Kierkegaard and Philosophical Eros

Between Ironic Reflection and Aesthetic Meaning

Ulrika Carlsson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350133730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In a bold new argument, Ulrika Carlsson grasps hold of the figure of Eros that haunts Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony, and for the first time, uses it as key to interpret that text and his second book, Either/Or. According to Carlsson, Kierkegaard adopts Plato's idea of Eros as the fundamental force that drives humans in all their pursuits. For him, every existential stance-every way of living and relating to the outside world-is at heart a way of loving. By intensely examining Kierkegaard's erotic language, she also challenges the theory that the philosopher's first two books have little common ground and reveals that they are in fact intimately connected by the central and explicit topic of love. In this text suitable for both students and the Kierkegaard specialist, Carlsson claims that despite long-held beliefs about the disparity of his early work, his first two books both relate to love and Part I of Either/Or should be treated as the sequel to The Concept of Irony.

1

The Temptation to Know

In the first proper essay of Either/Or’s first volume, Kierkegaard’s unnamed fictional author—dubbed “A” by the fictional editor—treats of what he terms “the musical-erotic.” Mozart’s Don Giovanni, he contends, is the greatest musical work ever produced—indeed the greatest musical work possible, since it expresses the ultimate idea that music is capable of expressing: the idea of sensuous desire.¹ Its hero embodies this desire, which propels him forward on an endless series of seductions. His quest is not for true love in a lifelong relationship, but for momentary satisfaction.

That essay is followed by an apparently unrelated treatise on tragedy, after which “A” returns to the topic of seduction, now from the perspective of the seduced. It is with that text, “Shadowgraphs,” that our joint reading of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony and Etiher/Or begins. As “A” closes his discussion of the three female characters who have each fallen prey to a seducer, he invokes snakebite:

And now in parting we shall unite these three women betrothed to sorrow; we shall have them embrace one another in the harmony of sorrow [. . .] for only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.²

Here the seducer is likened to a snake; his deception is understood as a painful and poisonous snakebite. The suffering that results from such deception is a particular kind or aspect of unhappy love—what “A” calls “reflective sorrow.”

The figure of the snake is bound to bring to mind the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. The first fallen woman, the first lover of truth, is indeed a prototype for A’s three Shadowgraphs. Like her, they see themselves as innocent with regard to the sin that has been committed. “The snake tempted me, and I ate,” is Eve’s simple answer to God’s question why she tried the fruit from the tree of knowledge. As she is expelled from the Garden and cursed with the fate of bearing children in pain, and being always dependent on her husband, so too Marie, Elvira, and Gretchen suffer the terrible repercussions of being seduced: a private shameful grief as well as a loss of trust, a loss of innocence.

Yet the personage most directly referenced by A’s metaphor is not Eve but Alcibiades, who mentions snakebite in his speech in Plato’s Symposium. That, in turn, is a reference to Philoctetes, a tragic figure in Greek mythology and the protagonist of an eponymous play by Sophocles. Philoctetes found himself alone on an island during the Trojan War, abandoned by his fellow soldiers who could not bear his cries of pain and the smell of his infected snakebite wound. Speaking to a group of intimates, Alcibiades draws out what he takes to be the moral of his story:

you know what people say about snakebite—that you’ll only talk about it with your fellow victims: only they will understand the pain and forgive you for all the things it made you do. Well, something much more painful than a snake has bitten me in my most sensitive part—I mean my heart, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, which has been struck and bitten by philosophy, whose grip on young and eager souls is much more vicious than a viper’s and makes them do the most amazing things.³

What has bitten Alcibiades is philosophy as practiced by Socrates; Socrates who, for all the assembled amateur intellectuals, personifies the pursuit of wisdom. It follows from the epistemological principle that Alcibiades extracts from the story of Philoctetes that he considers the other symposiasts his fellow victims, fellow sufferers of a bite more painful than a snake’s.

“Shadowgraphs” is one of the three texts in Either/Or that are ostensibly lectures delivered before the “Symparanekromenoi”—the “Fellowship of the Dead” or “Society of Buried Lives.” This, we gather, is a sort of philosophical working group for the study of grief, tragedy, and unhappiness. Yet their approach to their subject matter is not disinterested scholarship, for the Symparanekromenoi are also said to sympathize with grievers. In fact, it seems that their study of grief is itself a way of grieving, since—so “A” claims—grief can be known only by acquaintance. Sympathy—co-suffering—is not a mere accompaniment to the Symparanekromenoi’s inquiry, but the very method of that inquiry. For sorrow, “A” says, “sneaks about in the world in great secrecy, and only a person with sympathy for it is able to sense its presence.”⁴ And the Symparanekromenoi is up to this task, being “a society that knows but one passion, namely sympathy with sorrow’s secret.”⁵

It follows that the Symparanekromenoi must be quite similar to the Shadowgraph women—at a minimum, they must share their capacity for grief. And although it is natural to think that the Symparanekromenoi achieve a theoretical understanding of grief unavailable to the Shadowgraphs themselves, the members of both groups live a life of the mind. The Shadowgraphs’ grief leads them to study themselves. Theirs is, after all, a reflective sorrow: its distinctive symptoms are introversion and self-reflection. As the pain of the snake’s bite calls its victim’s full attention to itself, the victim turns away from the world into herself, immersing herself in her pain, burying herself in herself.

The guests in Plato’s Symposium also form a society, a study group, even if, as far as we know, they hold only this one meeting. Friends have gathered at the home of Agathon; together they contemplate the god of love. Literally, symposiasts are people who drink together, but intellectual discussion was a central feature of any Greek symposium. Whether or not there is truth in wine, it c ertainly is conducive to lively conversation. In addition to their intellectual aim, ancient Greek symposia were also romantic events, occasions to flirt and seduce. This particular symposium, devoted to Eros, is then self-reflexive: it treats in theory what would normally be practiced in it. Or maybe the participants reflect theoretically on a phenomenon they at the same time practice. Rather than replace practice with theory, this particular symposium is perhaps making love by means of theoretical inquiry. For philosophia is a love in its own right, the love of wisdom. To philosophize about love is therefore also to philosophize about philosophy. In fact, if Alcibiades is right, the love of wisdom driving each guest’s speech is at the same time a love of the person who initiated him into philosophy. They have all been bitten by the same beast, according to Alcibiades, are all haunted by the same demon: “He has deceived us all.”⁶ Deception is as much a preoccupation of Alcibiades’ speech as it is of “Shadowgraphs.” Reflective sorrow is a response to deception, and seducers like Don Juan are always also deceivers, “A” says, even as they are not reflective enough to be able to lie or intentionally mislead anyone. Don Juan’s seduction is aesthetic, and therefore deceptive by its very nature.

By way of pursuing this comparison between Plato’s and A’s symposia, suggested by the snakebite reference in “Shadowgraphs,” I will begin with an exposition and analysis of Don Juan’s seduction, and then explain how Socrates’ philosophy can be understood as an endeavor very much like that seduction. According to Kierkegaard’s treatment of Socrates in The Concept of Irony, Socrates’ philosophical stance is irony, which is an entirely negative stance. That it is negative does not mean only that it prohibits Socrates from making any positive claims about the nature of phenomena or the ideals that must bind us. On Kierkegaard’s view, Socrates negates the phenomenal world, but without putting in its place some heaven of ideas. His irony evacuates all the contents of the world, and leaves his interlocutors as empty-handed and disappointed as Don Juan’s women.

Many scholars have found the analysis of Socrates in Kierkegaard’s first book problematic. In light of Kierkegaard’s religious doctrine, they insist, the Socrates of the 1841 dissertation must either be dismissed as a youthful mistake of Kierkegaard’s or else reinterpreted as a more positive thinker. Another commentator yet has proposed that Kierkegaard’s dissertation on Socrates was really a critique of Hegel. But, as we will see, Kierkegaard comes very close to Hegel in his understanding of Socrates. Their differences, though important, arise from subtle disagreements about easily overlooked points. Rather than turn Kierkegaard’s Socrates into a positive thinker, and rather than despair about Socratic irony’s dead end, we should look to Kierkegaard’s portrayal of Socrates’ disciples—Alcibiades and Plato—if what we want are models of a positive approach to knowledge.

The Feminine Universal

Don Juan’s servant Leporello is an amateur statistician who doubles as the book-keeper of his master’s romantic life. He has a record of each conquest, and in his second aria in Mozart’s opera, he starts throwing out numbers. He tells Donna Elvira how many French girls Don Juan has enjoyed, how many Italian. In Spain alone, Leporello knows, Don Juan has seduced 1,003 women.

Don Juan’s love life does lend itself to a mathematical treatment, because his seductive endeavor is an exercise in abstraction. As “A” puts it, “it is not the extraordinary that Don Juan desires” in a woman “but the ordinary—that which she shares with every woman.”⁷ What Don Juan loves is a universal; something that admits of being shared and indeed cannot be claimed as private property. Although very numerous, these Many women fall conveniently under One. They are many of a kind and can be counted with the same basic unit. This also means that the number of the seduced could “just as well be any number whatever, a much larger number,” “A” points out. The significance of the number, 1,003, is purely aesthetic: being “uneven and random,” it “gives the impression that the list is not at all complete, that Don Juan is still on the move.”⁸

From Christianity and on, universality has been a mark of morality. In Kant’s ethics, for instance, each person shares in a universal humanity through the faculty of reason. Persons should be treated according to universal principles, and not in response to their particular qualities. But for Kierkegaard—and, as we see, also for “A”—morality is about the individual, not the universal. And the universal at issue in A’s interpretation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is not reason or freedom but a shareable quality instantiated in individuals qua natural beings. Far from endowing them with dignity—which Kant glossed as “pricelessness”—this universal makes them fungible, exchangeable for one another. Thus the women that have crossed Don Juan’s path are of no concern as individuals insofar as we are studying the aesthetic approach to love from this seducer’s perspective, because women are not unique individuals to him. Sensuous love, “A” says, “is not faithful but absolutely faithless; it loves not one but all.”⁹ Don Juan has not just been faithless to 1,003 women: his love is essentially unfaithful. According to “A,” Don Juan’s seduction lacks the consciousness required to single out one individual over another. He responds to a genus because he is himself generic. He is not a particular man of a particular age, with particular facial features.¹⁰ He is more like a force of nature:¹¹ the very force of sensuousness, which like every other force operates equally on all of nature. It targets kinds and acts on particulars only in virtue of their generic features. When Elvira takes the stage to hear Leporello’s enumeration, she is “a witness instar omnium [worth them all],” “A” says, though “not because of any accidental privilege on her part but because, the [seductive] method remaining essentially the same, one represents everyone.”¹²

This is why, according to “A,” opera is the appropriate medium for representing Don Juan. Music, he says, “articulates not the particular but the general in all its generality, and yet it articulates this generality not in the abstraction of reflection but in the concretion of immediacy.”¹³ Although music is sometimes called a language, it is immediate whereas verbal language is reflective. Music lacks reflective distance: it cannot describe or name a feeling, let alone a person or an event. It communicates without the intermediaries of concept and symbol. It does not designate moods and feelings but evokes them, making them present not to our minds through concepts, but in our minds as phenomena. That makes Mozart’s Don Giovanni a classical work: one in which subject matter and form—inside and outside—cannot be separated but are reflected into one another.¹⁴ For just as Don Juan recognizes and loves not individual women but femininity in general, so music can express only the general. Having no distance to what it evokes, music is as immediate as a bodily impulse; it is the artistic corollary of sensuality itself. For the sensuous, too, is immediate, and that means—following the ...