Nietzsche. But as I see it, there is no denying, and no amount of strategically selective 'dialoguing' should obscure the fact, that these are thinkers with fundamentally very different ideas about what the new world needs. Not one via positiva. Possibly two in parallel. But not so that you can have a foot in each.

  Kierkegaard was early criticized by conservative theologians for taking the heart out of religion, its cordiality, or warmth; he spoke not of comfort and consolation but only of suffering and sacrifice. Cultural radicals, the liberals of the time, on the other hand, seeing in the hard thoughts on religion a dramatic provocation of tradition, or even a reason to discount religion altogether, embraced him for possessing precisely those democratic virtues Nietzsche's later critics thought the latter lacked. To them Kierkegaard's whole performance seemed in tune with the new sense of the individual's release from confining authority and tradition. However, just as with Nietzsche, we can say that here, too, both the early opponents and the late adherents miss the point. Kierkegaard's point is that religion and morality cannot be of our own devising. If the world does harbour the resources needed for a positive revaluing of values, these values cannot be created by man. To accept that there is a moral and/or a religious aspect, these aspects have to be encountered, their challenges

  met. We cannot assume their purpose is to cater to our all too human needs. As Kierkegaard says in his dissertation, the world must then be confronted both as a gift and a task. Certainly, Nietzsche might well say the same. But the task for Nietzsche, apart from breaking the chains, would be to devise something with the means at our disposal, becoming a glorious exemplar whose exemplariness first begins with and depends on the appreciation of others. For Kierkegaard the tasks are already there all around us. Our all too human ethics already points them out to us. Revaluing these values consists in seeing them in a new light, less pretentiously, less sentimentally, from a point of view upon the world that transcends hope, fear and pity.

  * * *

  17

  DECISIVELY DISCONNECTED

  What are texts but inscriptions on paper, on a tablet, a screen or whatever? As a way of attending to the scruples of another kind of readership, though at the risk of parody, let me expand on my reflections in the introduction to Part II on Either/Or as both epitaph and epigram. A little fancifully perhaps but only in order to put the matter in relief.

  I said that the distance between an epigram over despised contemporaries and an epigraph over a whole cultural era is already considerable. In the case of Either/Or it is the distance between what Kierkegaard at least said he expected and what MacIntyre at least says was what happened. But instead of 'epigram' read 'telegram'. Yes, Either/Or was a telegram delivered in an envelope to 'her', for whose sake it was written. She was to be shocked out of her misery through being made to despise the author for publishing something so scandalous. But also, as indicated in Chapter 7, Regine was to be given to understand that there are conditions whereby some people specially prone to scruples of a spiritual kind are exempted from marrying. But what of the work as a whole? Is it not simply this message delivered in a massive envelope scribbled over with aphorisms, essays, a theatre review, letters and a sermon, things that have little if anything directly to do with the message itself and to be thrown away once the message is received, but perhaps picked up again by a by-passer who reads it with no idea of its origins or purpose? The by-passer reads it as recording the end of a cultural epoch.

  This is how some see it. What Kierkegaard himself intended with the text is one thing, and it is confined to his inner circle. What those outside the immediate circle do with the envelope, or even the telegram itself if they find it, is another. With regard to what the text really means, the author has nothing to say that any reader cannot also say. True meanings of texts are matters for infinite deferral. They are least of all matters of what the author had in mind when writing, or of what was avowedly intended with them at the time. Look only at the pseudonymity. Here is proof positive of Kierkegaard's own allegiance to this principle. It is what makes him so topical today. That he has no privileged status in the task of interpretation is stressed by his constant dodging away from his texts, ducking responsibility for them, peering over our shoulders to look at them just as we do. In his diversity he is a near perfect example of the Lyotard node-constituted self that materializes only in some specific authorial guise and

  conjuncture (of pen, ink, paper and inspiration). What biographical events join the various conjunctures is of no moment; all we have and all we need is there in the text, a text which lies there awaiting whatever renoding occurs in its ephemeral meeting with a reader. That's all there is to Kierkegaard too, for what interest have we in him other than as a writer? If we are fascinated by the biography, well and good, but don't let that fascination interfere with the free marketing of the test. Yes, we may say that behind the text there was something else, another set of nodes, an aspiring writer node, a social outcast mode, a social-sniper mode, and finally a Church-bashing, self-proclaimed martyr node, and so on. But all of these are biographical facts from a time long past, a life of conflict if not resolved at least long forgotten. Yes, everything we need is there on the surface, and whatever we make of it is there.

  Everything? Well, it has to be admitted that some allusions will have eroded, making it harder to make sense of some of the text. Time takes its toll on background knowledge, and then there's the terminology, the assumptions and beliefs – so some hermeneutic bridge-building of the kind attempted here in Chapter 7 may be needed. Not in order to reach back to Kierkegaard himself of course, to the lost nodes of selfhood that were his own attachment to his texts, but to be able to say that the texts are really before us.

  Some will deny the need even of this. If we anchor the text that securely in the past, don't we begin to risk losing it altogether? If the text is occasionally obtuse, why not just allow ourselves a little latitude, a little drifting down the stream of cultural time? The background can be refurbished after, or, where beyond repair, replaced, the terminology freshened up, the insights updated, the whole thing salvaged and burnished for curre
nt use. The past after all is an island from which we have escaped.

  Let me propose another picture based on what Kierkegaard himself has said. In notes for a lecture series he never gave (though the plan to do so suggests a philosophical intention) on 'Den ethiske og den Ethisk-Religieuse Meddelelses Dialektik' ('The Ethics and the Dialectic of Ethico-Religious Imparting') Kierkegaard says that 'on thinking of what it is to impart something, four things come immediately to mind: the object, the imparter, the receiver, and what is imparted [Gjenstanden, Meddeleren, Modtageren, Meddelelsen]'.1 We note that there is no provision made for a fifth component: the text. Where the object or, let us say, 'topic' is the existing subject's way of grasping and coping with his or her own life, this being what a Meddelelse, an imparting, is paradigmatically concerned with, we have no common reference, no object in an ordinary sense. Being 'existential', such 'communication' differs from that on topics about which people can advise one another on this or that, discuss and agree on how to deal with an identifiable problem, or give each other general rules or prescriptions for doing so. To be imparted, an existential matter requires something like a personal boost on the part of the recipient (Modtageren), something more than the recognition and acceptance of some such rule. So the imparter (Meddeleren), someone who has something to impart, is in some degree a

  teacher but realizes that the lesson can only be learned by the recipient catching on, not by being instructed, corrected, re-instructed, and so on.2 The message itself, the teaching, will be something that the learner should be in a position to grasp provided only the obstacles to doing so are removed, or at least presented to the learner in a way that can lead to the learner seeing them for what they are, namely obstacles, wrong avenues, convenient defences, or whatever else makes them get in the way of the truth as it can be for the individual.

  For recipients, or even just readers, like us, there are also the obstacles of distance, lack of background, difference in vocabulary. What Climacus calls an indirect Meddelese, best translated 'indirect imparting' rather than 'indirect communication', occurs successfully only in the case where all obstacles are removed. An indirect imparting is not just the picking up of a text with no relation to what its author intended. If it were, there would be no relation at all to the teacher and consequently no reason then to describe the relation as indirect. Nor, then, is there any reason to suppose that imparting indirectly means letting the leaves fly loose to be gathered and read in just any way. We do not locate texts merely by finding sheets of paper on which words that we understand are written. Texts are found when, the obstacles to locating the teaching (including our own lack of preparation for receiving it) being removed, we are in a position to grasp the intended effect. The indirect imparter is someone who has some idea of where to look for the truth and of the ways in which, if found, it should manifest itself. It is in so far as we can say that this idea is embodied in the text, which is to say, it is an essential part of it, that there is no stage where Kierkegaard's four components in the imparting of ethico-religious truth would permit the emergence of a fifth, the mere text.

  * * *

  NOTES

  Part I: Introduction

  1 Gordon Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001, p. 96: 'On the grand scale, it may be that Kierkegaard measures out as a relatively minor philosopher, but he was non pareil as a moral phenomenologist.'

  2 Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard's Religious Psychology, London/New York: Routledge, 1995, p. xv.

  3 For instance, Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

  4 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, X 2 A 130.

  5 Ibid., A 150.

  1 Climacus among the philosophers

  This is a revised version of a paper given to an invited symposium at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association on 27 March 1998. I would like especially to thank the official commentator, Frederick Neuhouser, for his excellently clarifying remarks, Henry Allison for his encouraging and helpful comments from the floor, Ed Mooney for constructive questions in correspondence, and Camilla Serck-Hanssen for valuable comments on the final draft.

  1 James Conant, 'Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense', in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam (eds), Pursuits of Reason, Lubbock, TX: Texas Technical University Press, 1993, pp. 207, 223' n. 82. Conant has in several places drawn parallels between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in respect of themes raised in the present essay. See, for example, James Conant, 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?', in Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989; 'Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for their Work as Authors', in Timothy Tessin and Marion von der Ruhr (eds), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief', New York, St Martin's Press, 1995; and 'Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility', in D. Z. Philipps (ed.), Morality and Religion, New York: St Martin's Press, 1996.

  2 Henry E. Allison, 'Christianity and Nonsense', The Review of Metaphysics, 20, 3, 1967, reprinted in Josiah Thompson (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1972. References in the text are to the latter. Allison is briefly acknowledged by Conant in 'Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense', p. 223, n. 82.

  3 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p.180. Allison quotes Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941. Swenson/Lowrie translate this as 'to realize the truth' (p. 175) (page references to the translation henceforth in parentheses).

  4 Stephen Mulhall, Faith and Reason, London, Duckworth, 1994, p. 50.

  5 SKS 7, p. 516 (504).

  6 Ibid., p. 516 (504). Swenson/Lowrie: 'for precisely the understanding will discern that it is nonsense'.

  7 Ibid., p. 516 (504).

  8 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78,X 1 A 556. Søren Kierkegaard,Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p. 400. References to this translation will be given in parentheses.

  9 SKS 7, p. 528 (515).

  10 Ibid., p. 527 (514). Swenson/Lowrie overtranslate 'Projekt' as 'thought-project', which, although it is Climacus's term ('Tanke-Projekt') in Fragments for the hypothesis that truth must be learned by paradoxical example, fails to convey the sense here that Christianity itself is a project, a 'scheme' of God's, not ours.

  11 Ibid., p. 528 (515). Swenson/Lowrie: 'apparently well known' and 'absolutely strange'.

  12 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. (with intro. and notes) by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson 1934), New York: Harper and Brothers/Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 58 fn.

  13 Ibid., p. 55.

  14 SKS 7, p. 521 (508).

  15 Ibid., p. 180 (176). Swenson/Lowrie has: 'This unity is realized in the moment of passion.'

  16 Ibid. (emphasis added).

  17 The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989, p. 60.

  18 Kierkegaard makes it clear in Papirer X, 6 B 79 (459) (1850) that Anti-Climacus inherits Climacus's views though to lend them a new focus.

  19 See Kant, Religion within the Limits, p. 54.

  20 Conant, 'Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense', p. 215.

  21 Papirer X, 6 B 79 (459). The passage goes on to say that the absurdity of the Paradox is the negative side of the frame o
f mind properly characterized as 'faith: 'The absurd rounds off the sphere of faith, which is a sphere unto itself.' It 'throws light on faith negatively'. The entry was made in 1850 (four years after Postscript). Among the pronouncements Kierkegaard puts into the mouth of his later pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, is the following: 'The absurd is not simply the absurd or absurdities indiscriminately … the absurd is a category … the negative criterion of the divine … the absurd marks off the sphere of faith, a sphere unto itself, negatively. … it is the category of courage and enthusiasm … [there is] nothing at all daunting about it …'