On Søren Kierkegaard

Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time

Edward F. Mooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351913751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Tracing a path through Kierkegaard's writings, this book brings the reader into close contact with the texts and purposes of this remarkable 19th century Danish writer and thinker. Kierkegaard writes in a number of voices and registers: as a sharp observer and critic of Danish culture, or as a moral psychologist, and as a writer concerned to evoke the religious way of life of Socrates, Abraham, or a Christian exemplar. In developing these themes, Mooney sketches Kierkegaard's Socratic vocation, gives a close reading of several central texts, and traces 'The Ethical Sublime' as a recurrent theme. He unfolds an affirmative relationship between philosophy and theology and the potentialities for a religiousness that defies dogmatic creeds, secular chauvinisms, and restrictive philosophies.

PART ONE
Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom

It’s not uncommon that one hears people say . . .
that a light shines over the Christian world,
while darkness broods over paganism.

[Yet] every single deep thinker . . .
becomes young again through the eternal youth of the Greeks.

– Fear and Trembling

the deep truth in Socratic ignorance–
truly to forsake . . . all prying knowledge.

– Papers, 1846

The only analogy I have
for what I am doing
is Socrates.

– The Moment, 1854

CHAPTER ONE
A New Socrates:
The Gadfly in Copenhagen

The other day I told you about an idea for a Faust,
now I feel it was myself I was describing.
–Papers, 1836-7

by bringing poetized personalities
who say I into the centre … ,
contemporaries once more [can] hear an I,
a personal I, speak.
– Papers, 1847

Sketching Life

Gathering Possibilities

In the late 1830s, early in his writing career, Kierkegaard experiments with sketches of Faust in search of knowledge. He makes sketches of other fable-like figures, sketches of the Wandering Jew in search of home, of the prankster Til Eulenspiegel in search of laughs, the Master Thief in love with surreptitious gain – or perhaps in love with lawlessness itself, and of Don Juan in search of woman.¹ These sketches might have been partial self-portraits, or explorations of trajectories his life might assume. They were also experiments in writing, but writing, for Kierkegaard, was always a way of questioning and consolidating what he felt to be the enigma of his existence.

Later we get sketches of Socrates, as if Kierkegaard were experimenting with the idea of taking on a Socratic mantle. This would be a Socrates who might even carry over traits from Faust, the Wandering Jew, Eulenspiegel, Don Juan, or the Master Thief. We’d sense a Socrates in relentless search for knowledge, yet failing, and passing off his futile seeking as a virtue (a kind of Faust); a Socrates who could seem rootless and alien to those who took his piety to be impious (a Wandering Jew);² a Socrates who could be a subtle trickster who could launch a line of inquiry about your life that seemed both pertinent and impertinent and, by his logical slight of hand, drive you to exasperation (an Eulenspiegel). We’d sense a Socrates on the verge of seducing his interlocutors (Don Juan), perhaps into lawlessness, while claiming a humble ignorance (a Master Thief). This would also be a Socrates willing to die for a vocation that we can’t help but admire (a saint, or as some early Church Fathers thought, a prototype or avatar of Christ).³

As Kierkegaard’s career opens out in the 1840s, we have the sketches on which his lasting reputation as a writer will come to rest. They are less fable-like, yet they still lay out ways of life that we or he might aspire to attain – or ways of life that are cautionary tales: lives to avoid, that drift aimlessly, hopelessly, or that have a demonic drive. These narrative sketches – like fairy tales, operas, comedies, or scripture – show possibilities of a range of emotion or passion, a range of various attunement, attitude, or mood, a range of strength or weakness of character.

In Either/Or, his first great work after his dissertation, Kierkegaard composes voices from a decidedly amoral, aesthetic way of life. We have the voyeuristic stalker of “The Seducer’s Diary,” and then the infamous Don Giovanni, the seducer in Mozart’s opera. Either/Or is a massive compendium of texts, and presents the expected answer to a seducer’s life in the staid ethical voice of an apparently happily married and well-employed Judge Wilhelm. From the title, Either/Or, we know these sketches of contrasting ways of life present life-possibilities that readers should take to heart. They are literary experiments, but not only that. They bear down on us existentially.

The gallery of wonderful, strange, and frightening portraits continues to expand through Kierkegaard’s prodigious authorship. In Fear and Trembling, we find the Biblical Abraham treated, in part, as a template through which fables of a religious or irreligious life could be projected. Still further on, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard creates a stock figure for ridicule, the enthusiastic assistant professor, floating in abstractions. In Stages on Life’s Way, we discover an array of characters gathered in a discussion modeled, in part, on Plato’s Symposium, where speakers talk of love, and toward the end, perhaps enact it.

We’re given an ever-expanding portfolio of sketches of a soul, or of a creature’s flailing search for soul, or of creatures defiantly rejecting the soul they might become. We have, in fact, an array of portfolios, for Kierkegaard distributes his work among various intermediaries, pseudonyms, or mock-authors, with names like Johannes de silentio, Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, and half a dozen others.⁴ This ever-expanding circus of contrasting voices speak and bespeak an array of life-possibilities that does nothing to foreclose the dizzying possibility of a never-to-be-ended search. Kierkegaard is not a writer to give us a flat, finished sketch of the most desirable or worthy life – and leave it at that.

Many of Kierkegaard’s sketches are strangely self-questioning. The famous Concluding Unscientific (or Unscholarly) Postscript looks like a scholarly tome designed to mock scholarly tomes. John of silence, the putative author of Fear and Trembling, is anything but silent. Johannes Climacus, John the Climber (or John Ladder), the designated author of Postscript, seems to ascend towards ever-improved views of religiousness or piety, but he also seems to climb down into giddy irony and humor.⁵ Can that be part of piety? Quick wit and humor is hardly the mood or attunement that Anti-Climacus inhabits in Sickness Unto Death, concerned as it is with modes of despair. And that landmark double book, Either/Or, may not in fact present a crucial choice between an “either” and an “or,” but instead present a subtle neither-nor.

These endless instabilities provoke and puzzle us. Which is fundamental, humor or despair? Who is fundamental, Socrates or Christ? Are Kierkegaard’s works excessively intellectual or essentially anti-intellectual? Are we to admire or condemn Abraham? Is Climacus earnest or ironical? If we probe these instabilities, they can quickly become dizzying, prompting us to grasp for a steadying interpretative equilibrium, or perhaps prompting us to forego stability, to venture living without it, yet not thereby succumbing to despair. We can find ourselves shifting from the question of restoring interpretative stability in our understanding of how these issues play out for Kierkegaard – toward a focus on stability or disruption as we try to live these issues out, find them play out, in our own experience.

The enigmas of the authorship seem unmasterable, and not because Kierkegaard lacks the talent to bring his writing to a rounded and satisfying closure. The endlessly coiling enigmas reproduce a deep fact of human existence, its lack of rounded closure. Kierkegaard engages us in an irresistibly fascinating rehearsal of the coiling instabilities in figures like Faust or Abraham or the seducer in Either/Or. These figures shadow fascinating allures and instabilities in Kierkegaard’s life as well, as we glimpse segments of it in his Journals and Papers. And these fascinations in turn activate a shadow of ourselves.

As we live out in our own imagination the allures and instabilities that Kierkegaard exhibits, we become responsive to those trajectories of becoming that are intimately our own. This triggers a deviation – really, an uncanny complication – in our course. As we allow Kierkegaard to engage us existentially, scholarly Kierkegaardinterpretation becomes interlaced with the intimacies of self-examination. By design, it seems, Kierkegaard begins to recede as an objective problem for scholarly inquiry or accurate exposition. I came to his text to learn “about Kierkegaard,” about what he knew – only to hear him ask, almost impertinently, what I know (if anything) about my life. I enter the unnerving shift from reading him to being read. I’m no longer preparing an exposition that can tutor the uninitiated in the puzzles he presents. I’m his patient, as it were, listening for counsel, immersed in the puzzle of my existence (and resistance). I’m prepared to be mentored by the mysteries and powers of the text.

To let Kierkegaard deal with us is like letting Socrates draw out something unexpected from our lives, helping us to be who we are and who we could become. Socrates is not a well-schooled expert in some technical field whose “knowledge” could be transcribed in a manual. He has no knowledge of that sort to convey, and so calls himself “ignorant.” His wisdom is that he knows that he knows nothing of the sort. He’s a midwife, bringing whomever he encounters to birth, or toward a birth. He’s a guide through the pain and joy and danger of intimate transformation, someone there to help. Kierkegaard describes his own task as Socratic, taking away platitudes or slogans in the course of giving readers, one by one, an independence, bringing to birth the singularities they are. He mentors and reads us – in the interest of setting free.

As someone who will recount the landscape and particular features of Kierkegaard’s writing, I must be a kind of tutor, untangling the ins and outs of the texts. That’s a scholarly task. But I also have to evoke the way that Kierkegaard mentors me – or you. That’s an unscholarly, unscientific task, and not at all a postscript to his ventures (or to mine). Looking at texts becomes musing on the self or soul not only of Socrates, say, or of a citizen he accosts, or of Kierkegaard, or of a soul he lays bare in writing. It becomes musing on the self or soul of an intimate acquaintance. I muse the labyrinths of my soul. He lures me into his world – to let me see how it’s mine, as well. And like the best of mentors, he then steps aside to send me on my way.

Encountering the Soul

Despite the great variety of his texts and their destabilizing enigmas, Kierkegaard pursues a disarmingly simple question. It’s the ancient Greek question: “What makes for a good life, or at least a better life, life as it was meant to be (if it yet can mean at all)?”

We seek a satisfying life responsive to what we are, including especially our needs and aspirations and what might answer them. Following Plato, we might think of virtues or excellences that, when incorporated in our lives, would make them more worthy: honor or courage, moderation or justice might be such strengths. Or from a more recent cultural base, we might think of solidarity or creative initiative, of service or hard work or honesty. A Christian might reserve a place for hope or charity or worship, and a Buddhist might seek a release from willfulness that saves a place for flowering compassion.

Searching for virtues to consolidate a better life would be one way to respond to the question Kierkegaard presents, but consolidation might require something else, perhaps a mood, tonality or attitude. We might seek a serenity, a life of less uncertainty, one with greater promise to keep despair or emptiness at bay; or seek a subtle openness to our inescapable and grounding dependencies on others.⁶ Yet again, it might seem that we should seek not exactly virtue, or an apt attuning mood, but the right modulation, quality, or intensity of our passions. We’d seek to feel things more deeply, or to damp down excitements, or to align passions with a community or landscape or with new ways of life alien to parents, strange to the friends of our youth. Of course, moods, virtues, and passions are not entirely separate consolidators of a life. They’re interlocked in those ways of life we can admire and make our own.

The search for a confluence of virtues, passions, and attunements might just be the best picture we can ever get of the soul or self, what we might call the animating center of a life. The human task would be to seek such soul or self, to trace unfolding moods, passions and excellences that we especially care about as an unfolding story that might be ours, and to live out the emerging narratives and paths that they delineate.

Kierkegaard’s journeys through ways of life are his search for self, for the vital core of the moods, virtues, and passions that give life. This makes his writing a spiritual discipline in the tradition Martha Nussbaum calls the Stoic “therapy of desire” and what Kierkegaard might call a therapy of passions.⁷ Love of wisdom becomes askesis, a purifying moral exercise. In Rick Furtak’s phrase, it’s a “quest for emotional integrity.”⁸ These Kierkegaardian-Socratic exercises trace paths he can take to heart (as well as other paths that he will di...