Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood

The Art of Subjectivity

Peder Jothen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317109204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Religious Art

In the digital world, Kierkegaard's thought is valuable in thinking about aesthetics as a component of human development, both including but moving beyond the religious context as its primary center of meaning. Seeing human formation as interrelated with aesthetics makes art a vital dimension of human existence. Contributing to the debate about Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic, Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood argues that Kierkegaard's primary concern is to provocatively explore how a self becomes Christian, with aesthetics being a vital dimension for such self-formation. At a broader level, Peder Jothen also focuses on the role, authority, and meaning of aesthetic expression within religious thought generally and Christianity in particular.

Chapter 1
Kierkegaard’s Ambiguous Aesthetics

I do not comprehend how the artist would maintain his calm, that he would not notice Christ’s displeasure, would not throw it all out, brushes and paints, far, far away, just as Judas did with the thirty pieces of silver, because he suddenly understood that Christ has required only imitators, that the one who here on earth lived in poverty and lowliness, without a place where he could lay his head ….¹

Anti-Climacus,

Practice in Christianity

In other words, music is the demonic. In elemental sensuous-erotic originality, music has its absolute theme.²

A,

Either/Or I

Poetry and art have been called an anticipation of the eternal. If one wants to call them that, one must nevertheless be aware that poetry and art are not essentially related to an existing person, since the contemplation of poetry and art, “joy over the beautiful,” is disinterested, and the observer is contemplatively outside himself qua existing person.³

Climacus,

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

In Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum argues that one cannot separate literary form from philosophical content when making and interpreting truth claims, especially those rooted in emotional experience. Weaving together aesthetic style and philosophical argumentation, she states, “literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content—an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth.”⁴ One must then pay attention to the manner in which an argument develops because form and content are deeply intertwined, requiring attention to both in order to fully understand a claim.

I begin with this view of the braidedness of form and content because it is a particularly apropos concept through which to engage Kierkegaard’s conception of the aesthetic. As Eric Ziolkowski recognizes, Kierkegaard was a “literary artist, albeit one whose art served not only aesthetic but also philosophical, ethical, theological, and ultimately religious purposes.”⁵ Consequently, any attempt at explicating his aesthetic must pay attention to the fact that his aesthetic style is deeply ingrained within his authorial intentions. Indeed, as I argue, his aesthetics is always intertwined with becoming a Christian.

This relationship makes clarifying Kierkegaard’s aesthetic a challenge, to say the least. For example, he has no specific set of lectures (like Hegel) or texts (like Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement) that develop a conception of the aesthetic as a system of artistic evaluation or judgment.⁶ He also does not offer a consistent use of the term, using “aesthetic” (den æthetiske) in at least two different ways. Most famously, it is the first and/or lowest of his three stages of existence, as a way a self relates to the world from an aesthetic perspective. Second, the authorship also uses the term in conjunction with a concept such as “poeticize” (digtning) that describes the act of becoming a self as a creative, and thus an aesthetic, act. Here, aesthetics beckons back to poiesis, a Greek work meaning “production,” thereby underscoring a deep ontological intention within his aesthetics. Yet, beyond these terms, Kierkegaard playfully and impishly incorporates a variety of aesthetic styles throughout his thought. He uses a cornucopia of aesthetic communication techniques, including narratives, dialogues, and thought-experiments, that call the reader to navigate a stylistic labyrinth of aesthetically rich concerns and argumentative forms when tackling the masterful provocation that is his authorship. These forms are then literary acts of provocation that lead a reader into a deeper self-reflection regarding one’s existence as a result.

Aesthetics then relates deeply to how Kierkegaard conceives of his authorship. For instance, he claims at one point that the whole authorship has a poetic intention at its roots, seen in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, written in 1848 but published posthumously in 1859. Yet, in The Point of View, he also describes a religious awakening that “gripped me far more deeply and in religious impatience annihilated in a certain sense what I have become, a poet.”⁷ But as a result, his authorship became centrally rooted in a religious task, rather than an artistic one. And explicating this tension between artistic endeavors and the religious life (and Christianity in particular), is then an important dynamic within his thought. For instance, Works of Love (1847) unleashes a number of critical barbs at any distinction between erotic and Christian poetry, thereby suggesting the near impossibility of the latter. Likewise, works such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), authored under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, and Practice in Christianity (1850), authored by Anti-Climacus, as well as his journals, offer critical assessments of the value of art within human life. In these texts, a life that cares about sensuality, beauty, and artistic creativity rubs up against the singularity of purpose inherent within a life devoted to living rightly with God. All of this suggests that making sense of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic thought is of a vital importance to making sense of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. It also, as Nussbaum reminds us, helps us appreciate the linkage between form and content that energizes his thought..

As such, to develop the Kierkegaardian aesthetic requires an appreciation of its ambiguity and complexity. This ambiguity, in part, reflects this diversity of terminological definitions and uses of the aesthetic within his authorship. Amidst this thicket, this chapter will strive to make sense of Kierkegaard’s ambiguous aesthetic, trying to avoid either an over-specification or under-specification of the concept. To do so, I suggest the idea of “fragment” as the means to enter into the richness that the term offers. At the end of Philosophical Fragments, Climacus writes “how shall we ever manage to begin?,” thereby reminding the reader of the difficulty of thinking about Christian faith, which must be lived to be best understood.⁸ Nonetheless, Climacus endeavors to develop a smuler (a “fragment” or “crumb”) of truth in order to challenge a reader to think about the ideas through which they exist in the world. Though only in the act of a reader’s response to a call to faith does the fragment become substantive, as a fragment, ever lacking a unified cognizable whole or system of truth, it provides a limited means to reflect on the inadequacy of philosophizing and theologizing amidst the reality that humans are living, acting, spiritual creatures.

I suggest that there are four “fragments” within Kierkegaard’s aesthetic. These fragments are not part of a whole, unified idea of the aesthetic, that when combined, creates a complete Kierkegaardian aesthetic system. Instead, in the spirit of Philosophical Fragments, each fragment is only one manner or way that the aesthetic can be understood as a dimension within human development. And as a frame, these fragments open up an interpretive trajectory to my argument that roots Kierkegaard’s aesthetic as an ontological tactic, an idea that correlates with De Certeau’s notion of “tactic.” Here, a tactic is “an art of the weak.”⁹ De Certeau uses the term to describe how marginalized groups resist the power of a dominant culture, a social location that relates well to Kierkegaard’s self perception. For instance, he writes from outside the dominant intellectual stream of his era (Hegelianism and Romanticism) and the Danish Lutheran ecclesial structure; he also is not tethered to an academic institution. Rather, he writes ‘without authority.’¹⁰ Thus, rather than a clearly conceptualized aesthetic style, he intentionally used a diversity of aesthetic tactics to critique the prevailing intellectual and religious ethos of his age as well as to provoke each reader to take responsibility for one’s selfhood.

Amidst this aesthetic muddiness, this chapter sketches out these four aesthetic fragments. In brief, the first fragment appraises Kierkegaard’s development of the aesthetic as a stage of existence, albeit the lowest of these ways of being in the world. A second fragment focuses on Kierkegaard’s judgment of art and beauty, especially in relationship to religion. The view here stresses how he opposes artistic expression as such expressions contradict the demands of Christian existence. A third fragment focuses on Kierkegaard’s literary style, explicating how a variety of literary styles directly and indirectly communicate Christian faith. The concern here is in exploring how his use of aphorisms, metaphors, poetry, irony, satire, and story-telling create a literary style. Finally, in a fourth fragment is the notion of “poetic” as an idea of human formation. Here, the self is itself an object of aesthetic production; it is about “living poetically” and Christian selfhood. What matters is not art per se, but producing oneself as a Christian. Each of these fragments thus has a lively and vivid coherence within its own fragmentary form; but these particular pieces are not part of a grand aesthetic scheme. Rather, they are each a provocative tactic which challenges a reader to reflect on one’s very being.

To understand his aesthetic in this fragmentary, tactical way bears interpretive fruit in that it affirms the connectedness between aesthetic form and ontological content in his thought. Without betraying the aesthetic as a vital theme, it helps disclose a deeply embedded foundational presupposition: human becoming. Each fragment offers its own spirited, independent, and cohesive whole that yet points a reader decisively to a deeper reflection upon how one exists as a self. The aesthetic then is intertwined with critique, provocation, and upbuilding, rhetorical and theological concepts that call a reader towards a deeper consciousness of the form and content of one’s being. These aesthetic fragments, used tactically, thus express a clear consistency: the call to become a Christian.

Fragment One: The Aesthetic as a Stage

Most likely, the primary Kierkegaardian aesthetic idea for many readers is the three stages (Stadier) of existence or existence-spheres (Existents-Spærer) that ground a self-existence relation: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.¹¹ As a tactic, the stages both provide a provocative act of self-reflection as well as an evaluative frame for a reader to reflect on how one relates to existence and God. Thus, the stages demand that a self take responsibility for how one relates oneself to the world in action, thought, choice, and desire as these elements shape one’s being. Of the stages, the aesthetic is the first and lowest stage; here, a self is not a self, as it lacks the self-consciousness of the demand to become a certain type of self through actualizing a higher ontological truth within one’s being (e.g. ethical or religious truth). Instead, the self either relates to existence in one of two ways: merely through natural desire and passion (ex. lust) without any connection to an ethical norm or a universal truth, or through imaginatively-held possibility, in which a self merely fantasizes about but never commits to an ethical structure such as marriage. In both forms of aesthetic action, a self exists merely in immediate possibility, lacking an existence in which a self is responsible to itself, others and God, because it lacks any thought-based mediated ontological possibility. It has no ethical norm or clarity about what it means to be a self, one that it can strive to embody within its existence. As a consequent, the self is not a self; it has no power over its activities. One exists in mere immediacy, a “fantasy-existence in esthetic passion” that lacks the self-consciousness and the passionate willfullness to become a responsible self.¹² It is a passive state, as one is led astray from the rigors of actuality and subjectivity by the imagination and passion as sensuous desire.

The prime example of the aesthetic self living through natural passion is Either/Or I (1843), written by A and edited by Victor Eremita. The Seducer’s Diary, written by Johannes and included in Either/Or I, offers the key development of the aesthetic stage as a largely imaginary, recollected existence. Stages on Life’s Way (1845) by William Afham, also discusses the stages, although he terms them “existence spheres” rather than stages. Likewise, the text Crisis in the Life of an Actress, which is about Johanne Luise Heiberg, the wife of the Danish poet Johan Ludvig Heiberg, contains an extensive discussion of the category of the aesthetic. Published in the newspaper The Fatherland in 1848, it was written by Inter et Inter.

To delve more deeply into the form of the aesthetic self rooted within natural passion requires focusing on “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic” from Either/Or I. Here, A pointedly affirms the aesthetic genius of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni and offers Don Juan up as the example par excellence of the natural, passionate self.¹³ The Don relates to existence merely out of lust and erotic, natural desire; he utterly lacks any self-awareness or concern about why he acts. Only immediate passion causes his actions, rather than any universal law or self-conscious choice. There is no self-reflection, but immediate sensual desire. Sensuousness is “power, life, movement, continual unrest, continual unrest, continual succession.”¹⁴ It is vitality and force rooted in sensual desire. A connects sensuousness with immediacy and the erotic, connoting desire as sexual, as there is a “sensuous-erotic principle,” ironically developed by Christianity.¹⁵ In order to affirm the vitality of the human desire for God, Christianity invented material, flesh-driven desire as its negation.

This form of natural desire as the erotic has three levels, all exemplified by characters from Mozart’s operas. The Page in Figaro exemplifies the first level. Rather than a particular object to desire, the Page’s desire is dreamlike, enmeshed with the romantic purity of desire itself. Papageno in The Magic Flute exemplifies the second level. Desire here is about endlessly seeking objects to desire, rather than seeking satiation. The Don exemplifies the third level. As the immediate unity of the previous stages, desire here fully desires an object in its particularity, while yet combining the desire of a partic...