The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series)

The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy

Daniel Greenspan

Walter de Gruyter

Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 19

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the

Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser

Monograph Series 19 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Daniel Greenspan

The Passion of Infinity Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Kierkegaard Studies Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser Monograph Series Volume 19 Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn

앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI 앪 to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenspan, Daniel. The passion of infinity : Kierkegaard, Aristotle, and the rebirth of tragedy / Daniel Greenspan. p. cm. ⫺ (Kierkegaard studies. Monograph series, ISSN 1434-2952 ; 19) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-3-11-020396-7 (clothbound : alk. paper) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813⫺1855. 2. Aristotle. 3. Tragedy. I. Title. B4377.G7195 2008 1281.3⫺dc22 2008026010

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN 978-3-11-020396-7 ISSN 1434-2952 © Copyright 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Typesetting: OLD-Satz digital, Neckarsteinach Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin

For Piet, bright, beautiful and beyond conceiving

Acknowledgments Without the support of the Howard and Edna Hong Library at St. Olaf College, which made a substantial amount of advanced research possible, and the generous spirit of Gordon Marino and Cynthia Lund, I would have been nowhere near as prepared to begin this project. For support both material and spiritual during the actual writing I need to thank the Kierkegaard Research Center, along with the Fulbright foundation, who together made my Copenhagen residency possible. There were many faculty members there from whom this project benefited, but certainly its most warm and welcoming director, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, whose editorial advice was essential, and whose encouraging presence across the hall often brought a lift. Joakim Garff, a kind of Socratic-comic guide while at the Center, must also accept my warm appreciation for his reading and sympathetic support, as must Jonas Roos, for a passing remark that provided far more than he realized. Although most of the work was completed abroad, both before and during this process there were two readers in the U.S. whose contributions were essential. Walter Brogan has been a source of valuable insight, particularly on the Greece sections. I especially need to thank Jack Caputo for his concernful mentoring of this project. His keen eye and sense for where to pull back from the edge were vital. Finally, Irene Ring and James Sikkema were both an indispensable part of the preparation of the manuscript, the latter sent at a critical moment apparently by the gods, volunteering without any obligation or hope of recompense. And of course, I need to thank Dana, for standing so close by me every step of the way.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

Part I Ancient Greece 1. Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus .

10

2. Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

3. Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy .

70

4. Psuchê Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology . . . . . .

95

5. Psychologizing Oedipus: Reason and Unreason in Aristotle’s Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

107

Part II Golden Age Denmark A. Kierkegaard’s Retrieval of Greek Tragedy 6. Tragedy as Historical Idea: Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama Reflected in the Modern”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

140

7. Stages on Life’s Way: Hamartia after Modernity . . . . . . . . .

158

8. Fear and Trembling: Tragedy, Comedy and the Heroism of Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

195

9. The Concept of Anxiety: Fate and the Tragic Logos of Second Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

209

x

Table of Contents

B. Beyond Eudaimonism: Tragic Virtue and the Practice of Eternity 10. Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method

237

11. Ethics Contra Ethics: Climacus on Eternal Happiness and Tragic Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

265

12. Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship . . . . . . . . . . . .

293

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

317

Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

327

Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

330

Introduction In his essay on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a work in which tragic emotion carries titular weight, Jacques Derrida gestured briefly at a new conception of emotions and the body which would do the lived reality of emotion better justice, one at which Kierkegaard, I believe, was hard at work: Why does terror make us tremble, since one can also tremble with cold, and such analogous physical manifestations translate experiences and sentiments that appear, at least, not to have anything in common? This symptomatology is as enigmatic as tears. Even if one knows why one weeps, in what situation, and what it signifies (I weep because I have lost one of my nearest and dearest, the child cries because he has been beaten or because she is not loved […]), but that still doesn’t explain why the lachrymal glands come to secrete these drops of water which are brought to the eyes rather than elsewhere, the mouth or the ears.1

To better interpret the phenomena of emotion, “We would need to make new inroads into thinking concerning the body” – “What is it a metaphor or figure for? What does the body mean to say by trembling or crying[.]”2 Through his careful phenomenology of emotional life, particularly these tragic emotions of grief and terror, Kierkegaard, we’ll find, attempts to restore both the archaic mystery of emotion and its cognitive significance (literally, that emotion signifies, intends a meaning) that Greek philosophy recognized intuitively. 3 It was this coinci1 2 3

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 55. Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 55. Rick Furtak Wisdom in Love, pp. 46 f. “[I]t is only because he understands emotions as cognitive phenomena that he can be accurately described as an advocate of ‘passionate thought,’ or ‘passionate reason.’” Furtak cites the following authors as presenting a similar view, though without acknowledging its implicit Hellenism: Walter Lowrie Kierkegaard, p. 99; Jean Wahl Kierkegaard, p. 229; David J. Gouwens Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, p. 52; C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, generally. Cf. Abrahim Kahn Salighed as Happiness? pp. 98-109. Khan also gives an impressive argument for the non-modernness of Kierkegaard’s passionate thought, though, again, without mentioning the Greeks.

2

Introduction

dence between reason and the body (that the body had reasons, and could be trained in its desires and action to express argued ideas about what was best, and that, on the other hand, reason might also be forced to express the ‘irrational’ reasons of the body) that constituted for the Greeks the interest and domain of what we now call moral psychology. Derrida’s essay poses this question of the emotive body within the broader context of investigations into the modern, European relevance of ‘daimonic’ madness (in the mystery religion primarily of Christians, but also ancient Greeks) as a repressed condition of possibility for rational culture and the ùthos of responsibility. His essay invites a return to Kierkegaard as the first philosophical thinker to interrogate the disenchanted rationality of enlightenment culture in terms of this challenge that the violence of divine madness once raised in the schoolhouse of philosophy. The irruption of the mystery and unstable emotion surrounding daimķn returns in Kierkegaard as an essential component of his critique of both philosophies of immanence and depressed cultures of reflection in need of a tragic blow and healing. Reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Aristotle’s aesthetics and moral psychology, under the heading of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, this book charts the conception of this irrationality as a practical problem for tragic poetry to explore and philosophy to conquer. Each of these thinkers represents an essential historical turn in thinking the problem of the irrational, both in terms of guilt (hamartia) and sickness and the purification (katharsis) and potential happiness (eudaimonia) that knowledge can bring. In reclaiming the structures and concepts of ancient Greek tragedy, Kierkegaard, we’ll find, undoes the undoing of tragedy Aristotle had accomplished in eliminating the possibility of daimonic experience from the table of tragic equations. Before Aristotle, the collapse of human reason was bound generally, and even with Plato, in part, to a transcendent religous domain, powerfully independent of man’s logos – the “sign of a beyond.”4 Aristotle’s 4

Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 74. Foucault distinguishes the powerfully independent irrationality of madness per se from “unreason,” the genus in which modernity envelops it, an opponent defined by the reason which, in it, fails, in which reason enjoys “a triumph arranged in advance” (p. 64). While Foucault locates the transition from the irrational to unreason in the classical age of modernity, the movement can be traced to Aristotle’s anthropologizing of the irrational as a form of animality. See, for instance, pp. 77-78 on the inherited meaning of Aristotle’s “rational animal.” “From the moment philosophy became anthropology, and man sought to recognize himself in a natural plenitude, the animal lost its power of negativity, in order to become, between the determinism of nature and the reason of man, the positive form of an evolution.”

Introduction

3

scientific psychology for the first time reduces man’s irrationality to the ‘unreason’ of an exclusively natural cause, that the reason implicit in a purposive and intelligent nature defines. 5 The psychologizing of dangerous emotion as pathù in the soul and the effect of unreasoning desires introduces an entirely new conception of the irrational as a blind, animal failure. While the overwhelming of our intelligence once signified the transcendence and divinity of other logoi, more powerful and complete, it lapses now into a simple stuttering or gap, a vacancy within our self-same reason, without meaning or use, which the philosopher’s care of the soul defends against. Without a radical intervention in Greek culture’s traditional concept of the soul (a creature largely of its poets, Homer chief among them), the philosopher’s moral science (epistùmù) or craft (technù) would have been unthinkable.6 And so in addition to the work, in Part I, on Sophocles and Aristotle, I also offer a pair of chapters briefly sketching the genealogy of the soul as a historical idea, from its conventional, literary conception to that worldconquering notion of a personal element in us akin to the divine – identified principally with thought – which philosophy would shape as the object of its moral care and psychological study. Reading Kierkegaard alongside the Greeks confirms a hypothesis whose invention was no luxury of mine, but rather Kierkegaard’s own, echoed by his first biographer, Georg Brandes, who described him as “essentially educated” not only “by Socrates” but also “the Greeks” more generally.7 In 1848, Kierkegaard drafted an invitation to an imaginary lecture series in which he would unlock the hermeneutical principle of his authorship as a modern writer. The relation to ancient Greece would be the key:

5

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7

Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 307. A key strategy of the philosopher’s art of life and its goal of rational independence, common to both Plato and Aristotle, was to make “our lives safe […] from these internal sources of uncontrolled danger.” In Nicomachean Ethics i.2, for instance, Aristotle uses both languages, that of art and science, to characterize his ethical-political thought and identifies the practical sphere of “the Good” as a domain of “science,” though not, of course, in the strict sense he gives it later in vi.3. Cf. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 94. In “the consensus of philologists, there is, at least through Plato’s time, no systematic or general distinction between epistùmù and technù. Even in some of Aristotle’s most important writings on this topic [of a technù governing practical choice], the two terms are used interchangeable.” As cited in Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 317.

4

Introduction

The undersigned intends to offer a short course of lectures on the organizing principle of the entirety of my work as an author in relation to the modern age, illuminated with reference to classical antiquity.8

The lectures were never given and until recently this Greek horizon of Kierkegaard’s thought, Socrates notwithstanding, had been left relatively unpursued. About twenty years ago, Alisdair Macintyre included a few pages on Kierkegaard in After Virtue, which he later admits, pleasantly enough, represented an amputated and somewhat mistaken view of Kierkegaard.9 This encounter with Kierkegaard, however abortive and mutated, was the first stroke on a new page, suggesting that Kierkegaard’s relevance as a moral thinker, historically, ought to be understood in terms of his relation to Ancient Greek virtue ethics, particularly Aristotle. For Macintyre, the “radical choice” theory which he ascribes to Kierkegaard marked the first recognition by our modern, rational culture that moral choice could no longer be rationally justified. Kierkegaard, for Macintyre, has been caught celebrating at Aristotle’s funeral, raising the flag of individual will amidst the useless fragments of reason’s moral claims. In the space of a few years, a number of essays were published, as well as a book, Kierkegaard After Macintyre, in which Macintyre’s criticisms were not-so-coolly rebuffed by Kierkegaard scholars, whom, loyal to the spirit of their man, took this attack somewhat personally. More importantly, though, than the accuracy of Macintyre’s reading of Kierkegaard (an insignificance Macintyre himself admits), was the surge of interest in Kierkegaard as a moralist along Aristotelian lines. Not only was Kierkegaard NOT Aristotle’s nemesis, historically, we began to hear, but there were important ways in which Kierkegaard’s philosophy of action labored in a workshop outfitted with Aristotelian tools.10 One critic “shall read Kierkegaard more as a successor of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas than as a predecessor of Sartre and 8 9

10

Pap. VIII 2 B 186, 292-293 (no SKS). Cf. JP 5:6094. See Alasdaire Macintyre “Once More on Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd. Anthony Rudd “Reason in Ethics, Macintyre and Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 136. Kierkegaard “was concerned with the long term development of character traits – virtues and vices. […] Why, then, is Macintyre’s account of Kierkegaard in After Virtue, (he has hardly mention him in his subsequent work) so negative?” Cf. Norman Lillegard “Thinking with Kierkegaard and Macintyre about Virture, the Aesthetic, and Narrative” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, pp. 211 f. Lillegard uses Macintyres’s framing of the question of ethics as “what sort of person am I to become” to place Kierkegaard in the classical tradition as moral psychologist.

Introduction

5

Foucault.”11 Most recently, in Wisdom in Love, Rick Furtak enlists Kierkegaardian moral psychology in a debate about Hellenistic ethics, offering a very reasonable justification of loving engagement with others, against the detached wisdom of the Stoics. Through Kierkegaard’s work Furtak offers a “guide for the emotionally perplexed,” “a conception of what it would mean to trust oneself to be rational in being passionate.”12 Still, rosy passages such as this ought to come as something of a shock to even those with only a glancing knowledge of Kierkegaard’s titles. They tempt us to draw Kierkegaard dangerously close to the therapeutic individualism of a certain brand of self-help, whose ideals of well-adjusted comfort he would have ridiculed expertly.13 Kierkegaard, of course, does hold the passion of love dear. In Works of Love, he has left us a lengthy and passionate meditation on its elemental, religious force. But is it so easy to forget that other passion at work in the Gospel of Luke’s frightful dictum (14:26), which his pseudonym de Silentio recalls in his poetizing of Abraham: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”14 As he raised the knife over his son, his wife’s child and the promise of generations, could Abraham trust that he was “being rational in being passionate?” Of course he could not. Explanation and justification were scarce on the awful peak of Moriah. Though, when the pseudonymous ‘A’ posed the question epigraphically – “Is reason then alone baptized, are the passions pagans?” – he did situate Either/Or as well as the authorship it inaugurates within the classically Greek frame of something like virtue ethics. Yet, as we’ll discover, the passions which interest Kierkegaard are not the tempered passions of the Greek philosopher, but instead the ecstatically conflicted emotions specific to the poet’s tragic plots, and typical, we’ll find, of Greek lyric generally. While it is not without cause that scholars of late have drawn Kierkegaard into the measured 11

12 13

14

Robert C. Roberts “Existence, emotion, and virtue: Classical themes in Kierkegaard” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 177. Cf. Robert C. Roberts “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a Method of Virtue Ethics” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Matustik and Westphal. Rick Furtak Wisdom in Love, p. xii. Phillip Rieff The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff’s book is a classic treatment of this historical trend. As translated from Kierkegaard’s Danish in the Hong edition of Fear and Trembling, p. 72.

6

Introduction

company of Greek philosophers, the tensions that ought to result are always either downplayed to a fault or missed entirely.15 John Davenport, for instance, discovers a Kierkegaardian virtue ethics, but “in place of the classical notion of eudaimonia as the human telos” attaches the goal of “narrative shape and enduring meaning” in “a human life.”16 He focuses, typical of the frontiersmen of Kierkegaardian virtue ethics, on the moderating, civic-minded example of the Judge, decontextualized and without reference to the religious. “That,” he writes, “is a further story, which we would have to trace to get Kierkegaard’s complete conception of existential virtue fully in view.”17 Yet, I would argue, without a discussion of the religious, we spoil the insight that Kierkegaard may have something like a virtue ethics to explore with a fraudulently amiable picture of how emotional life ought to be understood and developed. The tendency to define human beings by social standards, for Kierkegaard, leading naturally to the regimes of affluence and station, was responsible for the loss of the human itself. Man can only truly be man individually, in the awful, destabilizing encounter with god, an experience of the eternity whose incomparable measure brings personal mortality brutally and instantly to light. Investigating Kierkegaard’s debt to the ancient Greek ethics of virtue, to Aristotle in particular, in whom the technique of this ethics matures into a full-fledged psychology, requires the exploration of darker territory and more unstable passions, a return to the domain of tragic lyric in which the West first deliberated 15

16

17

See Robert C. Roberts “Existence, Emotion and Virtue: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 203. Roberts, another frontiersman of Kierkegaardian moral psychology, rightly distinguishes Kierkegaard’s thinking from Aristotle’s in its heightened suspicion of reflection, and the endorsement “against Aristotle” of dissociating “oneself from aspects of one’s character.” Yet, surprisingly, he never qualifies Kierkegaard’s work with regard to temperance, an Aristotelianism Kierkegaard utterly inverts. By default, Kierkegaard’s moral psychology appears to be a minor tune-up of Aristotle’s, subordinating passion to thought and establishing reason’s authority and harmony in the soul. Other commentators, such as Norman Lillegard, promote an identically sanguine view of Kierkegaard the Aristotelian, based on the isolated character of Judge William, exemplar, for Kierkegaard, of a very prudent, civic-minded rationality. Cf. Norman Lillegard “Thinking with Kierkegaard and Macintyre about Virtue, the Aesthetic, and Narrative” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, pp. 221-226. John Davenport “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macintyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 265. John Davenport “Towards an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macintyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, ed. by Davenport and Rudd, p. 308.

Introduction

7

on the problem of the irrational. It is Kierkegaard’s philosophical legitimation of not just some emotion (i. e., Greek wonder) but all of the soul’s modulations, no matter how distorted or painful, as crucial to our studies and exercises in humanity that makes him so worthy of attention. Through a poet’s sensibility and skill he ennobles even the most destructive and uncontained of the passions with a digniity and purpose. It is not until Kierkegaard’s philosophical drama, which I take up in Part II, composed of the pseudonymous lyrics of his various dramatis personae, that this ancient, tragic problem of the irrational assumes its latest shape.18 In each of his pseudonymous students of the soul we can observe psychological study return, once again, to the moral art of character-building, rather than the disinterested observations of natural science which at the time of his authorship were just beginning to find their pace. The authorship’s appropriation of tragic concepts and structures, not without tension, bears the influence of the philosopher’s concern for moral education and his definition of humanity in intellectual terms. Like Aristotle, Kierkegaard develops a theory of human action and a practice in virtue based on the authority of ideas and the absolute telos of ‘happiness’ – though one with explicit rather than implicit religious significations19 – grounding his ethics in reason’s passionately tragic experience of a god. This leads him to a radically different understanding and valuation of the passions, though oriented still by a version of the Greek ideal of passionate intelligence. The philosopher’s reason-centered craft of human life, armed now with a tragic-religious insight into reason’s failure to satisfy or even understand its desires, cedes its authority to the wonder and terror of religious experience as authoritative intelligence of a different order. Kierkegaard’s tragic moral psychology frees the psychologically reduced notion of the irrational from its dependent position (as a kind of

18

19

See CUP1, 625 f. / SKS 7, 569 ff. I take Kierkegaard seriously when he instructs us to regard his pseudonyms as dramatic characters, who nevertheless are the product of their own creation, whom he has merely ”prompted,” each with an independent psychology corresponding to their own ”life-view,” the philosophical perspective they embody. This is the difference between the Greek eudaimonia and the Danish salighed. For an analysis of Salighed, see Khan Salighed as Happiness? Kierkegaard on the Concept of Happiness. The concept, across the authorship, implies man’s impotence and the reliance on either his love of god, or god’s grace. It implies the shaping of individual personality, through “the exercise of one’s passional capacity” (pp. 72 f.). Like eudaimonia, it demands the activity of the self (p. 91).

8

Introduction

“manifestation of non-being” 20) beneath reason in the soul, enlarging the field of possible experience beyond the limits which rational man defines. This study of the pseudonyms would undoubtedly profit from an account of tragedy’s significance for the explicitly religious and predominantly signed writings, as well as Kierkegaard’s own biography. The biographical parallels with tragedy range from the obvious, such as god’s alleged curse upon the Kierkegaard family, killing five of Søren’s six siblings by his thirty-first year (1834, nine years before the authorship begins), to the more subtle hints, such as the journal’s sketch of “a novella titled ‘the Mysterious family.’” Here Kierkegaard considers reproducing “the tragedy of my childhood: the terrifying, secret explanation of the religious” which with the suddenness of a word would provide “a terrifying explanation of everything.” 21 Were we to look to the later writings and their almost insane fervor for religious offense, we would discover rich figures like St. Peter, exemplary figure of a tragic pollution and exile: “In love of Christ or in hatred of the world he left everything, his station in life, his livelihood, family, friends, human language, love of mother and father, love of fatherland,” 22 a thought from Christian Discourses once again completed by the journals. “The despised person, rejected by the human race, a poor, single, solitary wretch, an outcast – this, according to Christianity, this is what god chooses and what is closest to Him.” 23 But the subjects of dramatic literature and philosophical psychology, especially of the pagan ilk, are not properly Christian subjects, and space will not allow a responsible treatment of these themes as they do enter into the content of the signed works. In the context of the final chapter, though, placing Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous use of tragedy structurally in relation to the authorship as a whole, I do mark several points where this work could begin.

20

21

22

23

Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization, p. 115. For a general discussion of this development in the modern age see Chapters 3 and 4. Pap. IV A 144 / SKS JJ:147. Cf. JP 5:5690. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 352. On Garff’s analysis, the entries fleshing out this novella are later included in Stages on Life’s Way. SV1 10, 186. Translated by Bruce Kirmmse, in Garff’s Søren Kierkegaard, as with all references to the Papirer references in this introduction. Pap. VIII 1 A 598 / SKS NB4:113. Cf. JP 4:4131.

Part I

Ancient Greece Tragedy, Happiness and the Problem of the Irrational:

Aristotle’s Moral Psychology and the Challenge of Sophocles’ Oedipus

Dionysus has still his votaries or victims, though we call them by other names; and Pentheus was confronted by a problem which other civil authorities have had to face in real life. – E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational

The gods have become diseases. – C. G. Jung, Commentary on the Golden Flower

Chapter 1 Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus Introduction Oedipus was the quintessential tragic hero for Aristotle, and probably also for Sophocles. And so Sophocles returns to Oedipus, “most splendid symbol of humanity,” 1 a quarter century after the Tyrannus, having reached such an extremity of age it would excuse a poet of even his powers from more work. Kierkegaard, we will see, like Hegel, preferred Antigone to Oedipus. But this still places his most elaborate thinking on tragedy within the Oedipus narrative. As Kierkegaard himself will explain, the tragic nature of ancient dramas was not to be found in a conceptual dilemma which Antigone better represents, such as Hegel’s dialectic between divine and human law or logos. The ‘tragedy’ of Greek tragedies is rather internal to them, located somewhere in the actual dramatic time through which a family catastrophe unfolds.2 It is for this reason impossible to separate his (or our) meditations on Antigone from the tale of her father. A single guilt binds them as one. 3 And so the story of Kierkegaard’s Antigone begins with the father, Oedipus. “[I]t is not an individual who goes under, but a little world; it is the objective grief, unloosed, that now strides ahead,

1 2

3

H. D.F Kitto Greek Tragedy, p. 393 f. The sorrow, writes Kierkegaard, is “in the tragedy” itself. EO1, 148 / SKS 2, 147. “What provides the tragic interest in the Greek sense is that Oedipus’s sad fate resonates in the brother’s unfortunate death, in the sister’s conflict with a specific human injunction; it is, as it were, the afterpains, Oedipus’s tragic fate, spreading out into each branch of the family. This totality makes the spectator’s sorrow so very profound.” EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155. Cf. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 158. Kierkegaard anticipates Bremer’s understanding of hamartia as an entity extending itself through the action of the plays. Oedipus’ life “may thus be seen as a single long drawn out hamartia. Not a moral quality.”

Reason and the Irrational: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus

11

like a force of nature, in its own terrible consistency, and Antigone’s sad fate is like the echo of her father’s, an intensified sorrow.”4 In Fitts’ and Fitzgerald’s translation of the Tyrannus, they add an ornament which is not in Sophocles’ text. They call Oedipus the “heroic mind.” Although technically imaginary, it is an illuminating fraud. If the mind has a story, 5 as does the evolution of the Oedipus myth, from Homer through Sophocles, down to the modern versions of Corneille, Dryden, and Voltaire, then the tragic myth of Oedipus as “heroic mind” represents a second episode. In this story, the birth of ‘reason’ at the start of the 6th century develops unforeseen complications in the sphere of praxis,6 or, reasoned action. Oedipus comes to embody these complications as the paradigmatic figure of tragic knowledge, a transplant of the intelligence and accessibility of the Ionian postulate – logos – to the dissecting table of Athenian drama. Man rather than nature now becomes this object of rational investigation. This transplantation is completely natural to the Milesian germ of reason:7 The advent of the polis, the birth of philosophy – the two sequences of phenomena are so closely linked that the origin of rational thought must be seen as bound up with the social and mental structures peculiar to the Greek city. […] Reason itself was in essence political. […] When philosophy arose at Miletus, it was rooted in the political

4 5

6

7

EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155. That thinking has a history is of course what Hegel will claim. Kierkegaard, still very much under the impression of Hegel’s historicizing of philosophy in his early phase of authorship, at which point Either/Or was composed, echoes this thought throughout the essay on the tragic in ancient and modern drama. For the Hegel influence on Either/Or, see Jon Stewart The Relation between Kierkegaard and Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 182-237. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, p. 102. “In the history of humankind, beginnings ordinarily elude us. But if the advent of philosophy in Greece marked the decline of mythological thought and the beginning of rational understanding, we can fix the date and place of birth of Greek reason – establish its civil status. It was the beginning of the sixth century, in Ionian Miletus, that such men as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes ushered in a new way of thinking about nature.” J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Throught, p. 131. “In fact, it was at the political level that reason was first expressed, established, and shaped itself in Greece. […] For the Greeks, the individual could not be separated from the citizen; phronùsis, reflection, was the privilege of free men, who exercised their reason and their civic rights at one and the same time.” Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, pp. 139, 142. At the start of the 6th century B. C., the time of Solon and the world’s first strides in Athens towards rational politics and democracy, “[T]he culture of the Athenian nobility was Ionian through and through.” Solon used “Ionian scientific ideas as a pattern” for his political poetry and legislation.

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thought whose fundamental preoccupations it expressed and from which it borrowed a great part of its vocabulary.8

In hatching reason, the polis gave birth to the Siamese twins of philosophy and tragic poetry. Their inevitable division would necessarily kill one of the conjoined. And so the Greeks tear down the stage of serious tragedy a century after its construction. Oedipus is a model (paradeigmi, 1193) and it is his heroic mind which defines him. The heroic mind Sophocles bestows upon Oedipus of old would have been a pattern of thinking typical of all men of a new rational culture, which by the 5th c. had already begun to contest the traditional pieties and vision of Greek life, especially in the fields of medicine, the legal-political sphere, and more fundamentally in the science of nature. Thucydides has left us a record of this impulse, in the midst of the plague Athens suffered perhaps not long before Sophocles wrote this play (430-429 B. C.).9 And so Sophocles makes the themes of law, sickness and, implicit in sickness, nature, an essential part of his production.10 Oedipus was no incidental figure for Sophocles. There are no less than nine Oedipus tragedies of which we have no more than the title.11 Both Aeschylus and Euripides had written an Oedipus, like Sophocles, as part of larger cycles. These of course have been lost, save Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. Oedipus appears in both the Iliad and the Odyssey and both Hesiod and Pindar touch on his story.12 His is a very old story for the Greeks. In adopting Oedipus as its first child, Athenian tragedy adapted his character, deeply embedded in the collective mythos, to the shape of its own specific vision. It placed itself within a tradition of poetic reflection from out of which Oedipus emerges into full tragic bloom, 8 9 10

11 12

J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, p. 131. C. F. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 171. Cf. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, ch. III.3 and G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 88, 97. Knox devotes all of Chapter III.3 to the deep significance of medicine in the Tyrannus. Lloyd echoes that “[o]f course the play is not about medicine, about medical diagnosis and treatment. But human misfortune is depicted, repeatedly, in terms of diseases.” “[T]heir efforts so often come to nothing (as was the fate […] of Greek doctors of every description in their attempts to understand and to cure). To seem pious, or wise, or even good, offered no immunity to calamity, indeed no immunity was to be had, any more than there was for disease. Its sudden onset, often unexplained, maybe irremediable, captures, in so many respects, the very essence of the human predicament, serving as not merely analogous to, but itself a key example of human vulnerability” and the impotence of reason. Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, p. xxxiii. Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, pp. xii-xv.

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embodying the troubled heart of reason in the city’s breast, isolated like a sickness for treatment within the ambit of the theatre. Before moral philosophy or the tragic lyric with which philosophy briefly shared the city, man’s gnomic lot fell to the poets: Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, and Pindar. They projected a new cultural possibility through which the logos or account of the good human life could be discovered.13 For these poets, it was the divine order of Homeric $IKù given a new moralising interpretation that determined the path of human lives. In the context of tragedy, this archaic attempt to deliberately align human choice with a god’s Justice becomes terribly ironic. As the gods express themselves through human language, its capacity to plan or give an account is ironically reversed.14 Divine language intrudes upon mortal speaking. In the Tyrannus especially, language becomes a network of blockages rather than a snare for insight. Words indicate barriers, points of conflict between the past and what is to come,15 positioning Oedipus impossibly within the contrary logoi of men and gods. The Greeks, Sophocles included, believed “as if by instinct”16 that the universe was based on a logos, obeyed law, and “[e]very detail 13

14

15

16

J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 115. Bremer makes Pindar the lynch pin between Homer and the tragedians. Hesiod, Theognis, and Solon are supplemental sources for our understanding of the development of the moral equation through which tragic ¿Ê¿ÏÒÇ¿ can finally be interpreted. Pindar’s representation is ðÉÀÍÐ u ©ÍÏÍÐ u DÀÏÇÐu ÊÎÉ¿ÈÃÊ¿u ÒÅ: happiness, leads to complacency, leads to arrogance, leads to offence, leads to god-sent ruin. Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, p. 252. Jaeger points out that this has roots in the poetry of Solon. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 120. Human language is reversed when the gods express themselves through it. See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 42. Cf. Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 14648. Segal observes that “The present is both a recapitulation of the past and a reenactment of the past in symbolic form,” or, in Sophocles’ own language, “inferring the new by means of the old” (916). “Sophocles devotes most of the action to the problem of logical deduction in the present.” C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 143. Cf. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Thought, pp. 107 f. Vernant argues that what Bowra calls this “instinct” toward logos is organic to the social-political order arising with the polis. This helps clarify the natural community of reason between Ionian and Athenian thought, across fields as diverse as the study of nature, politics, and lyric poetry. It was not simply that Ionian natural philosophy exported the invention of reason to Athens, but rather that “the form and content of natural philosophy depended heavily on the secular-rational institution of the polis” underlying them both.

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in the Tyrannus is contrived in order to enforce Sophocles’ faith in this underlying logos.”17 But while the universal order to which philosophical reason aspires naturally draws the mind into its harmonies, the tragic logos seduces the intellect into a kind of suicide. Tragic guilt expressed a live political dilemma specific to Greece at this time between human reason and the force of the irrational, represented dramatically by the logos of divinity. Knowledge within the sphere of tragic thinking included “at its center a core of ignorance, the shadowy conjunction at our origins whose mystery we can never fully penetrate.”18 It had something of the Socratic, a knowledge whose only advantage was an awareness of its own ignorance, whose only accomplishment was the imposition of paradox and which could aspire to expression only through excessively ambiguous language. Oedipus’ vision of truth coincides with a blinding, as the eternal order of the gods intervenes violently in the contingent human time of the play. Once the catastrophe has unfolded and Oedipus the wise king has been destroyed, overtaken by a kind of divine madness, the traces of this intervening violence remain as a kind of screen through which a divine logos presents itself. This after-image of the divine anticipates another literary impression which, as we’ll see in Part II, the modern tragedy of Kierkegaard’s authorship evokes.

17 18

Cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1. Jaeger takes the explicaton of this unargued premise of Bowra’s as one of its essential missions. Philosophical logos can be traced back through the lyric poets to the epics of Homer and Hesiod; the order (dikù) at work in natural reality was originally a moral force, proper to the domain of poetry. Already Hesiod’s “mythical system is formed and governed by reason” (p. 65). “Like the rationalistic ideals which created the system of the Theogony, [Works and Days] presupposes city-state civilization and the advanced thinking of Ionia” (p. 68). The “justice” in Anaximander’s “nature” was a moral and not a physical law (p. 160). It was the life of the city-state and the the problem of the ways of god to man that was first read into the cosmos (p. 161), though, after the Ionian investigations of the 6th c. into physis, this nature would once again be read back into the inner life of the individual man. If there was a law of the cosmos, there must be a law for the souls living within it. Heraclitus takes this step (p. 180), connecting the “knowledge of Being with insight into human values and conduct, and made the former include the latter.” This is an original source for Greek thinking on phronesis, knowledge-related action. Cf. fragments 2, 112, 113, 114, 116. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 144. Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge In the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 147 f.

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Sickness and Purgation Already in the prologue of the first of the Theban plays, we have an ambivalence between the human and divine realms which rings true until the last, when Oedipus is translated like an epic hero, or those of Pindar’s lyrics, into immortality in the groves of Colonnus. We begin with a crowd of people huddled before the altars in front of Oedipus’ palace. He emerges before these suppliants, their “boughs of supplication wreathed with chaplets” (327), as a figuration of the divine.19 One of these suppliants is himself a priest, who has come to Oedipus like the others to supplicate in time of plague. The confusion of Oedipus with a god is almost immediately disclaimed. “It is not because we rank you with the gods that I and these children are seated at your hearth, but because we judge you to be the first of men …” (329). But that the confusion must be clarified only confirms what the audience must have felt. Oedipus emerges at the opening of the play like a god before his altar. What gives Oedipus this divine status, though, is more important. He is proton andrķn (33), “first of men.” This first of men has his universal aspect in an exceptional power to reason practically. Human wisdom is Oedipus’ native element and he establishes its measure both in the “incidents of life and in dealing with higher powers” (329). Though, the priest continues, “it is by the extra strength given by a god that you are said and believed to have set right our life” (329). The heroic mind is a gift from the gods that has made Oedipus the prototypical man. Sophocles drives the point home once more in the same piece of dialogue. Oedipus, says the priest, we do not know if your knowledge comes from men or from the gods. The exchange between mortals and gods is a dialectic which Sophocles will continue to exploit, slowly turning Oedipus’ divine status and authoritative intelligence on its head. 20 High will be made low, as in the ancient ritual of ostracization, and low made high, as with the pharmakos of the Athenian festival of the Thargelia. The relevance of both is worth explaining. The ritual of the pharmakos originates in the Athenians impious murder of Androgaeus the Cretan, re-enacted on the first day of the Thargelia. The pharmakoi were selected in terms of ugliness. They represent all that is dead and defiled in the city, what needs to be 19

20

J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 125. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 124.

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sloughed off or purified for the city to “be refertilized,” to bring itself back to life. Hence its connection with the fertility ritual of the eiresiķne.21 The pollution (agos) which the katharmos-pharmakos embodies gave him a sense of religious awe, 22 in addition to defilement – the pharmakos was treated royally before the expulsion. When a divine scourge afflicts a city, the normal solution is to sacrifice the king 23 and this so-called scapegoat is a member of the community who assumes the role of this king “turned inside out,” sacrificed in his place, carrying with him all the disorder he embodies. But the city set its limits from both below and above. Like the pharmakos, the ritual of ostracization, introduced by Cleisthenes and used between 487 and 416, expelled what was too high as opposed to too low. It seems to be a politicized version of the pharmakos, also protection against divine retribution, plague, and later tyranny. 24 Our picture of Oedipus resolves under the influence of both of these political and religious institutions with which tragedy co-existed in Athens.25 The action of the Tyrannus truly begins with an incident transpiring long before the prologue opens, to which the play as aetiology returns. Oedipus has freed the city from the tribute of that “cruel singer,” the Sphinx. Her song was doubly cruel. Not only did it surround the many deaths of her victims, but it also distracted Thebes from Laius’ murder. This distraction is the cause of the unholy sickness whose symptoms now emerge in full bloom, as will Oedipus, their cause, from behind the palace doors, once Jocaste has perished and the tragedy run 21

22 23

24

25

J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 129 f.  ÁÍÐ also denoted matters of religious awe, as indicated by the verb ¿ÄÍÊ¿Ç. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 132. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus in Athens” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 326. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 128. Vernant emphasizes Oedipus’ identity with the pharmakos, following the link Louis Gernet established between tragedy and the ritual of the pharmakos, as well as J. P. Guepin. Cf. p. 131: The paean of the opening scene was also part of the Thargelia, and would have reminded the Athenian audience of the kathartic ritual, connecting Oedipus with its agos. Cf. G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, p. 88. Lloyd confirms that Knox, Burkert, Sabatucci, Vegetti, Girard, Segal all agree on the association between Oedipus and the pharmakos: the source of pollution through expulsion is likewise the source of salvation. Cf. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet Oedipus in Athens in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 326. As tragedy was both a political and religious institution, it should be compared with other political and religious institutions.

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its course. In ridding Thebes of its affliction by the winged maiden, he “set right” or “straightened out” their “life” (hùmin orthosai bion), and so the priest also asks him now to “raise up the city so that it does not fall (anorthoson polin, 39). 26 Now as before Oedipus will be called upon to correct what has become crooked, but Sophocles translates this “crookedness” likewise into “sickness.” Addressing the Thebans as a father would his children, Oedipus sees all of them sick (noseite pantes, 60). Though “None of you,” he continues, with an irony only available to the audience, “is as sick as I.” The political disease from which Thebes suffers infects the king most of all. Presented first in dialogue flush with the language of Hippocratic authors, as a physician at the bedside of the ailing Thebes, Oedipus in the end stands “revealed not as the physician but as the sick man –” 27 the source of the city’s plague. As king of Thebes, Oedipus IS the city. The law of substitution is a special feature of both traditional Dionysiac sacrifice and those reserved for the altar of the tragic god’s stage. One sacrificial victim takes the penitential place of the group to which he belongs. That which affects the landscape and the populace naturally concentrates itself in its king. Oedipus himself explains the equation for us. “My soul [emù psuchù] mourns equally for the city and for myself and for you” (63-64). This “mourning [stenei]” was also a “groaning,” or “moaning,” the sound of the victim. 28 26 27

28

Sophocles uses another form of the verb ÍÏÆÍÑÆ¿Ç: to straighten. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, p. 147. Knox catalogues the many Hippocratisms in the play on pages 139-147. See also page 147n31 for additional instance of words with medical connotations. There is a homology between dominant forms of Dionysiac sacrifice in such rituals as the Agrionia and the Bouphonia, where the animal is symbolically killed as both god-victim and man-criminal, and the killing of tragic heroes in a drama. The homology also applies to the ritual of the pharmakos, as we’ve seen, as well as ostracization. In each case the victim is meant to be a redemptive substitution for another person or more typically for a group of people. There have so far been four ways of approaching the obscure relation between Attic Tragedy’s performance at the Spring festival of the Greater Dionysia and the myth and cult of the masked god for whom this festival was instituted. The first wave of scholars, such as Rohde, thought they had discovered in the myths of the tragic god the echo of historic events. And so when we find a people re-enacting the arrival by water of Dionysus to Greek shores, we then presume that at some point in the dusk of Greek pre-history Dionysus did arrive as a foreigner from the eastern shores of Thrace. Now of course we know this not to be the case. The linear B tablets at Pylos disproved Rohde’s thesis that Dionysus was a deity alien to the Greeks, and likewise called his thesis into question that his immigration infused the vital Greek bloodline with an alien strain, with a yearning to deny mortal life for a disembodied, immortal alternative.

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Diagnosis is the first part of any cure – knowledge of the causes (tas aitias) – and so Oedipus sends Creon to the Oracle at Delphi for just this reason, calling it a remedy (iasin, 68). The search for a remedy in the case of this particular ailment is also an inquiry into non-human realms. Oedipus presumes that the plague is not the fruit of chance, but rather of a divine order which the inspirations of the Pythian priestess will reveal. Upon returning from the oracle, Creon’s first words already imply the reversals towards which Thebes is prone, the tragic consti-

Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, in the early part of the 20th century, applied this historical method of interpretation in their groundbreaking studies of the underlying ritual structure of Attic tragedy. They were the first to follow Nietzsche in his attempt to envision the transition from full blown Dionysian rite to the allegorical lyrics represented on the tragic stage. While Nietzsche’s approach, the first on record, was one of inspired imagination, Harrison and Murray apply their philological science to the same problem in the same historical spirit as Rohde. J. P. Guepin replies to the unscientific inspiration of Nietzsche and the somewhat naive historicism of Harrison and Murray with a third method of interpretation. The myths and cult legends of Dionysus as they have been passed down to us ought not to be read literally as history, and neither should we abandon a scholarly pursuit of the actual course of events, as he believed Nietzsche had done for his own personal form of literary philosophical revel. Rather, these stories and practices, he believed, ought to be read in terms of their collective, symbolic, psychological meaning. In the matrix of cult, myth, and the literary production of the tragedies, Guepin discerns a systematic pattern of meaning bound up with killing, guilt, and penitential sacrifice. On this reading the nature of the myths surrounding the cult is not bound up in history, but rather in a tragic sense of paradox definitive of both actual sacrifice as well as the representations of it in the “gloomy” plays of the Greek stage. What constitutes this paradox will have to wait for the moment. The last word on the connection between tragic theatre and Dionysian cult is the shortest. There is nothing much to say. Pickard-Cambridge establishes this position in his Dithyramb: Tragedy and Comedy, a response to B. Frazer’s Golden Bough as well as Jane Harrison’s Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion: Themis and also Gilbert Murray’s appendix to Harrison’s book. Though in a revised edition (1962) of Pickard-Cambridge’s 1927 publication, T. L. Webster revives the possibility that Guepin pursues. More recently, see B. Knox Word and Action, p. 6. Knox confirms both the likeliness of some connection and the perhaps impossible difficulty of specifying what exactly that connection entails. On the other hand, a tacit representative of Pickard-Cambridge’s view, J. P. Vernant maintains that there is no proof of any material connection between Dionysiac cult and the dramatic contests. We can say nothing about the link between ritual and theatre, especially concerning sacrifice. Vernant does leave room enough to establish at least one semantic link. It is in the capacity to subvert reality for illusion that Dionysus claims his authoritative in tragic theatre. The power to convey illusion, the play of representations, “as if” it were real, to the audience assembled in the theatre at the Greater Dionysia is the special province of this god.

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tution of this troubled city.29 Though here Creon speaks of a reversal from bad fortune to good: “I say that even trouble hard to bear, if they chance to turn out well, can bring good fortune” (87-88). We can read the inclusion of chance here as an ironic charge timed to detonate catastrophically with a few words from the shepherd who finally confirms Oedipus’ true identity. Similar, we’ll find, to Aristotle, nothing in the vision which Sophocles constructs, ultimately, leaves room for chance. Tuchù appears only as a foil for the revelation of its antipode, Dikù. 30 Justice is the unflinching order governing the cosmos, but it can only be seen directly from a god’s perspective, and related to man ambiguously, indirectly, through the signifying wings of the prophet’s bird, or the obscure speech of an oracle. And so as the prologue ends, just before the first choral Ode, the priest calls Apollo down from the skies to save them and put a stop to the sickness. Sophocles connects Justice and healing in the figure of Apollo, “the healer.”31 Thebes’ sickness is both moral-religious and physiological and the moral defilement, unexpiated, is now expressing itself in the brutely physical terms of plague. The misfortune of sickness can only be translated into a greater health once the city has been purified of its blood guilt. Like the black bile of pre-modern melancholy, the substance didn’t cause evils the way that brain chemistry now ‘causes’ the ‘effect’ of depression as a kind of representation. It was evil – had value. Laius’ murderer would have to be physically expelled from the city. It is at this point that we first read of katharsis, or purification. “Poiķ Katharmķ,” Oedipus asks Creon, “With what means of purifying” (95) can we drive out the pollution (miasma). The purifying of Oedipus and the city’s unidentified guilt, what a more enlightened Aristotle calls hamartia, begins with an inquiry into another protoAristotelian concept in which Ionian science and moral-religious language intersect: ‘the cause [hù aitia],’ that which is ‘owed.’32 Where shall the track of an ancient guilt, hard to make out, be found? ÎÍÓÒÍÂqÃÓÏÃÆÅÑÃÒ¿ÇÇÕËÍÐοɿǿÐÂÓÑÒÃÈÊ¿ÏÒÍË¿ÇÒÇ¿Ð(108−109). 29

30 31

32

J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 334 f. Attic Tragedy expatriates political conflict (ÑÒ¿ÑÇÐ), like comedy derides it, and funeral speech denied it. Athens is represented as Plato would have wanted it, while Thebes is a model “anti-city,” a magnet for terror and strife. Cf. H. D. F. Kitto Greek Tragedy. Kitto develops this insight extensively. Apollo’s epithet is initially Paian, the physician of the gods, healer, and also saviour or deliverer. See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 161.

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The cause of the city’s grief will be determined when we know who is responsible for the murder. The cause will be to whom this sickness is owed.33 But before the nature of this guilt or debt can be exposed, before the murderer can be driven out or killed, as the Oracle advises, and the sickness purged, Oedipus must begin the investigation of his crime a second time by returning to the beginning (archù), again. The “riddling song” of the sphinx “forced us to let go what was obscure and attend to what lay before our feet” (339), Creon tells Oedipus before the chorus’ first stasimon. And so Oedipus must “light up the obscurity [aut’ egķ phanķ]” (339). He will now once again defend the city, but also Apollo (339), in search of the guilt or aitios which is likewise the ‘cause’ of the religious pollution dawning on the city.34 This “first of men” acts on behalf of Phoibos (133), Apollo the bright, the radiant, the pure – illuminating the obscure under the god’s aegis of light, and purifying the city and all who dwell there of its pollution. Oedipus investigates the moral-religious archù of this crime against the city and the gods through an investigation (historia), recalling the investigation of the Ionians into the rational principle (archù) of an essentially intelligible nature, composing a “history,” developing the “comprehensive account” which the Ionians dubbed theory (theoria). Sophocles’ representation of Oedipus as investigator poses the implicit question of the possibility of extending this Ionian science to the human sphere, to questions of ethics and religion, to man, his cities, and eventually, his soul – a question revolutionized by Aristotle’s philosophical psychology and, 2300 years later, Kierkegaard’s dialectical-lyric.

Terrible Knowledge, Tragic Speech, Third Wisdom The chorus first invokes Zeus as both speaker and healer: “Sweetspeaking message of Zeus […] Delian healer invoked with cries” (151154). This Delian cure comes in the form of language, and, particularly, speech. Since this first lament of the chorus is an absence of the right kind of mental attention, the kind of language which would re33

34

Aitia can mean an accusation of a crime, and also the guilt implied in the accusation, but also cause, in the sense of “for the sake of.” Oedipus’ “guilt” is the “for the sake of which” the plague is now on Thebes. This “for the sake of which,” or “cause,” returns as a principle of both ethical choice in Aristotle, and also kinùsis in the natural world. Agos from the verb Azomai: to stand in awe of, also to dread.

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direct this attention and the healing of the city’s grief coincide. “Sickness lies on all our company, and thought [phrontidos] can find no weapon to repel it.” (170) The images in the parodos of dark turning to light, night turning to day, are, as we’ll see, unmistakable. They seem to correspond naturally to the chorus’ appeal for this illumination of practical thought. But at this point the thinking would have to be divine, rather than human. The entire ode is a beseeching of the most luminous of the Gods to aid and defend Thebes, shining Phoibos, “bright-faced” Athena, “golden daughter,” and “Zeus, you who wield the power of the lightning flashes” (344-345). Yet, paradoxically, the illuminating vision which Oedipus seeks in Apollo’s name comes as if from the bright blackness of Phoibos’ sun turned inside out – the vision of an eclipse. To look directly into this anomaly carries the risk of blindness. This obverted sun which shines in a kind of night ironically requires special protection against the enhanced power of its light. There is a wonderful strangeness to events such as these, when nature seems to veer off course, just as there is something awesome and terrible in Oedipus, and the way he must learn. The Chorus’ parodos develops a powerful vision of this strangeness through the image of the embattled city. There the Thebans sing for a kind of fire. Just as customarily it is blood which washes away the taint of blood, both the plague and the cure are imagined as flames. The death which spreads “swifter than destroying fire” and “the flames of ruin” (343) which illuminate the Night of Ares’ onslaught invite the fire of Zeus’ lightning, paralleled by Sophocles with the Day which always follows this Night. Day and Night are continuous with one another. Their fires collaborate in the same work. Invited as well are the “fiery torches of Artemis.” The final god to be invoked is also familiar with the flame. It is “ruddy-faced Bacchus, to whom they cry Euhoe, companion of the Maenads,” whom they wish “to draw near with brightly blazing torch of pinewood against the god who lacks honor among the gods” (203-215). This dishonourable god is of course Ares. Thebes is caught between the flames of life and light, divine intelligence, and those of ruination, between Day and Night. 35 35

J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox. Guepin discusses the conflict in tragedy between the gods Dionysus and Ares as typical of the tragic paradox (pp. 43, 46). The destruction of the tragic hero, his criminality and guilt, is the other side of a divine innocence which he also embodies (pp. 108, 116). The problem of tragedy was previously the problem of sacrifice, the unity of joy in death and suffering, the unity

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For all of its luminosity the imagery of the parodos turns essentially on the ambiguity and paradox through which it evokes nature’s inversion, the inversion of light and dark, Day and Night. “The fruits of the glorious earth do not increase, and no births come to let women surmount the pains in which they cry out” (172-174). Nature is failing, but not of its own. Ares’ Divine fire has “scorched” (192) the womb of Thebes. It cannot grow, or nurture itself. Life has turned to death. The fires of plague brought on by pollution illuminate the Theban night. Yet it is the magnification of fire (so far an image of sickness) in the hands of the gods which brings healing. The sun of the Tyrannus is charged with a number of meanings, all of which refer back to the mingling of vision and blindness: illumination and darkness, wisdom and foolishness, sanity and mania. Oedipus returns to this familiar image of the sun as his initial confrontation with Teiresias concludes. “You are sustained by darkness only, so that you could never harm me or any other man that sees the light” (374375). But Oedipus suffers, finally, at the hands of Apollo, the most luminous of the gods, the god from whom the light of divine intelligence ushers forth at Delphi from the split rock. Oracular knowledge is akin to the knowledge of the prophet, which is unspeakably ambiguous, and in its unspeakability as well as its mechanism, unteachable. 36 It is the light of these benighted truths which will blind him. And I say, since you have reproached me with my blindness, that you have sight, but cannot see what trouble you are in, nor where you are living, nor with whom you share your home. Do you know from what stock you come? First you are unaware of being an enemy to your own above and beneath the earth, and, next, the two-pronged curse that comes from your mother and your father with deadly step shall one day drive you from this land; now that you have sight, then shall you look on darkness. (412-420)

Oedipus’ expiation is accomplished through sunlight, the pure god.37 It will drive him from the day and into darkness, a terror (deinon) neither to be seen nor heard (1312). Both Oedipus and the landscape

36

37

of victim and god, innocence and guilt, the value of violence, suffering and death (pp. xiii, 31, 62, 74-79, 84). Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus 395-396. Teiresias possesses two potentially distinct types of mantikù, according to Oedipus, who says the prophet has neither. On the one hand, divination, which was a skill that could be taught, and on the other hand a kind of inspired prophecy which cannot. The second kind of knowledge would be identified with the god, while the first would not. Cf. Cornford Principium Principium Sapientiae, pp. 73 f. Cornford distinguishes between the possession/divination of mantic wisdom, such as we read of in the Phaedo, or Republic 571d, and the augury by signs which is an “art of the reasoning faculty.” C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 184.

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take on the aspect of darkness and terror which Teiresias ascribes to the doomed king’s knowledge (316). The “fire of the sun,” along with the rest of nature, “the earth and the sacred rain” which Oedipus had inverted, can no longer receive him (1425-1428). The sun of Phoibos as it shines through oracle and prophet does not illuminate. Oedipus’ tragic vision will be forced to range through mountainous night, beneath a sun which burns all the brighter against this night’s black foil. It is an unnatural image – Oedipus is an unnatural creature. The sun that burns at night is the recoil of Oedipus’ speech upon him, which Teiresias has promised: “It is sad that you utter these reproaches, which all men shall soon utter against you” (oneidizķn, oneidiei, 372373). 38 The truth of Oedipus’ native birth will place him correctly in the royal line, straightening it out, while this straightening is likewise the recognition of perversion, of the ignorance in tragic speech within which tragic knowledge hides. He associates himself inadvertently with this foregone knowledge, with the Pythian oracle, its radiant God Apollo, and also Laius, the murdered king. In fact, Oedipus will act “as though he had been my father” (349). Oedipus’s pledge is ironic proof of the depth of his ignorance. He cannot act “as though” Laius is his father – Laius is his father. The speech made most clearly and with the most dramatic force by Oedipus, that of the curse, is also ironically a kind of speech without knowledge, even less than he realises. And I pray that the doer of the deed, whether a single man has gone undetected or he has acted with others, may wear away a miserable life in misery, miserable as he is. (246-248)

“It was not to leave the guilt unpurified [akarthaton]” (256), Oedipus says a few lines later to the chorus of Thebans. The only possible cause for the extent of Oedipus’ disaster is the curse upon the criminal which he voluntarily commends to the city and the gods. The killing, were it done without knowledge, or in self-defense, as it had been, would have required a mere ritual purification. 39 As for the parricide and incest which reveal themselves, even they would have been excused once the pollution were ritually cleansed. To a Greek audience this curse would have been completely 38

39

Sophocles’ language recoils in the doubling of the participle and the active indicative. This is a pattern that continues throughout the play. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 165, 172. The law of Dracon would have acquitted Oedipus of deliberate homicide. Oedipus’ crimes would have demanded purification, not punishment. SIG, 111.

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real.40 Patriarchs as well as the priests of Apollo were thought to have the power to curse with great effect. The revenging spirit of Laius as well as Oedipus’ devotion to the God in his invoking the curse would have been enough to insure its force. But as king Oedipus is given still a third established authority by which to command the fates.41 These words of his become a crucial part of the action of the play. As he himself explains, once the tragedy unfolds, “myself I spoke that word” (1381). But the power of ‘who’ speaks and ‘when’ draws its strength of language from the ordering power of a divine Dikù. It is the ritual power of language which demands Oedipus’ destruction, a wretchedness he unwittingly calls upon himself in Justice’s name. “But beside you other Cadmeans, all who approve these words, may Justice fight and may all the gods ever graciously remain” (275). The connection between the enforcing of this justice and both the power and obscurity of human language asserts itself consistently throughout the play. As Oedipus’ true nature gradually reveals itself, the curse he has uttered against the criminal repeatedly terrorizes him,42 from Teiresias’ initial demand that he “abide by the proclamation,” and “from this day on address neither these men nor me” (350-351), to Oedipus’ late recognition that he has “in my misery cut myself off, commanding with my own lips that all should drive from their houses the impious one, the one whom the gods had shown to be impure and of the race of Laius” (1379-1382). It is a “fixed point”43 of reference about which the story unfolds. Just before Teiresias enters the second scene, Oedipus, responding to a chorus confident in the power of his public declarations to draw a confession, explains that “He who is not afraid to do the deed is not frightened by a word” (296). But what if the word is a deed, part of the action, like a marriage vow or an insult? There is good reason to see Sophocles not only using language to forward the plot (which is what Aristotle meant, identifying language in the Poetics as part of the action) but also thematizing the ability certain kinds of language have to be deed-full.44 Oedipus was not afraid for his life 40 41

42 43 44

C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 172 f. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 173. Bowra provides a lengthy list of other textual authorities on the special ability to curse allotted certain figures. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 350 f., 744 f., 767, 813-820, 1290-1291, 1379-1382. John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 208. Aristotle Po., 1456a36-b4. On Aristotle’s claim, see John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. Cf. Charles Segal in “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 162. Sophocles’ Tyrannus makes “language itself the

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at the crossroads where he met his father, but it will be the word that strikes fear into him. It is the word which finally destroys him, spoken with a delayed knowledge, which, in dawning, reveals the terribly selfdestructive nature of this act of speech. The distinction between word and deed was well established for the Greeks. 45 By using the destroyed figure of Oedipus to present early on the sort of heroic distinction between word and action we are accustomed to finding in Homer and Pindar, Sophocles ironically calls this distinction into question and prepares us for the terrible action the word will soon have on this hero, whose deeds and catastrophes are intellectual – about speech and knowledge – rather than warrior-athletic. In the universe of Oedipus we “speak disaster,” we “accomplish words.” But this is only possible given the intertwining of the mental and the physical which was also conventionally Greek: he “accomplished the word given aforetime [palaiphaton] at Pytho,”46 Pindar writes of the famous king’s twist of fate. This is no isolated quirk of the poet. Xenophanes, for example, describes language similarly as something which, if true, completes itself in action. When a man says something “completely true” it has “completed itself,” “and yet he has no exact knowledge, in contrast to the god.”47 These usages all draw from the single well of Homer, in which the word often does just this (epos telein).48 Sophocles returns to the same source: “You shall not get away with speaking disaster twice [pùmonas ereis]” (363), Oedipus warns Teiresias. Disaster is wreaked with the lips and not the hands. But these words cannot be just any mortal words. And so it will not

45

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47 48

field that fully enacts the play between the hidden and the obvious.” Cf. J. L. Austin How to do Things with Words, for a discussion of performativity. Cf. Jacques Derrida “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy. Derrida offers a critical discussion of Austin’s notion of performativity. Bruno Snell, Poetry and Society, pp. 78 f., 82. There was a customary opposition between word and deed, or word and fact, in Homer and Solon. Snell cites Solon E. I. fr. 10: “for ye look to a man’s tongue and shifty speech, and never to the deed he doeth.” Pindar’s opposition between the hero and the poet who praises him, for Snell, reflects the same opposition. Tragedy, a development in the internalising of man, he argues, naturally transforms the passivity and language and reflection into something active. This will culminate in the pure activity of the philosopher’s contemplation, such as Aristotle’s ÆÃÍÏÇ¿. See also Iliad, xvi. 718-723, xx. 232-234, 497-498, xxii. 333-334. Pindar, Olympian Odes, 2.42 ff., as cited in Richard C. Jebb The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, pp. xiv-xv. Fr. 34. As translated by Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 142. Homer Iliad i.108. See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 142n18.

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be the speakable element of Teiresias’ knowledge that we ought to be interested in, not the teachable, but rather the unspeakable.49 The “truth” is implanted in Teiresias, whom we hear is a “godlike prophet” (298-299). Teiresias has a wisdom (phronùsis) in communion with “all things, those that can be explained and those unspeakable, things in heaven and things that move on earth” (353). Although, as Aristotle explains, the action of tragic speech expresses thoughts, there are some thoughts, like the prophet’s, which cannot be expressed directly, some knowledge which cannot be transmitted from one person to the next. Teiresias and Oedipus represent a distinction between two kinds of truth which language can express, divine and terrestrial, between two languages, prophetic and profane, and finally between two types of wisdom or knowledge. The prophet is said to “dispose [nķmķn] (300) all things, to distribute them (nemein), reminding us of the ordering function of law (nomos) in both nature and the state. 50 Behind this distinction in languages, truths, and wisdoms is the enforcing of this law, a quantity like Oedipus (though infinitely stable, rather than infinitely unstable) crossing the threshold between the human and divine, a principle of order for both nature and politics through which human wisdom and language are subverted by the gods from within. The first choral ode’s inversion of nature is mirrored by the inversion of wisdom and foolishness. “I did not know that your words would be foolish,” (433) Oedipus tells the prophet. Teiresias is foolish to Oedipus, but, we hear from the prophet, wise (emphrones) to Oedipus’ parents (435-436). Teiresias, whom Oedipus has called blind in thought (nous, 371), irrational, betrays the first glimpse of a vision which will change Oedipus’ wisdom into folly, and, likewise, the folly of the prophet’s riddling words into wisdom. The power of his intelligence has also been the cause of his ruin (442). True wisdom (phronùsis) belongs to Teiresias, the profundity of the religious, though Oedipus may have a talent for solving riddles (441). And so when Teiresias tells 49

50

The word for unspeakable things follows and is contrasted with didakta, things taught. The implication is probably that the unspeakable things are unspeakable in that it is impossible to explain how they work. J. P. Vernant The Origins of Greek Throught, p. 86. Force (Bia) in Athenian politics was a servant of “nomos, which reigned in place of the king at the center of the city. Because of its relation to dikù, nomos still had a certain religious connotation.” It was through logos that dikù was established. The element of force was an irrationality necessary to ensure the rational politics of the state. Cf. Arendt Hannah The Human Condition, p. 63 f. Arendt provides a relevant discussion of the verb nemein and its relation to the institution of Greek law, in its spatial aspects especially.

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him flatly who he is and what he has done, it is as if the prophet has merely stopped to clear his throat. Not two but three kinds of wisdom touch in this play, as three roads had met where Oedipus clashed with his father. “A man may surpass one kind of sophia by means of another,” but both are distinct from the wisdom of Zeus and Apollo, who “know the affairs of mortals” (498-505). Prophetic wisdom stands (like Oedipus will in the Colonnus, once transfigured) on a middle ground between human wisdom and the wisdom of the gods.51 The second chorus pits Oedipus’ intellectual weight against this inspired knowledge of the prophet. The “decision” (krisis) will be resolved once the “saying” is “made unmistakeable” (501). This unmistakable saying, the kathartic truth of the prophet’s divine logos, will express itself in a form that has been straightened out, a clarification of the prophet’s “obscure” and “riddling words” (439). And so the chorus refers to this language as orthon epos, the word that is straight.52 But what force is it that might pound this crookedness in Oedipus straight, releasing nature, the city, language and thought itself from the sickness with which it has been contorted? It will be the intervention of this third wisdom in the first, though without the mediations of the prophet: the coming of a dreadful knowledge. “How dreadful it is to know when the knowledge does not befit the knower!” (316-318) – Teiresias’ first response to Oedipus. He speaks of terrible knowledge, a “being-wise” which does not pay a profit, to paraphrase Sophocles’ expression: ÔÃÓÔÃÓ ÔÏÍËÃÇËoÐÂÃÇËÍËÃËÆ¿ÊÅÒÃÉÅÉÓÅ ÔÏÍËÍÓËÒÇ. But taken more literally, we can hear in the language of this expression the sense of goals (telù) reached through a knowledge which does not free the one who knows. Rather, it binds him, in contrast to the loosening, slackening, or freeing motion of luein. Even Teiresias is bound by this knowledge. “I shall never reveal my sorrows, not to mention yours” (328-329). But whether he speaks or not, 51 52

See note 97, ch. 1. See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Lame Tyrant” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 226 f. The theme of literal lameness and straightness, apart from a metaphorical correction of language, thought, or justice, as Sophocles clearly applies the idea, is essential to the play. Oedipus, as the chorus suggests in the first ode with the image of the wounded bull, due to the crooked lineage he originates, as Vernant has shown, is a “lame tyrant.” The tyrant is a god and a beast among men. He is isolated, rejects the rules at the basis of social life, placing himself apolis. In Oedipus we have the perversion of generations. He is originally other than he is, a bent figure. Mythologically, the tryant, such as Periander, is lame, like Oedipus, and possesses a “different, dancing gait.”

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“things will come of themselves, even if I veil it in silence” (341). If language is really so ineffective, as Oedipus, too, has claimed, and if there is such a gap between religious truth and human thinking, why did Sophocles, a fundamentally religious poet, compose his song? The human situation can be glimpsed from a point outside of it, its truth revealed, if and when this point places itself, however catastrophically, within man’s domain. It is an event no less essential to tragedy than it was to the Dionysian rite from out of which it grew. While Pindar’s mortals and gods intersected in the translation of the hero into immortal splendour, echoing Homer’s Elysium, in Sophocles’ lyric they meet in tragic conflict. Oedipus is this place where the time of the gods and that of humanity intersects. Tragic poetry is the misdirected language of its exposition. 53 Tragic Vision and Moral Education Sophocles illustrates through Oedipus man’s learning of an inhuman truth. 54 The development of tragic speech bestows a tragic knowledge upon the king, like that of Teiresias, a second wisdom through which a third communicates indirectly. Although the purpose of the play is not fundamentally moral, Oedipus does acquire what the philosopher might call the virtue of wisdom, though not as the result of sustained practice, such as the askùsis of philosophy, but rather in the spontaneous acquisition of vision, via the accidental pursuit of a veiled guilt. The Creon of the Antigone – twin tragedy of the intellect to the Tyrannus – learns in a similar way, as he explains to a chorus describing the typical circumstances of moral education, a situation which does not apply to his exception. He will not know what is happening to him until the education is over:55 Ah! Seeing justice seems to be like knowing it. Chorus: ÍÇÊqoÐÃÍÇÈ¿ÐÍÖÃÒÅËÂÇÈÅËÇÂÃÇË. But ah me … I will have a wretched learning. (1270) Creon: ÍÇÊÍÇÃÌ×Ê¿Æ×ËÂÃÇÉ¿ÇÍÐ. 53

54

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Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 163. “Poetic language ‘means’ by indirect suggestion and paradox as well as by (or in deliberate contradiction with) one-to-one correspondence.” See B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes. Knox is once again a great resource. On the contemporary significance of teaching and learning in the Tyrannus, he directs us to lines 31, 388, 357, 554, 545, 574, 576, 698, 839, 708, 1009, 1193, 1193-1195. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 113. The citation of this exchange belongs to Dawe.

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Creon’s learning is not the normal kind. It is not enough for him nor will it be for Oedipus to absorb this knowledge in the usual ways, practically, gradually acclimating his moral vision. Teiresias is of course right when he says that Oedipus “cannot learn from me” (333). 56 But then how can he learn? What kind of regimen does an education like his require? Since the resistance to tragic knowledge and the destructions it carries are naturally tremendous, recognition must be forced against every mechanism of defense that Oedipus and Jocaste can enlist. Divine knowledge appears here as a kind of truth which consciousness resists, unknowingly. 57 That the gods are in some sense Oedipus’ unconscious does not mean that they are merely a projection existing only in the mind. The resistance he mounts in his investigations does not oppose some fantastic primal scene, for instance, but rather something very much real and independent of him. The revelation of what the gods have in store, that speech which breaks “the veil of silence (341),” will be the recognition of this reality as a conscious fact. The true meaning of language, its knowledges, which shudder and break, do not begin in the mind of man. They have their beginning outside of him, only winding down to him finally. The recognition, we will see, begins with mania, and concludes in the reversal of a life and its essential life-view. It is a tragic rejoinder to the philosopher’s adequation of the knower with the divine object of knowledge. 58 In the case of Oedipus, to be56

57

58

He anticipates the problem of learning as Plato defines it in the Meno, and Aristotle at EN, ii.4, in terms of habituation. Cf. Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 218. This was an essential Greek problem even before Sophocles, in the poetry of Pindar, for instance, and can be traced back to Achilles and his teacher Phoenix in Iliad ix, though Pindar was the first to formulate it, as in Nemean Odes, iii, in The Odes of Pindar, “for it was thrust on him by the conflict of the aristocratic traditional education with the new rational spirit.” If virtue can be learned and taught universally, then aristocratic blood becomes politically devalued. Kierkegaard will return to individual learning and generation as an essential problem in the Fragments and their Postscript, where the possibility of learning, and especially of learning to be virtuous, takes center stage. Cf. Paideia, vol. 1, p. 28, on the force of the irrational and the limitations of education in Iliad, ix. Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 161. Segal says something similar: like the unconscious in Freud, the truth about Oedipus and Thebes is a radical alterity which seeps through the cracks in the reasonable structures of language, and lives. “Where Sophocles implies divine powers, Freud implies the processes of the unconscious.” See Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae. Cornford provides a general discussion of the history of the belief in the adequation of knower and known. This would

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come more like the gods through divine intelligence does not make a king. It expels one. Wisdom means self-destruction.59 Tragic experience transforms Oedipus’ vision through the eruption of tragic knowledge, in him, and with it the vision of the city he commands, as well as the Athenians who wrought the tragic stage. Tragic vision coincides with a social structure. Its lyric was part of a creative upsurge of “strictly political institutions, modes of behaviour, and thought” implicit in “the regime of the polis.”60 It is a consciousness divided between the old wisdom, which was unteachable, and the new didakta of a democratic reason and democratic virtue in which any citizen could train. In the Tyrannus, it is Teiresias who first announces the potential tragedy of knowledge – to know fully, beyond one’s measure, as a man, was to suffer. The divine truth with which Teiresias sorrowfully aligns himself from the opening scene has been set upon Oedipus. It is a contest between the king’s crafty truth and the uncrafted intelligence of the gods. And the speaking of truth, though Teiresias says otherwise, does matter. This tragedy is one of knowledge. The question of knowing, at the time, was no mere theoretical diversion, but rather an essential political matter. Oedipus embodies both the great teachers of the 5th century, Socrates included, and the student whose ignorance becomes the object lesson of the play, the instrument of its tragic purpose.61 Through this instrument the poet reveals the uncanny reality immanent in the things themselves of the city, its people and landscape, through which the divine logos shows itself. Teiresias had already tried to communicate this reality directly.

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apply to both the Ionian and Attic philosophers, ranging from the 6th to 4th centuries, where the mind and its object are formed of the same substance: Anaximenes’ air, for instance, Heraclitus’ fire, Anaximander’s apeiron, or, in the case of Anaxagoras, mind itself. And so the cosmos was by nature intelligible. Cf. Plato Republic 490b, 508de. Plato traces both the power to know and the truth which this power grasps to the single source of the Good. But the literal expression is Aristotle’s, who spells out this theory of knowledge in De Anima, iii.4. Cf. EN, 1139a8-11. As is typical, the late philosophical expression merely expresses a latency at work in the culture long before. For even more on Aristotle and the Greek background of this idea, see J. A. Stewart Notes to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, vol. 2, pp. 11-15, as well as H. H. Joachim The Nicomachean Ethics, pp. 169-172, both commenting on EN, vi.1. For early accounts of ‘homoiotic’ knowing by the senses, Joachim directs us to Empedocles, fr. B109; Democritus, frs. A77, A121 and A135. Bruno Snell Poetry and Society, p. 77. “All his searching and investigation destroys Oedipus himself. This is ultimate wisdom.” J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 31. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 136 f.

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Oedipus responded to the danger inherent in the more instructive kinds of speech with a warning: “You shall not get away with speaking disaster twice!” (363). But Teiresias spoke twice because he had not been understood (359, 361). The king cannot “see the plight” (367) in which he lies because he has not understood the prophet’s speech. He cannot see, or understand, because the knowledge Teiresias possesses cannot be taught. It must be undergone. Only in this way can there be the katharsis Oedipus seeks, can his soul and city be healed. We might get some sense of what this katharsis of intelligence involves with these, perhaps the most terrifying, of Teiresias words: This day creates you and destroys you. kÂqkÊÃÏ¿ÔÓÑÃÇÑÃÈ¿ÇÂÇ¿ÔÆÃÏÃÇ.62 (438, my trans.)

We hear an echo of the physical inversion of nature which struck the city’s fields and women: “The fruits of the glorious earth do not increase, and no births come to let women surmount the pains in which they cry out.” This inversion of generation concentrates itself in Oedipus’ fate, in generations crossed: brother-father, son-husband.63 The natural production which issued in death instead of life returns in Oedipus with absolute energy and again turns life on its head. The day of growth is the day of decay – the day of decay is the day of growth. This is the totally destructive depth which learning must achieve. We seem to hear the voice of Heraclitus sound here as the first scene draws to a close, and once again, when Teiresias identifies the “first of men,” now, as the last, “most cruelly rooted out.”64 Behind the veil of harmony is the unflinching truth of human strife weaving itself perpetually into divine patterns.65 Once the investigation into the identity of the criminal succeeds, Oedipus, blinded by his own hand, will no 62

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It is true that we hear of Oedipus’ birth, his creation, in the context here of the question of his literal parentage, “those that gave you birth” (ÍlÑqÃÔÓÑ¿Ë). But human procreation soon slips into something else when Oedipus asks Teiresias what mortals gave him birth. Teiresias’ response, that it will be the day, casts Oedipus out beyond the limits of the human, where he rightly belongs by dint of his tragic fate. “And he shall be revealed as being to his children whom he lives with both a brother and a father, and to his mother both a son and a husband, and to his father a sharer in his wife and a killer” (457-460). “For there is none among mortals that shall be more cruelly rooted out than you,” (427-428) the prophet tells him. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 201. There is a kinship between Sophocles and Heraclitus. Both impose the absoluteness of a logos upon man and both consign human knowledge to obscurity and contradiction. In addition to Jaeger’s Paideia, Bowra also points to the influence of Ionian ideas on Sophocles’ distinction between perceived appearance and reality, opinion (ÂÍÌ¿) and knowledge or truth.

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longer see what there is to be seen. He will have discovered nothing on his own. Tragic knowledge sharpens the contradictions in Oedipus to their finest point, between the intellect and this active something that “is never fully explicable in rational terms.”66 The play moves in the manner of a revelation. In this sense Jocaste will be right, when, dismissing the oracles, she councils Oedipus in the impenetrable uncertainty of fortune. Pronoia, the foreknowledge implicit in reasoned choice and moral responsibility, is impossible (978). Oedipus’ mutilation, however, enacts the renunciation of this reasonable human vision in which “the event” (977, 1080) of Luck rules, anticipating a god-like vision akin to the prophet’s: For he broke off the golden pins from her raiment, with which she was adorned, and lifting up his eyes struck them, uttering such words as these: that they should not see his dread sufferings or his dread actions, but in the future they should see in darkness those they never should have seen, and fail to recognise those he wished to know. (1271-1274)

What has come to light is Oedipus’ own terrible nature, which Teiresias has known since the start. The investigation into his birth reveals that Oedipus in marriage returned to the source of his being (1499), as through his criminal investigation he has returned to another beginning, the time of the murder, before his arrival.67 This was a terror which could not be learned through examination, or looked upon directly, but rather revealed against the mass of his intellectual will. Even Oedipus’ genius was unable to provide the conditions for receiving this kind of knowledge, nor could an intellect as desireful as his interest itself in pursuing it. It breaks in upon human thought from beyond the horizon, an unsought for numen which destroys as it enlightens.

Tragic Crime and the Onset of Mania What is it that forces this terrible knowledge upon Oedipus? Where does it draw its strength? In the first ode, the criminal is pictured by

66

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Sophocles’ view is “a product of religious and philosophical thought,” he writes, directing us to Heraclitus, frs. B78 & B79; Parmenides, fr. B1; Alcmaeon, fr. B1. Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 149. Cf. 1496-1499. The parricide can be seen as a necessary complement to the incest, their father killing his own, (ÒÍËοÒÃϿοÒÅÏnÊ×ËÃÎÃíËÃ), to “have issue with the mother, from whom he himself had sprung.”

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the Theban choristers as a “bull, limping sadly with sore-wounded foot.” He “travels through the wild jungle and through caves and over rocks” because Zeus “armed with fire” pursues him (462-482). Oedipus’ name announces to us the “swollen foot” of this bull (oidein – pous: to swell – foot), as it betrays the intellectual rather than physical source of its injury (oida: I know).68 While Oedipus the bull flees this terrible knowledge which the prophet forecasts, “the dread spirits of death,” Erinyes of father and mother “that never miss their mark,” as well as the prophecies themselves, take on a physical reality. Emerging from the earth’s centre the prophecies “hover about him, ever alive” (481-482). The language of the prophecy is real, the stuff of heat, earth, and vapour. Like the life which this earth nurtures, a living which extends to human generation,69 oracular language is also alive (zķnta), akin to the vital flames of Zeus and his son Dionysus, but also Ares the destroyer. The life of earth nurtures that of language and, as allies of the divine order in which Oedipus and his city are thrown off balance, both have become distorted beyond human thought and control.70 Oedipus will be forced to adopt a difficult vision, like the philosopher in Plato’s cave. Learning to see man as he truly is draws the initiate of tragic knowledge into the hands of a daimķn deploying madness as an instrument of this renewed perception. Because human language is not built to house such a vision, the god communicates through language that is riddled, or bent, though the broader vantage of the play’s end reveals this derangement as the sudden eruption of intelligence. Oedipus unearths his true identity, an episode in the series of interpretations of the Delphic maxim (gnķthi seauton), making Oedipus an unlikely companion for Socrates and a precursor to his great Danish admirer. When Creon and Oedipus collide in the second scene, precisely this question of mental health and the integrity of knowledge dominates the exchange. It is a straight mind (orthos phrenos, 528) which judges straightly (orthķs phroneis, 550), says Creon, to which the chorus adds: 68

69

70

For a gloss on the linguistics of the name, see J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus in Athens” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 322. Cf. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 127 f., 149, 183 f., 189, 264. An individual’s life is always referred to by Sophocles as ÀÇÍÐ, while the life which extends across generations is expressed in terms of ÄÍÅ. Charles Segal “Earth in Oedipus Tyrannus” in Sophocles Tragic World, p. 212. Segal gives his analysis of this element (ÁÅ, ÕÆÍË) as divine, as opposed to the political ÕÍÏ¿, or land, over which the king rules.

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speaks “the word that is straight” (505). But in what ways can this straight-thinking become vulnerable to a crookedness? Distinguishing himself from Oedipus, Creon attempts to correct the debauched king with these words: When I do not know I like to say nothing. ÃÔqÍlÐÁ¿ÏÊÅÔÏÍË×ÑÇÁ¿ËÔÇÉ×. (569)

A more literal translation is helpful: “For with regards to that which I do not know, I love silence.” Oedipus is living proof of the consequences for not cultivating this appropriate love of silence. While “a mind that thinks sensibly cannot become evil” (600), judging poorly will contort a straight mind into a crooked one. The juxtaposition in the line by the poet makes it clear: ÍÓÈ¿ËÁÃËÍÇÒÍËÍÓÐÈ¿ÈÍÐ (−) È¿É×ÐÔÏÍË×Ë (600). There is one hinge upon which “thinking well – evil mind” turns. In the case of Oedipus one is in the process of spinning into the other, and as Creon advises, “time alone reveals the just man” (613). He has already beseeched the king to pause and “reflect upon the matter” in order that he “might give himself the logon” (583, my trans.). But Oedipus cannot think straight. He suffers from divine inspiration, a mania brought on by the gods that since Homer, through “mental blindness,” has brought great men to ruin.71 The chorus will soon sing of the shafts of passion which the gods send down upon those, like Oedipus, who disturb the order of Justice. The shape of his life has been redrawn to include the vague hands of a daimķn – possessing both mind and spirit – which only now make themselves known. Once Jocaste reveals a few more details of Laius’ murder at “the place where three roads meet,” Oedipus himself recognizes a kind of mania overtaking him, a “wandering” of the soul (psuchù) and a “stirring” of the mind (phrenķn) (727). This stirring (anakinùsis) is literally a motion upwards, a rising we might associate with waking up. Along with the ever-present images of the sun, Helios, “foremost of the gods” (660), this hint of Oedipus’ madness strikes us as the initial ascent of a kind of divine light, one which ignites an alter71

See J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 104, 112. Cf. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, pp. 116-9. Oedipus’ madness is a development in the Greek concept of atù. As Bremer explains, both atù and hamartia link some kind of error to mental derangement brought by a god. But this happens in different ways for different poets, depending on the degree of culpability assigned to the error, the moralizing of the atù. Homer and Sophocles are free of this moralizing, while Hesiod, Theognis, Solon, Pindar, and Aeschylus develop the moral significance of atù as divine punishment. Aristotle’s error will be of the Homeric-Sophoclean ilk.

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native form of knowing in the ‘middle place’ between gods and men which Oedipus occupies. The development of these “torments [atais]” (1205) – a mania bespeaking the influence of a daimķn – climbs toward its highest pitch as the act of self-mutilation draws near. 72 Oedipus is an artistic-political experiment in the limits of law, the extreme situations by which the shape of law and the city it defines is established from the outlands of what is prohibited or excluded. The law that tragedy expressed was still in the making and these extremities of legal circumstance test the limits of what law can contain, of what legal speech can comprehend.73 Oedipus’ mania is a consequence of violating the divine nomos which first greeted us in the figure of the prophet. A divine pattern has revealed itself in the stormswept waters of Thebes, though the full extent of it is not yet clear. With the conventions of human law consumed by revolt, the disease and chaos of Thebes that Oedipus concentrates in his individuality open a choric space, a place without place,74 removed from both the land (chora) of the city and the humane earth (gù) that gods provide, through which the chorus of Thebans glimpse divine law: “The mortal nature of men did not beget them, neither shall they ever be lulled to sleep by forgetfulness. Great in these laws is the god, nor does he ever grow old” (868-872). This is a law grounded in the fear of Dikù. Its violation calls “shafts of passion [thumou] against defenseless souls [psuchas amunķn]” (893-895). By the third scene, Oedipus’ mania rises to the surface language of the drama. This passion he suffers, in which his logos fails, which only intensifies as the play continues, was typically daimonic in Sophocles’ time.75 An invisible power has been at work in his life, diverting him internally from his chosen course. “Would one not be right who judged that this came upon me by the action of a cruel deity [daimonos]” 72

73

74 75

J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 118, 163 f. Bremer spends time developing the centrality of atù, a god-sent mania, to Sophocles, and Oedipus in particular. His blindness is ÆÃÍÆÃË, indissociable from the act of the gods. The doom which he had to work out himself is simultaneously the accomplishment of the god Apollo (164). Cf. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, pp. 95-98. Dawe also goes through great philological lengths to show the genealogical connection between atù and hamartia in Sophocles and determines that the idea of ruin or damage which generally defines atù is based on a more fundamental cause of “mental blindness.” J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 339. Cf. Jacques Derrida “Khora” in On The Name. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 41.

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(828-829), he asks. Oedipus also invokes the interference of the gods in the figure of Zeus,76 defining himself soon after as hated by the gods (echthrodaimķn) should his fate work itself out in the disaster which looms.77 The chorus later confirms the background influence of the daimķn. “With your daimona as my example, yours, unhappy Oedipus, I say that nothing of mortal life is happy” (1193-1196, my trans.). Of course no god has intervened directly, at this point. All the action has arisen naturally from within the relation Oedipus bears to his world. But this is just how the irrationality of the daimķn worked for 5th c. Greeks, and that of Homeric atù before it. It is an exteriority which operates from within.78 Through its infection by this unstable difference the immanence of human reason and design is obverted, forced, ultimately, to recognize the authority of a divine Other. This alterity communicates itself only indirectly, through the reversed course of human affairs. Anxiety, an “exciting” of “his mind with every kind of grief,” is the first signal of the work of this unseen daimonic power upon Oedipus (914-917).79 As Jocaste supplicates before Apollo, bearing garlands and incense, she laments to the god that Oedipus is no longer a “rational man [ennous]” (915-916), but has been possessed by some irrational force. Presenting herself here before the god of light, so that Oedipus might be restored to “mind” through a “cleansing solution” (921), she goes on to describe his manic state more specifically. The king is “at the mercy of the speaker,” she says, “struck powerless” if anyone “speaks of terrors” (915-917). The cleansing which Jocaste speaks of is also a loosening or freeing from the grip of this fear. 80 Speech, like Oedipus’ curse in the first scene, possesses great occult power in this play. The magic of the word takes effect in physical reality. The word and the world – ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ – coalesce in a way that is alien to modern distinctions between subject and object. Language is of the earth, the skies, and inside Oedipus is a terrible world about to spill. 76 77 78

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Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 738. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 816. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 38-42. Atù, unruly passions, pollution, and moira, and Erinye, are each typical forms of daimķn as linked to misfortune. It returns at lines 1190-1196. For references to the “active” intervention of a daimķn, where the passive, undetected influence translates into actual madness, despair, and self-destruction, see lines 1258, 1260-1261, 1300-1302, 1311, 1327-1328, 14781479. There is also the reference to atù at line 1205. The word ÉÓÑÇË refers us to both the ”lustral baths” through which the polluted are cleansed, and also the related freeing or loosening of ÉÓÃÇË.

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Though language also functions in a way to which the methods of psychoanalysis can testify today. It takes only a word to dredge the unholy monsters of the unconscious to the daylight of consciousness. Still, as we’ve seen, the unconscious here is not within Oedipus. It is a divine transcendence latent in the world of men, about to dawn upon him awfully. A key feature of the mania mounting in Oedipus will be its capacity for doubled or even tripled language, accommodating contradictory truths. The word in general in the Tyrannus has a “double power [dunamin diplùn]” (938), like the words of the messenger who visits Jocaste once her supplications are through, whose message will bring pleasure, but also sorrow (936-937). That language is always more or less obscurely doing two things at once is no accident, since there are two orders of thought and language intersecting, human and divine, in the ambiguous third wisdom which both Teiresias and Oedipus abide. 81 It is impossible to contain a tragic character like Oedipus within a single “network of meaning.”82 The characters themselves testify to it as the story unfolds behind them, and they gain the kind of narrative perspective afforded the reader. They become readers themselves, for whom the autonomous force of language is always playing tricks, even when it is language they themselves have spoken. The loosening of the signifying web within which Oedipus’ identity hangs is both a symptom and cause of this mania. In Jocaste, a precursor of this doubling or reversibility in language enjoins a scepticism concerning the oracles, and the limits of human knowledge more generally. The play is written at the height of the sophistic enlightenment, and Sophocles gives Jocaste the role of the skeptic for whom all truths can be argued both ways. 83 To be reasona81

82

83

W. B. Stanford Ambiguity in Greek Literature, pp. 163-173; J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Ambiguity and Reversal” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 117; Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 140. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 349. See Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, pp. 176 f. The Tyrannus was written at “the height of the sophistic enlightenment” in Greece. It is clearly about “conscious knowledge.” It “may certainly be read as a critique of man’s confidence in understanding and controlling his world through his ever-increasing power in the physical, biological, and medical sciences, and in the human sciences of language, politics, history, and so on.” Segal echoes hear a reading made earlier by Knox, in Oedipus at Thebes, a debt which he acknowledges, only to go on, more to my taste, to stress the significant resistances and blindness of Oedipus to “the radical otherness of the kind of ‘knowledge’ that

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ble, as she prays that Oedipus would be, though the terror of the word is fast upon him, requires submission to chance. Foreknowledge is impossible – that is the discovery of reason, the return to nous which it seems Oedipus may now make. “It is the event that rules, and there is no certain knowledge of anything” (977). Oedipus will soon declare himself enthusiastically to be this “child of Tuchùn (1080) – “Event” – the mother of a human time which streams freely, without significant purpose or measure. But this apparent return to reason is only the heightening of his madness. The elevation of reason is equivalent to a kind of madness. Jocaste’s faith in rhetoric and chance, which we see in her attempt to use language to persuade and bend chance to her will, along with her rejection of certain knowledge, dead ends in the unholy madness which peaks in her suicide, just before Oedipus, mutilating himself, mounts the crest of his own disturbed heights. This is the telos of the play, whose arrow, the chorus has told us and will tell us again, inevitably hits its mark (481, 1197-1201). The sickness of the city must concentrate itself in Oedipus, to be expelled with him. It is his service to them as sacrificial victim, an offering to the divine order of Dikù in which Oedipus plays a part that has come offensively loose.84 No priest is required to raise the knife, no maenad to tear at his flesh. Oedipus accomplishes this sacrifice under his own power, through the simple act of bringing the truth of his origin (sperma) to the light of knowledge (idein) (1077). He will bring his birth to light, make it appear (phanķ, 1059)85 through dialogue, as he promised earlier to “light up the obscurity” of Laius’ killer (phanķ, 339). But to uncover the mystery of his birth, the source of his life (sautou

84

85

he does not have.” This is “a knowledge to which the organs of consciousness – the ‘ears, eyes, and mind’ of line 371 – are indeed ‘blind’.” See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox. There is good reason to interpret the tragic hero, at least partially, in terms of the “resistance model” of Dionysiac myth and sacrifice. He is both criminal and victim, guilty and innocent, human and divine. The offense is somehow necessary, if not to the gods, then to us. This is Guepin’s conclusion. To live means to kill, and to take life means to incur guilt. This guilt must be expiated. Charles Burkert reaches similar conclusions in Homo Necans about the nature of Dionysiac Religion, where the community incurs a murderous guilt in order to establish its own moral-religious limits, and then re-establish its innocence and the bounds of an ordered, human life once again through sacrificial violence. See ch. 4, especially p. 226. B. Knox Oedipus at Thebes. Knox gives a complete discussion of the significance of Ô¿ÇË× and similarly derived words, at pp. 131-133, connects it with inquiry at pp. 120 f., mind at p. 125, knowing at p. 128, reason at p. 133, truth at p. 134, and teaching and learning at pp. 135-137, invoking the “atmosphere of the intellectual ferment” of the time.

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biou) in a line of generation (genos), he must sacrifice this individual being (1060).86 His self-sacrifice will ironically be the effect of this intelligent self-assertion, through which he accidentally tears the fabric of society within which the tune of nature, time, the gods, and human identity is harmonized. The ambivalence between the human and divine in Oedipus, a place where society ruptures, the excluded source of its health, the source of pollution, is also a source of salvation. But the fever must rise before it breaks. The excessively inspired language of the third stasimon points toward the mad presence of the divine in both Oedipus and the choristers themselves, who sing now of Oedipus’ divine parentage. Who, who among those who live long bore you, with Pan who roves the mountains as your father? Or was it some bedfellow of Loxias? For the mountain pastures are all dear to him. Or was it the lord Cyllene, or the Bacchic god dwelling on the mountain tops that received you as a lucky find from one of the black-eyed Nymphs, with whom he often plays. (1098-1109)

This has been a puzzle of its own to many interpreters. What to make of Oedipus’ hypothetical fostering or adoption by a number of gods? The choruses of Sophocles, we should recognize, do not stand outside the time of the play. Their perspective is neither that of the gods nor that of the author.87 Their beliefs change, they make exchanges and undergo the play as do the individual characters. In this ode, we witness the passing of Oedipus’ inspired mania like contagion to the choristers themselves.88 As Oedipus loses his right mind, swooning with the terrible knowledge of his birth, the chorus now swoons with him, as the intoxicating appearance of the gods in the figure of Oedipus’ fate similarly inspires the Thebans. The sickness which Thebes had contracted in adopting Oedipus as its king, while first literally bearing black fruit, expresses itself ultimately in the symptom of holy madness which they share with their debauched king, likening him to a god, while singing, inspired like the poets, of his fellow immortals.89 86

87 88 89

The play consistently opposes the distinctly separate lives of individuals (ÀÇÍÇ) from the generations and destructions within the processes of “Life” itself (Ä×Å), of “living.” An example of this is the cluster in which one’s “life,” at line 983, is distinguished from a “being alive” or “living” at lines 979, 985, 986. H. D. F. Kitto Greek Tragedy, pp. 159-161. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, p. 199. The four kinds of holy madness as Plato describes in the Phaedrus are that of prophecy, poetry, philosophy (as love), and initiation. While the madness of atê is clearly at work here, the situation is as always ambiguous. Both Oedipus and now his chorus could also be said to suffer from the madness of initiation, through which a mystical union is forged between man and gods. That Oedipus returns in

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His madness and theirs coincides with his removal from the human line of generations, choked by the knot his probing has tied in it. He is placed in the incestuous family of the deathless gods, in which time and generations are always crossed, going nowhere, where frivolity and luxury are the rule. But this chorus, after all, is mad.

Madness, Katharsis and Language The mounting enthusiasm and anxiety of Oedipus and his chorus, as well as the queen, anticipate the violent release of this energy in a concluding katharsis. What the effect of katharsis was is a question imposed on us by Aristotle. While he was interested in a katharsis in the audience, we are still at work inside the play. The language of katharsis is part of the drama. What it entails in Aristotle is a complicated and difficult question, one that will have to wait for chapter three. Here within the context of the drama we can claim a little more authority. The theme of purification sends us back to the king’s question at the beginning of the play. By what means will Thebes be purified? After begging for the rights of an old man to keep quiet, the elderly shepherd finally completes the story Oedipus has been assembling. Oedipus demands the shepherd “speak justice” (toun dikon, 1158), reveal the truth that can ease this crease in nature that has starved and infertilized the city of Thebes. This day will destroy him, Teiresias augured, and this katharsis comes at the hand of this unwilling shepherd, a few words from whom make a grand sacrifice of his king. The sacrificial blow which a few turns of phrase deal Oedipus is best described by this shepherd himself. While in the opening scene of the Tyrannus Oedipus stands like a god before his altar, he now lies prostrate upon it. Just before the blood spills, the shepherd warns his victim: Ah, I have arrived at the danger in speaking.90 ÍÇÊÍÇ ÎÏÍпÓÒ×ÁqÃÇÊÇÒ×ÂÃÇË×ÉÃÁÃÇË.

90

the Colonus as a prophet figure, like Teiresias, who is finally translated into immortality, supports the thesis that here too his unholy madness, like the pollution more generally of which it is a symptom, also has a holy aspect. Lloyd Jones, in the Loeb edition, translates: “Ah, I have come to the danger point in telling my story.” It is a matter of emphasis. While he puts it on the point of arrival, I put the emphasis on the speaking. It is in speaking that I have arrived at the danger, rather than being at a certain point in speaking.

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And I in listening. But nevertheless, one must listen. È¿Á×Áq¿ÈÍÓÃÇË¿ÉÉqmÊ×пÈÍÓÑÒÃÍË. (1169-1170, my trans.)

And so the shepherd and the king face one another, overcome together by their fear of what speaking will reveal. The revelation demands they cooperate in a speech which claims them both, unwilling instruments of its own momentum. Neither wants to continue, but they must. The shepherd because he is forced by his king, and the king because he also has been forced. Despite his resilience to the truth of his crime (he has set himself against it from the start), the irresistible desire to know in combination with the facts (to pragma) has overpowered his ability to evade it. “Ah, famous Oedipus, whom the same wide harbour served as child and as father on your bridal bed! How, how could the field your father sowed put up with you so long in silence?” (1207-1213). This is the pollution of which the house must be purified (katharmķ, 1228). The ambiguous doubling we have seen throughout the language of the play, between day and night, straight and crooked, true and false, life and death, sickness and healing, justice and chance, wisdom and foolishness, sanity and madness, etc., all seem to be rooted finally in a doubling of the flesh. Before taking her life, Jocaste “weeps over the bed where in double misery [dustùnos diplù] she had brought forth a husband by her husband [andros andra], and children by her child [tekn’ ek teknķn tekoi]” (1249-1251). But the “double power” of the poet’s word is co-present with the power of bodies to wreak a “double misery,” a power which is physical, expressed by other bodies, the husband who is also a son, the father who is also a brother, the wife who is also a mother. Oedipus is the “self-same seed [tauton sperma],” a seed that was sown twice in the same maternal soil, the father that grew up to kill his own (ton patera patùr humķn epephne, 1496), yet the wretchedness of Oedipus’ fortune is likewise a wretchedness of mind (tou nou), as it is for those, like the chorus, who must look on him (1348).91 This becomes unequivocal as the passive influence of the daimķn to which Oedipus and the chorus attest translates itself into a more direct and violent intervention in life and mind, which, in Oedipus, are so closely joined.92 The passage at 1258-1262 is “surely a locus for the way the 5th century Greeks thought about the irrational.” 93 91 92 93

Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1348. “How I wish I had never come to know you!” Cf. lines 1258-62, 1300-2, 1311, 1327-1328, 1478-1479. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 164. Bremer points out that both ÃËÅÉ¿ÒÍ and ÃÊÎÇÎÒÃÇ “are used in tragedy to indicate the sudden and destructive approach of, or mental invasion by, divinity.”

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And in his fury some god showed her to him; it was none of us men who stood nearby. And with a dreadful cry, as though someone were guiding him he rushed at the double doors, forced the bolts inwards from their sockets and fell into the room. ÉÓÑÑ×ËÒÇÂq¿ÓÒ׿ÇÊÍË×ËÂÃÇÈËÓÑÇÒÇÐÍÓÂÃÇÐÁ¿Ï ¿ËÂÏ×Ë ÍlοÏÏÅÊÃËÃÁÁÓÆÃËÂÃÇËÍËÂq¿ÓÑ¿ÐoÐníq kÁÅÒÍÓÒÇËÍÐÎÓÉ¿ÇÐÂÇÎÉ¿ÇÐÃËÅÉ¿Òq ÃÈÂÃÎÓÆÊÃË×Ë ÃÈÉÇËÃÈÍÇÉ¿ÈÉÅÆÏ¿È¿ÊÎÇÎÒÃÇÑÒÃÁÅ.

This wretchedness and mania, the ambivalences he embodies, cannot come to light outside of the ambiguous logos of the play’s tragic speech. In blinding himself, Oedipus avenges his daughters Antigone and Ismene, as a brother, against the father who begat the three of them. He has split in two, punishing the father, as son, with a physical metaphor for the blindness with which the father’s mind has seen and probed. Come to these hands that are your brother’s, which have done their duty on the eyes of the father who begat you, once so bright; he who unseeing, unknowing (ÍÓÆqlÑÒÍÏ×Ë)94 became (ÃÔ¿ËÆÅË) your father by her from whom he himself was got. (1480-5)

The ‘showing [ephanthùn]’ of Oedipus’ ‘becoming’ depends essentially on the grammar of kinship, as all the disseminations of meaning in the play have depended upon the potential play of the signifier, have had the structures of Greek grammar as a necessary condition.95 His madness is both the collapsed crossing of generations and of the symbolic ordering power which distributes them, the conventionalized space and time within which identity is established. The crushing vacuum that the gods leave in their wake absorbs them both. In the end, this katharsis accomplishes the straightening which Oedipus, his wife and the chorus have each in their own way sought. Once the truth is made clear, the dark figure of Oedipus has no more need of the light (1182). The inversions have been righted. It is no 94

95

In Oedipus declamation to his daughters, as one who neither sees nor “knows,” Sophocles significantly chooses the participle of historia, the proto-philosophical investigations of the 6th c. Ionians into an essentially rational ‘nature.’ Charles Segal “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 141. “Sophocles makes the ambiguity of language impinge inescapably on the ambiguity of personal identity. In the play language and kinship function as parallel modes of situating oneself in the world and so of knowing who one is. To know the truth of what we are, we need to understand the discourse through which we create ourselves.” Cf. Charles Segal “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious” in Sophocles Tragic World, p. 179. Segal, however, does not want to deny that reality exists outside of textuality, to make “the post-structural fallacy, reducing what can appear only through language to a solely linguistic existence.”

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longer the darkness which illuminates. It is no longer the sun which blinds. The paradoxes of nature along with his identity have been simplified.96 Once the truth is revealed, speech becomes plain. The only thing the sun can do for Oedipus is shine upon the world which he has defiled. But Hades too is prohibited. To die would be to return to the heart of his defilement, the shades of the mother and father he violated. Because Oedipus can neither look upon this world nor the one below, he chooses the middle place of blindness, no longer of this world but living still within it.97 Though even this habitation will be beyond the city, in the wild regions of Kithaeron (1452).98 The mountain where he was first left to die as an infant once again becomes his home, the same mountain where the maenads, inspired by their tragic god, perform their savage winter dance, suckling the young at their breasts, before tearing them apart and eating them raw.99 96

97

98 99

See Charles Segal “Earth in Oedipus Tyrannus” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, p. 212. Segal analyses the relation of men as mortals to the divine element of earth, and with it sky, as opposed to the “land (ÕÍÏ¿)” over which man has dominion. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Oedipus Between Two Cities” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 356-358. As Vernant points out, in the Colonus, Oedipus occupies part of the ÊÃÑÍÁ¿Ç¿, or middle place, between the gods of the underworld and the gods above, chthonos and Olympos. The space in the play is divided between the sacred wood and the profane space through which access is given freely. Oedipus is always carried to and fro between them. The bùma, the exact frontier between the sacred and the profane, also acts as the boundary between silence and speech, between the wood where quiet must be observed, and the place where it is proper to speak. My interpretation of the blinding follows Bowra. C. M. Bowra Sophoclean Tragedy, pp. 179-183. The implication is that Oedipus was not mad, but “chose” to blind himself. Though this is the inference Bowra draws, I do not. Dwelling neither in this world or another strikes me as a fairly mad choice, governed by a paradoxical logic. Oedipus is left with no ‘place’ to go on living. Yet ultimately Bowra dissolves the difference between this self-possessed choice and the work of a ¿ÇÊ×Ë. Bremer, too, does the same. “Daemon and man are viewed as one awful entity bent upon destruction.” The subtle difference may be that the former insists on Oedipus’ self-presence in the act, though it was destined to pass, while the latter emphasizes Oedipus’ raving. The ample textual evidence Bremer gives for his view outweighs Bowra’s interpretation, based only on dramatic logic. For the influence of the ¿ÇÊ×Ë on Oedipus, especially his blinding, see lines 738, 816, 828 f., 1193-1196, 1258, 1260 f., 1300 ff., 1311, 1327 f., and 1478 f. See Euripides Bacchae 752, where Kithaeron is mentioned. J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, pp. 252-256. The suckling which precedes the maenads’ homophagy is said to be a symbolic mothering. Usually animals were used, such as fawns. The rending of the beasts and eating raw of their flesh signified a devouring of their own child. This “symbolizing” was sometimes accomplished more precisely by the devouring of actual children, stolen from the arms of other mothers. It is possible that more rarely some women did massacre their own children

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Happiness and Moral Wisdom Once the terrible knowledge of the third scene is secured, Sophocles interposes a few concluding words on happiness in the chorus’ final stasimon. He distinguishes between two kinds:100 the first, olbos, implies wealth and prosperity, the benefit of talents, such as a fine intellect or good birth, successfully put to use – what we might simply call good luck.101 There is another concept of happiness, though, that carries with it a number of religious nuances which the first lacks. In the fourth ode, now that Oedipus’ endowments and good luck have been unmasked as conspirators in his annihilation, the chorus sings of this other kind of happiness, of eudaimonia. The generations of mortals are always “close to nothingness” (1186), they chant. What man, what man wins more of happiness than enough to seem, and after seeming to decline. ²½ÐÁ¿Ï ҽпËÅÏÎÉÃÍËÒ¿ÐÃÓ¿ÇÊÍËÇ¿ÐÔÃÏÃÇÅÒÍÑÍÓÒÍË mÑÍËÂÍÈÃÇËÈ¿ÇÂÍÌ¿ËÒ¿ÎÍÈÉÇË¿Ç. (1189−1192)

In the same lyrical breath, the chorus explains the connection between this universal pronouncement and Oedipus’ fate in particular. The first of men has been revealed as the last. The Thebans use his fate (daimona) as an exemplar (paradeigmi) for all mortal men (1193): “Nothing of mortal life is happy” (1196, my trans.). Through his representation of eudaimonia, Sophocles reveals the last great paradox of the fall of Oedipus and the purification of Thebes. Oedipus’ arrow had found its mark, travelling correctly and with great strength when he destroyed “the prophesying maiden” and “stood like a wall keeping off death” (1197-1201). But this success (olbou) was not eudaimonos, “sactioned by the gods” (1198). Oedipus’ happiness was not a happiness, his eudaimonia, from a wider perspective, that of the gods, was dusdaimoni, a terrible fate (1302). Now relaxed, the

100

101

in this Dionysiac rite. The entire ritual is traced back by Guepin to the Egyptian threshing of wheat, a mythological metaphor for Seth’s murder of Osiris, and his rebirth and reassembling at the hands of his sister, Isis. Seth, the criminal, then becomes the sacrificial victim in expiation of his crime. Sophocles’ distinction, we’ll see in Chapter 4, mirrors Kierkegaard’s own between lykke and salighed. Cf. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1530, 1285. “So that one should wait to see the final day and should call none among mortals fortunate (ÍÉÀÇÄÃÇË), till he has crossed the bourne of life without suffering grief.” “Their earlier happiness (ÍÉÀÍÐ) was truly happiness.”

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web of time102 that had twisted into the knot of Oedipus reveals the paradoxical collision of happiness and unhappiness in the same man, a crookedness and a being-straight, a bending which destroys life, and a divine correctness of course which sustains it. In being destroyed Oedipus’ faulty human knowledge is converted into a more truly heroic mind. But this hero is also an outcast, without human abode, living as an animal or a god. Like the translation of heroes in Homer and Pindar, Apollo, straightening him out, translates Oedipus as knower into a kind of god. This divine correctness, foreordained, frames the contingent successes (olboi) of human life within the wider lens of a destiny they allot. Luck is a mere apparition, it only “seems [dokein]” (1189-1191), while the true fate in store is no more likely a eudaimonia as it is dusdaimoni, the worst of miseries. For a moment the awful irrationality which seeps into the human scene through Oedipus disturbs this veil of appearances long enough for us mortals to steal a look. But it cannot be squared with human categories, eliciting contradiction from the chorus. “To speak straight, you breathed life into me and lulled my eyes in death” (1220-1222),103 they sing paradoxically to their fallen king. Who Oedipus is and what he has accomplished for the city of Thebes cannot be communicated directly. He is too many things at once to be identified. To “tell the truth” or “speak straight” in a world where Oedipus is the paradigmatic man, we admit it, the chorus sings, sense cannot be made of any of this. We are left only with the horrible image of an Oedipus which the mind resists. Once the blinding has taken place and things have been “straightened out,” Oedipus is once again remarkably sane. The god-sent atù he has suffered, temporary by nature, exhausts itself.104 Now, alongside his daughters, Oedipus laments that he cannot give much advice (phrenas, 1511), not because reason fails him, but because they do not yet have understanding. We wonder what kind of advice Oedipus would have been able to provide his daughters, had they reached the age of reason by the time his horror had come to light. Everything in the play militates against the relevance of human reason, its wisdoms and prospects for moral education. The intelligent desire that 102

103 104

Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1213. “Time the all seeing has found you out against your will.” This is a minor adjustment of the Lloyd Jones translation. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 1299-1302. “What madness (Ê¿ËÇ¿) has come upon you,” the chorus asks Oedipus, first seen after his blinding. “Who is the god (¿ÇÊ×Ë) that with a leap longer than the longest has sprung upon your miserable fate?”

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drives Oedipus so ambitiously towards his mark, the investigations it pursues and the choice in which it concludes, none of these operate under human authority.105 Sophocles perverts Heraclitus’ enlightened formulation, subjecting ùthos ambiguously to daimķn.106 Happiness is a matter for the gods to decide, whose self-same time invades the contingency of life onstage and determines every outcome, manifesting itself through the zones of opacity and incommunicability in the words men exchange.107 Returning in his idea of justice and guilt to a Homeric understanding, Sophocles contests the poetry intervening between he and the blind bard – the logic of man enforced by the gods is neither just in any moral sense nor is it discernable.108 Like Oedipus, we are seeds furrowed within a divine fabric, which, upon relaxing itself into its full display, extinguishes each protective fold for the sake of a brighter pattern.

105

106

107

108

See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 119. Oedipus embodies phronùsis, to which euboulia is related, as well as “that quality of deinotes to which Aristotle alludes at EN, 1144a25.” Cf. pp. 111-112. For a parallel in the Antigone, the only other tragedy, writes Dawe, composed in terms remotely as intellectual as the Tyrannus, see the chorus’ stress on the need for euboulia (1098), the messenger’s summation of events in terms of aboulia (1242), Creon’s description of his own dusbouliai (1269), Antigone’s description of her possible error as dusboulia (95), and especially the closing lines of the play, a “homily on phronein.” J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 37. Vernant emphasizes the ambiguity of Heraclitus’ formulation within the context of tragedy: ùthos anthropķ daimķn. The fragment can read, “it is character in man that one calls daimķn,” or, “that in man which one calls character, is daimķn.” This ambiguity for him is the essence of tragedy. Kitto, Bowra, and Bremer also subordinate character to daimķn, though Kitto and Bowra also cite Oedipus’ hubris as an essential component of his tragedy. Indirectly this points to the ambiguous identity between character and daimķn which Vernant claims. For Bremer, there is no ambiguity. Oedipus’ fate is through and through the work of a daimķn. Knox, on the other hand, insists unambiguously on the flaw of hubris. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 48. Cf. p. 43. The word hamartia actually occurs at lines 621 and 1149 in the Tyrannus. The sense is that of missing the mark. It also shows up in the same sense in both Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus.

Chapter 2 Literature and Moral Psychology: From Homer to Sophocles Introduction Aristotle, we’ll discover, pursues the same problem as Sophocles, the conflicted nature of reason and its relation to the irrational, though in a purely conceptual register, and transposed fully into the language of theoretical psychology. At no point before Aristotle do we find a theory of psychic conflict in exclusively conceptual language, apart from images or dialogue, in the absent third person voice of science.1 This leap in methodology is what makes him such an essential case, historically. His attention to lived experience, especially the concreteness of emotion and desires, as well as the many dues he pays to common sense, make his work as practically relevant as it is interesting from the standpoint of historical psychology. The story of how this became possible is in part a revolution in how the Greeks thought about the soul or psuchù. What had been anything but personal and immortal, two centuries before Aristotle’s time, was transformed into an immortal and fully personal thing with which the individual identified completely.2 The idea and therefore experience of one’s ‘soul’ was remarkably new, and 1

2

See W. K. C. Guthrie “Plato’s Views on the Nature of the Soul” in Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 241 f. “To ask: ‘what then is the nature of the ‘motion’ of God, and of souls absorbed into his being?’ would be, for a man like Plato, to exceed the bounds of logos. Here mysticism steps in. […] Nevertheless this is just the sort of question that the irrepressible Aristotle did ask. […] [F]or Plato, however far dialectic might go, the veil between it and mythos must always remain, since it existed in the nature of things. For Aristotle, to take refuge in mythos at all was nothing but a confession of weakness.” Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 73. On Orphism and the soul: “We may think of this Greek conception of the soul as beginning to develop in the sixth century. Its roots may well reach deep into the pre-historic strata of human existence; but during the sixth century the belief that the soul was divine

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ultimately a hybrid of Greek thinking and the ingress of foreign religious ideas from the east, across the trade routes of the Black Sea. Before Socrates (and the sophists and medical writers from which Plato drew in illustrating him, who also distinguished importantly between soul and body), we hadn’t had souls the way we do now. 3 And without that Orphic watchword: “I, too, am of godly race,” the Socratic care of the soul, with the infinite value it placed on the individual personality, would have been inconceivable, as would the science of the soul and human action Aristotle proposes a century later.4 For Aristotle, desire combined with thought is the cause of human action, and all human action ought to be guided by an idea of the good life, or what it is to flourish (eudaimonia). In order to obtain this blessed form of happiness, then, we need a science of the soul to lay out the structures of reason and desire, so that they can be ordered in the way that best disposes us towards this flourishing. This is an echo of the problem of logos as Sophocles imagined it in the figure of Oedipus, but the terms of the problem have taken on new meanings, been transcribed into the substance and language of psychology as opposed to religious poetry. Just as Aristotle’s thinking, we’ll find, in its early phases retains a trace of this divine transcendence in the irrational element of the human soul, Euripides gives us two shining examples of this psychologizing of the irrational within the tragedy of the preceding century, both in the characters of Medea and the Phaedra of

3

4

and had a metaphysical destination took on the intellectual form that enabled it to conquer the world, and this will always remain a decisive historical event.” Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, p. 160. Burnet, in the landmark essay of 1916, argues that Socrates’ genius lay in this re-invention of psuchù as the site of a moral self care, or therapeia. “Socrates, so far as we could see, was the first to say that the normal consciousness was the true self, and that it deserved all the care bestowed on the body’s mysterious tenant by the religious.” And so the philosopher’s care of the self, in Socrates, was originally modelled on the Orphic-Pythagorean concern for katharsis of a divine, immortal self. Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 6, 108, 181-183, and, more generally, Part iii, ch. 4, pp. 141-155 & ch. 5. Claus gives a more nuanced and painstakingly etymological argument for a general shift in popular 5th c. usages of the word among sophists such as Antiphon (v.) and Gorgias (Encomium of Helen); the pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus (fr. B191, et al.); and the pairing of psuchù-sķma in the medical texts, Airs, Waters, Places and Regimen I, which theorize a technù of the soul. Cf. pp. 182 f. Plato developed this psycho-physical pairing (The psuchù was “the psychosomatic physis of a man, amenable to therapy and doctrines like those furnished by scientific medicine for the body.”) into the opposition with which we are now familiar. See Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 89. Orpheus, fr. B19.

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the Hippolytus: “I know what crimes I am about to commit, but my anger is stronger than my reason, anger which causes the greatest afflictions among men” (1078), 5 says Medea, or, in Phaedra’s companion monologue, “We know and recognize what is right, but we do not act on it, for we are in the grip of passion” (380). This overlap between the problem of the irrational as both the poets and the philosophers conceived it begs the question of their common, intellectual inheritance, especially concerning the soul in which philosophy located the problem.6 While Sophocles’ concern for human action and choice opened the space for Aristotle’s theory of the human, like all poets, he perceived reality in terms of “living shapes, not as concepts.”7 This chapter’s task will be to trace the lineage and trajectory of this transformation of ‘soul’ which allowed something like a full-fledged moral psychology, such as Aristotle’s, to emerge from the popular inheritance from which tragedy eclectically draws. Practical science, the science of man and human action, full-fledged in Aristotle for the first time in history, concentrates itself on the nature and care of the soul. By closely following this shift in the soul’s conception, from that of religious poetry to the philosophically scientific register of investigation and conceptualization, we can stage the background for the shift, more specifically, in the troubled relation between reason and the irrational. Following Aristotle’s own advice, as students of ethics we “must learn the facts about the soul” (EN, 1102a18-20). So before turning to the state of tragedy in Aristotle and its implications for his ethics and psychology, I want to distinguish his view of the soul from that of Sophocles, by churning the literary-cultural soil in which philosophy went digging for the roots of its ‘psuchù’ as custom and the poets had traditionally conceived it. We’ll find that the altogether mortal soul of Homer and the lyric poets, before taking on its personal, immortal character somewhere between Socrates and Plato, and then, in a compromised form in Aristotle, was forced into conversation with a belief in the divinity and immortality of certain individuals foreign to Greece at this time: the image of the Thracian theologos. 5 6

7

See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 126, 128. His translation. See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 353, for more on tragedy – Euripidean in particular – as character psychology, containing a theory of psychic conflict: “Euripides was the first psychologist. It was he who discovered the soul, in a new sense – who revealed the troubled world of man’s emotions and passions. He never tires of showing how they are expressed and how they conflict with the intellectual forces of the soul.” Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 112.

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Homer: Opening the Path for Psychology As odd as it may seem to apply the term psychology to Homer, the story of Greek psychology begins with the father of poetry, whose proud achievement it was to distinguish the soul (psuchù) from the corpse it survives.8 Aristotle identifies Homer as the seed bed of tragic lyric, and Sophocles’ conception of the soul, we’ll see, also draws from this Urpoet. In fact, the Iliad and Odyssey provide us with the first model for a general psychology which the West has to offer.9 Socrates taught that the soul was “‘the intellectual and moral personality,’ and in consequence a thing of unique and priceless value,” wrote Guthrie. All Europe “has a reason to be grateful for his teaching.”10 This soul as Socrates redefined it was a literary conjuring, as far as Greece was concerned, and by no means a popular inheritance. Nor was it popularly received. Homer, we’ll find, understands by soul almost the exact opposite of the individual character that Socrates describes and Plato confirms as immortal and god-like. In the very first lines of the Iliad, Homer identifies the individual man with the body which the breath or shade of soul leaves behind, the husk on which the birds and dogs feed.11 Homer became a hero for a chthonic thinker like Nietzsche, not so much because of what is there, but because of what isn’t. In Homer’s two epics the reader discovers the significant absence of any interest whatsoever in a life other than this one. Homeric man hated nothing more than death, where the divine order, beauty, and strength of life, in dying, really did become carrion for birds and dogs. There was no apologizing for the ugly certainty of man’s future. “‘Do not try and explain away death to me,’ says Achilles to Odysseus in Hades;” Death is beyond interest, “for when death comes it is certain that life – this sweet life of ours in the sunlight – is done with, whatever else there may be to follow.”12 The idea that earthly existence was somehow false, a training ground or a shadow of some other realm, is foreign to Homer. Death is merely the shuttling away of the thin psuchù-image of the embodied man to the house of Hades. 8 9

10 11

12

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 136. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 1. Beyond the esthetic, and the intellectualhistorical, “there is a third side to the Homeric phenomenon which we might call the ‘philosophical.’” Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. xi. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Cf. Iliad i. 3-5; xxiii. 105. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 4.

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But what then are the qualities of this soul? Rohde, the first to till this field, qualifies the soul initially by what it lacked. We can work our way back towards Homer’s concept by stripping away the alien layers of our own thinking, until we get to the hollow center that is Homer’s psuchù. “It [the psuchù] is described as being without feeling, deserted by mind and the organs of mind.”13 All of the capacities we typically ascribe to ‘soul,’ such as spirit (thumos), mind (noos), and desire (boulù), for Homer appear to be functions of “the empire of the body.”14 There is no one term which contains them.15 These powers we customarily ascribe to the unitary soul are referred to through physiological metaphors of the heart, the diaphragm, or other bodily organs associated with affection and drive.16 Will, feeling and intelligence are expressions of the midriff (phrùn).17 ðtor, a seat of feeling, seems to have designated the throat, and kardia, functioning similarly, the heart.18 The closest Homeric analogue for something as abstract as our ‘soul’ appears to be thumos, an agent variously of passion, will and knowledge – though tied, like phrùn, to the midriff.19 But Homer’s use of thumos implies that treating ‘psychic’ phenomena more generally as manifestations of the literal body was already somewhat a thing of the past. Thumos, though still closely tied to the midriff, was an immaterial function. The terms of psychology had begun to slip from the body into a symbolic register, the germ of an

13 14 15

16 17 18 19

Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 5. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n). Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 8. “Homer has no one word to characterize the mind or the soul. Psuchù, the word for soul in later Greek, has no original connexion with the thinking and feeling soul.” Cf. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7, and chapter 1 generally. The soul functions are divided by Claus into ÆÓÊÍÐ ÊÃËÍÐ ÅÒÍÏ ÈÅÏ ÈÏ¿ÂÇÅ ÔÏÅËÔÏÃËÃÐ ËÍÍÐ, all of which can “denote human psychological agents.” Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 30. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Coeur, p. 43. See David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 16-26. Claus makes clear that all of the elements of the soul could exhibit agency, for Homer. But on my reading of him, and others already referenced, especially Rohde, thumos distinguishes itself in combining a relative abstraction from the body with a passionate, existential situatedness, compared to these other forces. In this sense it anticipates the ‘soul’ developed and studied centuries later by Greek moral psychologists. Although, as one of a number of forces and agencies that overlap in a person, it does this only barely. On the immaterial nature of thumos and its similarity to phrên, both in function and location, Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29 f.

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inner life somehow separate from the world of bodies and force. 20 Powers such as noos, boulù, menos (courage), and mùtis (cunning) are thought of as “independent, free-working, and incorporeal.” 21 They are of, but not precisely in, the body. Homer conceals this primitive intellectualizing of man and world in the dust and blood of battle, retaining its root in the body, while, at the same time, providing an abstract psychology that reflects the meaningful order he brings to man’s world, mirroring the orderly realm of Olympus. 22 He is the first stage of psychology and of European thinking. 23 Even those scholars who question to what extent the Homeric soulwords essentially designated disparate parts of the body admit that insisting on the distinction between the mental and the physical is to impose an anachronism on not only the poet, but the age. There are, of course, tensions that exist within the Greek words for soul.24 And we can elaborate on these tensions, using the language and concepts we have spent ages developing. But to fully succeed at this task would be to destroy the essential value of archaic psychology for us now. It offers an alternative model from the ground up of what it means to think and feel, the relation between an individual’s thought and feeling and the common world. To the archaic Greek speaker our modern distinctions between ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ subject and object, were simply not possible. 25 We’ve already found this ambiguity, original to 20

21 22

23

24 25

David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 25 f. Claus, for example, contests this traditional understanding of soul-functions in Homer, taking Snell as an example. Rohde, he argues, misses the influence of the development of secular disciplines, alongside Orphic-Pythagorean ones, on the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of the soul. Even in Homer, he believes, these soul-functions are somewhat free of the body, and together express a “life-force” which carries through the pre-philosophical literature, and enables, along with the Orphics, the 4th c. philosopher’s conception of the immortally rational, personal soul. His study is extremely systematic, covering every single instance of psuchù’s usage from Homer to Plato, and cannot possibly be glossed here. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 30. We might see the mighty Cyclops whom Zeus enlisted in his struggle to establish this order as a precursor to the spirit element of the soul, in Plato and Aristotle, which serves reason, a kind of divinity, in its rule over the appetites (the violence of the chthonic Titans subdued by Zeus in the realm of Tartarus). For a discussion of the institution of order in the Greek cosmos by Zeus, against the Titans, see Norman Brown’s introduction to his edition of Hesiod’s Theogony, p. 20. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 22: The lawfulness of Olympus will be infused into the human mind, which, in Homer, is constructed as a part of the order they govern. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7. David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 7.

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Homer, reflected in the world of Sophocles’ Oedipus, which the literature intervening between Homer and tragedy will confirm, as will Aristotle’s psychology as late as the 4th century. The nature of Homeric psuchù, essentially embodied and alive, resists the kind of analysis I am skirting here as I try to align his innovations with those static analyses of philosophy to come. Not only was there no one soul to contain the personal life we now identify with the entity, but perception, thought, feeling, these things we now think of as somehow ‘inside’ the person were for Homeric man implicit in the world each man shared with the rest. Seeing, for example, in the verb derkesthai, denoted a “visual attitude” towards the world, an image of the eye itself, as gleaming, or menacing, etc., and not the function of the eye or the mind as such.26 It is an objective look someone has which is seen in the eyes of another, or, other times, when the verb is used with an object, a kind of visual beam which falls upon it, or cuts through to it: what we might call a gaze or a stare. There is no firstperson seeing in the modern sense of a purely psychological function. Like the other verbs for seeing, it expresses outward qualities of an action, dependent on gesture and feeling, not an immaterial, passive function of the mind or soul, or the seeing or knowing related to it. 27 Mind (Noos) was still too closely connected to the eye and this eye to the world (as one body among others) to be itself a source of anything.28 Seeing (idein) and knowing (eidenai) were determined by their object. The same would be true for the passionate intellect of thumos with which noos is often mingling. The difference for both of them from other physical organs is so slight that they become merely other elements of the person, an aggregate of bodily and quasi-psychological parts which respond to the touch of the world upon them, the many forces which penetrate him, each of which are connected with specific actions, parts of the body, and types of experience (fiery menos in ambitious limbs, for example, or defensive alkù in battle, sthenos in the force of muscle, the kratos of the ruler, etc.). 29 Homeric man is a 26 27 28 29

Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 2 f. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 4. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 18. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 20. Cf. pp. 5-8. Like the disunity of the self or soul, the body, too, which opposes it as an organic whole, has not yet been thought of in Homer. “[T]he Homeric Greeks did not yet have a body in the modern sense of the word; body, sķma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended as melù or guia, i. e., as limbs. Again and again Homer speaks of fleet legs, of knees in speedy motion, of sinewy arms; it is in these limbs immediately evident as they are to his eyes that he locates the secret of life.”

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loose connection of living parts infused with bodily forces, drawn or compelled by the shine or menace of the face of things, behind which lay the surge and power of the gods, or by the gods themselves. He is not yet the source of his own actions.30 There is an added irony in looking for Homer’s psuchù since the soul in Homer only becomes active in death. It has no function in the living man “except to leave him.”31 So long as the body breathes, the psuchù lies within, imperceptibly dormant. Likewise, sķma, for Homer, is only the corpse.32 The life of the body is divided between the many forces and objects compelling the limbs, muscle, heart, eyes, and other living organs, which are neither our body nor our soul. As the body (sķma) is a corpse in which the formerly active limbs come to rest as a generic whole, the soul is a “feeble double of the self.”33 Not only is this soul not immortal, it “can hardly be said to live even, any more than the image that is reflected in the mirror[.]”34 Both psuchù and sķma, the separate entities of soul and body, as we conceive them, Homer considered dead. In addition to the departed shade, Homer sometimes uses the word psuchù when “unmistakably we should say life.”35 This vague breath unites the independent powers of the body in a generic “living.”36 It is through the more original sense of breath that the shade and this lifeforce were bound together. 37 The verb apopsuchķ, in Homer, meant to breathe out. When we die, we breathe out the soul, a principal of animal 30

31 32 33 34

35 36

37

Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 31. In other words, he has no spontaneity of the mind, will, or any purely spontaneous impulse of emotion. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 5. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 6. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 9. Cf. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 142. Rohde alludes here to Apollodorus, who described the soul as an eidolon or image with “no more substance than the reflection of the body in a mirror.” Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 31 (59n). Homer Iliad xxii. 161. Cf. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 51 (58n). Cf. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 74. Homer often uses the word psuchù in the sense of life. Rohde recognizes this usage, but projecting the famous passage from Pindar back into Homer, discovers an indwelling soul in the person, freed in dreams and in sleep. Jaeger, following Walter Otto’s landmark critique, reduces this sense of psuchù to merely generic life. See Walter Otto Die Manen oder Von den Urformen des Totenglaubens. Claus takes this to the extreme, reducing all the soulwords in Homer to a mortal “life-force” which is nevertheless not identically a part of the body. Ernst Bickel Homerischer Seelenglaube, p. 259. As Jaeger explains, this connection, now natural to any discussion of Homeric psuchù, was first made by Ernst Bickel. Jaeger brings Rohde, Otto, and Bickel together in his discussion of the priority of

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life shared by both man and all the lower species. 38 The flight of the soul to Hades and the loss of this force of animal life easily coalesce in the physical metaphor of the breath, and exhalation.39 Homer’s world is a kosmos, “a perfect organization such as men try to establish in their earthly states.”40 But in certain isolated passages of Homer, such as the funeral games, and the nourishment of the dead with wine and flesh, as well as the cremation of the body along with a man’s possessions, weapons, etc., the belief in a life for the soul after death still peeks back at the reader, despite the poet’s veils, from a more primitive past.41 These, Rohde believed, were the relics of an ancient soul-worship, a more primitive, chthonic-daimonic cult.42 In Homer these rituals occur only on “special and isolated occasions” and appear to be only “half-understood.”43 Time has removed from us exactly what led to the abandoning of this animistic cult of ancestor worship, the

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40 41 42

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“breath” over “life” and “shade” in the ordinary usage of soul-words in archaic Greece. Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 77. Homer uses thumos, however, almost exclusively for this principle of life in the lower animals, preserving the language of psychù for man. The exceptions to this only reinforce the rule. It is retained by the Orphic poets of the sixth century who represent the soul entering the child on the wings of the wind. Here, the Homeric conception takes its turn towards the Socratic, and eventually the scientific psychology of Aristotle. This is an important point, presupposing the connection between Homer and the Ionians, especially Anaximenes, who had identified both intelligence and life with the air, and, as we’ll see in part five of this chapter, made the Orphic adoption of the traditionally Greek philosophical impulse possible, preparing Greek soil conceptually for the cultivation of a profoundly new and strange sense of psuchù whose coinage we attribute typically to Socrates: our ‘true self,’ a personal divinity and immortality attributable to the rational element in us which is in some sense independent of the body. Whether the soul is immortal for Socrates is an imposing question, and not one I pretend to answer here. But it was divine, rational, and apparently set against the normal desires of the body. Though Rohde’s study excludes Socrates for just this reason: a “doctrine” of immortality was not part of his teaching. Burnet’s, infers a doctrine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socrates’ project. Charles Burnet Socratic Doctine of the Soul, pp. 158 f. More recently, Claus’s exhaustive philological study concludes that the Socratic “invention” of the soul as the cognitive and moral identity of the individual does not until the Gorgias become “the fully realized psychological version of the Pythagorean soul.” David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 183. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Erwin Rohde Psyche, pp. 12-19. By soul, Rohde apparently means any non-material double which survives the death of the body, but not necessarily anything denoted by the word ‘psuchù’ itself. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 23.

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belief in an animation of the souls of the dead after the body’s expiration.44 But when the primitive past seeps through the cracks in this new foundation, it does so as daimķn. Yet, for Homer, the arbitrary power of individual daimones is limited both by the notion of an ordered fate (moira) and by “the will of the highest of the gods.”45 There is a notorious suppression in Homer of these aberrant powers, part of no larger order, which disturb the authority of Zeus’ Dikù. The epic, then, provides the germ of the Greek dialectic between reason and a more primordial irrationality, which, in asserting itself, reason is forced to suppress: The irrational and the unaccountable is the natural element of the belief in ghosts and spirits; this is the source of the peculiar disquiet inspired by the province of belief or superstition. It owes most of its effect to the instability of its figures. The Homeric world, on the contrary, lives by reason; its gods are fully intelligible to Greek minds and their forms and behaviour are clearly and easily comprehensible to Greek imagination. And the more distinctly were the gods represented, the more did the spirit-phantoms fade away into the shadows.46

The epic poet was of the same stock which “in a later age ‘invented’ (if one may be allowed to put it so) science and philosophy.”47 With the chthonic opacity of the daimones removed, a near perfect order was composed in which the soul-functions and their burgeoning metaphysics could become clearly ordered, and orderable. Aristotle’s De Anima, from this angle, is an amendment to Homer. In both Homer and Aristotle the soul distinguishes itself from inanimate matter, first as life, breath, and shade, as well as the spiritualized yet mortal body of thought and feeling, and, later, as “the form of the living body.” This “mental attitude was a distant threat to the whole system of that plastic representation of things spiritual which the older antiquity had laboriously constructed.”48 Tragedy, the art of terror before the unknown, would be the return of reason’s primeval opponent in Greece for the last time.49 Luther 44 45

46 47 48 49

Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 28. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. See also E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 23 (65n), 42, 58 (79n). Dodds echoes Rohde, while rejecting the notion that the Homeric Erinyes represent what was once an ancestor spirit. It is, though, an element of the ancient notion of daimķn. When daimonic madness ensues, it is an effect of some violation of cosmic order, a dispensation of moira. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 29. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 33-38. Now and then, as during the early stages of Attic tragedy, the dark forces regain their power, and the terror of the mysterious asserts itself once more. The wonder in one’s eyes, before the Olympians, does

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will reintroduce this enemy of reason to modernity, again, just as reason itself is getting a foothold. Kierkegaard, in his spirit, charged with both the light of Greek reason, the ecstatic daimķn and suffering of the mysteries, and the imagination of the poet, will stage the tragic contest on the invisible, inner stage of the infinite dwelling within him. The construction of this inner stage, however, requires that the self acquire a depth which, we’ve just seen, it never had in Homer. 50

Homer and the Lyric Poets: A “Psychology” of Conflict In what sense were Homer and the lyricists to follow doing psychology, addressing the same problem of the irrational that the philosophical prose of ethics and politics would later take up as moral science? As a rule, when a person is emotionally distressed, Homer neither names nor analyzes the nature of the emotion. The Iliad’s Agamemnon is a perfect example, overcome by distress, his army on the brink of ruin, and unsure of which direction to turn:51 Agamemnon lay beyond sweet sleep, and cast about in tumult of the mind. As when the lord of fair-haired Hera flashes, bringing on giant storms of rain or hail, or wintry blizzard, sifting on grey fields –, or the wide jaws of dread and bitter war –, so thick and fast the groans of Agamemnon came from his heart’s core, and his very entrails shook with groaning. (X, 5-10)

This is one of two examples of the strife of anxiety in the Iliad. The other involves the Achaeans as a group: So Trojans kept watch that night. To seaward Panic that attends blood-chilling Rout now ruled the Akhaians. All their finest men were shaken by this fear, in bitter throes, as when a shifting gale

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not affect the whole man as does terror before the daimonic. The eye distances the gods of Olympus, making them objects of admiration, peers, almost, more remote, but also familiar. This wonder and admiration for the Olympian order, which the disordering terror of the daimonic necessarily interrupts, issued in philosophy. Cf. Heraclitus, fr. B45, as trans. by Kathleen Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic philosophers, p. 27: “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul (psuchùs), though you travelled the whole way: so deep is its Law (logon).” The first discussion of the psuchù per se as something with inner depth shows up in Heraclitus. As we’ll see, the lyric poetry of Ionia and Aeolia will be an important precursor to this invention of an infinitely deep, inner territory in man. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 38 f. This is one of two examples of anxiety (l’angoisse) in the Iliad given by Romilly. The other involves the Achaeans as a group, at ix. 4-8.

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blows up over the cold fish-breeding sea, north wind and west wind wailing out of Thrace in squall on squall, and dark waves crest, and shoreward masses of weed are cast up by the surf: so were Akhaian hearts torn in their breasts. (IX, 1-10)

Emotion is presented forcefully, but this force is matched by the simplicity, evidence, and externality of its cause. Homer divides a man from himself neither in thought nor feeling. 52 When characters reflect, Homer, in place of showing them in the train of thought, presents them in conversation with themselves, as if they were two. 53 Characters dialogue with their thumos, or their kardia. Where we should find a struggle against oneself, just as hesitation is broken by outside influence, either of the gods or companions, these errant forces come similarly from the outside, as Athena calms Achilles in Song I, restraining him from attack on his general, staying his sword through a psychic intervention. 54 A true division in the self is so rare in early Greek literature generally that a single episode in Homer remained, as late as the fourth century, the classic example of psychological torment. Rapping himself on the chest to stay the murders for which his heart literally cries out, Odysseus cries in reply, “patience, my heart!”55 The scene returns three times in Plato (twice in the Republic [390d, 441bc] and once in the Phaedrus [94d]) as a vision of the soul’s struggle with itself. More so than the lover’s torments of the lyrics, it is this moment in Homer which remained paradigmatic of psychic strife. But even this example depicts the heart as a contestant which comes upon man from without, not from within. The lyric poet, like Homer, “inscribes the life of men in their actions and reactions.” But the lyricists do introduce a few changes. They slow things down, concerning themselves less with history and more with perception and feeling, the aesthetic absolute of attunement to a moment, to an episode such as the close of Sappho’s wedding hymn: … like the gods … this thronged crowd drove speedily … to Ilium. The sweet piping flute mixed with the lyre and the rattling of castagnets; brightly the 52 53 54

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Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 19, 31. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 31. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 34 f. Romilly refers us here to Iliad i. 193200. “The Gods direct the game. And this fact rids the poet of the need to search for psychological explanations.” Romilly, Patience Mon Couer, 37. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 41.

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maidens sang a sacred song, the divine sound reached the aether … along all roads … mixing bowls and platters … myrrh and cassia and frankincense rose in the air. The women raised a cry, those who were older, and all the men raised a delightful song, triumphant, calling upon the far-shooting lord of the Lyre, and they sang of Hector and Andromache, like to the gods (GL, fr. 44). 56

Despite their unmatched sensitivity to impressions, the immensity of their feeling, Greek lyric rarely expresses the life of the soul. It was pithy, and less analytical than Homer. 57 With the exception of three minor developments, the tendency to avoid psychologizing character and action “shows clearly that no major difference has intervened since the epic.”58 There is not much mention of psuchù in the popular lyrics (elegiac and iambic poetry), and when there is, it is Homeric. 59 Homeric psuchù remains the touchstone, despite the growing depth of mind and feeling in the lyric and the eternities of sensibility and sensation they explored. There were three developments in the lyric beyond Homer which prepare the ground for the tragic problematizing of the relation between the autonomy of human thought and feeling and the force of the world and its gods driving man from without. First, some of these poets talk about themselves in terms of “I,” exposing their feelings. “Wretched I lie, dead with desire, pierced through my bones with the bitter pains the Gods have given me” (EI, fr. 84), sings Archilocus in one epode.60 Second, while Homer had occasionally presented hesitation, and even more rarely a conflict with externalized desires or feelings, lyricism in-

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57 58 59

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As cited and translated by Bruno Snell. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 62 f. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 46. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 411. Jaeger also confirms Rohde. “It is only natural that the poets imitating Homer should have retained his terms with their old significations.” Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 79. Claus gives an exhaustive list and analysis of its post-Homeric usage, and comes to the same conclusion. With relatively rare exception, the use is essentially Homeric. David Claus Toward The Soul, ch. 2. Cf. p. 193, his index to citations of psuchù, for references to fragments. Cf. Archilocus EI, frs. 2 & 68: “In the Spear is my kneaded bread, in the spear my Ismarian win, when I drink, I recline on the Spear”; “I long to fight with thee even as when I am thirsty I long to drink.”

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sisted on the fact that people often act in spite of themselves.61 Perhaps it is in this experience of paradoxical feeling that the tincture of the self first impresses itself on literature and thought: “Lo! I both love and love not, and am mad yet not mad” (LG, fr. 104), sings Anacreon. The lyrical self is a source of delayed or obstructed action, a place where the memory or hope of action thrives poetically, as a kind of frustrated longing. It is a place where tensions thrive between contrary desires, such as Sappho’s “bitter-sweet Eros” (GL, fr. 130), part of the unstable world in which the back and forth of Anacreon’s conflict flourishes. Sappho, for example, writes of herself that she is divided between the desire to speak and a shame that holds back her tongue (GL, fr. 137). Finally, even in the evocation of an overwhelming love, the place where lyric takes the most remarkable step forward, they have “reprised the Homeric principle which consists in describing the proper emotion by evoking physical symptoms.” Instead of sentiments, Sappho describes sensations, as the following fragment demonstrates perfectly:62 For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than the grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying (GL, fr. 31).63

The psychological in lyric is still the physical. It happens on the surface of things. The source of these physical assaults is still the action of the gods64 – a savage exteriority, as were the psychic interventions in Homer. Eros and Aphrodite are capitalized, unable to fit within the psychological miniature of the human breast or skull. The force of love which the lyric expresses, having, yes, introduced the “I” in order to evoke it even more tensely, is still centrifugal, directs the versifier out towards the lover or the god, not inside towards a ‘self.’ They are 61

62 63 64

Sappho GL, fr. 1, 24: “she will love even against her want (ÈÍ×ÈÃÆÃÉÍÇÑ¿)” adj. trans.; fr. 94, 5: “truly I leave you against my will (¿ÃÈÍÇÑ’)”; cf. Theognis EI, 388: “and, acting forcibly against his want, to carry much shame” (adjusted trans., ÒÍÉÊ¿ ÂqÍÓÈÃÆÃÉ×Ë¿ÇÑÕÿÎÍÉÉ¿ÔÃÏÃÇË). Cited by Romilly in addition to other fragments. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 47. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50. As cited in J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 50 (my trans. from the french). Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, pp. 52 f. According to Snell, all of the violent emotions, for the lyricists, were the result of the action of the gods.

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always uncovering through their individual, lyrical person a greater source of value, such as Justice in Solon, whose “price” should the guilty escape “the pursuing destiny of Heaven,” is paid by their innocent children or else by their seed after them.”65 It is Solonian Justice which “paves the way for Attic tragedy,”66 generating “the very core of the religious doctrine” which it dramatized a century later.67 The lyrically ambivalent subject, divided in thought and feeling, anticipates the ambiguous innocence of tragic guilt which Aristotle, we’ll find, rethinks in the purely cognitive terms of hamartia.

Sophocles and the 5th century The tragic poet, Rohde writes, is “committed to the search for an adjustment between the mental attitudes of an older and a newer age.” He must “assimilate and make his own the spirit that actually called forth the dark and cruel legend of the past” to his own time.68 As we’ve seen, these ‘ages’ can be classed in terms of the proto-philosophical Homeric religion, well-ordered and perspicuous to the human mind, and an older, daimonic religion which threatened and disturbed the burgeoning rational order. No tragedian is as focused by this task of reconciling them as Sophocles, with Aeschylus still rooted so literally in archaic religion, and Euripides overtaken by the philosophical spirit which ultimately triumphed over the age. Though Rohde may have been too much a creature of his own time when he claimed that ancient drama was “an artistic product based on psychological interest,”69 he does have his reasons. In posing the modern question of rational autonomy, the tragic poets must problematize human agency, and, by implication, venture into the realm of psychology. Individual psychology springs first from the moral quandary tragedy presented. The Homeric soul remains an essential element in the popular conception of the soul in the classical age with which both academic philosophy and tragic poetry would have to contend. Along with Homeric ‘life’ the idea of the soul in the fifth century confused several other notions. The influence of a new form of religious belief contradicting 65

66 67 68 69

Solon EI, fr. 13, 28-32. Cf. fr. 4, 14-16. “Justice, who is so well aware in her silence of what is and what hath been, and soon or late cometh to avenge.” Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 64. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, pp. 144 f. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 422. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 421.

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Homer’s already shows itself in the poetic and philosophic belief that the unconscious activity of dreams and visions manifests a divinity within man.70 The Homeric shade also mingled with the notion of the living corpse which Homer had done his best to erase. Pindar can speak of Hades conducting the mortal bodies of the dead to his underworld estate and early Greek vases and later Euripides speak to us of the psuchù dying.71 Add to this medley the idea of the soul as the living self which appears to have cropped up first in 6th c. Ionia on the graves of sailors, for example, and the writings of Anacreon, and Semonides,72 and you have a mess of conceptual indistinction. The concept of ‘soul’ in Sophocles, however, is much narrower in scope and more easily managed. There is no mention of the living corpse, and no immortal, divine substance repressed within the body. The influences bearing on Socratic thinking about the soul’s personality and divinity had not penetrated the popular, earth-bound quarter of tragedy.73 It is most similar to the initially Ionian and later Attic conception of the living self, a trope for what in Homer went by the name thumos.74 Sophocles’ psuchù can be the seat of many capacities, like courage, passion, pity, anxiety, and appetite, but before Socrates, and while he perambulated Athens, the soul was seldom, if ever, the seat of reason.75 When the soul did constitute a self, it was a bodily self whose imagination was strictly emotional. It did not experiment in or identify with a purely rational reality independent of the body. The 70

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E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 135 (3n). This belief shows up in a fragment of Pindar’s, as emphasized by Rohde. Pindar The Odes of Pindar, fr. 131. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 415. Rohde also directs us to Xenophon Cyropaedia, 8.7.21, Plato Republic, 571d, and Aristotle Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138 (18n). Dodds cites IG, I2.920; Euripides Helen, 52; Euripides Daughters of Troy, 1214; Pindar Olympian Odes, 9.33 in The Odes of Pindar. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 138. This notion repeats in Sophocles. Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 64. It is used interchangeably with body (sķma) at line 643 to refer to the person of Oedipus. David Claus provides a close analysis of psuchù in the tragic poets. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 69-85. He concludes that barring some exceptional instances in Euripides, the soul has not yet, in the tragic lyric of the 5th c., taken on the qualities of personal character which become essential to its development in Socratic and post-Socratic thought. See discussion on pp. 97 f. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139. Dodds follows Burnet’s lecture, “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul.” This language would have been extremely unusual to the ear of the 5th century Athenian, as Aristophanes satire in the Birds and Clouds attests.

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soul in Sophocles is no reluctant prisoner of the body; it is the “life or spirit of the body, and perfectly at home there.”76 And so Sophocles can speak of the soul as dwelling in the blood.77 It may be possible, however, to extract even a little more detail, approaching something like technique, from Sophocles’ notion of psuchù. In almost proto-Platonic fashion Sophocles’ Antigone contrasts the emotive self (psuchù) with two other elements of character: intellectual judgement (gnomù) and moral judgement (phronema).78 Phronema seems to act as a middle term involving both, a kind of gate passing between them, as Plato’s thumos will act as a mediator between the purely reasoned activity of the logistikon and an unreasoning epithumia. Of course in Plato, and then Aristotle, all three elements are inscribed within a single psuchù. Here the psuchù is part of loose talk about the self which aligns it with two other elements in a suggestively philosophical way. This only further demonstrates the contrast, since the psuchù itself is one of the elements, as was thumos in Homer, which also had a sort of umbrella function psychologically. A single psuchù comprising the whole of a man is clearly absent. Sophocles, more than any other poet, maps the interstices between the germ of an inner life of freedom and rational responsibility, on the one hand, developed by philosophy, and an opposing religious necessity, a divine dikù contesting this autonomy of reason. He does this, however, without any official training in either theology or philosophy.79 The reasoned element for Sophocles would not have been the philosopher’s psuchù, but, like Homer, most often the thumos, and in some cases nous.80 The multifaceted entity of thumos along with the other abilities typical of human life could not by any account be interpreted as the single substance of individual character that the soul becomes in the human-scientific imaginations and moral psychological techniques of 4th century philosophy. The moral substance of a man which the educations of reason sculpt, imposing the shape of it’s harmonies from without through a reason within, was not part of Sophocles intellectual repertoire. Neither Homer nor the lyric poets showed any sign of its psuchù, and it was they who conceptually set the tragic stage. 76 77

78 79 80

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 139 E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 159 (27n.). ÒÍÓÊÍË ÃÈÎÇËÍÓÐ ¿ÃÇ ÖÓÕÅпÈÏ¿ÒÍË¿ÇÊ¿ Sophocles Elektra, 785. ÖÓÕÅËÒÃÈ¿ÇíÏÍËÃÊ¿È¿ÇÁË×ÊÅË. Sophocles Antigone, 176. Rohde Psyche, p. 431. See Romilly’s discussion of Sophocles, generally. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer.

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Character Psychology and Strife in the Soul How then can we speak of a tragic psychology without a psuchù to identify the thinking person?81 As we observed in chapter one, the inner life of thought and feeling and the outer realm of nature and the gods intertwined in Oedipus’ world. The answer to this question lies outside of the notion of soul, then, in the strict sense. It is found instead in the literary evolution of the idea of personality, or character, with which Socrates aligned the psuchù. It was the personal nature of Socrates’ soul that revolutionized the concept, and not the immortality assigned it by his student, Plato.82 As we’ll see with Sophocles, we need not have a soul to explore character and disposition, though the technique of the self which philosophy introduces will require it. While Homeric man “is not yet thought of as the source of his act,”83 the tragic poet rethinks action in order to extend as far as his abilities and inclination allow the degree to which individual responsibility can be thought. A new interest arose in the 5th century in what drives man from within, and tragedy was the literary genre most committed to this reflection on the sense of human acts.84 It examined through figures like Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ajax, Euripides’ Hecuba, and Aeschylus’ Clythemenstra the potentially disastrous conflict between the old mysteries and violence on the periphery of the city (ritually explored by adolescent boys as ephebes of Artemis the huntress, or the bacchant women on the mountain of Kithaeron) and the new reason, demarcating this outland of violence from the sanctioned order of the polis. Tragedy’s manner of expression was the first attempt to animate the individual agent artistically. This manner – the mask – forced the inner regions of this persona into the open air. The art form empha81

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J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 45. Romilly asks this question of Homer, which given her work, would extend just as well to the lyric poets. It is in tragedy that something which we might legitimately begin to call psychology first shows up. But even here the nature of the soul is not at issue, as it will be for philosophy. This is why Jaeger’s Paideia objects to Rohde’s study, which excludes Socrates for this reason: a doctrine of immortality was not part of his teaching. See Guthrie’s introduction to Psyche for the reply to Jaeger’s objection (and also Burnet’s, in “the Socratic Doctrine of the Soul,” which is the same – though Guthrie doesn’t mention it). Cf. Charles Burnet “Socratic Doctine of the Soul,” pp. 158 f. Burnet infers a doctrine of immortality from the Apology, but not one essential to Socrates’ project. In addition, see note 39, ch. 2. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 45 ff. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 53.

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sized the collective significance for the city gathered in the theatre. It instinctively turned away from the intimacy of personal sentiment explored earlier by the lyric toward the objective potency of action.85 Sophocles was especially well placed for the literary development of ‘character’ which could only proceed once religious explanations of human action were on the wane. This psychological interest and the literary developments that accompany it are grounded in an unprecedented interest in disposition as a source of human action. 86 This finally is the sense in which psychology begins first with the moral deliberations of tragic lyric, and ethics, the science of human action first opens the doors to interiority.87 It doesn’t matter that Oedipus never chooses, that his character doesn’t affect the action, that the serious psychological conflicts are always objective ones between opposing characters, character and situation, character and the gods, never a matter of characters at odds with themselves. The way that he undergoes the action is a powerful comment on both his character and the others with which he collides, such as Teiresias, and Creon. As we saw in the first chapter it is not as a source of action – and so, in a way, we are still with Homer – but rather as a reverberation of it that an innovative psychological nuance first takes the stage of Greek life in Sophocles. Suffering follows character. Though he doesn’t choose his path, or have an interesting inner life, Oedipus the king is irreplaceable, caught in the web of his past and future, and, as a literary figure, the complex of tradition. Because of who he is, he suffers in an exemplary way. This occupation with ethical categories such as character, disposition, action, and the moral debates between characters, the language of which tragedy borrowed from the legal and political discourse of rhetoricians and sophists occupying the city, introduced a level of psychological conflict unheard of in any previous genre, even more radical than that of the lyricists.88 But Sophocles never analyzes the ‘nature’ of this conflict. He does not inquire into its mechanism. Feeling (more often than not, suffering and despair) is presented concretely, actively, as living in a way that still recalls Homer.89 Sophocles doesn’t explore 85 86

87 88 89

J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 54. See Winnington-Ingram Sophocles: an Interpretation. Romilly, additionally, argues that the invention of the third actor was necessary in order to stage the debate between characters qua characters. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 74 f. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 76 f. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 78. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 81.

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‘who’ the character IS, his substance, or soul, but rather the moral compass they carry, how they act, what kind of person they want to be.90 Though the individual pain is real, resolution comes when one yields to another, to a god, not, as with the philosophers to some, as Aristotle, we’ll find, codifies for the first time into theory, when one conquers oneself. No one educates Oedipus and he never struggles with himself internally. This could be said of Sophocles’ characters in general. They are never uncertain, or wavering in their actions.91 They are unified and steadfast as characters. Aristotle was right: through their action, they represent types of thinking. There are occasionally conflicting emotions, but Sophocles consistently refuses to give his protagonists divisions in the soul or self.92 They don’t have the formal nature93 which a soul provides, which the philosophical mind will impute, and which 90 91

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J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 78. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 82. See Sophocles Ajax, 457: “And now what to do,” Ajax asks, return home, or go to Troy. But this is a false problem. The decision, like all decisions in Sophocles, has been made ahead of time. It is oratory. Both choices are unsatisfactory. He has already decided to die. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 83. See Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 673675 (re: fluctuations of anger), 1303-1305 (re: the mix of fear and curiosity). In The Trojan Women, Romilly observes, Hyllus acts despite himself. See the final scene, where he burns his father, Heracles, on the pyre, and resolves to marry Iole, the woman responsible for his mothers’ death and his father’s stricken condition – especially lines 1202-1208, 1230-1231. As Dodds observes, line 176 of Antigone suggests otherwise, a hint perhaps of the philosophical conception to come. Romilly also cites this line as evidence for a possible counter-claim, in order to point out that these are not divisions in the soul, but rather in the person, which includes the soul. Still, it pushes the boundary of her claim that no such division exists, without necessarily contradicting it. See C.E Hadjistephanou The Use of Physis and its Cognate in Greek Tragedy with a Special Reference to Character Drawing. Hadjistephanou, in a systematic study of Sophocles’ plays, concludes that physis is used consciously to “to describe character either on the basis of duties and rights, or by virtue of general characteristics, or by ascribing to them individual traits, his main concern being to portray characters of noble birth and nature, and characters who display hubristic behaviour and are led to destruction” (Abstract). Only class characteristics are relevant to our question, and all of these are closely associated with the idea of birth, especially in cases of nobility. “Nobility of nature always presupposes nobility of birth” (pp. 30 f.). The original meaning from out of which the physis of individuals, in terms of character traits, develops, likewise, is birth (p. 9). The usage breaks down into six clear-cut categories relevant to character drawing: “birth,” “suggesting social rank and status” which is tied to birth, “growth,” suggesting stages of it, as in the growth of wisdom, “the ‘growth’ of man” as a species of life, “the differentiation of the sexes,” “‘character’ or ‘nature’” which is either noble or of another specific trait. There are no instances of “nature” used to describe something like the soul or essence of

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any moral psychology in the full sense requires (as a moral substance to mold).94 Aristophanes’ satirizing of Socrates’ language is our best witness to how odd the language of the soul applied to the ‘true self’ of normal consciousness would have seemed not only on stage, but in the mouth of the ordinary Athenian.95 If we look at the plays themselves, we see that thumos, an element of the Platonic soul, in the Tyrannus strikes the soul like an arrow from without.96 Emotion, even speech and thought, like the words of prophecy emanating from the earth or the appeal of “the land (47-48)” which calls Oedipus its saviour, like tragic knowledge, issues from a divine exteriority latent in all things. Emotion such as thumos is there to justify or explain character and action, never as a point of independent interest. The thumotic, for example, for Oedipus’ chorus, are the unjust. It is with arrows of thumos that the Gods punish these people. Emotion has an essentially dramatic significance.

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man, as found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (see Hadjistephanou’s appendix of extraneous usages of physis). See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 2, pp. 37, 88. Foucault breaks the art of the self down to ontology, deontology, ascetics, and teleology. It is ontology which gives us the ‘what’ that we are to shape. Also, in Oedipus Rex, for example, the soul (psuchù) shows up three times, at lines 64, 727, 894. In none of these places does it have a ‘psychological’ significance. It merely refers, as was common, to living people, with an emphasis on emotional life. There are two noted exceptions in the rest of the corpus, both in the Philoctetes, one of his latest plays. At line 55, a psuchù is said to be capable of being entrapped by words, suggesting it is the seat of knowledge. At line 1013, “the mean soul of Odysseus peering through crannies” suggests it is the seat of character. Burnet cites both as exceptions to the rule, in the 5th century, where in “no other place is it even suggested that the ‘soul’ has anything to do with knowledge or ignorance, goodness or badness, and to Socrates that was the most important things about it. Charles Burnet “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 156 f. Aristophanes Birds, 1555; Clouds, 94. Aristophanes plays on the ambiguities between the traditional Homeric meaning of “ghost” and the Socratic identification of the soul with the individual personality. Cf. Burnet, “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul” in Essays and Addresses, pp. 157, 160 f. To care for the soul would typically have meant to be physically careful, to “mind one’s ghost.” Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus, 894: ÆÓÊÍÓÀÃÉÅÒÃÓÌÃÒ¿ÇÖÓÕ¿Ð (shafts of passion hitting souls). Here, the Chorus uses “souls” to mean individual people, who will suffer passions, if the gods punish injustice; 63-4: ÃÊÅÖÓÕÅ. Oedipus uses soul here to refer to the self which mourns, “equally for the city and for myself and for you.” In both cases of use the “soul” is generically emotive; 727: ÖÓÕÅÐÎÉ¿ËÅÊ¿. Here Oedipus refers to the loss of balance, emotionally, distinct from the stirring of the mind also named. This coincides with the mourning and the passions in the first two examples.

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Sophocles does speak of man’s ‘nature’ in one sense. The ‘growth’ of man – his origins in a specific type of birth – which characterizes his physis as a member of one of life’s species, as animals and plants also distinguish themselves specifically with respect to life, implies that man has certain natural limits which he should not transgress.97 Man’s nature is distinct from the gods. The fortune of a character can stand or fall on whether or not this limit is respected, namely, on the pursuit of sophrosynù and the avoidance of hubris.98 Physis in this sense is still tied closely to natural growth. The word is never used to characterize a god, as part of a class or in any other way, since, for Sophocles, gods are perfect and cannot ‘grow’ as men do.99 Physis as growth exemplifies the vegetal in man, as much as it is a word which in its Ionian modifications points to what this nature, in particular, might be. As with the cult of Dionysus from which tragedy grew, Sophocles understood human life dialectically as part of a more primordial living in which all things that grow and whose lives are eventually spent are embedded.100 There is no content to man’s physis other than this imperfection which being physikos represents. We are still a long way conceptually from Aristotle’s devising the universal essence of man, a soul defined by the unborn governance of reason over the unreasoned animal elements with which it has been forced into collaboration. What then will Aristotle as the first scientist of man make of this Dionysian art that had insisted so awfully on man’s inevitable part in the violences of nature, on the destruction of the human categories ordering sexuality and violence, as well as Homer’s distancing of men from the gods, especially in matters of reason?101 If tragedy is to be allowed back into the city from which Plato barred it, the tragic view of reason will have to yield to the universal pretensions of philosophical 97

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See Sophocles Ajax, 758-761, and, regarding the use of reason, Antigone, 683-684 with 720-721. As cited by C. E. Hadjistephanou in The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 53. C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 54. C. E. Hadjiestphanou The Use of Physis and its Cognates in Greek Tragedy with Special Reference to Character Drawing, p. 25n1. Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, pp. xxxi-xxxvii. Kerenyi explains what on page 239 he calls the “dialectic” immanent in the Dionysian outlook. For Homer, mortality was something to enjoy while strong, and fortune was with you, and then lament as life was taken away. In the Dionysian religion, death and life intertwine in the ‘indestructible living’ of organic nature, capable not only of physical reproduction, but of ecstasies and visions. It had essentially divine properties.

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knowledge.102 As a part of a universally rational nature, even Oedipus, the most tragically excommunicated of figures, like all men, is governed by its logos. What he is – ‘human’ – will have to be redescribed in a way that makes him, as much as any part of nature, and much like a patient is for a doctor, intelligible.103 Before turning to Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, where he pursues this science of the soul and human action, we first need to examine the Poetics’ complementary interpretation of tragedy.

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Aristotle’s sympathy for tragedy ought to be seen within the context of Plato’s rejection of the art form. See Republic, 606b, specifically on the threat of tragic emotion. Aristotle claims that rather than exacerbating the emotions of pity and fear, tragic provocation mollifies them. See G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 176-179. Lloyd provides a discussion of the relation of the doctor (iatros) to the natural scientist (physikos) in Aristotle, and the naturalizing of medicine in terms of the physis of the Ionian philosophers. For Aristotle, the investigation of first principles and causes of disease, as part of nature, is the job of the natural philosopher as well as the doctor. The best doctors must derive their principles from the study of nature. Cf. Aristotle OS, 436a17, and OB, 480b22-4, as cited by Lloyd.

Chapter 3 Aristotle’s Poetics: Oedipus and the Problem of Tragedy Introduction Aristotle’s Poetics, an incomplete set of lecture notes, is the first literaryphilosophical analysis of tragedy, the origin of aesthetics and the tradition of literary criticism to come. It gives us an unprecedented picture of philosophy’s reception of the Dionysian art and the problem of the irrational it presented in the violent and disordered life it brought to the Greek stage. But Aristotle’s Poetics was written about 70 years after Sophocles’ and Euripides’ death, and more than a century after Aeschylus had exited life’s stage.1 Aristotle, then, is an audience member in an empty theatre, whose stage has been abandoned. As a commentator on a dramatic art that is no longer being performed, Aristotle’s place at criticism’s hermeneutical beginning is doubly ironic, since it was the rise of a philosophical (or, maybe more specifically, ‘sophistic’) sensibility in fifth century Athens that put serious tragic lyric to death. Aristophanes in the Frogs (406 B. C.) was the first to announce the death of tragedy: Right it is and befitting Not, by Socrates sitting, Idle talk to pursue, Stripping tragedy-art of All things noble and true. (1491-1495)2

Aristophanes is writing about Euripides, whose ear for him was too inclined towards the Socratic. It was through the influence of philosophy upon tragedy and Greek life that the art form was corrupted and forced into decline. 3 By examining what Aristotle makes of katharsis 1 2 3

John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, p. 11. Trans. by Snell. Bruno Snell The Discovery of the Mind, p. 113. See Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 113. “The art had in fact been stripped of its very existence, and it cannot be denied that philosophy was responsible for its destruction.”

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and hamartia in the Poetics we can better situate his ethics and the relevant psychology in relation to tragic lyric, and determine tragedy’s legacy within philosophy’s moral and political science of the human soul. Aristotle’s Poetics devise a place for a sane Oedipus whose tragic blow does not deprive him of self-knowledge – of who he is. In doing this he redefines two crucial components of the tragic scheme: hamartia and katharsis. Hamartia becomes unambiguously Oedipus’ own, part of a rational, anthropocentric world, something we can comprehend and potentially control, as katharsis lapses into a pleasurable relief of emotion, no longer capable of spontaneously transforming the individual from without as it had before in the ecstasies of religious rite and the mystery cults of gods like Dionysus, as well as on Sophocles’ stage. Aristotle, by, contra Plato, finding a place for tragedy within the city walls, philosophically adopts the problem of irrationality irrupting through Oedipus and the earth (gù, chthon) beneath Thebes, ironically preparing a moral psychological interpretation which eliminates the possibility of tragedy as Sophocles originally conceived it. Something as basic as Aristotle’s tastes in language, unable as he was to distinguish between the dissos logos of sophistry and that of tragedy, demonstrates a typically philosophical rejection of the essential ambiguities of tragedy, without which its ironies, reversals, and inherent care for conflict fall flat. The Poetics and Rhetoric completely neglect the deliberate use of ambiguity in poetry, symptomatic in the poet’s hands of a logos which contests itself implicitly, and of a figure like Oedipus composed of the difference or gap within it.4 Aristotle was undoubtedly a member of the same squad which Aristophanes has Socrates and Euripides founding together, neutering the gods upon which Sophocles’ tragic vision of man depends. 5 The story of tragedy which we have today begins in the expert hands of one of its killers. 4

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See W. B. Stanford Ambiguity in Greek Literature, pp. 12-14 (on condemnation) & p. 22 (on neglect). Poetic ambiguity in every case for Aristotle is a “regrettable accident” of “the reader’s ignorance or the poet’s incompetence,” writes Stanford (p. 69). Poetry, like philosophy, deals with truth, and to be true is to be clear (saphes), or, put another way, to be Greek. This excluded lexical ambiguities essential to Sophocles and the Tyrannus especially, as Stanford shows in Ch. 11. The play contains more than twice as many amphibolies as any of his other plays (p. 173). John Jones On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, pp. 13-15, and chapters iii-iv generally. Jones argues persuasively that the tragic hero is a false imposition on Aristotle’s text.

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The Essence of Tragedy: Katharsis and Hamartia This makes the Poetics a kind of autopsy. Fittingly, it is the model of the organism, the living whole, which guides Aristotle’s analysis. Tragedy ceased to change, he writes, once it acquired its own nature (1449a14).6 It will have to be understood in terms of function and aim, as, for Aristotle, do all living things. The link between the art of the poet and the nature which the art inspects, the shape to which it fits its craft (which, like all art, it imitates), marks a break in Aristotle’s understanding of poetry with the irrational influence of divine inspiration in the tradition before him. This “old story” of which Plato speaks in the Laws (719c) surfaces most clearly in the Phaedrus’ divine blessings of madness, their violent alteration of established social norms connected with Dionysus’ vintage, one of which is the gift of poetry (244a-245a).7 But we can trace it back at least as far as Democritus in the 5th century (frs. 17 & 18) who cites Homer as an instance (fr. 21). Aristotle’s rational nature governing both poetry and the poet replaces the gods and their madness as the source of what becomes a poet’s mimetic skill.8

The Katharsis Passage Aristotle identifies the form of tragedy which the poet imitates in its “tragic effect [tùs tragķdias ergon]” (1450a30-31), the source of endless circling by scholars around a passage which is not likely, barring the discovery of the hypothetical missing book of the Poetics, to become any clearer: 6

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Cf. Aristotle Po., 1449a23: Nature discovers the metre suitable to dialogue, when dialogue comes into being; Po., 1451a9: The limit of the size of a drama corresponds with the nature of the material. Po., 1460a4: Nature itself teaches the poet to choose the proper metre for an epic structure. Cf. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 82-96, on physis and its role in the technù of poiesis. Plato Phaedrus, 265a: Divine madness is produced ÓÎÍ ÆÃÇ¿Ð ÃÌ¿ÉÉ¿ÁÅÐ Ò×Ë ÃÇ×ÆÍÒ×ËËÍÊÇÊ×Ë. Poetic madness is linked to Dionysus’ wine by Cratinus, and its retrieval by Horace “made it a commonplace of the literary tradition.” According to Cratinus, writing even before Democritus, the best poets have been inspired by wine. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 101. See Cratinus, fr. 199k. Horace Epistles 1.19.1. See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 83-87. Before Aristotle, Plato, in both the Phaedrus and Ion, writes of the madness of poetic inspiration, and the lack of a technù. Their lack of knowledge also shows up in Apology 22b-c, and Meno, 99c-d.

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A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions (tķn toioutķn pathematķn katharsin). (1449b24-8)

Aristotle goes on to explain which plot lines will be most effective in producing the tragic effect. It is within the context of this discussion that he hits upon the tragic guilt or error of hamartia. A good man should not pass from good fortune to bad. A bad man should not tread the reverse path. Neither will arouse pity (eleon) or fear (phobon) or inspire “the human feeling [philanthropon].” Extremely bad men falling into grave misfortune are also to be eschewed, because while this may arouse the human feeling it likewise fails to produce the tragic emotions of pity and fear. There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e. g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar families. (1453a4-12)

The katharsis of emotions producing the tragic effect, and the hamartia of the play, though logically distinct, are unified in this turn of fate which Aristotle calls reversal (peripateia). The degree of pity and fear to which Aristotle continually returns depends on the way in which the poet accomplishes this reversal. The “incidents of pity and fear” which the poet imitates “have the very greatest effect on the mind when they occur unexpectedly and at the same time in consequence of one another; there is more of the marvelous [to thaumaston] in them than if they happened of themselves or by mere chance” (1452a4-6). In an ideal plot such as that of Sophocles’ Tyrannus, reversal and discovery (ANAGNķRISIS) on stage and katharsis in the audience will coincide. The discovery and the reversal “will arouse either pity or fear – actions of that nature being what tragedy is assumed to represent; and it will also serve to bring about the happy or unhappy ending” (1452a39-b3). If plot is the life and soul of the tragedy, then the reversal and discovery are the center of its force (1450a33-5). In the Tyrannus, Oedipus himself is the site of reversal and discovery, the place where plot twists in the ideal way. “The marvellous” or “the wondrous” is maximized in him and has a reciprocal effect on the tragic emotions (1452a4-6). Though this wonder is a “pleasure,” it alone does not qualify as tragic. “Not every kind of pleasure should be required of a tragedy, but only its own proper pleasure” (1453b10-12).

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Depending upon who is doing the chronicling there have been up to six interpretations of the katharsis associated with this pleasure.9 The earliest period (neo-classicism) interpreted the effect in moral terms. On this view tragic katharsis taught us how to be virtuous, to avoid misdeeds and the suffering they cause.10 A similar but different view is that katharsis actually generates “emotional fortitude.” Aristotle suggests as much in the Rhetoric (1383a4-5). By exposing ourselves to catastrophe, and surviving, we are less likely to fear it in the future. A sort of homeopathy for the soul, it is a “loosely stoical view” with adherents dating back to the Italian Renaissance.11 A third group, also, like those concerned with moral psychology, relates katharsis to the cultivation of the mean found in Aristotle’s ethics.12 But the last great 9

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See Halliwell’s Aristotle’s Poetics. In the following notes, I follow the appendix, generally. It appears first in Italy, with Segni and Maggi, and later in the Frenchmen Corneille, Rapin, and Dacier. The same idea emerges in England in the work of Dryden and Johnson. For example, see the work of Robortello, Minturno, and Castelvetro. Stephen Halliwell “The Poetics and its Interpreters” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 418 f. This theory dates back to the Italians Vettori and Piccolomine, later, the Dutch Heinsius, and most famously, Lessing, who interprets the term in its religious sense of purification. Lessing’s view drew on Heinsius’ recognition of the connection between emotion and virtue. Though Lessing breaks with much of the moralizing of earlier interpretations, he still connects katharsis with the mean of the Nicomachean Ethics. For Lessing, this purifying katharsis metamorphoses passions into virtues. He placed Aristotle’s comments alongside those on pity and fear in Rhetoric ii.5 & ii.8, and connected these tragic emotions with moral persuasion. See Lessing Hamburgische Dramaturgie, ed. by Fricke, p. 332, as cited by Bernays “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, ed. by Jonathan Barnes. The theory still has live variants, in Halliwell, for example, and Janko, perhaps its foremost representative. See Richard Janko “From Catharsis to the Aristotelian Mean” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, pp. 346 f., 352. Janko notes that other critics neglect the intellectual component of phronùsis in feeling the emotions properly. He combines the intellectual and the emotive in support of the view that tragedy conduces us to the mean of the Nicomachean Ethics, “giving us universal patterns of action,” enhancing both phronesis and moral virtue. But if Lear’s objection stands, that tragedy for Aristotle always preserves the distinction between mimùsis and reality, then Janko’s view is untenable. It would train us to feel the wrong things at the wrong time, he argues, since drama is not homologous to real life. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 320. Goethe is the forerunner of the “dramatic or structural” interpretation, the fourth, in which katharsis is perverted from the audience to the play. While the theory, of which Else and Kitto are both modern proponents, is, given the evidence in the Politics, as untenable as the first three, it does eliminate the moral teleologies

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coup in the katharsis argument was raised by Bernays, who, first to emphasize its link with Politics VIII, argued in his famous article of 1857 (“Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy”) that katharsis ought to be understood as a physiological metaphor, a medical purging, rather than one from religious ritual, or lustration.13 Not only did he transform the debate among scholars of Aristotle, but, as Freud’s uncle in-law, he seems to have influenced Freud and Breuer in the formative stages of psychoanalysis.14 While earlier interpreters (such as Minturno, Milton, and Dacier) may have applied a kind of medical analogy to their moral readings, Bernays liberated the therapeutic view from its moral parent, to which it had been something of an ornament. It is his view which still dominates the scholarly landscape in one form or another. Placing the Poetics side by side with the Politics makes it impossible to locate tragic katharsis in the play, as had Goethe, struggling against the moral reading. Katharsis concerns emotions in the soul. It also eliminates the purification metaphor which Lessing’s interpretation borrowed from religious cult, replacing it with the medical one of purgation. But finally how the word functions metaphorically (medically, morally, religiously, and in the general senses of cleansing or separation) both within and outside of the corpus leave us stranded on an island of generality from which there is no hope of escape. That the preponderant use of the word katharsis in Aristotle, for example, refers to menstrual discharge, remains a problem for Bernaysians.15

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they artificially imposed. This was the motive, after all, for Goethe’s forcing katharsis from the audience to the play. In “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy,” Bernays comments on the clear mistranslation of the passage he was forced into in order to accomplish this relocation, making of katharsis a “balancing” in the mimùsis (p. 155). See Goethe Gesaumtausgabe vol. 15, ed. by W. Rehm, pp. 897-900. A mention should also be given to the doctrine of intellectual katharsis, which reduces the process to inference and the intellectual clarification of the plot. L. Golden is the first and best known advocate of this underdog view. See L. Golden “Mimesis and Catharsis” in Classical Philology 64. Golden argues that katharsis is merely intellectual clarification, excluding the emotions. Pleasure becomes cognitive. See I. M. Bywater Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, p. 152 on 1449b27. Bywater makes this basic distinction in lines of interpretation between the physiological and the religious metaphors. He favors the first, as do I. Whether or not this purgation has a moral value or not will have to be settled. Bywater, and later, Lear, reject this notion. Both Janko and Halliwell represent the opposition. Bennet Simon Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece, pp. 140-3. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 315.

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In the politics, it is true, medical purgings (iatreias) are used as a metaphor for katharsis (Pol. 1342a5-17).16 But read closely they ought to lead us to the view peculiar to Aristotle, which is ultimately nonpathological. For any experience that occurs violently in some souls is found in all, though with different degrees of intensity – for example pity and fear, and also religious excitement (enthousiasmos); for some persons are very liable to this form of emotion, and under the influence of sacred music we see these people, when they use tunes that violently arouse the soul, being thrown into a state as if they had received medical treatment and taken a purge; the same experience then must come also to the compassionate and to the timid and the other emotional people generally in such degree as befalls each individual of these classes, and all must undergo a purgation and a pleasant feeling of relief; and similarly also the purgative melodies afford harmless delight to people (my italics).

Aristotle likens the healing which tragic poetry supplies to the musical cure of enthusiasmos in the familiar cults of the time, especially those of Phrygia, where the flute dominates.17 He repeatedly connects the flute and the Phrygian mode, as well as the Bacchic orgù and the dithyrambic rhythms of its music with this violent enthusiasm of emotion and the “pleasureable relief [kouphizesthai hùdonùs]” from katharsis.18 The violent emotions of pity and fear occur within the context of these kathartic songs, referring us back to the pleasurable katharsis of tragedy and connecting the cathartic ritual of Dionysiac cult (and other related cults, such as the Corybantic rites, and those of phrygian Kybele) with tragic theatre.19 Theatrical music in particular provides 16

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I. M. Bywater Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, 155-59. The context presents “a whole series of words which either have or may have a medical meaning.” The pleasure of healing is connected with EN, vii.13 1152b34; vii.15 1154b17. Bywater’s commentary provides a list of other classical writings, beginning with the physicians, in which the katharsis of “x” (a similar construction) is found. Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 19 (32n). Burkert testifies that Pol., 1342a8 implicitly refers to the Corybants. The Phrygian melodies of the bard, Olympus, are said to excite the soul to enthusiasm, and, by implication, to have an effect on character, which is of the soul. Pol., 1340a6-7. He later writes that the Phrygian mode makes one enthusiastic, as does the flute. Pol., 1340b5. They are not fit for the purpose of ethics, but for that of orgiastic katharsis. ÃÒÇÂqÍÓÈÃÑÒÇËm¿ÓÉÍÐÅÆÇÈÍË¿ÉÉ¿Ê¿ÉÉÍËÍÏÁÇ¿ÑÒÇÈÍË oÑÒÃÎÏÍÐÒÍÇÍÓÒÍÓпÓÒ×È¿ÇÏÍÓÐÕÏÅÑÒÃÍËÃËÍlÐk ÆÃÍÏÇ¿È¿Æ¿ÏÑÇËÊ¿ÉÉÍË ÂÓË¿Ò¿ÇÅÊ¿ÆÅÑÇË. Pol., 1341a21-24. Pol., 1342b4-12 seals the connection between Bacchic dithyramb, the flute, and the phrygian mode. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 76. Early Dionysiac ritual, Dodds believed, was essentially cathartic, in the psychological sense. He refers us to Euripides Bacchae, 77, though the meaning of “purification” remains ambiguous: “Blessed are dancers and those who are purified, who dance on the hill in the holy dance

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the pleasurable relief of katharsis, democratically, without prejudice, for both the healthy and the sick, the virtuous few and the uneducated masses, to whom Aristotle goes on to extend the added pleasure of relaxation, a kind of entertainment in which the pain of work is relieved (Pol. 1342a17-29, 1339b38-39) – recalling perhaps Pindar’s Dionysus who “breaks the rope of heavy cares” (fr. 248). Since the pleasure of katharsis occurs for everyone purgation cannot be pathological in Bernays’ sense. Not only would pathologizing katharsis elide the distinction between healthy and sick, it would also of the god.” Cf. Parker Miasma, p. 288 (36n): Plato’s Euthydemus 277d attests to the cathartic rite of thronķsis practiced by the Corybantics; Pindar speaks of “the mother” as kathartria tùs manias, at Pythian Odes 3.139b in The Odes of Pindar, and Diodorus, at 3.58.2, of a Kybele more generally who “invented purifications for sick animals and children.” But there is little evidence for a healing Dionysus in the historical period, writes Parker. What evidence there is he gathers from The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 95, 87n, where Dodds refers us to Plato’s Laws 815cd. Plato rejects as not suitable for the life of the polis certain Baachic dances which were performed ÎÃÏÇ È¿Æ¿ÏÊÍÓÑÒÃÈ¿ÇÒÃÉÃÒ¿ÑÒÇË¿Ñ. Along with Linforth “Telestic madness in Plato, Phaedrus 244de” in University of California Publications in Classical Philology 13, Parker takes Phaedrus 244e as a reference to Baachic/Corybantic rites which release from madness through homeopathic katharmoi and teletai (though Dionysus is never mentioned). This, says Dodds, is the usual story since Rohde. See Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 287. Rohde found that Plato had the Melampus story in mind, who “healed the Dionysiac madness of the Argive women ‘with the help of ritual cries and a sort of possessed dancing.’” See Apollodorus The Library 2.2.2, as cited by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 77. Lastly, the cult of Dionysos iatros was said to have been recommended to the Athenians by Delphi. See Athenaeus, frs. 22e, 36b. Other authors cited by both Dodds and J. Croissant Aristote et les mysteres, p. 121, such as Aristides Quintilianus de Musica, 3.25 and Servius ad Georgics, 1.166, 2.389, who connects Dionysus to an emotional-psychological katharsis, already bear the influence of Aristotle’s famous theory of katharsis, and so mislead us as clues to its background. Robert Parker Miasma, pp. 288 (38n). Walter Otto, on the other hand, rejects the therapeutic thesis outright: “The madness which is called Dionysus is no sickness, no debility in life, but a companion of life at its healthiest.” Walter Otto Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 143. The argument rests largely on the observation that the god, not just his initiate, is mad. Vernant, likewise, preserves Dionysus as a celebrant of life, not a doctor. For them, he is the bearer of an ecstasy which unifies god and man, temporarily destroying the bounds of the individual and granting him a god-like experience of the world. This may have more to do with the difference between the more primordial cult of the god and the mysteries emerging later, at the time of the politicization of Greek life. See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Masked Dionysus” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 388, which appeals to Plato’s clear destinction at Phaedrus, 265 between healing ecstasies and those of Dionysus. Cf. Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. In its 400+ pages, Kerenyi never discusses a therapeutic function for Dionysian madness.

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imply that the virtuous were pathological. This, for Aristotle, is impossible.20 Emotions, as well, for Aristotle imply an “orientation to the world,” require “belief” as well as “feeling.” 21 And so reading purgation in the medical sense of a physical expulsion again cannot be right. Since the simple release of emotions for Aristotle is not in itself pleasurable, katharsis in the proper sense must explain why a particular kind of emotional expression evoked musically is pleasurable.22 Just as musical entertainment and relaxation as well as the musical ordering of the soul are naturally pleasant (as music is generally), the pleasure of katharsis is another natural propensity music brings to the table of Aristotelian psychology. It ought to be understood as a certain kind of pleasure, connected at least by analogy with emotional violence and relief (perhaps like relaxing amusement is for the strife of work), one especially suited to tragedy’s dramatic mechanism (mùchanù) and the pity and fear it evokes. 23 Admittedly, the picture of katharsis as a psychic pleasure rooted in specifically tragic music is still somewhat obscure. But our real concern is the relation between katharsis and the moral-psychological question of character. Fortunately, the Politics’ discussion of katharsis concerns the moral significance of music. Through it we move one step closer to mapping the central mechanism of tragedy onto the motions of ethics. Music in general for Aristotle has four possible uses: education (paideian), amusement (paidian), pastime (diagogù) or katharsis (Pol. 1339b13-15, 1341b32-9).24 The moral question bears on the relation between katharsis and education. These four musical functions 20 21

22 23

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Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 317. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 317. See Aristotle Rhetoric, ii.5 and ii.8, as this pertains to pity and fear. For a discussion of the cognitive role of emotions more generally in Aristotle, see Matha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 307-309. Regarding the non-medical interpretation, Lear adds that Aristotle shows no signs of familiarity with homeopathic cures, which is how tragic katharsis is said to proceed. Rather, his work always explains medical cures allopathically. Halliwell says the same. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 193. EN, 1104b17; EE, 1220a36. Cf. EN, 1154a27-31; 1154b12-15; EE, 1220b30; Pol. 1337b41; 1339b17. Cf. Croissant’s discussion. J. Croissant Aristote et les Mysteres, pp. 49-58. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Articles on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 328. For a discussion of the natural character of katharsis in the Politics and Poetics, which comes to generally the same conclusion as I have, see G. E. R. Lloyd In the Grip of Disease, pp. 187-193. Amusement is later removed, in the second passage of these two passages, and katharsis added. Although amusements and pastimes could be more or less interchangeable.

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carried out by both melody and harmony relate, he says, either to ethics and character (ta ùthika), actions (ta praktika), or enthusiasms (ta enthousiastika) (Pol. 1341b32-39 [re: melodies], 1342a2-5 [re: harmonies]). He links katharsis primarily with enthusiasms, and these, through both Bacchic rite and “theatrical music,” at least indirectly with tragic theatre and dramatic action. In both cases the religio-moral and therapeutic purifications pervading Greece in the late archaic and early classical period are dimmed to the vanishing point (as Homer himself once suppressed Dionysus and the daimones). The spontaneous ecstasies of the mystery cults, the more sober initiations of Eleusis, as well as the devoted training in god-like ways of life (bioi) among the Orphics and Pythagoreans have been rinsed away. Tragic katharsis becomes a kind of aesthetic pleasure with certain emotional features, a “psychological interpretation” of the phenomenon of ritual with the aid of a loosely medical analogy.25 Distinguishing the educational value of Dorian melodies and harmonies (Pol. 1342a28-30) from the enthusiasmic katharsis inspired by the Phrygian mode (Pol. 1342a11), Aristotle groups them generally into “ethical ones for education” and those concerning action and enthusiasm “for listening to when others are performing (Pol. 1342a1-5).” He rejects the Republic’s bringing the Dorian and Phrygian together for education, because the Phrygian mode “has the same effect among harmonies as the flute among instruments – both are violently exciting and emotional” (ÍÏÁÇ¿ÑÒÇÈ¿ È¿ÇοÆÃÒÇÈ¿, Pol. 1342a33-1342b4). Enthusiasmic melodies and harmonies are clearly set off from ethical melodies and harmonies, as the musical purpose of katharsis, which, along with amusement, brings a kind of pleasant relief, was set apart from moral education. 26 Not only is there no direct link between katharsis and ethics or politics, Aristotle tells us directly enough that these enthusiasmic purgations are dinstinctly unethical (Pol. 1341a21-24). Just as Aristotle’s tuchù is a condition for eudaimonia but categorically distinct from it, 27 the tragic katharsis triggered by the operations of tuchù is set apart from the sphere of ethics, whose moral-scientific object will be the soul in which

25 26

27

See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 194. Aristotle Po., 1342a21-25. Aristotle actually recommends that the musician use unethical music to please the vulgar, whose souls, “warped from the natural state,” are best pleased by “those harmonies and melodies that are highly strung and irregular in coloration …” See Aristotle Po., 1452b34. Tragic action concerns tuchù. For the distinction between tuchù, which concerns external goods, and virtue, see EN, 1124a12-31.

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eudaimonia thrives, defended with the proper training against the potential miseries of tragic catastrophe.

The Hamartia Passage Through the secular metaphor of medicine, Aristotle reinterprets the religious katharseis of the centuries before him in terms of emotional provocation, psychologizing a religious rite. 28 In connection, hamartia, another term heavy with religious signification in the 5th century, and moral-legal weight in the century to follow, the centerpiece of the mechanism of this tragic effect, will be similarly neutered. The reconception of tragic guilt by Aristotle accomplishes the expulsion and secularizing of the destructively religious element natural both to the God of tragedy and the Sophoclean art, rethinking hamartia in light of a secular-rational ethics and psychology. The interpretation of the hamartia passage has been fraught with as much controversy as the concept of katharsis, which should come as no surprise. The two ideas are intimately linked. The moralizing interpretation, again, was the first to prevail, and in the same commentators determining the fate of katharsis.29 The Italian Renaissance set a moral tone which would take centuries to correct. 30 These are the tides which carry to France, along with Vettori’s specious introduction of the “tragic flaw” in his 1560 commentary, where the two misinterpretations take complementary and near permanent root. In the century to follow, in France, the bastard notion of tragedy’s poetic justice is born from the combined influence of Seneca and the medieval mystery-plays. The French Academie thought hamartia as the righteous punishment of evil, sins, or moral fault, 31 consenting to a new and 28

29

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See David Claus Toward the Soul, p. 154. The medical writers anticipating philosophy’s technù of the soul identify its disturbances with an internal physis which is “fundamental and single,” excluding any “demonic and external” sources. In tracing the scholarship on hamartia I follow Bremer’s exhaustive account almost completely. Valla’s 1508 translation was the starting-point of interpretation. He renders hamartia “per flagitium et scelus” (through misdeed and impiety). The word soon takes the leap directly to “peccatum” (sin) in Pacci’s influential 1536 translation, though this sin is also coupled with imprudentia, “a lack of information of foresight.” The pillar of this influence was Mesnardierre. Corneille and Racine insist on the moral fault of the agent, some “fatal weakness” of character, as did Rapin, and, the decisively influential commentary of Dacier: “Les vices d’Oedipe sont l’orgueil, la violence & l’emportement, la temerité & l’imprudence.”

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unambiguous interpretation of hamartia as “fatal passion or vice.”32 The English schools under heavy French influence followed a similar trajectory, via the work of Rymer, who actually coined the term “poetic justice” in his 1678 essay The Tragedies of the Last Age. 33 Yet, that hamartia means wrongdoing is made impossible both by what Aristotle actually has to say about tragedy34 and by the relevant sections of the ethical works, which I will soon examine. 35 What did Aristotle actually write? The context, following the passage on katharsis, is still Poetics XIII, where plot and the type of tragic figure best represented are under discussion: There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but ÂÇqgÊ¿ÏÒÇ¿ËÒÇË¿ [through some hamartia], of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e. g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar families. (1453a6-1453a12)

The plot and the tragic figure at its center, destroyed through an act of hamartia, should be tailored to the production of pity and fear. Oedipus is not so much a person as he is a hamartia delivery system, a moving, empty center within the motions of the play, who through his vulnerability to hamartia and its disastrous consequences reveals the pitiable and the fearful to the audience. Since the tradition after Aristotle is suspect, it is helpful to search both before and within Aristotle’s work for a proper translation. In addition, semasiological study of the word group in general can place Aristotle’s hamartia in relation to that of tragedy. Aristotle must have 32 33

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J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 80. Dryden concurs with Rymer, and John Dennis carried the “banner of Rymerian criticism” into the next century (Though Addison raised objections to “this ridiculous doctrine” his tune did not carry). For a comprehensive discussion of modern scholarship on hamartia, see J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 91-98. The moralizing interpretation of hamartia was first challenged, somewhat ambiguously, by Vahlen’s Beiträge (1865). Following Vahlen’s reading of the term as “ignorance,” Bywater’s 1909 commentary develops and further establishes this view. But it was not until O. Hey’s semasiological study of 1927, “Hamartia” in Philologus, 83, writes Dawe, that the moral interpretation of hamartia was “killed stone dead.” See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 90. It remains to discuss the 19th century tradition of interpretation, German philosophy and “Tragsiche Schulde.” But this will best figure as an introduction to the siginificance of tragedy in Kierkegaard, as a member of this group. In any case, it is more germane to philosophical topics than to the philological question of hamartia in Aristotle and Attic tragedy. I will postpone its significant details to the beginning of the next chapter.

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been aware of one special legal connotation of hamartia, an exculpable mistake, as opposed to the punishable offense of adikùsai. 36 This meaning derived from an old one common to all hamart- group words as well as three others (alitein, amplakein, sphallesthai) that show an affinity: “to miss, lose an object, lose position.”37 The meanings were originally morally neutral. There have been five semasiological studies of the word itself and they all agree (save one) that Poetics 1453a10 refers to an ‘error’, ‘mistake’, ‘blunder’, etc. 38 But by the 4th century these older meanings had been decisively obscured. The word had generally come to mean a punishable offense, a crime. The affiliated words also tended since Homer toward a moralization of what had originally been a physical, morally neutral description. This makes Aristotle’s use of it exceptional, and more overtly specialized. Through Bremer’s exhaustive study the development of the word from Homer to Aristotle’s time becomes sufficiently clear. What had meant ‘miss’ slowly took on the meaning of ‘err’ until finally it connotes ‘offense.’39 The fifth century retained both meanings of the word, an ambiguity between innocence and guilt that made it perfectly suited to tragedy. In fact the first use that we have of the substantive hamartia is in Aeschylus, where offense’ is most frequent, while in Sophocles it is the sense of ‘err’ which predominates. It is easy to see how the genre of tragedy popularizes and metaphorically transforms the word group. Similar trends in this period can be found in the historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, in which the frequencies of use are balanced (to miss: 32 – to err: 38 – offense: 33). In the latter, the opposition of hamartanein and adikein, an exculpable mistake and a 36

37 38

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J. M. Bremer Hamartia, p. 20. Cf. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 64. Dracon (7th c.) had been the one to introduce the distinction between akousios, hekousios, and dikaios (as it applied to killing) which Aristotle continued to develop three centuries later, though Dracon’s innovation concerned the measure of an act’s offense, not the psychology of the criminal. It was a matter of what, socially, was forgivable or not. For more on the nature of Draconian law, see Louis Gernet Recherches sur le Développement de la Pensée Juridique et Morale en Grece. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 26-9. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 24 f., Bremer cites the studies by van Braam, Hey, Phillips, Harsh, and Ostwald. Harsh interprets Aristotle through Plato and Tragedy. This, argues Bremer, obscures his conclusions significantly. J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 31-56. Homer and the lyric poets together use it in the first sense 40 times, the second 6 times, and the last six times. By the fifth century, tragedy invokes this group a total of 127 times, 25 in the first, 41 in the second, and 59 in the third. See tables on p. 31 (Homer), p. 36 (Tragedy), p. 40 (History), p. 44 (Orators), p. 56 (4th c.: Plato, Aristotle, Orators).

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punishable injustice, becomes clear. But this was actually a “rhetorical commonplace” among early orators such as Antiphon, Gorgias, and Prodicus. Their use of the word group is more disproportionately metaphorical than any of those previous, that is, more morally charged.40 In the legal world of the 5th century hamartia took on a special meaning which embraced the contradictory meanings of both mistake and offense: injurious action, the magnitude of the act and the intention of the agent notwithstanding.41 Hamartia could refer both to an act that was hekon ek pronoias, intentional and voluntary, as well as an excusable misdeed begotten through ignorance (agnoia).42 Aristotle’s ethics were in part trying to clear up this muddle of jurisprudence through the introduction of a more sophisticated psychology of action which could define intention and choice, and therefore culpability, more clearly. Defining Oedipus as a figure of hamartia was propadeutic for the moral and legal categories operating within ethics and the state. A look at the Nicomachean Ethics will help us interpret the meaning of tragic hamartia in the more opaque context of the Poetics.

Tragic Action: Oedipus in the Nicomachean Ethics Reading the Poetics adds color to the moral agent of the Ethics. It situates and extends him within the broader frame of life and action.43 Likewise, there is an ethical strategy implied in the hamartia of the Poetics that immediately becomes clear when we look to the Ethics. Plato, conveniently, has left us a passage which bears striking similarity to Aristotle’s, which situates more definitively the philosopher’s occupation with this term. Plato reflects in the Republic on what kind of an actor may enter his State. Being a measured man (metrios anùr, 396c) the actor will be prepared to imitate good men, and, sometimes, their failure via some error (esphalmenon, 396d). The Platonic inheritance, then, is greater than some might suppose. Though Aristotle defends tragedy against the sedition which Republic III and X allege, he saves the art by reducing it philosophically to something befitting, at least potentially, the Platonic legacy at the heart of the theory. As 40

41 42

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See note above. The meanings ‘err’ and ‘offense’ outnumber the original sense of ‘to miss’ by more than 200 (63-157-117). O. Hey “Hamartia” in Philologus, 83, p. 15. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 64. This is a basic premise of John Jones’ On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy.

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we’ve already seen, his restrictions on music were even more severe than Plato’s. Hamartia will have to live up to extremely optimistic and ultimately rational criteria, which become most explicit in the Ethics. The Nicomachean Ethics provide Aristotle’s mature view of hamartia. Dramas (dramata), he writes, were called “dramas” according to many because they represented people in action (drķntas, Po., 1448a2729). The two spheres of interest, ethics and poetics, therefore, were naturally kin.44 In the beginning of the third book Aristotle gives an account of voluntary and involuntary actions (hekousiois and akousiois) that, with several allusions, clearly has tragedy in the background. The involuntary, he says, due either to compulsion or ignorance, “are condoned, and sometimes even pitied” (EN, 1109b31-33). He refers in this context to Alcmaeon of Euripides’ lost play – “compelled by certain threats to murder his mother.” Voluntary action begins with the agent, while the “origin” of compulsory action (to biaion) “is from outside” (EN, 1110b16-18). Action like Oedipus’ “done through ignorance is in every case not voluntary” (EN, 1110b18-19). Though effectively Oedipus causes the parricide and incest he suffers, the force of ignorance, actually, compels the action from without. This is Aristotle’s version of tragic ambiguity. It is not voluntary (ouk hekousion) in every case, and involuntary (akousion), as with Oedipus, “only when it causes the agent pain or regret.” Aristotle makes a further distinction between acting in ignorance or through ignorance (en or dia). In the first case ignorance is not the cause, but a feature of the action, as when the drunken or the enraged (or, the drunkenly enraged) attacks the innocent streetlamp, for example. It may be true that he acts without knowledge of right and wrong, but the reason that he tarries with the inanimate is not ignorance.45 It is because he is angry, and drunk. The agent’s emotions (pathù) are the cause. Acting in ignorance refers to what Aristotle will analyse as akrasia in book VII. Although not deliberate, since the man acts despite himself, he is cognizant of the particular facts; his action is “in some sense voluntary”46 and therefore punishable. Oedipus, 44

45

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Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 140. “[I]t implies that the fabric of tragedy, or indeed of all poetry, is the representation of human purpose striving for realisation, and therefore falls within the purview of ‘practical’ or ethical philosophy.” The distinction here is between knowledge of the universal or major premise and the minor premise or particular fact. See pp. 109-113. Wrong action through spirit or appetite shows up at EN, 1111a25, and is deemed voluntary, because unnatural in kind or force, and though beyond individual control, is no less natural to humankind than reason, as stated at EN, 1111b-b3.

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though, for whom apparently the murder and without question the incest are both chosen, must act through ignorance: an unconsciousness of the particulars “of the act and of the things affected by it.” In cases like these, Aristotle writes, the act is pitied and forgiven, because he who acts in ignorance of any of these circumstances is an involuntary agent” (EN 1111a-a1).47 Aristotle identifies the circumstances of ignorance surrounding these involuntary actions of the Oedipal type: 1) the agent, 2) the act, 3) the thing that is affected by or is the sphere of the act; and sometimes also 4) the instrument, for instance, a tool with which the act is done, 5) the effect, for instance, saving a man’s life, and 6) the manner, for instance, gently or violently (EN 1111a2-6). Both ignorance of the agent and of the thing affected or the sphere of the act would apply to Oedipus. Aristotle, confirming its relevance to the Poetics, cites the Euripidean figure of Merope as an example of the ignorance of effect, who mistook her son for an enemy.48 Although Oedipus’ “ignorance of the sphere of the act” would make his action involuntary for Aristotle, stopping there would fail to describe what we have already seen in chapter one to be the essence of Oedipus’ hamartia: more than anything else, he is mistaken about his own identity. Although Aristotle lists ignorance of the agent as one type of ignorance, he immediately disqualifies it. “Now no one, unless mad (mainomenos), could be ignorant of all these circumstances together; nor yet, obviously, of the agent – for a man must know who he is himself” (EN 1111a7-9). Aristotle separates the agent from the sphere of the act and makes him a special kind of object about which, barring madness, it is impossible to claim ignorance. But Oedipus’ ignorance of “the sphere of the act” was originally, for Sophocles, grounded in the ignorance of himself which Aristotle separates and consigns to fiction. This ignorance, a half-civilized form of religious madness, disappears from the philosopher’s moral-aesthetic equation. Aristotle cannot make the action of a tragedy human-centered, subject to the same logos governing his Ethics and Politics, and also let these religious overtones ring out. Homer, for instance, had no problem blaming Agamemnon for stealing Briseis from Achilles, which, nevertheless, he 47

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The two remaining types of action are deliberate wrong action, the punishable consequence of a vicious character, an “ignorance displayed in moral choice” (EN, 1110b33-4), and deliberately virtuous action. This is an example taken from the lost Cresphontes, which, we’ll find, also figures in the Eudemian Ethics.

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chalked up to the religious madness of atù.49 For both Homer and Sophocles that the gods ruled the game was no excuse. The offense of crime was no less real. Aristotle leaves the poet’s Oedipus stranded in the no man’s land of tragedy, where the center of rational man and his cities, that which moves and guides him, his identities, can still be displaced. He replaces him with yet another avatar, a more sanguine Oedipus, like Homer’s, who “ruled on in beloved Thebes,”50 and exiles Sophocles creation to the hinterlands of gods and beasts, a territory beyond the human, against which its boundaries and aspirations are defined (EN, 1145a22).

The Alteration of Hamartia in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle in Book V devises his plan for a sane Oedipus, the source of an involuntary action – though neither medically or religiously deranged, due not to the compulsions of ta bia, but rather agnoia. That religious madness is no longer a valid interpretation of tragic action is enough to confirm the divorce of Aristotle’s hamartia from the archaic madness of atù. But this alteration of just how it is that reasoned choice is tragically reversed by external forces introduces if not a problem within Aristotle’s theory, then at least a major challenge to the relevance of the theory as a whole for readers. “[E]ither hamartia in Aristotle’s discussion has a meaning unknown from any of its other very frequent occurrences in Greek literature (including Aristotle himself), and Aristotle has not seen fit to add a word of clarification to his casual introduction of this novel concept: or else his words have almost no relevance to Greek tragedy as it was actually practiced[.]”51 Intepreting Aristotle’s hamartia as an “error of judgment,” as scholars generally do these days, rescues him from this irrelevance, and also harmonizes the single line in which the word appears with the rest of his work. “[A]n error of judgment,” however, “is something which can be either entirely the responsibility of the man who makes it,” as in 49

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Iliad, ix. 119. “But since I was blinded by atù and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make my peace and abundant compensation.” Odyssey, xi. 312. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 72, p. 91. Dawe’s article argues that atù and hamartia, while distinct, are continuous in the tradition. Aristotle’s usage is perfectly sensible. Adkins, in “Arisotle and the Best Kind of Tragedy,” emphasises the distance between Aristotle and the world view in tragedies of the 5th century.

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Aristotle, or, with Sophocles a century before, it “can be something induced, normally by the gods putting a man in such a position that he has little choice but to make a decision that will later recoil on him with disastrous, and above all disproportionate consequences.”52 So which is Aristotle’s use of the word? What does it make of Sophocles’ tragic paradox: an externality interior to Oedipus, which as it unfolds according to divine necessity destroys him? The beginning of an answer lies in the development of the language of “psychic interference” in the literature before Aristotle. The origin of its development, of course, is Homeric, where we read of the atù sent by the gods. But Homer assigns responsibility to the temporarily insane, which he can do only because reasoned choice is not the criterion, as with Agamemnon, compelled “to make amends” though “Zeus had stolen my wits[.]”53 The agent is still too mixed up in the act for psychological criterion to excuse him. As in the first Greek laws laid down by Dracon, later, in the seventh century, intention was not the issue. What mattered was the objective content of the deed, the offense it caused, what we might call the moral damage.54 Aristotle’s ethical project, in part, is an attempt to distinguish once and for all the moral and legal agent from the objective act, to develop a theory of action sufficiently grounded in the rational principles of the new Athenian politics, which could do away with the violent tribalism of the past that Homer represents and Dracon basically retains. The common conceptual root of atù and hamartia, deeper than mental blindness, is this damage (blabù) that they explain. Both words account for damage men accomplish when in some sense not the source of their action. Homer never once uses the term hamartia. He explains the way in which good men come to harm (blabù) through atù. But by the time of Euripides and Aristotle the word atù drops out of use completely. 55 Meanwhile, in the 5th century tragedies as well as the intervening lyric poetry, both words are used in similar contexts and “seem to be equated.”56 Antigone herself in a “homily 52

53 54

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R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, p. 94. Iliad, xix. 155-157. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 3. J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 61. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 106. See R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, pp. 101-105, for a list of exemplary contexts. Dawe establishes the correspondence between both atù and blabù, of which these examples

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on phronein”57 implicitly connects deliberation and hamartia with the atù of the famous ode at 582 and its “Erinyus of the mind” (Erinus phrenķn): For those whose house is shaken by the gods, no part of ruin (atas) is wanting, as it marches against the whole of the family; like the swell of the deep sea, when darkness runs beneath the water, brought by the dire blast of winds from Thrace, it rolls up from the bottom the black sand and the wind-vexed shores resound before its impact. 58

Aristotle, in choosing hamartia, had distinguished the “vital strand” of at least the tragedy of the Labdacids, which, more than any other, in the Antigone and Tyrannus, was about logos at its destructive limits, although what Aristotle understood by the word was still only “a part of what the tragedians had understood by it.”59 When Aristotle discusses hamartia in the Ethics directly he couches the damages of Book III’s discussion of voluntary action in his own civilized language. Hamartia enters the text explicitly in Book V within a broader discussion of just (dikema) and unjust (adikema) actions, that is, actions which are either punishable or not. First, an act must be voluntary, as described earlier in Book III, to qualify as either just or unjust (EN 1135a15-17). Aristotle now regroups the blabai of the earlier book in terms of justice and injustice. Compulsion (ta bia) drops out of the equation, leaving a space that he fills with the introduction of hamartema, acts committed dia agnoia. Both hamartema and the misfortunes of atuchema are categorized as acts done through ignorance, while adikema are the effect of either incontinence (akrasia, acts done in ignorance) or vice (kakia), both voluntary. Atuchema are not attributed to the agent at all. Hamartema are their moral and legal equivalent. In cases of hamartema, as with atuchema, I am the archù of the act qua damage. But I am ignorant of its ‘purpose’ or ‘end’ – the possibility that the act would prove harmful. This makes my action akķn, involuntary. If the poet determines the hamartia correctly, fol-

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are types. Aristotle, at EN, 1135b, classifies hamartema along with atuchema and adikema as types of damage. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 111. See Sophocles Antigone, 925-928: ¿ÉÉqÃÇÊÃËÍÓËÒ¿ÂqÃÑÒÇË ÃËÆÃÍÇÐÈ¿É¿ οÆÍËÒÃпËÑÓÁÁËÍÇÊÃËkÊ¿ÏÒÅÈÍÒÃÐÃÇÂqÍÇÂqgÊ¿ÏÒ¿ËÍÓÑÇ ÊÅÎÉÃÇ×È¿ÈοÆÍÇÃËÅÈ¿ÇÂÏ×ÑÇËÃÈÂÇÈ×ÐÃÊÃ. Outside of these odes, the language of the play has consistently legal and moral-philophical resonance. Variations on bouleusis relate the play to phronùsis: Euboulia (chorus, 1098), aboulia (messenger, 1242), dusbouliai (Creon, 1269), dusboulia (Antigone, 95), tied to blabù at 1050. R. D. Dawe “Some Reflections on Ate and Hamartia” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 72, p. 123.

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lowing the doctrine of the Ethics, the tragic figure will cause his own ruin, but through an involuntary blunder which cannot be blamed, one legally identical with bad luck. Yet, it was against the senselessness of bad luck that Sophocles’ lyric voiced its tragic appeal.

Katharsis and Wonder (or) What’s Become of Pollution By severing its ties with atù and forcing divine activity, if necessary, outside the performed time of the drama, Aristotle secularizes the origin of tragic collision, as his rule for the dramatic mùchanù explains: There should be nothing improbable among the actual incidents. If it be unavoidable, however, it should be outside the tragedy, like the improbability in the Oedipus of Sophocles. (1454b2-8)

This rule forcing the divine outside the frame of the plot extends from an earlier discussion of how dramatic action should proceed in general. It is the thought and character of the agents from which action flows (1449b36-1450a3) and the playwright should always present this character-based action as “necessary” or “probable.” Divine interference would defy this rational necessity or probability. It must be excluded, along with everything else, including dumb luck, which is alogos (1454b6-8, 1460a28). Hamartia can be discovered, explained, and re-interpreted according to the broader rational vision which the end of the play provides. Wonder and terror before the gods are translated into the pleasure of katharsis, triggered by the unlikely discovery of reason in a pitiful, terrifying situation which had seemed at first to defy it. Aristotle, like Sophocles, connects disaster with wonder, which for the Greeks came as a pair, and had implicitly religious connotations.60 But for Aristotle it is the logos in disaster that ignites wonder, while, for Sophocles, it is the disaster pregnant in logos. Katharsis is enhanced by wonder, we’ve seen, when the poet structures his plot in such a way that the right figure suffers the right dramatic grammar (1452b34-1453a12). In Aristotle’s hands, his hamartia becomes something we can in principle understand, which unfolds in the right 60

Religious wonder and terror can be recogznied in the etymology of agos, the disastrous corruption which has its root in azomai, a mood of religious wonder. While the religious wonder which we find in the agos of Thebes is connected with actual divinities, in Aristotle, wonder is grounded in logos, which, of course, is also divine.

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way. It excites the mind to understanding, another kind of pleasure, connected by Aristotle both within this work and others with wonder (to thaumaston) (Metaphysics 982b12, 983a12, Rhetoric 1371a33). While the Metaphysics famously connects wonder with reason as a spark for understanding, the Poetics ties wonder to the irrational as its chief factor (alogon, 1452a4-6, 1460a11-17). The pleasure of wonderment passes from this tension between reason and the irrational to relief.61 Through poetic katharsis the unintelligible nightmares which we refuse to allow as members of a civilly ordered society, or even to see and to know, are brought into a reasonable, living whole. “There should be nothing alogon among the actual incidents” (1454b6-7). All of our Oedipuses are tamed. We wonder at the logos of that which seemed so violently alogon. In Sophocles, wonder is the tragic accession of human reason to the terror and wonder of life amongst the gods. Aristotle reinterprets tragic wonder within the now rational horizon of katharsis and hamartia as the accession of the irrational to the shape of human reason.62 The poet, says Aristotle, resembles the philosopher (1451b5), and perhaps his poet a little too much. The Poetics contests the status of the gods in Greek myth – and by extension tragedy – as causes of action that “lie at and beyond the limits of human comprehension” and which we therefore cannot anticipate, penetrate, or control.63 Their shadow remains as a mere incidental and exculpable “ignorance in the sphere 61

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See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 70-74, where Halliwell makes this connection. Lear objects and attempts to distinguish the desire to understand, in the Metaphysics, provoked by wonder, from the Poetics, in which he finds wonder provoked by the desire to understand. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty. His distinctions, though, are slippery and ultimately unconvincing. His fundamental point in making them is to point out that tragic pleasure is not cognitive, and that this wonderment before the unanticipated and in this sense irrational (bringing both passages together) is distinct from the “proper pleasure” of tragedy. But Aristotle does say that the marvellous is required of tragedy. Po., 1460a11-12. Its pleasure and the katharsis of emotions could hardly be distinct, since Aristotle identifies them at Po., 1452a1-6. Popular Greek belief would have privileged the gods over nature and dumb luck as a source of eutuchia, to which Aristotle alludes at Phy., 196b5-7 and Rh., 1391b1-3; Aristotle rejects traditional divine pthonos at Met., 982b32-983a3; Met., 1000a9 and 1074a38 introduce and reject the popular, mythological view. EN, 1178b8 describes the perfect contemplative happiness of the gods, whose activity is now exclusively intellectual. Finally, at Pol., 1252b4-7, alluding to Xenophanes, fr. 14, Aristotle supposes we imagine gods as men, ruled by a king, because we are men ruled by kings, or once were. Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 233.

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of the act” as authentically tragic hamartia, ironically, becomes a necessary mistake in the preservation of the intelligibility and integrity of the whole.64 The Poetics reduce the resistance or paradox of the gods, pollution in Oedipus and plague in the city, to mundane ignorance, disabused by the kathartic discovery and reversal which reason discovers in a mechanism of its own design.

Conclusion The theatregoer, through tragedy, was able to exchange safety and regularity for the absolute perspective of extreme possibility which the play evokes. That chaos exists and is possible for us is something they could explore safely within the quarantine of the theatre, the paradigmatic breakdown in Oedipus of primordial social bonds, a catastrophe which the drama, ideally, imbues with a meaning and a form.65 By redefining hamartia as an “error in calculation,” and identifying katharsis with a superficially aesthetic pleasure, connected in the Politics with a pause in the Athenian work-week, the terrible flower of tragedy is cut off with the bud. Not only is the destructive power of the gods evacuated from the stage, but, we find, catastrophe averted becomes preferable to catastrophe undergone.66 It is better that the pollution, the plague, be avoided in advance, and if that is impossible, at least traced back to an error of judgment that could have been. True phronùsis “would make mistakes like the ignorant mistake of Oedipus impossible.”67 The best way to avoid potential misfortunes, we will find out in the Ethics, will be moral education. This begins with the soul. While tragedy was never, for Sophocles or Aristotle, a morality tale, Aristotle does preserve the connection between character and fortune. Exceptionally rational, good men (epiekeis) should not suffer tragedy.68 64 65

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Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 226. This is an observation of Halliwell’s. Jonathan Lear “Katharsis” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, pp. 334 f. Po., xiv. 1454a9. Aristotle prefers a tragedy that ends happily, where disaster is averted at the last minute. This is in tension with Po., xiii. 1453a23, where he says the opposite. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 387. Nussbaum offers this as a partial explanation for why Aristotle excludes men of surpassing virtue from tragic roles. The best candidates for hamartia cannot be unexceptionally reasonable, good men (not epieikùs, Po., 1452b34) – they must not be “pre-eminently virtuous and just

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Tragic guilt must be of a specific kind and its parameters are a matter of character and action. But underlying this aesthetic criterion is the conviction that tragedy has a moral hue and its audience an eye to see it. Plays, like individuals, have a character (ùthos) and a thinking (dianoia). Though an error like Oedipus’ cannot be blamed, within Aristotle’s framework it can be avoided, and this is ethically significant. Aristotle’s primary ethical interest will not be a theory of blame, but rather how to cultivate the best possible life. Even if Oedipus is blameless, the tragic case remains ethically instructive. One ought to train oneself intellectually in the interest of eudaimonia. In chapter five we’ll see just what kind of mutation Sophocles’ Oedipus will have to undergo to enter this ethical calculus and perhaps wonder if tragedy itself and Oedipus as its best ambassador remain still, despite Aristotle’s invitation, an outsider to philosophy’s secular-rational ethics and politics. Fragment 15 (Rose) of Aristotle’s alerts us to his awareness of an alternative form of education – competitive with philosophy – bound still to the archaic religious power of katharsis: initiates in the mysteries “educate” and purify themselves through the ritualization of suffering. Like the Oedipus of tragedy they do not learn (mathein) anything. They experience or suffer it (pathein). Undergoing this experience transforms their disposition (diathùsis) spontaneously.69 Kierkegaard, we’ll find in Part II, calls for a similarly kathartic education. But the Poetics dismisses the spontaneous regeneration through suffering and katharsis to a minor corner of the philosophical world-view, dividing it from any moral considerations of the soul, and minimizing its force to mere aesthetic play. Rather, it is the Orphic-Pythagorean askùsis of the shaman, whose influence on philosophy and its reconception

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(Po., 1453a7-8)” – despite the fact that the seriousness and nobility of the tragic figure (Po., 1448a2,27, 1448b10) which Aristotle insists on would seem to recommend just such a man, as Aristotle himself suggests (Po., 1454b13). Cf. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 13-15. To be epieikùs for Aristotle meant to be morally honest and righteous (EN, 1137a31), distinguished by arête, as are the appropriately tragic characters (ùthù chrùsta, Po., 1454a17). The more unworthy of misfortune is the tragic figure, the greater a man he is (epieikùs also had social overtones, Cf. EN, 1132a2, 1167b1, Pol., 1274a15), and the greater the pity he solicits (Rh., 1386b31, 1385b33, 1389b10). See Werner Jaeger Aristotle, pp. 160, 162. Diathùsis is a medical term which both Plato and Aristotle recoup as ‘education’ in their diagnoses on soul. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 88 (n51). Cf. Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10, and DC 284b3, where Aristotle describes an emotional proof of God’s existence, as opposed to a rational demonstration: Ê¿ËÒÃÇ¿ÎÃÏÇÒÍËÆÃÍË.

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of the soul we’ll explore in the next chapter, which prefigures the prolonged, individual practice in virtue that Aristotle makes a central feature of his ethics. Pythagorean katharseis, in fact, may be the least problematic precursor to the tragic katharsis of the Poetics.70 Divorcing tragedy from the ecstatic madness which Herodotus’ tradition ascribes to the Baachants (ekstasis, existasthai, mainesthai)71 and the profound sense of pollution and guilt of which the archaic Greeks were capable, Aristotle’s doctrine of tragic mimùsis also deprives tragedy of the special significance of its appointed god, Dionysus, as the god of illusions.72 This is an especially poignant departure since it was likely under the auspices of the god for whom reality dissolved into illusion, and illusion became real, that something like theatre became possible.73 This break, we’ll see in chapter five, complemented by Aristotle’s ethics and psychology, reduces the tragic guilt and katharsis associated with Dionysus and his theatre to rational psychology. The irrational from then on can assert its power only within the human soul, where reason, naturally superior, can exercise it into a shape to match its own. Before getting to this story we need to know under what influence this leap can take place. The possibility of thinking the problem of the irrational psychologically relies upon a break in the culture’s narrative about soul, or psuchù. The extent to which human reason could study and master the irrationality that in cult and theatre (and even 70

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See Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 187. Aside from medical purges and religious purifications, a third possible precedent for Aristotle’s tragic katharsis has been found in the musical katharsis of the Pythagoreans. The earliest record of Pythagorean katharsis comes from one of Aristotle’s pupils, Aristoxenus, fr. 26 in Die Schule des Aristoteles, ed. by Wehrli, who wrote about the sect’s cathartic use of music. While also religious, the effect of this spontaneous purification “must have differed appreciably from the ecstatic or frenzied type of Corybantic katharsis,” and would have applied to all initiates, not just the pathological. This is a feature, as we’ve seen, that returns in the Politics. Herodotus, 4.79.3. It is the language of the Scythians in their observations of the Baachants he records. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 94 f. (84n). Although Rohde read the soul’s departure from the body into ecstasis, this language is “commonly used by classical writers” for “any abrupt change of mood.” It could “mean anything from “taking you out of yourself” to a profound alteration of personality” (p. 77). Homeric Hymns, 7.34. See E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 94 (82n); J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The God of Tragic Fiction” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, p. 187 f.; Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 248: the Dionysiac nature of the tragic actor’s “ecstasy” passed naturally to the spectators.

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Homer’s epics, occasionally) disturbed the harmonies of men – their cities and their souls – in place since Olympus had been raised and the daimones suppressed – required a radically new conception of the individual. And so reason conjures both the instrument of psychology and the object it studies, psuchù, as tools in the subordination of the irrational qua unreasoning desires in the soul to a governance reason claims by nature. In the following chapter, we’ll see how the soul develops into the kind of medium through which such control can be exercised, as a kind of science. It is a development in the Greek story surrounding the god Dionysus, an alternative line of Dionysian flight, one of his ecstasies.

Chapter 4 Psuchù Redux: Philosophy and the New Psychology Introduction The companion psychology to Aristotle’s revision of tragedy draws inspiration from two disparate strains in Greek thinking, one native, the other a trace of foreign blood welling in other-worldly figures like Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, poisoning life and thought against the mortal body Homeric man had celebrated. It was this infamous “drop of alien blood”1 which Rohde mistakenly traced to the ingress of Dionysus’ cult from the Thracian east, across the trade route of the Black Sea. Though we now know that Dionysus was not the source of infection, 2 it is no less true that “the idea of an everlasting soul in man contradicts every single idea of Greek popular religion.”3 There did, however, despite this contradiction in the culture, develop a belief in the divinity and immortality of the soul.

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Erwin Rohde “Die Religion der Griechen,” p. 27. See Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Appearing on the linear B tablets discovered at Pylos decades after Psychù was published, Dionysus exonerated himself. It was clear that he had been in Greece since Mycenae, a millennium before Rohde imagined his voyage to Greece from Thrace. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 254. Moreover, neither the cult of souls which Rohde detects behind the scenes of Homer, nor the Homeric psuchù led to the idea of an “everlasting, indestructible, immortal life.” The soul never pre-existed the living person, nor did it lie dormant within him, despite Rohde’s mistaken introduction of the doubled self of Pindar’s, active in dreams or sleep, back into Homer as an inactive animistic double within the living person. This has since been recognized generally as an erroneous anachronism. In Homer the soul was but a dead image of the mortal man. In any case, Rohde himself explains that the animistic cult was focused on the remembrance of the dead here on earth, through the memory of those surviving (p. 253). It was earth bound, tied to the family hearth. Its claims to happiness were mortal claims, for which it depended upon its survivors. To be immortal was to be a god, for the Greeks (p. 253). The dead ancestor was no god.

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This alien strain, we’ll find, contradicts and through this contradiction revolutionizes the primordially Greek story about the soul dominant in Sophocles’ lyric. And while a sort of descriptive psychology of the individual does begin with tragic lyric, and Sophocles in particular, it does not mature until Macedonia comes to power, in the time of Aristotle, when the city has lost some of its hold on the individual.4 More freedom, less hierarchical rule, as with the modern period, corresponded to an increased demand for self-rule, a broader and more anonymous, horizontal web of power and its articulation in and through a dissipated assemblage of individuals. 5 Before the decline of 4th century Athens psychological interest had aimed at groups: “crowds, assemblies, of Athenians or Lacedaemonians, of oligarchs or democrats, of soldiers, youths, the elderly, of barbarians.”6 In the philosophy of the fourth century a new need arises. The interest shifts importantly to the character and soul of the individuals making up these groups, as we find first in Plato, and, even more so, in Aristotle.

Philosophy and the Reconceptualizing of Psuchê By the time Plato provides the first psychological taxonomy the idea of a personal, immortal soul may have been in Greek circulation for at least a couple of hundred years, first recorded for us qua psuchù in Heraclitus.7 Though it did not rear its head in the poetry we have dis4

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J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 17: “The psychology of the individual, initiated in tragedy, will not truly mature until the city will have lost some of its power – which is to say under Macedonian domination.” See Michel Foucault History of Sexuality, vol. 3, pp. 81-84. Foucault applies this insight to the slightly later Hellenistic and Roman periods. Alasdaire Macintyre seems to imply that the same notion can be applied to modern-philosophical attempts to provide a rational justification for moral claims, and their dead-end in the irrational ideals of a bureaucratic culture. This culture accepts on what amounts to faith both the possibility and value of the efficient management and optimization of human resources. Alasdaire Macintyre After Virtue, p. 62, and chs. 6 and 7 generally. J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, p. 17: “This trait appeared in all its force with the work of Thucydides; but one discovers it also in a number of analyses by Euripides, and in a large part of Platonic thought.” Fr. B 62, B88: mÂÃ<¦Ï¿ÈÉÃÇÒÍÐíÅÑÇËmÒÇÈ¿ÇÒÍÄÅËÈ¿ÇÒÍ¿ÎÍÆ¿ËÃÇËÈ¿ÇÃËÒ× ÄÅËkÊ¿ÐÃÑÒÇÈ¿ÇÃËÒ×ÒÃÆË¿Ë¿ÇumÒÃÊÃËÁ¿ÏkÊÃÇÐÄ×ÊÃË Ò¿ÐÖÓÕ¿ÐkÊ×Ë ÒÃÆË¿Ë¿ÇÈ¿ÇÃËkÊÇËÒÃÆ¿íÆ¿Ç mÒÃÂÃkÊÃÇпÎÍÆËÅÑÈÍÊÃË Ò¿ÐÖÓտп˿ÀÇÍÓË È¿ÇÄÅË As cited by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 173n109. Dodds cautions there against discounting the quotation because of its “pythagorean language.”

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cussed, which remained remarkably secular, it existed nevertheless, and does shine through in places, such as a well known passage in Pindar (5th c.) about the divine in man released during unconsciousness, first in sleep, and ultimately in death.8 It was the Orphic poets who prepared Greece intellectually for the developments in the domain of soul. The Orphic poets abstract midway from the world of images to that of ideas, offering theogonic explanations of the nature of man and world, why they are corrupted, and what we can do, as individual bearers of an ancient, reincarnated pollution and guilt – trace of the murder of Dionysus by the Titans – to influence their direction positively.9 It tempts the Greek thinker to distance himself from the empire of the body and pledge himself to another empire, beyond the sun. The Orphic theogonies that consolidated this new outlook in the 6th c. were fueled by philosophical developments in Ionia, such as Anaximenes’ rationally ordered accounts of the universal nature of things. Even before this alien blood was introduced, the Greek ‘psuchù’ had a native tendency to expand to include consciousness. This is visible in both Homeric poems, with their expression, “psuchù kai thumos,” and in Anaximenes, who writes that the soul (for him, air) rules us (sunkratei hùmas).10 The real value of this alien strain, exemplified by shaman figures like Empedocles, was not in the doctrine of transmigration itself, which is obscured for us anyhow, but that it invigorated the native Greek tendency to think of the soul or breath as the unity of generic life and the individual spirit or consciousness. Once the human powers of feeling and thought are identified with a personal soul, so long as it is embodied it also depends on this life-force.11 Since psuchù is the broader of the two concepts, what was originally “ani8

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Pindar The Odes of Pindar, fr. 131. Cf. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 135; Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 415; Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 75 f. Each attribute central importance to the passage. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 57. “The truth is that the theogonic writers cannot be understood except in the light of their close reciprocal relationships of their own period who are connected with them by the common bond of theological speculation, no matter how much they may differ in intellectual type.” “From the spiritualization of nature, theogony draws new strength (p. 71),” as in the divine first principles of Anaximander and Anaximenes. “Though philosophy means death to the old gods, it is itself religion; and the seeds it has sown now thrive in the new theogony” (p. 72). Iliad, xi. 334; Odyssey, xxi. 154, 171; Anaximenes, fr. B2. Cf. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 80 (n24, n28). Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 83.

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mal life” in the broadest sense, a principle of animation, will absorb the specifically human life (thumos) of thought and feeling. From here developed this idea of the soul as something independent of the body which preserved the individual’s identity from before and then after his mortal turn on earth. It gave infinite permanence to the “intellectually and morally responsible agent.”12 Many scholars have traced the invention of this Orphic strain of thinking to what has perhaps erroneously been called “Greek shamanism.”13 Ever since Rohde’s Psuchù classicists have consistently looked to the influence of Thracian shamanism on Greece to explain the invention of such an un-Greek idea within its borders.14 This figure of the Greek shaman, most vivid (because most recent) of which for us is Empedocles, was a healer or purifier (katharsios) of both soul (daimķn) and body, a poet, musician, sage, prophet, and leader of men all wrapped in one.15 Empedocles was the only one of these personae to leave first person testimony – “And I am an immortal god for you, no longer liable to death.”16 He unites in a single figure these fields 12 13

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Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, pp. 84 f. See Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy? pp. 184, 206. Whether the Greeks ever had anything like the shamans of Siberia, or the native of North America, has been called into question by at least a few. Hadot, for example, objects that the rational, universal perspective of philosophical practice, a non-perspective encompassing them all, has nothing to do with the Shaman. The tribal shamans incarnated in themselves animal spirits. It is a comic juxtaposition, he claims, enlisting other scholars such as Hamayon. At best, he says, the “symbolic rituals” of shamanism are too alien to the philosopher not to make things more rather than less obscure. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 263. Rohde connects shamanism with the belief in “the power of the soul after separation from the body.” But he mistakenly traces this belief back to Dionysus, whom he thought was a Thracian god, called there by the name of Sabos, or Sabazios. Sabos, he thought, passed into Greece through Phrygia, where a people “almost identical with the Thracians” shared a cult contradicting all Greek norms of measure, closing the gap between men and the gods when the worshipper, possessed by him, is himself called Sabos (pp. 256-258). But the Dionysian element is not a necessary one in the story. There was still a Thracian influence which both Dodds and Cornford document, though it transformed the native Greek god, rather than introducing him from abroad. Meuli documents the Thracian import in his well known article a decade after Rohde, and scholars such as Jaeger, Cornford, Chadwick, and Dodds pursue these shamans for some clue to the poison which seems to have entered the Greek vein, anesthetizing the exceptional individual to worldly life, and invoking a vision for the soul of a divine promise to come. K. Meuli “On Greek Contact with Thracian Culture” in Hermes, 1935. Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae, pp. 121-4. Empedocles, fr. B112. ÃÁ×ÂqnÊÇËÆÃÍпÊÀÏÍÒÍÐ ÍÓÈÃÒÇÆËÅÒÍÐ (my trans.). Cf. frs. B113, B117 & B146, as trans. by Kathleen Freeman Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic

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which reason will soon diversify into medicine, poetry, politics, and natural science (replacing prophecy). Like the philosopher Pythagoras, both Heraclitus and Parmenides (student of Pythagoras), as well as Empedocles, Sophocles’ peer, thought knowledge in terms of a divine recollection which reflected the shaman’s belief in rebirth, the permanence of something personal in man (psuchù or daimķn).17 The Orphic-Pythagorean story stretches back to Zalmoxis of Thrace, leader of a community of “the best of citizens” who were deemed immortal.18 Tradition assigns Zalmoxis positions both before and after philosophy, making him both Pythagoras’ teacher and his student. It was through Pythagoras and possibly the Orphics (though the relation between these two sects is unclear, and they both, in any case, represent a common impulse) that the idea of individual immortality institutionalized by the shaman in his remote circle of influence was generalized to include anyone willing to submit to these kathartic practices.19 The Orphic theogony codifies philosophically-poetically the concept of a personal divinity and the immortality of the human soul. The joining of consciousness to the ‘life-soul’ (identified by the Ionians with impersonal elements such as air) in a single psuchù appears first in the outlook of the 6th c. Orphic-Pythagoreans as a presupposition of their doctrine of “the so-called transmigration of souls.” 20 Orphic or not, Pindar’s second Olympian Ode is our oldest and most secure evidence of this invention of an immortal destiny upon the hitherto mortal soul. It marks a totally new outlook on human life and the nature and function of man’s psuchù: 21

17 18 19

20 21

Philosophers, pp. 64, 67: “But why do I lay stress on these things, as if I were achieving something great in that I surpass mortal men who are liable to many forms of destruction.” – “For by now I have been born as boy, girl, plant, bird and dumb seafish.” – “And at the last they become seers, and bards, and physicians, and princes among earth-dwelling men, from which (state) they blossom forth as gods in highest honor.” See Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae, ch. 7. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 144. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 149. Their traditions by the 5th c. had become indistinct, and we have only what this century has preserved for us. On this “generalization,” see E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 144. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 83. Pindar Olympian Odes 2.68-73 in The Odes of Pindar. Jaeger confirms in Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers that the second Olympian is our oldest and most secure source. In addition and not without significance is the more ambiguous bion athanaton of Pythian 3.61, as well as frs. 129-133, so important for Erwin Rohde’s theory of the soul. Fr. 131, for instance, alluding to the mysteries: … “having, by happy fortune, culled the fruit of the rite that releaseth them from toil. And while

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But, whosoever, while dwelling in either world, have thrice been courageous in keeping their souls [psuchan] pure from all deeds of wrong, pass by the highway of Zeus unto the tower of Cronus, where the ocean breezes blow around the Islands of the Blest, and flowers of gold are blazing, some on the shore from radiant trees, while others the water fostereth;

Describing what was probably the mystery religion of the ode’s recipient, Pindar communicates here a completely new feeling in man. He no longer feels fully at home in the world and attends to a ritual regulation of diet and other actions, concerning bloodshed especially, which will secure his soul a place in Kronos’ hall on the Islands of the Blest. The Orphic soul-theory which Pindar’s ode expresses directly influences Plato and Aristotle in their view of the divine and permanent nature of soul or mind, though stripped free by them of the bodied imaginations of the poet. It also infiltrates the medical practice upon which their care of the soul is based.22 As logos replaced tribalism and the religious authority of the priestking (basileus) on the seat of power, the force of the irrational simultaneously asserted itself in religious mysteries and therapeutic cult, as well as the figure of the shaman, and a generalized anxiety about pollution, especially by blood. It is no coincidence that the cult of Asclepius’ religious medicine emerged alongside the secularization of medicine in Alcmaeon and Hippocrates. The existence of Greek tragedy is proof enough that reason, when it first appeared in Greece, hung in a precarious balance with the irrational. In instituting a new, Olympic order, Homer had suppressed the older, more deeply rooted chthonic religion attached to the hearth of a household. He began a spiritualization of man’s bonds to the earth and each other. Possession by a god, by Dionysus or Phrygian Kybele, may have been a return of the daimķn and a temporary release from the increasing burden rational culture and organization placed on individuality. 23 As the city

22

23

the body of all men is subject to over-mastering death, an image of life remaineth alive, for it alone cometh from the gods. But it sleepeth while the limbs are active; yet, to them that sleep, in many a dream it giveth a presage of a decision of things delightful or doleful.” Claus singles out the same texts as evidence of a transition in the use of “psuchù,” the conclusion of which he may restrict to the 4th century. Also important is the Pythagorean Philolaus, B14, the daimķn of Empedocles, B115 and Xenophanes, B7. David Claus Toward the Soul, pp. 111-120. On the philosophical influence, see Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, p. 87. On the medical influence, see Hippocrates Regimen, c. 4; cf. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 3, p. 39. Dionysian katharsis and the Corybantic rites were to some extent identified with one another by the Ancient Greeks. This is why Plato can use ÑÓÁÈÍÏÓÀ¿ËÒÇ¿Ë and ÑÓÊÀ¿ÈÕÃÓÃÇË as synonyms (Symposium, 228b, 234d), and refer to the same

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developed, this spiritualization culminated in the rational individual of secular politics.24 Along with these orgiastic cults, the theos anùr or theologos (as they were called by the Greeks) emerges as a kathartic figure similarly possessed by a god (Empedocles refers to the immortal part of himself as daimķn, not psuchù).25 In the wake of the new mental universe of this “guilt culture”26 techniques had been developed to accomplish purity through purificatory katharseis. These ritual purifications could instantly reverse particular taints, like, for example, the pollutions suffered by Oedipus. Redefined within the context of the theos anùr they became part of a religious askùsis, an exercise or practice through which the devotee was kathartically transformed, prepared for his immortality to come, into a kind of god. Homer’s defining limit separating man from god was breached. Religious pollution (miasma) was no longer about coming into contact with a particular defilement. Man was in essence defiled. Katharsis and Askùsis were linked in the figure of the shaman who purified himself through extensive retreats and self-denial. 27 On-

24

25

26

27

healings as both ¿l Ò×Ë ÃÈíÏÍË×Ë À¿ÈÕÃÇ×Ë Ç¿ÑÃÇÐ and Ò¿ Ò×Ë ÈÍÏÓÀ¿ËÒ×Ë Ç¿Ê¿Ò¿(Laws, 790de). Cf. I. M. Linforth Corybantic Rites, p. 157. Linforth identifies the Corybantes as a specialized, healing version of the cult of Kybele, “the mother.” Cf. Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 25. The Mater Cult, in other words, the Corybantic cult of Kybele, and that of Dionysus, Burkert claims, merged at an early point. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 142. Dodds’ view can be traced back to Rohde, who suggested as much more than thirty years earlier. Erwin Rohde Psyche, p. 261. Like the Dionysian religion, which Dodds believes became a democratic form of ritualized katharsis, expelling psychic tension, the shamanistic belief, transformed by the Greeks, answered, Dodds writes, to “the needs of the times.” The rise of individualism coincided with the birth of the city-state. Along with the ecstatic cults of the 6th century, we find in the Ionian-Aeolic lyric of the same period, such as Sappho’s, a corresponding desire on the part of the individual to release that individuality in an ideal community of some kind, of love, memory, beauty, sympotic poetry, music, and drinking, etc., or, most basically, a community of those caught in the ebb and flow of time. On the theologos, see Frances Cornford Principium Sapientiae, pp. 102 f. All madness, and religious intrusion in the human realm is essentially daimķn. See Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, pp. 35 f.: Ê¿ËÇ¿ ÉÓÑÑ¿ ¿ÒÅ ¿Ï¿ ÊÇ¿ÑÊ¿ ÃÏÇËÓÃÐ, all refer to a “sinister numen in different guises” which is daimķn. E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 28. This is Dodds’ term. The transition from shame culture to guilt Culture, he writes, from Homer to Aeschylus, “is gradual and incomplete.” E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 149 f.

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omacritus, a poet like Euripides who tends toward the philosophic, in the tradition of these theologoi provides a suitable myth in which to shroud this moral-physical a priori. It circulates widely in Athens by the 5th century and ties this burgeoning psychological problematic to the god of tragedy it adopts as its own. The Orphic poem attributed by Pausanias (2nd c., a. d.) to Onomacritus (6th c., b. c.) mythologized and canonized an idea which ritual and belief had preserved unconsciously for some time. 28 Plato later alludes to it no less than four times and his pupil Xenocrates also uses it to explain the soul’s imprisonment in the body.29 That it bears lasting philosophical relevance is undeniable. The poem is only loosely myth, one of a number of so-called Orphic theogonies of the 6th century in which Thracian thought becomes systematized in the spirit of Greek philosophy. 30 It already deals in relative abstraction with the themes of guilt and purification, playing against the more general background of the birth or growth (physis) of the race. Onomacritus sings of man’s genesis and future salvation, when the reign of Dionysus begins. Man, he writes, was born of a violent death, punishment for an earlier and more heinous violence. The Titans had lured away and captured Dionysus as an infant, torn him to pieces, cooked these pieces in a cauldron and then eaten them. When Zeus discovered this abomination he destroyed the Titans with his lightning bolt and man grew from the remains of their polluted flesh, but also of the innocent child-god they had digested, born of a divinity with the need for penance and cleansing. That these developments had something to do with the problem of justice in the more primordial sense of moral order seems clear. The idea that the individual is reborn made it possible to subordinate apparent injustices to a magical source of justice superceding it. The discrepancies of this life would work themselves out through a series

28

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Pausanias, 7.18.4, 8.37.5. “The stories told of Dionysus by the people of Patrae, that he was reared in Mesatis and incurred there all sorts of perils through the plots of the Titan, I will not contradict, but will leave it to the people of Patrae to explain the name Mesatis as they choose.” “From Homer the name of the Titans was taken by Onomacritus, who in the orgies he composed for Dionysus made the Titans the authors of the god’s suffering.” See Plato Meno 81bc, and Laws, 701c, 854b; Cf. Pindar, fr. 127b, and the Xenocrates fragments, as cited by E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 155-156 (n131, 134). See Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, ch. 4 generally. Other Orphic theogonies were alleged of Epimenides, fr. B5; Eudemus, fr. 117 (Spengel); Pherekydes, fr. B1; Acusilaeus, fr. A4; et al., as cited by Jaeger.

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of rebirths.31 In this sense it is part of the same literary tradition from which tragedy emerges, ruminating along with the poets on the nature of justice, following Solon, and the problem of choice and responsibility. A strikingly similar inspiration leads Sophocles’ Oedipus to explain his suffering by hypothesizing an ancient crime of man against the gods. 32 Two radically divergent lines of flight, both the tragic and Orphic components of the soul-narrative are part of the Dionysian legacy, which, like Orphism, concerned man’s freedom (lusis) from his conventional, worldly condition, a religious katharsis of his normal state. In Aristotle’s science of the soul the story will be stripped finally of its mythological plasticity and translated into the rigorous, transparent language of the concept.

Conclusion The poetic legacy taken up by the Orphics (incorporating theogony, the general Greek sense of pollution and cathartic practices, as well as the Dionysian ecstasies and their own ecstatic sense of cathartic union with a god) anticipates the philosophers, who, approaching the same problem, a conflicted sense of both innocence and guilt, jettison religious myth for a secular myth about reason and the soul’s education. But there were important differences in the nuance of their pedagogy. Heraclitus’ psuchù recalls the divine logos through an intensive, inner searching (“I searched into myself,” he says, fr. 101), while Parmenides describes the illumination as a spontaneous grace or fate outside of the philosopher’s hands. “The goddess greets him at the portals of light: ‘Welcome, since no evil fate has dispatched you on your journey by this road.’”33 Both represent alternatives to the worldly search championed by figures like Xenophanes, who compared the imperfect knowledge of human beings to the knowledge of one perfectly omnipotent god (fr. 24), and later, Hecataeus, whose account is “true” because it is how “they appear to me.”34 And so at least two centuries before philosophy brokered its official theories of education in texts such as 31 32 33

34

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 151. Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, 964-965. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 148. Cf. Parmenides, fr. B1, 26. For a general discussion of different kinds of knowledge and their acquisition, see ch. 7. Bruno Snell Discovery of the Mind, p. 143. This is the opening phrase of Hecataeus’ histories. While his accounts are ridiculed by the historians to come, Herodotus for example, it is his “particular achievement that he placed knowledge, as it was

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Plato’s Meno and Republic and the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, divergent ideas of how knowledge was acquired, especially divine knowledge, were beginning to assert themselves: inward striving and anamnùsis, inquiry in the realm of the senses, or a divine gift received in the flash of an instant. Once the philosophers of Athens get to work on individual psychology (within the broader frame of the city, and the universal, rational order containing them both) man’s conflicts will take place within the domain of reason itself. Aristotle’s moral psychology, we’ll find, retains the notion of personal struggle which developed in the lyric and spiked finally in tragedy, but there is no more collision between human reason and the gods, as in tragedy, or, as in the Orphic tradition, no violence between the gods themselves corrupting man’s nature at the source of his birth. The Titan myth explained to the Greek his dual sense of both divine innocence and criminal corruption. This is the same tragic ambivalence we found in tragedy, improvising now with the anxiety over the body, over meat, birth, sexuality, death and especially spilt blood penetrating archaic Greece. The problem of killing, of violence, and life as violence, was perfectly suited to the god divided between these trajectories.35 The ritual and myth devoted to Dionysus was a rehearsal of the struggle between individual forms of life (bioi) such as man and the eternally regenerative life (zoù) pulsing within him, which gave him life only with the same indifference in which it would inevitably take it. 36 Philosophy usurps the tragic dilemma between bios and zoù for itself, between mortality and immortality, following Onomacritus and the Orphic adoption of Dionysus. The philosophical psychology of the fourth century continues to develop this strife within the soul between animality and divinity, an ambivalent guilt, securing further the interpretation of man as this split and inaugurating a second stage in the penetration and domination of Greek culture by this drop of alien blood.37 The philosophical

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understood by him, in a position whence it could be advanced and augmented.” For Herodotus’ lambasting of Hecataeus, see Herodotus Histories, 4.36. See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, generally, and pt. II specifically. For an explanation and references behind the distinction of zoù and bios, see Karl Kerenyi Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, pp. xxxi-xxxvii. Karl Kerenyi Dionysos:Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 239: “The Dionysian religion possessed its own inherent and immanent ‘philosophy’ – its ‘dialectic’ – differing from that of the Orphic literature based on Orpheus’ journey to the underworld. In the journeys of mortal men (not of gods like Dionysus) to the underworld, at least the beginnings of a psychology and ethical philosophy are inherent: a doctrine of the immortality of the soul and of the punishment of sinners.

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care or therapy which Socrates had introduced a century earlier bore on a soul conceived in light of this Orphic alienation from birth and death. 38 It revised this primitive need to purify a guilt in terms, now, of knowledge and ignorance. Unwilling to identify virtue exclusively with knowledge – as had Socrates, ignoring the independent motives of the passions – individual moral psychology beginning with Plato and maturing scientifically in Aristotle absorbs the wild sparagmos and hķmophagos of Dionysus into the individual soul where it becomes a vague animality for reason to tame. 39 Rinsed of the dynamic

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This is no longer a mere ‘immanent philosophy’ as in the dialectic of the Dionysian religion, but rather a pre-philosophical view of the world.” Charles Burnet Socratic Doctrine of the Soul, p. 147 f. Orphism certainly made an impression on Socrates. Its influence on the “higher thought of Greece was by no means negligible.” Jaeger’s more current work confirms: “Now this complete coalescence of life-soul and consciousness in the conception of the psuchù appears in the religious beliefs of the sixth century Orphics and Pythagoreans as a presupposition of their doctrine of the so-called transmigration of souls. It is impossible not to see in this doctrine one of the most important causes of the diffusion of the un-Homeric meaning of the word psuchù and its ultimate triumph.” “And when Socrates holds that the preservation of man’s soul from harm is the thing most important in life, and that in comparison with this everything else must recede, his emphasis on the value of the soul, so incomprehensible to the Greece of an earlier age, would have been inexplicable” without the influence of the Orphic way of life and their belief in the divinity of the self. Werner Jaeger Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, pp. 83, 89. Burnet, however, is tentative to draw too close a connection to Socrates, because for him this Orphic belief does not include anything which might be receptive of character, the focus of Socrates teaching. It also cuts against his now disputed view that the soul until the end of the fifth century was a seat of unconscious, dark emotion, not yet identified with the individual person. The Orphic soul is not identified with the “I,” he says. But this is as false of early fragments such as that of Empedocles, an Orphic figure, as it was for the simple sailors whose graves we read of earlier. For more on these fragments, see page 63, above. The personal, divine nature of the “second self” of the Orphics was a necessary step between the old and new story in Greece about the soul. See Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 2, p. 38. Burkert, also, the most recent authority, writes that it is beyond doubt that the new religious concepts related to metempsychosis played a significant role in the development of the notion of psuchù. Walter Burkert Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, p. 134 (n78). The point is obviously not that there was a conscious rinsing and internalizing of this Orphic Dionysus. I am only giving a voice to connections which assert themselves between elements in the written culture, laying bare identifications, associations, which traditionally go unrecognized. Plato was the first to generalize the exception of the shaman to an essential human possibility. But the divine spark of the shaman, their exceptional nature, still shines through, in the divine madness of the Phaedrus, for example, and also the Republic. See also E. R. Dodds the Ancient Concept of Progress, p. 109. Plato’s psychological interest in these dialogues, writes,

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growth of Dionysian life absorbing the individual destructively in the anonymity of its effects, the philosopher identifies the former irrationality of the daimķn in man as psuchù with the static impersonality of the cosmic order or logos. Moral responsibility will rest entirely on the individual (and, indirectly, his community) whose job it is to cultivate reason ascetically in his soul. Internal harmony and self-rule (enkrateia) become an essential human possibility40 and the puritan strain of thought introduced by the shamans is absorbed even more deeply and invisibly. The philosopher is no longer willing to submit to divine transcendence in the violence of tragedy or enthusiasmic possession in the mysteries. Ethics as science makes tragedy impossible. Aristotle immanentalizes this divine transcendence in man and makes it a logos for philosophy to develop, a divine spark which ascetics can fan into flame, which will elevate all men, at least potentially and at best temporarily, like the ecstatic bacchants in the wilds of the throng, to the immortal life of gods (and, incidentally, autonomous agents of reason). This mundanizing of the soul allows Aristotle to pursue the problem of the irrational presented by Sophocles’ Oedipus within the confines of a naturalistic psychology, in which, as we saw in the last chapter, the gods play no role.

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Dodds, concerns “exceptional natures and their exceptional possibilities – those possibilities which, though the foundation of the Academy, were to be developed systematically for the first time[.]” See J. de Romilly Patience Mon Couer, pp. 180-186. The idea of the soul divided between wisdom and the passions and enkrateia as a moral imperative first appear in the Sophists, such as Antiphon, and Democritus. But the term itself, in its moral sense, shows up first in Xenophon. See Xenophon Memorabilia, i.5, ii.1, iv.3, iv.5.

Chapter 5 Psychologizing Oedipus: Reason and Unreason in Aristotle’s Ethics Introduction If Nietzsche was right and Oedipus is a Dionysian mask, the philosopher collects it from the floor of the theatre he empties and refashions it according to a rational aesthetic, ordering and sanitizing this both holy and unholy figure for his initiation into philosophy’s human science. Aristotle’s conception of tragedy, while no doubt determined by his ethics and psychology, influence them in return, insofar as his moral psychology is structured in such a way that the tragic collision in Oedipus, and any human agent for that matter, is suppressed. In Dionysus’ theatre we saw the human logos of Oedipus paradoxically obverted and destroyed by a god. Aristotle translates this combat between logoi into the language of character psychology, repositioning the ungovernable exteriority of this god within the confines of a soul naturally compelled to resolve this immanent difference between reason and the passions.1 Philosophy’s potential mastery of the passions and desire generally, an essential component of tragic strife and violence, depends upon its reconception of their very nature.2 The conflict between reason and unreason in man will not mean, however, ignoring the passions, like Socrates had, or training them out of existence, as in the apatheia to which Stoics like Chryssipus aspired. In fact, to our surprise, once we better understand Aristotle’s language, we’ll see that virtue consists in dealing with the passions lack of reason on its own terms. The irrationality of emotion for Aristotle is nothing like what we today would describe in those terms, 1

2

Aristotle Pol., 1254b5-8. It is “intellect” that rules the appetites, naturally, “mind” that rules “the passionate element.” Nussbaum identifies the tragic potential of passionate attachments, alongside the potential conflict of values, as the two components of tragedy with which anti-tragic philosophy would have contend. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 9.

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and so he grants emotion more prized a place than we are likely to expect. Practical wisdom (phronùsis), the intellectual virtue reconciling this split, conceived in a correspondingly ‘strange’ way, not only depends on the appropriate preservation of unreason, but is, by the post-Cartesian standards of reflective distance and transparency, only ambiguously rational. Reason, we’ll find, as it was for Plato, is also invested, and through a desire all its own, in action and life. 3 But the terms of this contest of desire in the soul, in which individual character, and, by extension, political life are the stakes, are of course set by Aristotle, and the Poetics’ neglect of paradox is negative proof of the elimination of tragedy from tragedy itself.4 It points toward an analogous design in the Nicomachean Ethics. How this tragic collision has been transformed through its transposition into the register of theoretical psychology is what we now set out to discover.

Akrasia in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics What are the consequences in Aristotle’s moral psychology and theory of culpability for his secularization of the tragic? There are conflicting accounts of this transformation within the body of Aristotle’s work, and so we can observe in the alterations of Aristotle’s moral psychology between the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics the internalization and personalization of this divine exteriority with which Sophocles’ Oedipus collided. The source of Oedipus’ pollution, guilt, and ultimately violence – as well as its effect on Aristotle’s theory of moral action – slips from the displaced center of the gods to that of the rational agent.5 3 4

5

See Plato Republic, 580d7-8, where reason is specified as a kind of appetite. Stephen Halliwell “Pleasure, Understanding, and Emotion in Aristotle’s Poetics” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 253. As we have seen, Halliwell confirms that Aristotle “doesn’t attribute to paradox a central role.” Jaeger gave the definitive argument for the chronological priority of the Eudemian Ethics over the Nicomachean Ethics, which depended in large part on the elimination of the “Platonism” in Aristotle’s more ecstatic conceptions of man’s relationship to the divine, and a more pronounced dualism of soul and body. See Werner Jaeger Aristotle. The prioritizing of the Nicomachean Ethics goes back definitively to Aspasius, in the 2nd century. A. Kenny argues for a late dating of the Eudemian Ethics which would place it at least coordinate with the Nicomachean, and perhaps later. See A. Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics and Aristotle on the Perfect Life. His position is based on an examination of the disputed books which the two treatises share. He concludes that they belong originally to the Eudemian Ethics, which in other respects proves to belong to the later period of Aristotle’s authorship in Ath-

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The Eudemian Ethics Aristotle argues in both the Eudemian Ethics and Nicomachean Ethics that voluntary action should be defined by thought, exclusively, and not desire (EE, 1223a21-24a7). In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle explains that since both the self-ruled and the akratic man act voluntarily, yet both do so from contrary desires, it must be their intention (dianoia) that defines the voluntariness of the act. Incontinence (akrasia) is voluntary in both the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics because the akratic “in a sense” knows what he is doing (EN, 1152a16) – the action is intended (EE, 1225a28).6 As in the Nicomachean Ethics involuntary action is defined as dia agnoian (EE, 1225b1-16) – through ignorance – and akratic action remains voluntary because the impulses of both desire and reason are natural, and so the dominance of either expresses itself in voluntary action (that is, action that begins in the agent [EE, 1224b21-9]). Akrasia could only be mistaken for involuntary action if the passions that overwhelm reason in the akratic were something external

6

ens. Kenny’s view contradicts Jaeger’s and Dirlmeir’s finding that they were original to the Nicomachean Ethics and filled a gap in the Eudemian Ethics created by a loss of the original books, and Cooper’s view, as well as Gauthier-Jolif’s, that Aristotle simply used these books twice, inserting them again in the later work, a rewriting of the first. Kenny has failed to persuade the mainstream of Aristotle scholarship, represented by such figures as Cooper and Erwin in their reviews of The Aristotelian Ethics. For more on this summary of the debate as well as an overview of the original statement of his position, see the appendix to Aristotle on the Perfect Life, pp. 113-142. No matter what the chronology, the two treatises represent variant views of Aristotle’s, suggesting some kind of osmosis of the gods between the pathù of a man’s soul and the heavens of Greek myth, a trace of this something lost or suppressed operating within Aristotle’s work itself. If we can talk about the rise of philosophy in terms of secularization, it would be hard to resist Jaeger’s conclusion that the Nicomachean Ethics represents a later stage in that process, at least in spirit. In any case, since Burnet’s commentary over a century ago, central works such as Ross’s Aristotle, Hardie’s Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, Cooper’s Reason and Human Good, and Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness have found in it a useful supplement to its Nicomachean cousin and “the modern consensus of scholars” is that both treatises are legitimately Aristotelian. There is an exception at EN, 1147a11-b12, where akrasia, along with all irrationality owing to the pathù are said be agnoia. But responsibility is not being discussed here, and it is probably an earlier view (coincident with EE, iv, unlike the modification/development at EN, 1152a16. See I. M. Glanville “Tragic Error” in Classical Quarterly 50 [n1]). When responsibility is discussed, Aristotle maintains the “knowledge” of the agent.

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to man, like a god, for instance, exerting a compulsive influence. So far there is not much shift to anticipate in the Nicomachean Ethics. The difference between the two is buried just beneath the surface, not in what acts count as voluntary, but in how Aristotle determines the psychological model of the voluntary action of akrasia. For the Aristotle of the Eudemian Ethics, if a passion is unnatural, beyond “what his nature [physis autou] is able to bear” (EE, 1225a25), the action to follow is excused as involuntary. “What it is not able to bear, not being within reach of his own natural desire or calculation, is not within his control” (EE, 1225a26-27). Reminiscent of the Homeric tradition and the lyricists, for whom Love is a god, and passions sent by him from without, this applies “for many,” he says, to the passion of eros, but also to some instances of anger (thumos) and even ta phusika (EE, 1225a20). Due to the violence of the passion it is “as if” nature were overpowered. The distinguishing passage comes a few lines later, confirmed even more strongly later in chapter VIII: Therefore those who are inspired and prophesy, though their act is one of thought, we still say have it not in their own power either to say what they said, or to do what they did. And so of acts done through appetite [epithumia]. So that some thoughts and passions do not depend on us, nor the acts following such thoughts and reasonings, but, as Philolaus said, some logoi are too strong for us. (EE, 1225a28-34, my italics)

According to Aristotle, citing the 5th century Pythagorean author, there exist transcendent logoi which enter the pathù.7 These passions and thoughts are both ours and not. Our reason is overpowered, like the akratic who we’ll examine shortly – but unlike the akratic we act involuntarily. This description is perfectly amenable to Oedipus as Sophocles bequeathed him. Divine possession actually introduces the treatise on the first page, as Aristotle considers the first principle of both ethical works: eudaimonia. He wonders if “men become happy in none of these ways [nature, teaching, or discipline] but either – like those possessed by nymphs or deities – through a sort of divine influence, being as it were inspired, or through chance” (EE, 1214a23-26). Nature, teaching, and discipline (askùsis) together constitute the raw material for Aristotle’s moral science, its inculcation through habit in the man (an askùsis recalling the cathartic practices of the Orphic-Pythagoreans). Theos competes with this science for the place left by a sophistic 7

Philolaus’ single work, of which we have fragments and testimony, included the study of both medicine and cosmogony. He is Aristotle’s primary source on Pythagoreanism. Walter Burkert Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, pp. 235-238.

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tuchù that Aristotle must systematically exclude in favour of reason. Though the daimķn does not emerge triumphant in this work, supplanted as it is by a logos-governed virtue, it does win a few small places for itself that are expropriated in the interest of rational nature and character in the Nicomachean Ethics. The distinction in the Nicomachean Ethics, subtle but important, will take place with respect to these ambiguous cases of divine inspiration when the individual acts in a sense both dia gnoian and dia agnoian. It is the status of certain kinds of pathù and their relation to knowledge in these more ambiguous circumstances reconceived in the Nicomachean Ethics as hamartema that shifts. In the Eudemian Ethics’ account of divine enthousiasmoi, acts following from these enthusiasms are unnatural, and therefore involuntary and blameless. Like the akratic, the agent does not technically act through ignorance. But the logos and/or the epithumia transcend him. The enthusiasmic, intentionally, like the akratic, and yet unviciously (aneu kakos) does wrong (though without blame, while akrasia is blamed). This paradoxical category of intentional, blameless action somewhere in the interstice between these two texts becomes hamartia. The Eudemian Ethics further clarifiy the vague coincidence of divinely inspired thought and action with the pathù of epithumia in the last book of the treatise (EE, 1248a33-b7). A companion to Poetics XIV’s discussion of eutuchia and the happy ending, the subject is again the potential threat which tuchù (qua chance) presents to reason, and the explanation of eutuchia in terms other than chance. How is it that the lucky aphrones succeed, without art or logos (EE, 1247a13-16)? Or is it because he is loved, as the phrase is, by a god, success being something coming from without, as a worse built vessel often sails better, not owing to itself but because it has a good pilot, namely, the divinity. But it is absurd that a god or divinity should love such a man and not the best and most prudent. (EE, 1247a24-29)

Since the cause cannot be intelligence or divine protection, it must be nature, Aristotle concludes. But nature is the cause of the absolutely uniform, and fortune is the opposite. Fortune surprises. It disrupts the regularity of things. Aristotle persists in understanding good fortune as a natural talent, and concludes that there is no such thing as a fortunate person, in the usual sense, because this would leave their success causeless, an impossibility. But there are people with a desire naturally capable of some unreasoned divination. Their acts do not actually spring from chance. They only seem to do so. Still, he insists, either fortune or chance must be the cause of this natural endowment, man’s starting point for deliberation. Yet, both

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introduce an arbitrariness into life which Aristotle’s rational teleology cannot admit. The solution finally lies in his psychology. The object of our search is this – what is the commencement of movement in the soul? The answer is clear: as in the universe, so in the soul, God moves everything. For in a sense the divine element in us moves everything. The starting point of reasoning is not reasoning, but something greater. What, then, could be greater even than knowledge and intellect but God (EE, 1248a24-29, my italics)?

Now at first this divinity seems as if it could be something akin to the prime mover of the Metaphysics, assimilable to an impersonal intelligence. But Aristotle immediately describes this divinity in terms that are inarguably daimonic. It is greater than the intellect, identified against rather than with the pure thinking of god in Metaphysics XII.7. As if addressing the problem of tragedy, an internal mover which is neither character nor intellect, which is also exterior, he continues: Not virtue, for virtue is an instrument of the intellect. And for this reason, as I said awhile ago, those are called fortunate who, whatever they start on, succeed in it without being good at reasoning. And deliberation is of no advantage to them, for they have in them a principle that is better than intellect and deliberation, while the others have not this but have intellect; they have inspiration (enthousiasmos), but they cannot deliberate. (EE 1248a29-33, my italics)

This power beyond reason also makes an appearance in a fragment of one of Aristotle’s lost works, On Prayer: “God is either reason or something even beyond reason.”8 The fortune of inspired epithumia (an “unreasoning desire” [EE, 1247b19, 26-28] for the good) moves the fortunate aphronimos secretly from without. He is a vessel piloted by a god, like Oedipus, but reversed, hitting the eudaimonos mark, steering successfully past disaster to the eutuchia of Poetics XIV. Aristotle goes on to draw this divine inspiration together with both a Teiresian prophecy and Oedipal blindness, as well as a dreamy, perhaps proto-Kierkegaardian melancholy. This quality sees well the future and the present, and these are the men in whom the reasoning power is relaxed. Hence we have the melancholic men, the dreamers of what is true. For the moving principle seems to become stronger when the reasoning-power is relaxed. So the blind remember better, their memory being freed from concern with the visible. It is clear, then, that there are two kinds of good luck, the one divine – and so the lucky seem to succeed owing to God; men of this sort seem to succeed in following their aim, the others to succeed contrary to their aim; both are irrational, but the one is persistent good luck, the other not. (EE, 1248a38-b14, my italics)9 8

9

Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 49; Aristotle Die Schule des Aristoteles, ed. by Wehrli, fr. 1. When Aristotle speaks of the others, who succeed contrary to their aim, he seems to refer to those who are fortunate by nature, not divinity.

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In addition to the citation of the Orphic-Pythagoraean author in book II, the dreaming mentioned here has been connected by Aristotle in an early fragment with the flight of the shaman’s soul during sleep, in which, experiencing a kind of pre-death, it gains the power of prophecy.10 This daimonic order in which the shaman is inscribed inherently contests the rational one that for the mature Aristotle governs all things in the human soul, as, for Homer, Olympus distantly marshalled the world of men. As the daimones of tragedy contested the authority of ùthos in Heraclitus’ formulation – ùthos anthropķ daimķn – so in the Eudemian Ethics individual madness and inspiration in the soul upset the morally virtuous reign of reason over the passions, producing action which is only ambiguously one’s own, a trace of the recently deceased art.

The Nicomachean Ethics When the ambiguously intended actions of the akratic are examined in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives us an emended picture of the pathù. He introduces a generic “nature” (EN, 1149b4) which replaces “unnatural” inspirations as exculpatory, implicitly excluding these spontaneous inventions of divinity as an explanatory cause of blameless action. While before it was ‘nature’ which made us responsible, now it excuses us, transforming these unnatural, violent emotions into a punishable source of guilt (EN, 1148b15-49a20). Instances of emotional violence somehow force us outside of nature, as an aberration. Unnatural violence is ours. We are responsible for its effects. Since actions are involuntary only when their archù is exķthen (when their origin comes from outside of the agent), these unnaturally strong passions remain culpable because they are still natural to the soul of the agent. Those that compel us from without, because they are generically natural, are blameless (EN, 1149b4-7); but these specifically human compulsions (ta anthropika) are not. But it is also “human nature” that pardons us. Violent emotions either compel us internally, culpably, according to our humanity (de dokei oux ùtton anthropika einai ta aloga pathù, EN, 1112a32-33), or, in a sense from without, also according to a shared human nature (tùn anthropin phusin, EN, 1149b4-7). 10

Aristotle, Fragmenta, ed. by Rose, fr. 10. mÒ¿Ë Á¿Ï ÃË Ò× nÎËÍÓË È¿Æq ¿ÓÒÅË ÁÇÁËÃÒ¿Ç k ÖÓÕÅ ÒÍÒà ÒÅË ÇÂÇÍË ¿ÎÍÉ¿ÀÍÓÑ¿ ÔÓÑÇË ÎÏÍÊ¿ËÒÃÓÃÒ¿Ç ÒÃ È¿Ç ÎÏÍ¿ÁÍÏÃÓÃÇ Ò¿ ÊÃÉÉÍËÒ¿ ÒÍÇ¿ÓÒÅ Âà ÃÑÒÇ È¿Ç ÃË Ò× È¿Ò¿ ÒÍË Æ¿Ë¿ÒÍË ÕÍÏÇÄÃÑÆ¿ÇÒ×ËÑÍÊ¿Ò×Ë.

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In fully secularizing the unreasoned pathù of the soul and eliminating this trace of the daimonic, Aristotle slips into an ambiguous dialectic in which nature both pardons and damns, as does being human. As an individual over and against nature, wrongs committed because of emotional violence are punishable. As an individual who, from a broader perspective, is a part of nature, this same emotionality is an innocent, proto-Romantic impulse of nature’s fundamental power and the passionate individual’s connection with it. In either case the independent force of the gods which in tragedy intruded upon the human sphere from within, disappears, leaving another quasi-tragic creature, ambiguously both a part of and independent from nature. The gods have now been evacuated from the private stage of ethics, the moral-psychological scene, as, in the Poetics, Aristotle had forced them from the public stage of tragedy. Along with them, we lose the concepts we need to think a man like Oedipus. Since violent emotions cannot possibly be conceived as “human” in the exculpatory sense (since only an aberration of nature) the concept of a passion which comes from without, inspired epithumia, is eliminated.11 The idea that logoi could enter us from without would be even more anomalous. Since Sophocles’ Oedipus was no akratic, this makes him an ambiguous and potentially problematic figure for Aristotle of voluntary, yet blameless, crime – a problem he’ll resolve by introducing hamartia and, with it, a conspicuously enlightenment Oedipus. The Eudemian Ethics avoid this aporia into which Sophocles’ Oedipus was placed by the Nicomachean Ethics (EN, 1111a2-7, see earlier discussion at p. 85) by including a much smaller list of the elements of voluntary action: one must “act with knowledge of the person acted on, instrument, and tendency” (EE, 1225b2) of the act (in other words, to kill rather than save). Oedipus’ mistake at the crossroads could be explained as exculpable by the admission of divine interference in book II connected with the possibility that the agent fails to know himself and therefore his relations. That he might not is the ‘sane madness’ – a madness operating from within the apparently sober operations of reason – which makes Oedipus a moral philosopher’s nightmare. Excluding divine madness from the Nicomachean Ethics’ table of explanations, Arisotle replaces his ignorance about who he was and the 11

There is a minor exception, insignificant for my argument, at EN, 1110a23. Certain types of “mixed actions” in which an individual is compelled by an outside threat to choose wrongly are said to be involuntary, “when one does what he ought not under pressure which overstrains human nature and which no one could withstand (tùn anthropin phusin, EN, 1110a25-27).

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truth of his relations with hamartia as a sane version of this mania – an internal source of involuntary action in an agent who nevertheless is neither somatically nor religiously deranged. This ambiguity was also the source of his tragedy for Sophocles. But, as we saw in the first chapter, this fails to describe the ignorance specific to the fallen king as Sophocles created him: an ignorance of oneself. Aristotle’s mature account of human action has no place to situate Sophocles’ Oedipus, no category to place him. Oedipus remains a paradox and a challenge to the practical philosopher to truly grapple with the challenge the irrational poses to the authority of discursive thinking. He is not akratic, but neither is he mentally sick, nor vicious. And yet he embodies the worst offense the fertile imagination of the poet can dream up. The traditional categories of guilt and innocence cannot apply. He has committed no injustice (adikema) yet there are his crimes, and human nature construed as part of a larger nature cannot excuse him, nor, as a pathological source of injustice, can it akratically explain his guilt. He becomes most human when as a member of the human community he is destroyed. The paradigmatic guilt of Sophocles’ Oedipus is a challenge to thought which Kierkegaard, in the wake of modernity, inspired by philosophy’s return to the well of tragedy in Schelling and Hegel, will be the first to take seriously.

Aristotle’s Oedipus, Secularizing the Paradox Like Sophocles, Aristotle presents us with the problem of secularisation and the ever-expansive limits of human knowledge: the anthropologizing of gods and nature and the naturalizing of man as a part of this nature. It is within the substance of the individual soul that Aristotle perpetuates this legacy, the dilemma between an apparent instability and wondrous irrationality in things, in us, even, in Oedipus as us, and a deeper rational necessity. Though the art of Sophocles differs deeply from that of Aeschylus and Euripides, in all three figures the tragedy hinges on two necessities which come into conflict. In Oedipus this is the necessity of a human reason which tends to extend itself indefinitely, and the irrational, the logos of the gods which man’s reason runs up against at its destructive limits. “The price of Aristotle’s philosophical rapprochement with the problem of tragedy turns out, at the level of ideal theory, to be secularisation”12 not just 12

Stephen Halliwell Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 233.

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of nature and political life, but also the individual soul. His advances in moral psychology pave the way for a reconciliation between these opposing forces of necessity, the difference between which by default becomes the problem of freedom. The irrational is transformed, as desire, into a part of organic nature. Man remains a point of conflict where an apparent irrationality can surface, where a new ambiguity between human nature and nature as such asserts itself. Aristotle applies the distinction typical of the philosopher between appearance and reality to the irrational itself, which becomes a sort of evanescence on the surface of man. Human being, an idiosyncratic form of life in which a single nature coils against itself, generates the appearance of irrationality. But this is an unreason with no being of its own. Man’s submission to chance is a base form of necessity or slavery.13 The freedom of elements within the whole of nature, one of which he counts man, is achieved for Aristotle by plugging in to the necessary order of reason. Irrationality as something to be extinguished, like fog polished from a glass, like the apparent ‘causes’ of tuchù or a daimonic theos behind which lie the necessary truths of a rational order, only applies to beings with a share in reason. Now appetites may conflict, and this happens wherever reason and desire are opposed, and this occurs in creatures which have a sense of time (for the mind advises us to resist with a view to the future, while desire only looks to the present); (DA, 433b5-10)

The intervention of human reason as a mediator in the course of an immediately rational nature gives birth to a conflict which we can call irrationality. But this is really just a quarrel between two overlapping reasons or natures, immediate and mediate, which arise in the single space of the human soul and must confront their difference.14 The irrational in this sense is kept within human-psychological bounds. It reflects a struggle between the ‘time’ of human reason, in which the moment distends, and a lower nature with no sense of time. It is a function of temporal difference, not a difference in kind.15 Like everything else under the heavens, this irrationality can be studied in terms of natural 13 14

15

Aristotle Met., 1075a19-22. Aristotle EE, 1224b34-7. Both reason and appetite act, says Aristotle, “in a way, contrary to nature, and yet, broadly speaking, according to nature, but not the same nature.” See Henry Richardson “Desire and the Good in de Anima” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, p. 399. Human achievement and distinction from the animal realm are marked not by “a new relation to the good,” but because they imply a rational ability to compare, to conceive of relations, which allows them to deal with “conflicts among difference aspect of their good.”

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causes.16 Akratics, women, and even Greek boys are unreasoning because they make poor judgments,17 not because they fail to judge.18 One must have reason to become irrational. Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx only to uncover a deeper and even more destructive plague: himself. In ridding the city of this plague, he destroys himself. Still, as a riddle, Oedipus remains. Aristotle solves the plague of the irrational, Oedipus’ legacy, the riddle of the self, as a misrelation within the human soul between two contrary desires. He lays out the nature of the problem of unreason at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics’ first book. Like the Socrates of the Republic, Aristotle distinguishes the parts of the soul through a description of the impulses of desire at work in akrasia: For we praise the rational principle of the continent man and of the incontinent, and the part of their soul that has such a principle, since it urges them aright and towards the best objects; but there is found in them also another element naturally opposed to the rational principle, which fights against and resists that principle. For exactly as paralysed limbs when we intend to move them to the right turn on the contrary to the left, so is it with the soul; the impulses of incontinent people move in contrary directions. […] Now even this seems to have a share in a rational principle, as we said; at any rate in the continent man it obeys the rational principle – and presumably in the temperate and brave man it is still more obedient; for in him it speaks, on all matters, with the same voice as the rational principle. (EN, 1102b14-29)

Both incontinence and continence allow us to distinguish the elements of this contest. In the continent, reason manages to suppress its oppo16

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18

The explanation of natural being in terms of the four causes is typically referred to in the literature as “sublunary.” Heavenly motion, which, since it is circular, for Aristotle EN, 1147a24-b19 is not really motion at all, but activity (energeia), is explained in terms of the motion (kinùsis) from potentiality (dunamis) to actuality (energeia). Aristotle EN, 1111a27. Children and the lower animals act voluntarily, when their actions are caused through thumon or epithumon. See Aristotle DA, 430a26-8, b5: Phronùsis makes use of nous in forming unified concepts in a judgment. Cf. Aristotle APo., 100a1: The “ ‘experience’ of animals who possess logos is radically different from those without it.” Cf. Charles Kahn “Aristotle on Thinking” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by Nussbaum and Rorty, p. 368 f.: [E]ven in the empeiria of medicine, or practical reason, before a universal is laid down, “sortal concepts” such as man, sickness, etc, the ability to recognize individual substances such as these, are necessary. Aisthùsis alone cannot provide these. Deliberative imagination (phantasia bouleutikù) is required for rational judgments, and it belongs exclusively to the rational animal, as at DA, 434a5-7. This desire provides a unity of conflicting desires by picking out a single object of desire which corresponds both to appetitive and rational desire. This is the good as orekton. See Henry Richardson “Desire and the Good in de Anima” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, p. 398 f.

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nent, but not to change its mind. It maintains authority through a constant struggle that makes the contestants easy to pick out. In the case of incontinence the difference is even more pronounced. Since the incontinent act despite themselves their regret makes them an easy mark. In regret or repentance the voice of reason has its arm twisted behind it, forced to announce its own defeat.

Unreasoning Desires To say that unreasoning desires have “changed their mind” or that reason’s “arm” has been “forced” may seem like confusing metaphors to bring to bear on Aristotle’s soul. Wasn’t the point to separate reason from the desires and passions connected with the body? Aristotle does seem to identify unreason with the appetites and desires in general (thumetikon kai holķs orektikon), splitting them off from reason. But in the same breath he also gives these appetites and desires the rational property of voice, and intelligent ears, necessary instruments for understanding and obeisance. “The appetitive and in general the desiring element in a sense shares in it, in so far as it listens to and obeys it” (EN, 1102b30-32). What then is the relation between the passions and reason? Is reason an absence of desire, and vice versa? Do reason and unreason overlap at all, and, if so, in what way? Aristotle distinguishes three different kinds of desire or impulse (orexis, hormai) (EN, 1102b22): epithumia, thumos, and boulùsis. Since the objects of desire for Aristotle are logically prior to both the actual spring of desires and their capacities (DA, 415a18-22), its three types are each defined teleologically in terms of their objects, rather than some generic, object-less hunger. There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the base, the harmful, and the painful. (EN, 1104b30-33)

We do not have an experience of hunger, or lust, and then find ourselves some lunch, or willing flesh. Rather, we have a desire that is always already directed towards an end (telos, eschaton, hù eneka, DA, 433a15-17), e. g., a hunger for the steak at Chez Jay’s, a lust for that cocktail waitress, revenge against my brother’s killer. Through desires we become what we are, move towards the kind of goal that befits us. The account is explicitly non-mechanical and reflects a Greek spirit hearkening all the way back to Homer, who doesn’t write of generic

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hunger or thirst, but rather desire (eron) for food and drink.19 Without some form of this object-drawn desire, for Aristotle, motion is impossible. Thought (nous or dianoia) cannot independently produce movement (DA, 433a23, EN, 1139a35). Descartes’ Cogito or the bureaucratic manager, even the psychoanalyst, while measuring, analysing or observing, cannot act, insofar as their thinking is removed from the source of desires in the bodied world. The action embedding this thought is just a more sophisticated kind of animal motion for Aristotle. The same language of “taking aim” or “shooting at” describes both the lower animal’s pleasure-seeking and the rational work of the phronimos (stochazesthai, HA, 542a30). The lowest form of desire is epithumia or appetite. It is the desire for pleasures, ultimately those of touch, e. g. sex, sumptuous food, inebriation, etc., which moves “each of our bodily parts” and “leads us towards” the object (EN, 1147a34-5). Aristotle distinguishes epithumia essentially as that form of desire which has no argument or reason, but “merely springs to the enjoyment” of that which argument or perception says is pleasant (EN, 1149b34-36). But because of the different senses attached for us to the word ‘reason,’ Aristotle makes it extremely tricky to uphold this distinction between rational and unreasoning desires. Both the Eudemian Ethics and De Anima warn us about holding too fast to psychological distinctions like these, which can only be formal, comparing them to the concave and convex sides of a single curve.20 There is a kind of reason even in the appetites, which rely upon imagination. 21 They recognize the sweet, for example, the shapes attuned to pleasure, as well as pain. This is judgement (krisis), which, like desire, is implicit in sentience, because sentience implies motion, and therefore both desire and judgment. The thinking behind the action motivated by appetite can be put into propositional form: Pleasures are good. These pears seem ripe, and sweet, probably juicy. Eating them would be pleasurable. It includes a number of things we would class under thinking. But this does not make them rational in 19 20

21

See Homer Odyssey, viii. 485; xiv. 454. Aristotle EE 1219b32-36. “It makes no difference whether the soul is divisible or indivisible [into rational and irrational parts], so long as it has different faculties (dunameis), namely those mentioned above, just as in the curved we have unseparated the concave and the convex, or, again, the straight and the white, yet the straight is not white except incidentally and is not the same in essence.” Aristotle gives similar warnings at de Anima, 432b8-9. See Martha Nussbaum The Therapy of Desire, pp. 80 f. “[A]ll emotions are to some degree ‘rational’ in a descriptive sense,” “cognitive and based upon belief.”

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the moral-psychological frame Aristotle provides. They move in similar ways, but towards objects which are qualitatively different. Thumos-desire in a similar way (though with some qualification) is rational only in a weak sense. Aristotle is nowhere explicit about the object of thumos, but the virtue of courage clearly depends upon it.22 Courage turns on the passion of anger (orgù) – linguistic cousin to thumos – as well as fear (EN, 1115a7-8). But the passion of thumos at work in courage is conceptually broader than these two passions. Courage springs from a thumotic desire for more than just relief from the twin pains of anger and fear, or from the raw inspirations of spirit itself that boil in the blood (EN, 1116b31-1117a1), the impulses for the strife of contest and victorious self-assertion assigned to it by Plato (part of a Homeric legacy which Aristotle, in his theory of this potentially courageous passion, surely inherits, though about this aspect he is less explicit). 23 Like moral virtue more generally, this desire from which courage springs aims at a nobility (to kalon, EN, 1115b13) defined essentially by reason and choice, rather than the pure passions of spirit. 24 Deliberation, then, is not a feature of thumotic desires. For thumos, like epithumia, once you have perception, desire and action follow im22

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Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 266. Cooper confirms the absence of an outright explanation of the object of thumos. See Aristotle Rhetoric ii.2. Anger is a desire to return pain for pain, physical or otherwise, one attended, unlike thumos, by a certain pleasure, the expectation of revenge (esp., 1378a32-35, 1379a10-11). On thumos in Plato, see Republic, 581a9-10. On the Homeric legacy of thumos in Plato, see Jonathan Cooper Plato on Human Motivation, pp. 130-136. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, pp. 270-280. Cooper spends several pages piecing this argument together. He cites the privileging of incontinence with respect to thumos in EN, vii.6, over appetite, as an essential distinction between these two types of irrational desire. The elaboration of the virtue of good-temper in EN, iv.5 is marhsalled as further evidence that the mere harnessing of anger cannot qualify as the virtue of courage, which involves the more primordial desire of thumos, of which anger is a species. Aristotle, he shows, connects thumos to the praiseworthy, a relative, perhaps, of the honor thumos seeks in Plato, through the intermediary of a new object: to kalon. At both Rh. 1366a33 and EE, 124bb19-20 the noble is identified with the praiseworthy, which is specified at To., 135a13 as “the fitting.” The identification of nobility with what fittingness appears againt at EE, 1249a9. Met., 1078a31-b36 explains that the highest nobilities are order, symmetry, and determinateness, properties of mathematics especially, as well as virtuous actions. The difficult challenge of attaining order, symmetry, and determinateness in action, of attaining action that is “fitting,” posits Cooper, elicits the contest-lust of thumos on a path cleared in advance by reason. Thumos must be oriented, he concludes, through an education in reason, from competitive self-assertion to to kalon.

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mediately. Although, like the appetites, thumotic desires can be put after the fact into propositional structure and exhibit what has been called a value-thought:25 Dishonor is bad. This man has called me a dog (a terrible ancient Greek insult). Vengeance is called for. What Aristotle calls the major premise converts itself through perception of the particular fact into action: I attack him, maybe verbally, maybe physically, depending on the situation – who the man is, who else has heard the insult – and the extent of the damage. This is not quite reason in the strict sense, for Aristotle, but it is “a manner” of reasoning (EN, 1149a32-33). Nevertheless, in the motions of both appetite and spirit, emotion is the cause of action, not reason (dia pathos, ou dia logos, EN, 1117a9-10). This is true despite the fact that thumos, like epithumia, must discriminate whether or not what is happening ought to trigger an expression of its desires – as opposed to discriminating what in fact has happened (whether, for example, this man was merely calling after “a dog,” not calling me one), and what a good expression of thumos in this particular circumstance would look like. These latter discriminations belong to reason proper. Courage without logos, he continues, “springs from feeling,” and has only “some affinity to true courage” (EN, 1117a9). Nonetheless, following Plato’s discriminations between these two types of unreasoning desires, Aristotle does draw thumos in toward reason, distancing it somewhat from the more rarefied irrationality of the appetites, whose only thoughts concern whether or not this is an object of pleasure before them, or pain. Appetite takes no cues from reason proper. In some sense, Aristotle exempts spirit from the company of its hungry, mute tenant below, discovering in it an affinity with reason which the appetites lack. The impulses of spirit, he writes, help reason with its work (EN, 1116b31). At 1149a25-b3 he describes how even a misguided thumos hears reason, but in the wrong way, hastily adopting a faulty logos before reason has issued its final command. Thumos borrows an evaluation appropriate to reason, but mistakenly, “just as hasty servants hurry out of the room before they have heard the whole of what you are saying, and so mistake your order, and as watch-dogs bark at a mere knock at the door, without waiting to see if it is a friend […] Hence thumos follows reason in a manner but epithumia not.” Nevertheless, true courage, the virtue of thumotic desire, requires a reasoned choice of which the lion of Plato’s soul is not capable. Hence Aristotle insists against Plato that there can be no virtue of thumos 25

Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 243.

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per se, independent of the operations of reason – only one like courage that relies heavily upon the force of its passion, its instinct for contest and its love of the laurel (EN, 1116b31-1117a5).

Rational Desire We’ve seen to what extent the passions can be called rational and in what sense they cannot. They are moved by emotion and not deliberation. Deliberation (bouleusis), we’ll find, implies another kind of desire: boulùsis, a desire for truth. Aristotle divides the rational part of the soul between scientific and calculative-deliberative elements (to men epistùmonikon to de logistikon). The function (ergon) of “both the intellectual parts of the soul,” practical reason as well as theoretical reason, is “the attainment of truth” (EN, 1139b12-13). In De Anima Aristotle is careful to point out, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, that nous alone cannot make choices, distinguishing between a purely contemplative mind (nous theoretikos) and one engaged by desire and motion (nous praktikos). “[M]ind is never seen to produce movement without appetite (orexeķs) (for boulùsis is a form of orexis, and when movement accords with calculation [logismon], it accords also with boulùsin)” (DA, 433a23-25). Boulùsis, the impulse of reason that moves the thinking animal, uses action to express a considered notion of what is good for oneself, “the truth about what is in fact good.”26 Unlike the static intelligence of nous, epistùmù, or the sophia combining them, 27 phronùsis is inherently motivated, compelled by this third kind of desire, boulùsis, which translators are tempted into rendering as will or choice, neither of which capture the movement inherent in the word. Not every good can excite this movement, only the practical good (DA, 433a29-30), exercising what Aristotle elsewhere deems the secondary virtue (allùn aretù, EN, 1178a9-10) of man as a composite being (suntheton) in whom the stuff of reason – eternal, and therefore pre-existent, disembodied, and therefore impersonal – mingles with the living body of the animal. This synthesis engenders an essentially social and moral being with passions and desires that both include and guide him in the shared world, and, implicitly unruly, also need to be disciplined. Aristotle describes this practical 26 27

Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 242. Aristotle EN, 1149b14-16. The soul achieves truth in affirmation or denial within the five fields of technù, epistùmù, phronùsis, sophia, and nous.

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desire for truth about the good as “a truth-attaining rational quality, concerned with action in relation to things that are good and bad for human beings” (EN, 1140b6-8). But this statement in the Ethics is slightly misleading because it seems to place phronùsis outside of the action, like a disembodied, Cartesian (or Kantian or Husserlian) calculating from a kind of reflectively deduced distance. This is not how the deliberative part of the soul (bouleutikon) functions.28 Phronùsis expresses its rational desire in and through its activity. This “rational wish,”29 the moral reflection it extends, and finally the perception of the relevant particulars in which, through choice, it concludes, comprise one arc in which a specifically rational kind of desire expresses itself practically. Desire establishes the mark at which deliberation and choice take aim (EN, 1111b27-28), fixing the end for which the means, not the end, are chosen. The motion that begins with this rational wish, which includes a deliberate view of the good, proceeds through a choice about means that Aristotle describes in terms of desire combined with reason (orexis kai logos, EN, 1139a33-35). 30 While he distinguishes this rational desire in the soul of the phronimos (and, more specifically, the logistikon) from the unreasoned desires of thumos and epithumia (EE 1223a26-27, 1225b24-26, DA, 414b2, 433a226), in the last analysis, it is unreasonable, he warns, to divide desire according to the criterion of rationality. “If the soul is divided into three, appetite [orexis] will be found in each” (DA, 432b8-9). Desire operates both below and above the line of reason. When it does, Aristotle calls it by different names: boulùsis in the calculative part (tķ logistikķ), thumos and epithumia in the unreasoned part (tķ alogķ) (DA, 432b5-7, Cf. EN, 1111b10-12). The Motions of Akrasia: Contrary Desires in the Soul Given this arrangement of the soul in terms of a divine reason and unreasoning desires, we now need to know the nature of the conflict through which Aristotle distinguished them – where irrationality has 28

29 30

Aristotle divides the soul into five parts, according to function: nutritive (threptikon), sensitive (aisthetikon), intelligent (noùtikon), deliberate (bouleutikon) and appetitive (orektikon). Ross’s translation. Since choice is desiderative thought, or rational desire (orektikos nous hù orexis dianoetikù, EN, 1139b5-7), in addition to “intellect or thought” (nou kai dianoias), it is also deeply rooted in the habits which sediment cumulatively as character (hexeķs ùthikùs, EN, 1139a33-35).

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been relocated. The first place to look in Aristotle is the phenomenon of akrasia, or incontinence, where the rule of reason over the passions fails and the idea of the good is ignored. Reason is the natural ruler, but at the same time, unreasoning desires are as natural to man as reason. There would be something inhuman for Aristotle about someone in whom appetites and spirit had been eliminated, who was not moved as much by the heart and stomach as they were by the head. On what foundation do the passions, slaves by nature, for Aristotle, build their revolt, now that philosophy has inverted the tragic collision between human reason and the gods, identifying the former with the latter and irrationality as a purely internal, psychic strife – an aberration idiosyncratic to our naturally conflicted form of life? To understand the medicine he applies, in keeping with his own medically-inspired method, first we have to apply ourselves to the particulars of the sickness. There are four forms of akrasia which Aristotle describes. First, unreason in us at times may overturn reason’s authority to choose what it knows and can explain to be the good (EN, 1146b31-36). Although I have this knowledge in some passive sense, I fail to make it real in my actions. When the opportunity presents itself I fail to be the person I had ideally chosen. This person remains an impotent potentia. As in drunkenness, madness, or even sleep, my knowledge is tabled; I act in ignorance, “not conscious of the knowledge at the time.” The second explanation concerns what is called the practical syllogism, where “reasoning on matters of conduct employs premises of two forms” (EN, 1146b36-1147a10). Here the universal or major (katholous) premise of my action, that I am a strict vegetarian, for example, and therefore have chosen to abstain from meat, fails to realize itself in “the minor (kath’ hekaston) premise.” This minor premise would be the particular fact, for example, of the hamburger, hot and bleeding, which I am occasionally forced to eat, despite my clearheaded choice earlier that it is ‘good’ to keep all things bloody off my menu. During these moments I no longer see something I ought to avoid, and for such and such reasons. Desire overwhelms the arguments of prudence. I see and think only with my appetites, which, defined by the object that draws them, recognize only a source of pleasure and immediately affirm this pleasure as the good which they seek. The universal plays the role here of the passive intelligence in the first instance. Although the akratic mistakes its application to the particular, he still possesses the universal prohibition (e. g., don’t eat meat) and so has knowledge “in one way” but not “in another.”

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In a third statement Aristotle repeats what he has now twice demonstrated, that the akratic both has and does not have knowledge of his action (EN, 1147a10-24). He refines the distinction of having knowledge by pointing out that even having knowledge, the use notwithstanding, can be understood in two different ways. When the drunk, the maniac, or the sleepwalker acts, he does it mechanically, unconsciously, his knowledge no longer a “part of the tissue of the mind,” like an actor “speaking a part.” Alterations in the body can disturb the accrued time of moral education, can make moral beginners of us, strip us of the habits of reason and serve us up whole to our lower halves. We can speak correctly without “knowing” it, “repeat propositions of geometry and verses of Empedocles; [like] students who have just begun a subject reel off its formulae, though they do not yet know their meaning[.]” But just as the drunk, the maniac, or the sleepwalker acts unconsciously, the state of knowledge, even when we do not act, is suspended. Lastly, returning to the syllogistic account, Aristotle explicitly draws the irrational into the sphere of scientific study with the addition that we “may also study the cause of akrasia in terms of nature and causes” (EN, 1147a24-b19). 31 It is the unreasoning desire, he clarifies, that opposes the major premise, with its own set of beliefs about what is good embedded in the tissue of my miseducated impulse. Yet the logos of the act only “accidentally” opposes the logos of the correct major premise prohibiting the enjoyment, of, for example, the juicy hamburger. As in the second example, the major premise is not being used, and, as in all three of the previous examples, there is a sense in which desire defuses knowledge. In every case the akratic both knows and does not know. He acts despite himself, but, Aristotle says, in a sense voluntarily, because a kind of knowledge is present, that “derived from sense-perception.” For both reasons this irrationality cannot be Oedipus’. He does not act despite himself. His action is the eminently rational one of inquiry, and his ignorance is not of the universal (i. e., do not commit incest, do not commit parricide),

31

Aristotle EN, 1139b18-25: “The nature of Scientific Knowledge (ÃÎÇÑÒÅÊÅ) (employing the term in its exact sense and disregarding its analogous senses) may be made clear as follows. We all conceive that a thing which we know scientifically cannot vary; when a thing that can vary is beyond the range of observation, we do not know whether it exists or not. An object of Scientific Knowledge, therefore, exists of necessity. It is therefore eternal, for everything existing of absolute necessity is eternal; and what is eternal does not come into existence or perish.”

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but rather, the particular (i. e., this is mother in my bed, this is father charging me at the crossroads).

Phronetic Presctiptions: Resolving the Contrary Motions of Desire In fact, this incontinence is the state in which all human life begins. Children are rational, for Aristotle, but their reason has not yet learned to rule, which it does by nature. It is a curious feature of Aristotle’s theory that the authority over bodily desire implicit in reason is in practical fact hard-won. What is natural to us is also said to be extremely difficult. Knowing how akrasia works is the clue to how temperance, the strenuous perfecting of man’s delicate, conflicted nature as the rational animal will be achieved. Aristotle, like Plato before him, in an ethics also beholden to the political perfection of men, followed the methodology of early medicine as a true technù and model for the philosopher’s care of the soul (psuchùs therapeia). 32 For Aristotle, who, unlike Plato, distinguishes between the domains and tools of practical and theoretical philosophy, 33 medicine will be doubly crucial in developing a new domain of knowledge in the practical arts and a resolution for the practical-psychological problem presented by the irrational. The medical model opened the possibility and satisfied the need for “a different kind of knowledge,”34 attuned to individual exemplars, experience in the flux and on the ground. Rejecting the eternal, universal idea of the Good as a ground for ethics and politics, Aristotle needed to develop the concept of a knowledge grounded in action, rather than detached, a priori reflection. A soul undergoing Socrates’ or Plato’s philosophical therapeutic based purely on theoretical reason will remain practically unaffected, like the sick patient who disobeys the doctor, because in practical 32

33 34

This is Jaeger’s conclusion, whose article I follow generally in the following paragraphs. In Plato, Jaeger directs us to the Gorgias, 464 (re: care of the self), 500e, 501ab (re: as true art [technù]), 517a (re:politics), and the Phaedrus, 270c-d (re: dialectical method). Though most of the Platonic examples from Jaeger come from the Gorgias, “[T]here are many passages in Plato in which he refers to medicine as a typical or exemplaric art.” The medical example “served Plato for the same purpose throughout his life,” down through the Laws (857c-d). Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 54. Aristotle Met., 1025b18; EN, 1094a27. Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 55.

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philosophy as in medicine the “field of thought is not knowledge but action.”35 The things concerned with action and that which is useful have nothing stable in themselves, just as it is in matters of health. If however the general statements [ho katholou logos] are of this nature, there is even less accuracy in the statements about particular cases, since they fall under no art or precept, but the person who is acting must himself always keep in mind the special circumstances of the moment and what they require. This is true also of medicine and of the art of navigation. (EN, 1104a3-10)

Navigation was a typical example in medical literature, and both Plato and Aristotle follow identifiable passages from the Hippocratic author’s On Ancient Medicine in adopting its methods. 36 The logoi of both navigation and medicine were subject first to the individual situation. The centrality for the physician of cultivating aesthùsis becomes the lynch pin in Aristotle’s program. To properly train other souls to recognizing the good we must first be able to see it ourselves. Once we forget how, no amount of reflection on the matter can retrieve the image, no quantity of logical gymnastics. The radical contingency of both medicine and ethics meant that instead of presenting a rule, their only reference was the logos of the perfect artist, be they doctor or phronimos.37 The Nicomachean Ethics deals with the problem of irrationality explicitly by analogy with medicine. The eye doctor, he says, must know about the whole human body, just as the politician must know the facts about the soul, so that this split can be resolved (EN, 1102a18). This parallel between the politikos and the doctor (iatros) persists throughout the Ethics.38 35

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37

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Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 60 f., 58. Cf. Aristotle EN, ii.5. Hippocrates Ancient Medicine, c. 9: “But no measure … can be found except aisthùsin.” Jaeger compares with the use of aisthùsis at EN, 1109b20. Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in The Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 56. Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in the Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, p. 59. Werner Jaeger “Aristotle’s Use of Medicine as Model in his Ethics” in the Journal of Hellenic Studies 77, pp. 57, 59, 61. The excess and defect by which the mean of virtue is determined, writes Jaeger, are also borrowed from medicine, because these vary from individual to individual. See Aristotle EN, 1138b25. Ross confirms. See W. D. Ross Aristotle, p. 193. The educative model based on an application of pleasures and pains is, for Jaeger, clearly a mainstay of medical dietetics, one that also appeared in the Laws’ definition of punishment as a form of therapy (iatreias). See Aristotle EN, 1104a30-33, b11. Aristotle notes and defends Plato’s theory of the application of opposites, concludes Jaeger, as the right way to find the mean and therefore restore virtue. See Aristotle EN, 1104b16. Throughout book vi, the

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There is something paradoxical in Aristotle’s concept of akrasia, a source of general frustration among scholars. If man’s nature is essentially rational, and reason is the natural, divine ruler over unreason, how can akrasia, the rule of the lower over the higher in us be possible? How can the natural authority of reason be overturned, or, more technically, why is the better syllogism achieved via practical reasoning overcome (EN, 1147a24-25)?39 The difficulty is grounded in a deeper ambivalence within Aristotle’s psychological framework between the logos which defines our essence and form of life, the rationality through which man is identified with the divine, and the contingency and unreason endemic to human affairs which he likewise insists on, which prevents us from achieving this divinity permanently. It is as if we have two essences, two natures, which contradict one another. In fact, according to Aristotle, we do. De Anima introduces a theoretical tension between the two souls – psuchù and nous – one personal, embodied and mortal, the other impersonal and undying – ‘synthesized’ in the human animal as syntheton. This inherently conflicted account of the soul may simply reflect the “paradoxical structure of the human condition”40 for Aristotle, a tragic tension and choice between two ways of life (bioi), one contemplative and divine, withdrawn as much as possible from the everyday, and the other mundane, emotionally involved, economically and civically engaged.

39

40

phronimos prescribing the authoritative logos in the soul is explained with examples from dietetics, knowing, for example, and being able to select in particular the right kinds of fowl to eat. The Hippocratic Regimen, part of the abundant medical literature on regimen at Arisotle’s time, reminds us immediately of Aristotle’s examples of choosing correctly from the light and dark meat of birds. Jaeger cites connections in general between phronùsis and medicine at EN, 1141a22 (re: good is variable by individual); 1141b14 (re: they relate major and minor premise); 1141b1821 (re: dietetics), which corresponds to Hippocrates Regimen ii, c. 46, c. 50, and eating the right kinds of meats; 1143b25, 1143b31, 1144b10, 1145a7 (re: difference between sophia and phronùsis). His aiming (stochazesthai) at the good is also borrowed from the Hippocratic author, who, like Aristotle, was developing a technù stokastikù, a kind of science based on logos, but operating within its own specific limits.” See Hippocrates Ancient Medicine, c.9. Charles Burnyeat “Aristotle on Learning to be Good” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 85. Charles Kahn “Aristotle on Thinking” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by Nussbaum and Rorty, p. 362. Kahn asks, “[I]s human nature constituted by one essence, or two? I do not see that there is any genuine solution for this tension within Aristotle’s account of the psuchù. But I want to suggest that this is not so much an inconsistence in his theory as a systematic attempt on his part to do justice to our split nature as human beings” (p. 361). Cf. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good, ch. 3.

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Solving this dilemma between psuchù and nous in the text of the Ethics and De Anima and the kinds of life they recommend is perhaps impossible, and, for us, unnecessary. More important and less ambiguous is the nature of this conflict in the mortal, embodied soul in which the foreign element of nous penetrates the animal life of man (his psuchù). The virtue of nous, like nous itself, “is separate” (EN, 1178a23, Cf. DA, III.5). Psychological conflict is possible because there is a certain sense in which, according to Aristotle, I am not myself. For a man to choose anything but the life of the mind would be to “choose to live not his own life but the life of some other than himself” (EN, 1178a3-4). Yet this other life is what human nature requires. The desires and requirements of moral virtue are mine insofar as these are my appetites, insofar as I am this suntheton, this volatile mixture that is man. Strife and rebellion in the soul is the product of this natural division in man between “two souls” in a single, living body.41 The individual psuchù where character sediments is split between itself as an animal principle, a mere living, and the pure nous which makes it a specifically human living. Although the virtues of character partake of the divine element of nous in character’s dependence on phronùsis, because of its passionate element this character and the psychù in which it inheres is essentially embodied, like phronùsis itself and the happiness that belongs to it” (EN, 1178a20-23).42 As the body becomes intelligent, intelligence becomes embodied. It is exposed to the same persuasion from below, the fogginess and chaos of the passions, that these passions ought to heed from the harmonious clarity of the reason above. The embodiment of logos in this idiosyncratically composite form of life makes it possible for us to pervert our nature. We can fail to reason. The slaves in us can revolt. Even worse, if unreason gets control (as in cases of vice), we actually begin to reason on behalf of our brute, animal nature. We deliberate and choose against the good. This risk is what makes us human. Our decisions matter, from the trivia of how to eat to the major decisions about education, and culture, because it is possible to ruin ourselves, for Aristotle, beyond repair. Since knowing the good will depend on the specific act of perception, we must constantly practice seeing things in the right way. 41

42

Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 176. Cooper describes human nature for Aristotle in just these terms of “two souls.” Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 174. In this sense, practical intelligence is “an excellence belonging to the mind at all,” insofar as “Aristotle here means to identify a human being with his mind.”

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The theme of vision leads us back to Oedipus. Oedipus’ first sight, a kind of blindness, was replaced by a second sight coinciding with the loss of his eyes, which, like the prophet’s, Sophocles identified with a deeper truth. The ignorance which makes his action involuntary is a permanent feature of the situation.43 There is no abiding character outside of his crimes to blame for a moment of passionate weakness. He undergoes a total reversal of vision. For Aristotle, eupraxia, the goal of ethics, is also a matter of vision. The good really is as the good man (spoudaios) judges; he “sees the truth in each kind, being himself as it were the standard and measure for the noble and pleasant” (EN, 1113a30-36). Experience teaches what the good is since it is “a matter of the particular circumstances, and judgment rests with the faculty of perception” (EN, 1126b4-5).44 For eupraxia to take place all forms of desire in the soul will have to come into alignment. How can the chaos of experience be brought into line with some reliable standard or measure (with which, for instance, the legislator can determine the dispensation of pleasure and pain which the cultivation of character – vis a vis habit, and once again, proper perception – requires [EN, II.3]) if this standard is derived from experience itself? This circularity is only a problem if I have issues with the contingency of the good, its vulnerability to misapprehension and the possibility of losing this sight of it permanently. It is only a problem if I fail to recognize that the moral virtue which I require as a stepping stone to phronùsis is always also the product of phronùsis, a sedimentation of the habits of desire and moral perception attuned to its orthos logos (EN, 1106b36-1107a1, 1144b26-27). But the circle also turns the other way. In the act, where its syllogism concludes, practical reason depends on moral virtue for its eyes. The phronetically hohned “eye of the soul” presupposes moral virtue as its foundation (EN, 1144a2931). It is virtue that “chooses” the end and phronùsis the means to attaining it (EN, 1144a8-9, a20-22). These eyes, if their “moral vision” (EN, 1114b7-8) is good, have been subjected life-long to the practice of reason. Experience “has given them an eye for things, and so they see correctly” (EN, 1143b14). The phronetic intuition (nous) on which 43

44

Richard Robinson “Aristotle on Akrasia” in Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. by Barnes Schofield and Sorabji, p. 86. Robinson uses Oedipus as an example of involuntary vs. akratic action. See Aristotle EN, 1114b20-23: “[T]o what degree and how seriously a man must err to be blamed is not easy to define on principle. For in fact no object of perception is easy to define; and such questions of degree depend on particular circumstances, and the decision lies with perception.”

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they depend “is both a beginning and an end,” the archù and the telos, since the particular fact is “both the starting point and the subject matter of demonstration” (EN, VI 1143b10-11), and so both the knowledge and practice of the good abide a certain groundlessness. Virtue and phronùsis are mutually dependent (EN, 1144b30-33), like the two lenses of binocular vision. One focuses on the mark of eudaimonia in the distance, the other on the particular fact as determined by this rational horizon (horismos logos), the (constituent) means to an (inclusive) end (tas pros telos).45 Eupraxia is that in which these two eyes come into alignment, producing the one concrete image of sound binocular vision. Aristotle also connects the object of epithumia (the desire after which boulùsis is modelled) with appearances, but in a different sense.46 While the apparent good qua good at which virtue takes aim is the object of a boulùsis, the apparent good desired by the appetites is a good qua pleasure, not qua good. This is a distinctly different kind of value, just as to kalon, the object of thumos, is a different kind of value. But the authority of the rational wish operating in phronùsis brings all three values into alignment. As the soul’s desire is layered, so must be the object of this desire, which is unified conceptually by nous in the act of judgment.47 The problem of desire is actually the problem of objects of desire and the task of phronùsis is the unification of competing objects of desire into a single object. Judgment (to krinein) in all animals – discriminations between possible pleasures and pains, objects to be pursued and 45

46

47

Commentators have spent ample time addressing the contradiction between Arisotle’s statement in Book iii that deliberation is of the means (EN, 1111b11-12, etc.), and his statement in Book vi that deliberation concerns both the ends (EN, 1142b30-34) and the means (EN, 1144a7-9, etc.). Cooper and Wiggins, for example, contra Ross, argue that they are continuous, rather than representing first, a restricted analysis, and then later, an unrestricted analysis. The tension is resolved if we understand the “means” inclusively, as specifically comprising the end (though not as parts mechanically comprise a whole), rather than instrumentally. In both bks. iii and vi we deliberate not about eudaimonia per se, but about how actually to specify it. David Wiggins “Deliberation and Practical Reason” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 227. The only end which is never deliberable is the chief end of eudaimonia, fixed by reason’s desire. It is legitimate that an undeliberable end for someone is a means for another, and so both deliberable and not, respectively. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, pp. 15 f. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, p. 269. See Aristotle EE, 1235b27: the pleasant is an “apparent good.” It is what appears good to you in such a way that you may still not think it good at all. This will be the good as orekton. See Henry Richardson “Desire and the Good in de Anima” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by Nussbaum and Rorty, pp. 398 f.

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avoided – rests on imagination. Imagination is also a kind of thought (noùsis, DA, 427b28-30), a process through which “an image is presented to us,” a “state of mind by which we judge and are either right or wrong” (DA, 428a-4). To imagine, “then, is to form an opinion exactly corresponding to a direct perception” (DA, 428a28-30) – such as the blending of the perception of white with the opinion that it is white. Many animals are said to have imagination, but not opinion, or the beliefs that opinion implies, because these are ultimately grounded in rational discourse, such as opinions about what is truly good. Only the human animal will suffer from conflicting desires for competing objects, because, Aristotle says, reason implies a sense of time. This is a function of the unique form imagination takes in man when combined with nous.48 Now desires may conflict, and this happens wherever reason and appetite are opposed, and this occurs in creatures which have a sense of time (for the mind advises us to resist with a view to the future, while desire looks only to the present; for what is momentarily pleasant seems to be absolutely pleasant and absolutely good, because appetite cannot look to the future)[.] (DA, 433b5-10)

Temporality is the effect of bouleusis, a deliberative form of imagination (DA, 434a6-9) distinct from the purely aesthetic imagination of other animals. It only exists in calculative forms of life, namely humans, as a form of imagination that measures by “a single standard” and so “implies the ability to combine several images into one” (DA, 434a910) – under the aegis of belief about the good. “[F]or the thinking soul (dianoetikù psuchù) images take the place of direct perceptions […] hence the soul never thinks without a phantasmotos (an image)” (DA, 431a14-18). In the instant the phronimos perceives the good that he desires and how best to achieve it, this combination of several into one, of past and future objects of desire within a single impulse, becomes the mechanism through which disunity in the soul is overcome. Learning to see and to desire correctly implies an integration in the soul as well as the objects this soul desires. In the temperate and courageous man, the unreasoned parts of the soul speak cooperatively in the same voice as reason (homophķnei tķ logķ, EN, 1102b27-28).49 48

49

Charles Kahn “Aristotle on Thinking” in Essays on Aristotle’s de Anima, ed. by Nussbaum and Rorty, p. 368 f. Even for sortal concepts, the kind used in empirical work, such as medicine or practical reasoning, this form of imagination would be required. Aisthùsis alone cannot provide these. Cf. Aristotle APo., 100a1. The “‘experience’ of animals who possess logos is radically different from those without it.” Their virtues, temperance and courage, are defined by a mean which falls between two extremes. Temperance is the mean concerning appetitive desire and the ob-

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When the brave and temperate soul enjoys an activity “in accordance with perfect virtue” (EN, 1102a5-6) – eudaimonia – it is because the immediacy of appetitive desire, the quasi-reflective thumotic desire, and the fully reflective and temporal desire of reason have become partnered under the authority of the last. The present moment falls smoothly into the streaming of past and future, because the image of the present reflects the images of previous pleasures, beauties, and goods, as well as those still desired. The perception of the particular fact in which the practical syllogism both concludes and begins (in the sense that this perception calls the universal premise into action) is the opinion (or appearance, doxa) “which causes movement, not the universal” (DA, 434a20-21). This appearance reflects character more generally, the relevant concepts of value developed over the course of one’s lifetime – pleasure, beauty, honor, justice, etc. – with which it intuitively discriminates the object and organizes its desires. These phronetic desires are exceptional in that they feature more than just a cause for action, but also a rational account of this cause in conceptual terms. While appetite judges soft skin and sweet-smells pleasant, but does not know why, or care to, and spirit similarly judges that dishonour ought to be avenged, this rational wish, while in a way just as spontaneous as the first two, driven on by a kind of necessity, can give an account of why, for example, socialism is the best form of government. Its movements are slower, and sometimes stilted, and it begins life with a kind of clumsiness. But for just this reason it can eventually learn to cope in highly complex situations in a way that the lower order desires cannot. Still, we are not constantly deliberating, nor do we need to. 50 Barring moral conflict, this desire can satisfy itself as naturally as its rowdier neighbours below. But the right habituation settles one’s thought and character in such a way that reasons could be given, if necessary, and that desires up and down the scale express this logos at least indirectly through their actual pursuits and

50

jects of pleasure, specifically touch, located between insensitivity and profligacy. Aristotle EN, 1118b8. Courage is the mean concerning thumos and things to be feared or confidently opposed, found between cowardice and rashness. Aristotle EN, 1116b24, 1117a5. Often enough our choices don’t require any deliberation at all. This might seem, for Aristotle, to cancel them out as choices, since choice presupposes deliberation (EN, 1112a15-17). But since virtuous action is necessarily chosen (EN, 1105a31-32), this leaves the virtuous acting in very strange ways, deliberating all the time about simple matters. This oddity disappears in recognizing that an account could be given, since choice is the product of a unified habituation of thought and desire, together, as they intertwine.

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avoidances. 51 By repeatedly acting in a virtuous way I develop the character requisite for virtuous action, which has the right reasons. This training in justice seals the “impulses” of both passion and intelligence within the single horizon of one “outlook on life.”52 Even if I don’t deliberate about whether to steal from mom, this time, I have already practiced my relation to family in a thoughtful way. This does mean, however, that at one point or another every sphere of action ought to be reflected on. When we act, this deliberation, essentially, will still be part of the action.

Conclusion Practical reason is called upon to construct a narrative about eudaimonia and the good life which bears on everyone who chooses, as this particular person, in this particular situation, etc. This conception of a chief good puts the present choice within the context of past and future choices, and depends upon the accumulation of these choices for its strength and concreteness. 53 In this sense reason constructs a narrative which ennobles choice, first a single choice, and eventually a lifetime of choices, ultimately a shared lifetimes of choices. It is in this way that logos affirms as good the human life that Aristotle tells us is essentially political, in virtue of a shared rationality, the common narrative reason provides. Despite Aristotle’s insistence on “the vulnerability of the good human life”54 to the forces of luck (tuchù), since eudaimonia is always a matter of the reasons, the style and tex51

52 53

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The agent of virtue must “be in a certain state of mind” when he acts. Aristotle EN, 1105a32-b. It is not what he does, but how. Implicit in this “how” is that “the person who does them must also have certain properties.” Aristotle EN, 1105a3133. He must act knowingly, and choose the actions for their own sake, from a firm and unalterable character. For a classic discussion of moral education in Aristotle, see Charles Burnyeat “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty. Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 8. T. H. Erwin “The Metaphysical and Psychological basis of Aristotle’s Ethics” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. by A. O. Rorty, p. 47. For instance: “Yet evidently, as we said, [happiness] needs the external goods as well; for it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment.” Aristotle EN, 1099a31-33. Aristotle leaves room, here, for the “not easy” transcendence of external goods. For the opposite emphasis, see the chapter by the same name in Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 318-342. Cf. Aristotle EN, 1099b3-6, where he prescribes a good birth and sociality as a condition of happiness.

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ture of a certain choice and never the outcome, the true phronimos may become a kind of superman with the “superhuman excellence” Aristotle describes as “something heroic and divine” (EN, 1145a19). His life is “hard to take away” (EN, 1095b25-26, cf. 1100b12), “stable and in no way easily subject to change” (EN, 1100b2-3, cf. 1101a8-10). At one point Aristotle seems to seal off his vulnerability to chance completely: “if, as we said, a man’s life is determined by his activities, no supremely happy (makarios) man can ever become miserable (athlios). For he will never do hateful or base actions, since we hold that the truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow” (EN, 1100b33-1101a2).55 Tragic reversals might not only best be avoided poetically – for the true phronimos they are impossible. This draws the morally virtuous intelligence of phronùsis dangerously close to the moral indifference of theoretical life. “The theorizer has no need of such things (viz. the external goods) with a view to his own activity, and they are really, so to say, impediments so far as theorizing is concerned” (EN, 1178b3-5). Alternatively, Aristotle also grounds his clearest arguments for eudaimonia’s vulnerability to tragic luck in its activity, which might always be impeded from the outside: “for no activity is complete when it is impeded, and happiness is a complete thing; this is why the happy man needs the goods of the body and external goods, i. e., those of fortune, viz. in order that he may not be impeded in these ways.” The argument concludes by extending the opposite claim to its absurd conclusion of the happy “victim on the rack,” passively and torturously restrained. Yet despite these caveats about activity and luck, Aristotle comes “uncomfortably close to the suggestion that a good man can indeed be happy on the rack.”56 Although Aristotle’s moral psychology meant to solve the paradoxical suffering and culpability Oedipus presents, the drama of Oedi55

56

See Aristotle EN, 1101a6-10: “If things are so, the eudaimon person will never become wretched; nor, however will he be makarios, if he encounters the luck of Priam,” who suffered a great reversal of fortune. “Nor, again, is he many-coloured and changeable; for neither will he be moved from his happy state easily […].” Yet, Aristotle implies, he could be moved from it. Joachim and Ross defend the independence of eudaimonia from misfortune, while Nussbaum, through an analysis of Aristotle’s texts more generally, argues against their categorical distinction of eudaimonia from to makarion. Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 330 f. Eudaimonia, she concludes, remains vulnerable, though immured from the base wretchedness which athlios connotes. W. F. R. Hardie Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, p. 26 f.

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pus’ exclusion returns in Aristotle as a conflicted choice between two “ways of life” (bioi): the life of the mind or that of secondary or “the other” virtue (ho kata ton noun bios [or] ho kata tùn allùn aretùn). 57 “Such a life as this,” he says of the philosopher’s bios, “will be higher than the human level: not in virtue of his humanity will a man achieve it, but in virtue of something within him that is divine; and by as much as this something is superior to his composite nature [to suntheton]58 by so much is its activity superior to the exercise of the other forms of virtue” (EN, 1177b26-30). This nous, like Empedocles’ daimķn or Plato’s immortal psuchù, is said to come into the body “from outside” (thurathen, GA, 736b27-28, 737a10, 744b21), to lead a previous and separate existence as a kind of god. Its only virtue is sophia, which, like nous, Aristotle distinguishes from the passionate life of the body occupying moral wisdom (EN, 1178a16-22). At best, virtuous action will be a potential means for securing the human goods upon which this aspect of his life still depends.59 The contemplative exists, like Oedipus, in a space both inside and outside of moral-political categories, “beyond ordinary moral virtues – though, equally, beyond ordinary vices as well.”60 He is gradually withdrawing himself under his own power from the human condition. For the energy of the active intellect, the concerns relating to the body, how to manage it, where to draw its limits, etc., are simply a tool to rise a little above the human itself. The practical reasoning and moral virtue which depend on nous can distract from and even compete with the divine ascetics of contemplation it demands. Despite one’s embodiment, and therefore moralpolitical nature, “we ought so far as possible to achieve immortality, and do all that man may to live in accordance with the highest thing in him” (EN, 1177b34-36); Since the intellect “more than anything else is man (malista anthropos),” eudaimonia in the fullest sense amounts to 57

58

59 60

De Anima’s distinction between nous, “a different kind of soul [psuchùs genos heteron]” (DA, 413b26), mixed in man with the embodied, mortal psuchù (DA, 412b79, 413a3-6, 413b27-32), and the Nicomachean Ethics’ privileging of the purely intellectual virtue of sophia in its last book (along with its definition of happiness as the activity of reason in book I [EN, 1098a1-18], as well as book vi’s subordination of phronùsis to sophia, issuing orders “for its sake” [EN, 1145a6-9]), introduce a conflict into Aristotle’s mature conception of eudaimonia. See Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, pp. 157 f. (note). Cooper, Hardie, and Joachim take suntheton as living body, not a compound of body and soul, contra Gauthier. See Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, pp. 163-165. For a nice discussion of the contemplative of Book x, see Jonathan Cooper Reason and Human Good in Aristotle, p. 179.

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the life of the mind (EN, 1178a4-8). The life of moral virtue, the flourishing of the living body in both its rational and unreasoned capacities, an intelligence mixed with passion, “is happy only in a secondary degree” (EN, 1178a9-10).61 It is “purely human (anthropikai).” There is a kind of tragic ambivalence in Aristotle’s ideal of eudaimonia between the pure, disembodied activity of nous and the mixed, moral-political life of ordinary men that the body implies.62 We are faced with a contradiction between two definitions of the human, anthropos: one purely rational and divine, ideally detached from the human sphere of desire and shared commitments, and the other a moral-political creature whose body implies desires and commitments invested naturally in the shared space of nature and the city, requiring the moral-political training ethical theory means to ground. A phronetic care of the soul serves a divinity and knowledge in man that still amounts to exile. Oedipus’ is now the happiest of fates, and gnķthi seauton – as with Oedipus – the Delphic injunction of temperance, still governs it.63 The character which ethics studies and recommends, despite Aristotle’s concerns about the possible impediments of virtuous activity, moves dominantly toward this transcendence of the tragic domain of tuchù (specifically distinguishing the “external goods” of this non-chosen order of good or bad fortune [eutuchia or dustuchia] from the virtue inherent in character [EN, 1124a12-31]). Ultimately, his ethics abscond with the problem of the irrational that tragedy originally expressed, rephrasing it in a rational language about human nature, character-building and the power and divinity of the intellect that makes tragic conflict in our souls and our cities something the philosopher’s science in principle can overcome. It seals the gap in which the kathartic force of the archaic daimķn, its avatar in 61

62

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Aristotle EN, 1178a17-23: “Moreover, phronùsis is intimately connected with moral virtue, and this with phronùsis, inasmuch as the first principles which phronùsis employs are determined by the moral virtues, and the right standard for the moral virtues is determined by phronùsis. But these being also connected with the passions are related to our composite nature; now the virtues of our composite nature are purely human; so therefore also is the life that manifests these virtues, and the happiness that belongs to it. Whereas the happiness that belongs to the intellect is separate.” For a lengthy discussion of this contradiction in Aristotle and further citations of the “hold” of “ethical Platonism of some sort” “over Aristotle’s imagination,” in a book committed to a thoroughly anti-Platonic, tragic reading of Aristotle’s’ ethics, see Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 373-377. See Werner Jaeger Paideia vol. 1, p. 167. Gnķthi se auton was originally, at Delphi, a call to temperance.

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the shamans and the mysteries their beliefs encouraged, or the actual presence of a god, such as Dionysus, irrupted through musical rite and theatre from an outside beyond human understanding. It is a gap that Kierkegaard in the throes of the second enlightenment pries open, returning with a philosopher’s concern for character building to the original crisis of reason lyricized and dramatized in Dionysus’ theatre.

Part II Golden Age Denmark The Rebirth of Tragedy and the Prospect of Happiness in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Lyric

Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive trees, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people? – Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier

Every angel is terrifying. – Rilke, The First of the Duino Elegies

Chapter 6 Tragedy as Historical Idea: Either/Or’s “Ancient Drama Reflected in the Modern” The Importance of Tragedy as Historical Idea Kierkegaard concentrates his thinking on classical tragedy and its religious reflection after modernity in four of the pseudonymous works: Either/Or’s essay on the relation between the tragic in ancient and modern drama, Stages on Life’s Way, The Concept of Anxiety, and Fear and Trembling. In the opening chapters of part two, I will explore crucial points of contact between Greek tragedy and these four works and how these points may align. I want to develop a narrative in the authorship on ancient tragedy’s rebirth in ‘the present age’ as further meditation on praxis (deliberate action) at the limits of human reason. Neither for Kierkegaard nor for the Greeks did this limit always give itself away in the destruction of royal houses. Conflict with the irrational, tragedy councils, first in Athens, and then again in Copenhagen, is an inevitable feature for all of reason’s projects. Kierkegaard, returning to the autopsies of reason on the tragic stage, tailors the vision of this conflict to the shifting categories of experience in the modern age. Before we can address the tragic in modern times, though, a few words on comedy are necessary, since the way towards tragedy’s rebirth passes under the sign of the comic. Tragic understanding, ironically, was the property of “the happiest individual” (det lykkeligste Individ), property that an inadvertently comic culture has liquidated (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). Here is the first parallel between the ancient Greek world and Kierkegaard’s age. Like the Greece of Aristophanic comedy, the modern age, ‘A’ says, is now one of disintegration (EO1, 141 / SKS 2, 141). The invisible social-religious bonds securing the community are in decline. The age and its passions lack any concrete relation to a unifying Idea. Its ethical commitments have become totally disembodied, abstract, and therefore

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arbitrary. A comic subjectivity presides over the age that “wants to assert itself as pure form” (EO1, 142 / SKS 2, 142). This generic subject has no obligations or determinations of any kind, ethically, historically, biologically, etc., no practices or beliefs which it can’t skeptically call into question. ‘A’s diagnosis of the comic age depends on an understanding of tragedy, insofar as the reign of the comic is equivalent to the loss of tragic possibilities. With the loss of the tragic and the reign of the comic, the age sympathetically gains despair (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). The comic age loses the sadness of tragedy, and with this sadness (Veemod) so goes the possibility of katharsis, tragedy’s “healing powers [Lægedom]” (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). Beyond aesthetics as philosophy of art, the historical developments within the tragic drama are an occasion for reflecting more generally on the “common consciousness of the age” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144) and the beginning of an anthropology: human life is either “the sadness of the tragic or the profound sorrow and profound joy of religion” (EO1, 146 / SKS 2, 146). As the ancient world is modernized and the comic loss of the tragic develops, the sadness of tragedy turns on its hinge, revealing the possibility of a deeper, all-encompassing sorrow and the hope of an absolute joy. Because the modern subject is one that has become completely “reflected in itself,” that with Descartes and then Hegel as its expositors has filtered all of reality through the gaurantor of reflection, its comedies and therefore its tragedies are more acute than those of the ancients. ‘A’ presents tragedy as primitive stuff reflectively sharpened by the exagerrations of consciousness in Christian conscience and the modern age. His essay suggests that understanding tragedy properly in its modern form can deliver the age from the desperate abstractions of its particular ùthos. The individual, he writes clearly enough, cannot be happy “until he has the tragic” (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). What is it then that the present age has lost in the tragic? What, correspondingly, has it gained? Kierkegaard continues to explain our historical situation by analogy with drama. The modernization of tragedy transforms the nature of dramatic action. Anciently, action proceeded from more than just thought and character (dianoia and ùthos, which ‘A’ quotes in Aristotle’s Greek).1 There was a remainder exceeding them, beyond the “telos” fixed by human reason (EO1, 143 / SKS 2, 143). This “more” (det Mere), what ‘A’ calls the “epic re1

See Pap. III C 34 / SKS Not10:1. Cf. JP 5:5545. Kierkegaard inscribes the german of Hegel’s Aesthetics concerning this passage in Poetics vi.

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mainder” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144), was the true source of “suffering” (Liden) in a play. It is what has not merged in the dramatic dialectic of “lines.” This more is embodied first in the chorus, which is “more” than the individuality, at times having a privileged perspective, that of the city, or even the gods, expressing a world-order or objectivity from which the individual has been estranged. It is also embodied in the monologue, which is more than the particular “situation” in which the deed takes place, which exceeds both the immediate scope of the deed and the broader “action” in which the “epic element” resides, that of family history, religion, the history of the race, etc., all fodder for the pathos of monologue lyricizing the hero’s exclusion.2 The onset of the epic element divides the chorus and the monologue against one another, textual symptom of a collision between situation and action which the characters must address vis a vis reflection, i. e., dialogue, eventually understanding the place of the situation within the action’s broader scope. In the gap between the tragic individuality and the underlying religious substance, the dialectic of lines unfolds as a means of resolving their contradiction. The tragedy is a matter of situation catching up with action. A situation such as Oedipus’ which is abstract and therefore vulnerable to fate recovers its epic substance, its meaningful place within the larger story of a people, and, as the epic element reveals itself, the gap between chorus and monologue is closed. “The more” disappears. And so the tragic character of the poem was not just a matter of content. The structure of the text itself expressed the tragic nature of the action it presented. The tragic character of the text was this unimpeachable “more” – the gap between the chorus and monologue – which set the “lyrical concentration” and pathos of the individual mind against the extensiveness of the epic event, the deeper logos of the gods. It was the gap between the individuality’s tragic situation and the complete action which an entire trilogy embodied, which in fact extended beyond the trilogy to events implied but never presented, like Oedipus’ parricide, and to myth in general, along with the relevant religious ritual and legal and political exigencies implied by the drama. The tragic character of the text explains A’s insistence that all human communication take place in fragments (EO1, 151-3 / SKS 2, 2

Our ears may need some adjusting to this language, a remnant of Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen at the time, and Heiberg, the critic and dramatist, specifically. See Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic,’” 125 n81-82.

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150-2). But the epic “more” is a function of time as well as textual space: the empty now of dialogue, monological reflections on the past, and the eternal validity of the gods which dawns as future via the chorus. The split between monologue and chorus, the individual and the universal (or, the social), is also that between time and eternity, between the finite, fragmentary coherence in which memory contends with forgetting, and the elusive glimpse of the Idea, a horizon, always postponed, against which man strives artistically in his attempt to interpret human life, divided as he is from the unified narrative which a “view like the God’s” provides. From vast skyscrapers to the darting of the poet’s pen, all art, claims ‘A,’ is a place for the buried (EO1, 152 / SKS 2, 151). Everything we make is posthumous (efterladt) because incomplete. Everything is inherited and at the same time left behind (Efterladenskab). This is the tragic fact which modernity comically represses and which Kierkegaard attempts once more to retrieve in a historically appropriately form.

Hamartia & Katharsis: Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy In a very Hegelian introduction to the concept of tragedy insisting on the actual historical development of the content of the universal concept and the dialectical nature of their relation, in which each is empty unless mediated by the other, ‘A’ orients the modern concept of tragedy in relation to Aristotle’s originary definition (EO1, 140 / SKS 2, 140). 3 Yet, the aesthetician who clings too exclusively to the Poetics risks emptying the formal definition of its content, and there3

As in Hegel’s Aesthetics, ‘A’ reduces the ancient Hero to objective, universal aims: “Therefore what principally counts in Greek drama whether tragedy or comedy, is the universal and essential element in the aim which the characters are realizing[.]” G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1206. Hegel’s ideas on modernity also had a clear influence: “Modern tragedy adopts into its own sphere from the start the principle of subjectivity. Therefore it takes for its proper subject matter and contents the subjective inner life of the character who is, as in classical tragedy, a purely individual embodiment of ethical powers[.]” G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1223. Beyond this, like ‘A’, Hegel identifies the comic with an engorged subjectivity. G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, pp. 1199-1202. In the Papirer, Kierkegaard makes extended use of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, which he quotes in the German, page and line number. See Pap. III A 186 (1841) / SKS Not8:39.1; Pap. III B 28, 29 (1841) (no SKS); Pap. IV C 108 (1842-43) / SKS Not12:7 / JP 2:1738; Pap. V B 60, p. 137 (no SKS); Pap. V B 72, 33 (1844) (no SKS); Pap. III C 34, pp. 270-72 (1841-42) / SKS Not10:1 / JP 5:5545; Pap. X 2 A 605, p. 433 / SKS NB17:32 / JP 6:6602.

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fore meaning.4 We should not separate the ancient from the modern absolutely. On the other hand, abandoning Aristotle’s authoritative work on tragedy would deprive tragedy of its concept, sentencing it once again to abstraction. A’s goal appears to be a kind of mediation between the ancient and the modern, to mark the identity and difference between them, illuminating the specifically modern features of what enlightened Europe has made and will make of the concept of tragedy. ‘A’ clearly orients the question of tragedy and its use in the diagnosis and treatment of the present age in a reading of the Poetics, bearing particularly on the twin concepts of hamartia and katharsis.

Hamartia, Then and Now Aristotle insists, ‘A’ observes, that the hero have hamartia (EO1, 143 / SKS 2, 143). 5 Hamartia focuses the collision in an agent like Oedipus

4

5

For more on Kierkegaard’s use of Hegel, Solger, and Tieck in his philosophy of tragedy, see Niels Thulstrup Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, pp. 224-229, 276-277. For the Schelling background, see Anders Holm “Reflection’s Correlative to Fate: Figures of Dependence in Søren Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999. For hamartia in the german idealists in general, from Schelling through Hegel to Von Fritz’s criticism of these speculative interpretations, see J. M. Bremer Hamartia, pp. 87-89. In his Jena lectures on The Philosophy of Art, Schelling introduced a new concept of ‘the tragic’ which departed from the understanding of tragedy in terms of tragic effect. For a discussion relative to Kierkegaard, see, again, Anders Holm “Reflection’s Correlative to Fate: Figures of Dependence in Søren Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, p. 151. For Schelling, the “innermost spirit of Greek tragedy” which the philosopher discovers is a struggle between individual freedom and the power of necessity. In a proto-Kierkegaardian gesture, writes Holm, “Schelling’s interest in Greek tragedy” is “a kind of autocritique of his own idealist project: the tragedies teach us that individual freedom is in fact limited not by external opposition by a kind of internal undermining.” Freedom and necessity, individual and universal, need to establish a higher unity dialectically. Hegel historicizes this same idea in both his Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1209, and the Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 279, where preflective social morality (Sittlichkeit) is said to divide against itself in the objective laws of state and religion. For an exclusive treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of the Poetics, see Daniel Greenspan “The Rebirth of Tragedy at the End of Modernity: Kierkegaard’s Use of Aristotle’s Poetics” in Kierkegaard and the Greek World, vol. 1. See Karsten Friis Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic’” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 13, pp. 121 f. Curiously, Johansen, in his influential article, lumps Kierkegaard in with post-Lessing scholarship, where he also sticks Hegel, in which hamartia is interpreted in moral terms and katharsis becomes moral reconstruction. This is right for Hegel but wrong for Kierkegaard, who goes back to Aristotle’s

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of “deed” (Gjerning) and “suffering” (Liden), deliberate action and the onset of epic event (et episk Moment, Begivenhed) (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144). The guilt of tragedy lies between the responsibility of freedom and the fate one innocently suffers by necessity. As a result, authentically tragic guilt is ambiguously “guiltless.” Modern tragedies, on the other hand, turn on the hero’s unequivocal guilt. But this, again, is less a development of the dramatic category than it is an analysis of the “common consciousness of the age” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144). In analysing the art form Kierkegaard’s ‘A’ is engaged essentially in a historical psychology. Tragic action, when the epic element is taken into consideration, was as much event as action. But this was a function of the individual’s determination by the substance of the family, the state, and finally fate (EO1, 143 / SKS 2, 143). The destruction of an Oedipus was as much a suffering as it was a deed. Because modern tragedy deals with a reflected subject, one who has absorbed the world, without remainder, into thought, there is no longer any “epic background” (EO1, 144 / SKS 2, 144) against which choice operates. All situations can be explained immediately in rational terms, such as those, for example, of biological or historical determinisms, universally rational imperatives, utilitarian caculi, etc. In a Sartrean cut, all deeds are instantly cut off from the past, “can be explained in situation and lines” (EO1, 143 / SKS 2, 143). Every wound is cauterized instantly with the right theory. Action becomes transparent in situation, absorbing the excess and deficiency of the epic element (that more which is always missing) into the presence of the deed and its immediate circumstances. This transparency of situation occassions a choice which the tragic figure now bears painfully as his own, without remainder, occupying a self-same punctum which hamartia to criticize Hegel’s objectivized reading. It is the ambiguous innocence of the individual tragic figure in which the tragedy is located. Still, Johansen writes, “Kierkegaard in no way anticipates modern Aristotelian scholarship.” But despite his general praise for Lessing, it is clear enough that Kierkegaard’s reading of both hamartia and katharsis depart significantly from the moralist tradition Lessing perpetuates. Hamartia expresses the hero’s ambiguous innocence and subjection to forces beyond his control, outside of a moral scope. It does not, as with Lessing and his predecessors, as well as successors, concern individual virtue, and katharsis has nothing to do with morally regenerating an audience, with character building. On Lessing in Kierkegaard’s authorship, see in particular FT, 88 / SKS 4, 178 f. and CUP1, 63 / SKS 7, 66. Clyde Holler, the other more recent commentator on tragedy in Kierkegaard, emphasizes the return to Aristotle as a critique of Hegel, especially the leap in interpretation of hamartia. See Clyde Holler “Tragedy in the Context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Either/Or, p. 132.

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has swallowed every feature on the moral map surrounding it, every before and after, all the heres and yonders. Tragedy reformulated in modern terms demands a reassessment of the way in which tragic action unfolds, and, especially, the concept of its source in hamartia, tragic guilt. The introduction of unequivocal guilt in the modern age, the autonomy of individual reason to think and choose for itself (the freedom to be culpable), has an immediate effect on the structure of the drama.6 If the individual and his deed are the stuff of modern tragedy then it can be distinguished in the absence of monologue (EO1, 147 / SKS 2, 146-7). Along with the more of fate and the other epic remainders which converge in a tragic event, such as family history, divine nemesis, etc., the monologue itself vanishes, writes ‘A’ (and, he might have added, so does the chorus) (EO1, 147 / SKS 2, 146).7 As action becomes transparent in situation, thought becomes transparent in dialogue, which is to say, the textual remainders of monologue and chorus are absorbed together into the one totalizing, uncontested logos of the drama.

Katharsis In considering Aristotle’s notion of tragic katharsis, A’s role as historical psychologist compels him to focus on the emotion of pity (Medlidenhed), since it is the fragmenting of the social body in its loss of concretely relatable ideals that defines the comic consciousness of the age, and redefines hamartia as unequivocally individual guilt. To help clarify this development ‘A’ introduces the opposition of sorrow (Sorg) and pain (Smerte). The “suffering” of ancient tragedy diffused through an epic web of events, drawn away from its center in any individual deed. All deeds were absorbed in a mythically vast, anoriginal 6

7

Kierkegaard’s notion that the liberation of the individual in modernity coincides with a heightened sense of moral indebtedness, that modernity’s theoretically democratic impulse expresses itself actually in an ùthos of calculation and submission, certainly anticipates Nietszche’s analysis in the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals. For more recent developments along similar lines, see Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, whose concept of disciplinary power owes considerable debt to Kierkegaard by way of Heidegger’s notion of enframing (das Gestell). For a contemporary reading of enframing and its influence in critical theory, see Dana Belu “Thinking Technology, Thinking Nature” in Inquiry, 48 6, pp. 572-591. EO1, 147 / SKS 2, 146. The editors of SKS provide the alternate rendering of the passage, where Kierkegaard does include the chorus in the list of what’s vanished. This drops out of the Hong translation.

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network of violence, and the effect on the individuals ensnared in this web was sorrow. The tragic figure was never the center of the web, only its brightest strand. Sorrow penetrated the entire work of a tragedy (EO1, 148 / SKS 2, 148) in which the ambiguity between rational freedom and religious necessity made it impossible for any individual deed to be blamed. The greater the innocence, then, the greater this sorrow (EO1, 150 / SKS 2, 149). Ancient tragedies turned on the minimal “element of guilt” which attached this vague sorrow to a certain individual, like Oedipus. He did, after all, kill his father and share his mother’s bed, objectively violating the sanctity of two Ideas: ‘Family’ and ‘State.’ But this guilt remains “unreflected,” rather than internalized in the stuff of conscience: pity, upon which turned the katharsis of the spectator, was the right response. This in fact would be A’s objection to Hegel (EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155).8 It is grounded importantly in Aristotle’s insistence that the tragic effect of katharsis depends essentially on how the poet devises the hamartia. Kierkegaard drew particular attention to this passage in his journals, relating it to relevant passages in the Nicomachean 8

See Karsten Friis Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic’” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 13, p. 123. Johansen confirms that it is here that Kierkegaard parts ways with Hegel. The conflict of objective ideas is most important to Hegel, as opposed to the sorrow and pain of the hero, since “whereas Hegel is in search of a reconciliation of ideas, to Kierkegaard it is essential that the conflict is not ideally resolved. The ambiguity in the hero’s suffering has to be retained.” Cf. Clyde Holler “Tragedy in the Context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Either/Or, p. 128. Holler echoes Johansen’s interpretation. Aristotle is the tool Kierkegaard uses to beat Hegel back: “After the opening paragraphs, the reader may safely anticipate that the Aesthete will confront Hegel’s theory of tragedy with a reading of Aristotle’s hamartia that undermines the validity of Hegel’s conception” of tragic suffering as punishment well deserved. See G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1198: “A truly tragic suffering, on the contrary, is only inflicted on the individual agents as a consequence of their own deed which is both legitimate and, owing to the resulting collision, blameworthy, and for which their whole self is answerable.” Hegel focuses too closely on his own reading of Antigone, and neglects the epic nature of her suffering. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 284: “But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more inexcusable, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be violence and wring, to be ethical merely by accident, and, like Antigone, knowingly commits the crime.” “The critique of Hegel,” adds Holler, “lies in the destruction of his concept of tragedy, which in turn casts aspersions on both the method and results of the Phenomenology of Spirit.” Clyde Holler “Tragedy in the Context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Either/Or, p. 140. For a beginning of a critique of Hegel’s Aesthetics in Kierkegaard’s journals, see Pap. III C 34, 270-72 / SKS Not 10:1. Cf. JP 5:5545.

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Ethics which could illuminate it further.9 Interpreting the Antigone and ancient tragedy generally (following Hegel) as a dialectical clash between human and divine law reflects too modern a conception, focused exclusively on the isolated fact of the deed. Authentic Greek tragic interest is actually in the “transmission of Oedipus’ fate” (EO1, 156 / SKS 2, 155). It is a world that goes under with Oedipus, not just an individual. Tragedy unleashes an “objective grief” like “a force of nature.” Guilt broke upon Oedipus like a wave from behind and Antigone’s grief is an echo of her father’s. The modern elaboration of reflection and the ideal of rational responsibility transmute Greek sorrow into the more local pain of individual conscience, which the individual himself produces. While “the Greeks fear the hands of living gods”, modern man “fears the total guilt of conscience” (EO1, 148 / SKS 2, 148). Enter Raskolnikov, or his Danish cousin, Quidam, who we’ll meet in the next chapter. Guilt is something the individual concocts himself in the late hours at his writing table, as will Quidam, or sick and isolated on his couch.10

Antigone: From the Ancient Tragic to the Modern The ethical guilt which defines the modern understanding of hamartia, eliminating tragedy from the horizon and reducing action to the instant of the deed, as ‘A’ explains, marks a break with the innocence of aesthetic consciousness, be it the total innocence of Homeric man, whose actions were beyond him, or the relative innocence of the tragic hero’s ambiguous responsibility. Regaining the tragic means generating the katharsis of pity despite, or rather, in virtue of, the age’s exag9 10

See note 15, ch. 8. As Raskolnikov’s conscience suffers his murder, he is trapped on the couch in his sorry student room, where he languishes for most of the book. The languishing of intelligence becomes an important theme in modern fiction, and Quidam is another example. A third would be Rilke’s The Diary of Malte Laurid Briggs, which Rilke himself described in a letter to Clara: “Isn’t it this, that this test surpassed him, that he did not stand it in the actual, though of the idea of its necessity he was convinced, so much so that he sought it out instinctively until it attached itself to him and did not leave him anymore? The book of Malte Laurids, when it is written sometime, will be nothing but the book of this insight, demonstrated in one for whom it was too tremendous […] but like Raskolnikov he was left behind, exhausted by his deed, not continuing to act at the moment when action ought just to have begun, so that his newly won freedom turned upon him and rent him, defenceless as he was [.]” ‘Oct. 19, 1907’ in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke vol. 1, p. 181.

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gerations of subjectivity. Tragedy’s religious reflection in and past modernity demands of the age that it develop new categories to think this pagan-aesthetic phenomena: grace and divine compassion (Naade og Barmhjertighed) become ethically-religiously what tragedy was to human life aesthetically (EO1, 145 / SKS 2, 145). These are the “healing powers” corresponding to katharsis. Translating hamartia now in New Testament terms of inherited sin, katharsis returns from Aristotle’s rationalist conception of ‘error,’ a variety of ignorance, to its archaic sense of religious purification. Interpreted modernly, the maternal sympathies of tragedy and the aesthetic may disappear episodically into the rigorous paternalism of ethical conscience, but sympatheia returns in the turn back from ethics to religious subjectivity and its renewed sense of tragedy. The terrible “discrepancy” of sin had yet to appear in tragedy, whose epic element ultimately absorbed the sufferer and his sorrow – a kind of preliminary discrepancy – in tragedy’s “gentle continuity.” With the religious, the truly terrible nature of the truly discrepant individual can now be recognized and forgiven (EO1, 145-146 / SKS 2, 145-146), if not by the “motherly love that lulls the troubled one” which ‘A’ discovers in tragedy, then by a reflected version of it. No longer a relative ambiguity, now the coincidence of total innocence and total guilt transforms forgiveness into a paradoxical matter of fatherly love, a father’s love for a son, as an individual, as a moral-intellectual being, whom, however unfortunately, Kierkegaard tends to think of exclusively as male. What was guilt to the Greeks after the New Testament becomes sin. Sin is the category needed to fulfill the essay’s promise, to reflect the ancient category of tragedy in the modern, which as an exercise in aesthetics it can never do: “[n]ow, the religious is not an aesthetic category, and so the question of ‘the true tragic’ is still in suspense,” even within ancient tragedy itself. 11 The religious concepts which this 11

Karsten Friis Johansen “Kierkegaard on ‘the Tragic’” in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 13, pp. 117 f.: “The true counterpart is the religious category where the individual takes upon himself not a specific guilt, but ‘universal sin’ in all its [inexplicable] frightfullness, and therewith the possibility of mercy … Now, the religious is not an aesthetic category, and so the question of ‘the true tragic’ is still in suspense,” even within ancient tragedy itself. Johansen continues, “[T]he realm of the tragic is the ambiguous. To seek a unity of absolute innocence and absolute guilt in abstract terms is to raise a metaphysical question. To refer to the absolute unity of suffering and action in Christ is to speak religiously. The tragic must always be kept isolated from other categories – in this case from the metaphysical and the religious.” Johansen believes the tragic points towards a supercession in the religious, whereas in the religious I see its proper fulfillment. It is not that neither the Greeks

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reflection demands violate the limits of both the immediacy of the aesthetic, the undialectical nature of poetic thinking, and the unambiguous transparency of the ethical in which modern life is desperately stuck. Modern tragedy, ‘A’ believes, while it does reduce man and his misfortunes to the deed, making the individual unambiguosly responsible for what he does and suffers, doesn’t make his sin grand enough. Ethical responsibility ought to be exaggerated absurdly, beyond the particularity of the deed, in order to bring the essentially ideal nature of ethical commitment to light. No longer a single murder, but the whole of existence becomes a tragic liability, a loss that the individual conscience suffers, a death for which he is responsible. There ought to be, he says, a metaphysical guilt (EO1, 150 / SKS 2, 149). Without it, the inner resolve which ethics contributes is lost in the “half-measures” of aesthetics. The turn inward is avoided, along with the saving power of grace, the inexplicable katharsis of modernity. And so as modern consciousness is the orphan of Greek parents, ‘A’ develops the story of tragedy in the modern age through Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter. Reflection transforms Antigone’s sorrow into the pain of conscience (EO1, 154 / SKS 2, 153), but in such a way that the innocence of sorrow is retained as the reservoir upon which the pain draws. Her crime is displaced into the past, as her father’s, which in this version remains a secret to all but her, Oedipus included. Because a modern Antigone falls under “the category of reflection” her mood is an anxious one (EO1, 155 / SKS 2, 154). Her anxiety implies a break with the “present tense” of Greek life, inscribing her within its emptied space, now, from which she agonizes over past and future. Anxiety, he says, is a “genuine tragic category,” again suggesting that nor Christianity satisfies the concept of tragedy, as he implies, but rather that both do, and the latter in a more radical, more ideal way. The difference turns on the interpretation of the following passage from Either/Or, quoted by Johansen. Greek tragedy, he infers, was not truly tragic, because it remained unreflected: “The greater the guiltlessness, the greater the sorrow. If this is insisted upon, the tragic will be cancelled. An element of guilt always remains, but this element is not actually reflected subjectively; this is why the sorrow in Greek tragedy is so profound.” EO1, 149 / SKS 2, 149. This passage provides Greek tragic sorrow as an example of unreflected guilt, where the tragic is NOT cancelled, but preserved ambiguously in a guilt which both is and is not one’s own. If it was not actually tragic, then there would be nothing for modernity to reflect, and no occassion for A’s essay. Why, then, would ‘A’ use the word ‘tragedy’ at all? A’s point is that the tragic problem has become a subjective one, rather than the objective collision it had been for the Greeks. It is not a matter of the “true tragic,” as Johansen insists, but what constitutes the tragic at which point in time, in what way tragedy remains the essential category of human experience.

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genuine tragedy begins after both the Greek and modern forms expire – modern tragedy a historical expense in European culture’s accomplishing the essence of a Greek idea (EO1, 155 / SKS 2, 154).12 Antigone’s tragedy is staged now on the invisible scene of interiority, framed by a heightened self-consciousness that comes with secretkeeping and the enhanced awareness of time that the mood of anxiety governs (i. e., the lapse of a criminal present permanently into the past, and the constant projection into a future one must face, such as that of forgiveness, or punishment). The modern element is the amphiboly in her pain that comes with the secret of her father’s guilt (EO1, 161 / SKS 2, 159). The crime is no longer the deed itself, but knowledge of it combined with her sympathic sorrowing with the criminal. Sophocles’ Oedipus, too, contained a secret, but unconsciously, like a letterbox or a locket. This secret, once reflected on dramatically, would be evacuated. This is aesthetics, be it the dialectic of drama, or Hegel’s Concept. A gap in knowledge is filled, an ambiguity resolved – the locket opened and a single Truth, finally, seen. The self-same voice of the play, or Geist, mediates and absorbs the difference or conflict within it. But the ethical-religious secret of the modern Antigone (or later, of Abraham) cannot be spoiled. She will never know what her father knew, since he is gone, and couldn’t have asked while he lived for fear of disclosing it to him. She embodies a kind of moral paradox, guilty of no crime but his, although he may have inhabited an innocence she has lost due to her ambiguous knowledge. She has “done” nothing. Her guilt is what she knows, and, even more importantly, what she doesn’t. It is this ignorance that focuses her sorrow into tragic pain, the secret within her knowledge: she is incapable of discovering whether Oedipus knew of his crimes (EO1, 161 / SKS 2, 160). Like Quidam, another tragic figure we’ll soon meet, she cannot confess or repent, because her guilt is ambiguously undecided. This tension, ‘A’ writes, makes her a mother (EO1, 158 / SKS 2, 156). But unable to 12

Admittedly, Kierkegaard is a bit vague here. The text reads: “Furthermore, Anxiety always contains a reflection on time, for I cannot be anxious about the present but only about the past or the future, but the past and the future, kept in opposition to each other in such a way that the present vanishes, are categories of reflection. Greek sorrow, however, like all Greek life, is in the present, and therefore the sorrow is deeper but the pain less. Anxiety, therefore, belongs essentially to the tragic.” EO1, 155 / SKS 2, 154. This suggests that the Greeks were neither anxious nor tragic. But in other works such as Stages on Life’s Way and the Concept of Anxiety we will read that the Greeks, too, had an anxiety in relation to fate and the oracle, and that their light-minded, plastic beauty contained a sadness and anxiety as a latency. It is a matter of developing these in the direction of religion.

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marry or consummate her painful isolation with anyone but ‘A’ himself, and even then only in his own imaginations (she has breathed herself into him, as a mood, he confesses, in a night of erotics, [EO1, 153 / SKS 2, 152]), her true husband is this secret (EO1, 157 / SKS 2, 156). It represents a gap or lack in knowledge that corresponds to an excess – a more which confession, were it possible, would recover. ‘A’ makes her a mother as well as a bride, while paradoxically insisting on her virginity. How, then, and to whom, or perhaps what, does she give birth? When does the pregnancy – the secret – parturate? Tragedy becomes possible again once modern tragedy (and modern subjectivity) has expired. It becomes possible for children of a new Antigone. We are children of her virgin marriage to the secret, an Idea both personal and historical, an immaculate birth generated of the difference between individual conscience and the universality expressed in the race. The ‘objective dialectic’ of family in A’s revision of modern tragedy, the return of piety and a renewed sense of generations, imbues the individual with a content without which tragic collision is impossible. This was the aesthetically ambiguous element forsaken by modern tragedy and its German idealist interpreters. Without the accrued stuff of time and flesh only the transparency of individual thought and rational responsibility remain. But this renewed sense of substance is likewise complicated by the absolute cut of the individual from the family tree with the advent of a tragic secret. A redemeed tragedy demands the return of an objective necessity operating on the individual from above, and, at the same time, a radicalization of individual autonomy below, through the medium of reflection. The tension that results is an absolute collision between the individual and the universal, as opposed to the relative, objective collisions of the ancients (between Ideas, religious forces such as ‘family’ and ‘state,’ which collide disastrously in both Oedipus and his daughter).13 This is the amphiboly A’s Antigone embodies, which demands from the dramatist a renewed and heightened ability for monologues (EO1, 162 / SKS 2, 160). Hence, in the following chapter, we’re forced to sift through more than 200 pages of Quidam’s diaried soliloquy, a tragic monologue to end all tragic monologues (Frater Taciturnus, as well, could be read as Quidam’s chorus, 13

More obvious in Antigone’s case, for Oedipus, too, tragedy turns on the mutual crossing of family against city. The truth about his lineage puts him agonizingly at odds with the moral-political order of Thebes, which he and his royal family, above all, represent. Alternatively, taking his place in the city as king and wife of the widowed queen puts him incestuously at odds with the moral-religious order governing the hearth.

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commenting on his pathos once the diary has broken off, as if in a concluding ode, from the standpoint of a God). ‘A’ produces the tragic collision in Antigone by introducing romantic love as an obstacle to filial piety. The individualistic theme of erotic love which in the original play is merely part of the aftershock, breaking finally against Creon in the suicide of his son, Haemon (Antigone’s lover), in Kierkegaard’s modernized version takes over the dominant role of philia. Rather than the instinctive pieties of a daughter pitting Antigone against the generic contrivance of the State, ‘A’ gives us a conflict between the instinct of family and the infinitizing of eros, an interiorizing drive, on Kierkegaard’s reading, through which Antigone reflects herself out of the genus of family constituting half the crucible of the first version of this play (EO1, 163 / SKS 2, 161). No longer the unconscious universal of family competing against the reflected one of the state, two objective commitments colliding in the same figure, Antigone now embodies a conflict between the subjectively private demands of love and the objective telos of family. Because of her unique family history, falling in love with Haemon strands Antigone in a collision between two kinds of love which customarily complement one another: eros and philia, the identity of the family customarily extending itself through the incorporation of the erotic difference on which eros depends.14 A civilized eros reflects the universal of family. It is the family one chooses, as marriage and family reflect the intimacy of eros universally, making it public business. For Antigone, eros and philia have become crossed. In her tragically inverted world it is eros that demands disclosure, the loyal daughter’s confession of her father’s terrible secret, while the secrets of familial love become an individuating factor.15 Keeping the terrible family secret makes her impossible as a lover. As in the incest of the original Oedipus story, the transcendence of eros and the immanence of philia are divided, crossed, and turned against one another. For Antigone the competing Ideas of love and ethics are co-conspirators in their mutual failure, taking her down with them. With Antigone’s tragic circumstance as a model, Kierkegaard describes the modern experience of freedom, like her love, in such a way that the exercise of freedom becomes an impossibility. The collision between the individual and the universal, then, or a revision of it, in 14 15

See Giles Deleuze “The Problem of Oedipus” in Anti-Oedipus, pp. 154-166. Hannah Arendt The Human Condition, pp. 51-55. For Arendt, both Christianity and eros represent purely private impulses of withdrawal from the social world.

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which two different kinds of commitment to ‘the Idea’ lock heads – the aesthetic-erotic and the filial-ethical – in the new Antigone mounts to the point where action becomes impossible (EO1, 164 / SKS 2, 162). This is Kierkegaard’s point: it is only through this experience of impossibility that the third type of ideal commitment emerges: the religious. Only in death does the individual subject to modern tragic choice arrive at the far shore of action. The lover’s task is to wrest her secrets from her, since the secret is the axis about which eros turns. But when Antigone confesses her secret, she expires. It is the spiritual knot she is built around. Only death frees her from this ghost which has her in its grip; then is she able to love (EO1, 164 / SKS 2, 162). She belongs to Haemon as she leaves him. To choose to love is to choose to renounce this love. This is the sad heart of Antigone’s tragedy as ‘A’ adjusts it to fit modern conceptions. While Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter to the state, there the state remains, a glorious consolation for his loss. Tragic choice in ancient tragedy meant the inevitability of a loss. But because their conflicts were objective (between family and state in both the Antigone and Iphigenia at Aulis, the two examples upon which Kierkegaard draws most extensively), a choice, in theory, was possible, a tragic choice in which violence in some form could not be avoided.16 Choice provided relief at a cost. But it was relief, all the same. Deliberating on action as had the ancient tragic poets, Kierkegaard insists on the tragic nature of Antigone’s predicament and, by extension, all tragic heroes, as the impossibility of choice. But now there are no tragic economies in which one good is sacrificed for another. When Antigone chooses love at the expense of a daughter’s piety, even this love is denied her. Not to marry consigns her to a dead parent, a living burial like the first Antigone within the invisible walls of her father’s secret, rather than Creon’s underground chamber. Modern tragedy introduces subjectivity into the tragic equation, dividing the objective forces of family, rational politics, one god or set of gods and another, etc., against themselves in the reflective space of individual conscience: Antigone, for example, is divided erotically between the obligation to two families, past and future, father and husband. By subjectivizing ancient tragedy, pursuing the Euripidean line of flight, that of reflection,17 Kierkegaard turns Greece against Greece and in16

17

See Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 25. Nussbaum, most influentially, understands tragic choice as an irresolveable conflict of values, in which transgression of some kind is inevitable. Fear and Trembling identifies this trend with Sophocles’ Philoctetes, more than any other play. But it is generally attributed by scholarship to Euripides.

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troduces a radicalized tragedy in which any choice, even the choice of a partial loss, relative violence, is in principle impossible. To make a choice is to be defeated. It is more Greek than the Greeks. Antigone’s father and the spiritual laws that protect him, the gods of conscience, take their revenge on her disloyalty. But they don’t do it in the exterior, driving her like her father to blindness and exile. They attack her from within. These are the new hunting grounds of nemesis. This is the true expression of tragedy for a modern audience which the theatricality of aesthetes, seduced by a metaphysician’s story about the autonomy of human reason and its deeds, fails to produce. The path to a redeemed tragedy moves through the radicalized guilt of ethics and transplants the pagan holiness of the spectacle into the sanctum sanctorum of conscience. This inner sanctuary exudes no aesthetic interest. It is not for being seen (EO1, 149 / SKS 2, 148). The developments immanent in tragedy as an art form for ‘A’ lie well beyond Greek tragedy as well as its modern counterpart, beyond both aesthetics and ethics. They belong to the sphere of tragic religion.

Christianity and the Rebirth of the Tragic While “[m]odern tragedy is not tragic at all, Greek tragedy is not the true tragic,” either, “since it is alien to reflected subjectivity.”18 Though enlightened, ethical consciousness fails to take the collisions of tragedy seriously, eliminating exceptional figures of irrecuperable ignorance and discrepancy such as Socrates or Abraham in the solvent of the universal – leavening them rhetorically in Aristophanic caricature or bourgeois sermons, or sentencing them to death – it does the useful work of inadvertently demonstrating a comic contradiction at the center of tragedy. In ancient tragedy, the individual representative and victim of conflicted, objective Ideas such as ‘Family’ or ‘State’ must annul themself within them. Tragedy makes sport of puppets without a will or a mind to call their own,19 slaves with no reflective distance or 18

19

See note 11, ch. 6. For Johansen the metaphysical unity of guilt and innocence is a philosophical gesture which takes us beyond the aesthetic, but, I would argue, the religious movement brings us back, again, in a radicalized sense. For the Greeks, will or choice (prohairesis) was typically an extension of deliberative intelligence (logizesthai, bouleusthai), and in Aristotle, specifically, always cooperating with desire, never a separate faculty. It was arguably St. Augustine who first developed the notion of a faculty of the will, independent of reason and desire. See Karl Jaspers Plato and Augustine, p. 89; Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind,

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freedom from the Idea they embody.20 Tragic protagonists are moved about like paperweights, inanimate, but, and here is the joke, speaking nonetheless. This vision of the comic side of tragedy we’ll see in the next chapter is crucial to the passage from a pagan to a Christian understanding of it. According to A’s thoughts on a modern age dominated by an ethics of the Concept and the abstraction of its ‘deeds,’ the tragic collisions between individual and universal which ethics allegedly resolves by absorbing the flesh and history of these collisions into the abstract eternities of reason, makes ethics (in the Kantian sense of pure categories of Reason, or the Hegelian sense of a logic of existence) the biggest comedy of them all. Ethics engenders empty individuals dissolved in advance in one or another abstract universal, in state law, for instance, or a calculative, bureaucratic rationality and the ironic freedoms of bourgeois routine, rather than the concrete filial or civicreligious ideas of the ancients. The ethical position represented by Judge William of Either/Or’s second volume, for instance, becomes obviously ludicrous: “The personality appears as the absolute that has its teleology in itself.” 21 This is fantasy at the level of culture, a self-dissolving comic parentheses between two stages of collision, the tragic age of the Greeks and our own. The correct understanding of tragedy in the modern age, however, opens the door to the religious ‘more’ of Christ within the tragic texts circulated by aesthetes, both ancient and modern. Christianity offers the only true expression for tragedy, which in one sense is no longer tragic (that is, no longer naive Greek aesthetics), but nevertheless fulfills the originally Greek tragic vision, which like Antigone’s love be-

20 21

pp. 84-110. According to Arendt, St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and its notion of the two laws battling within him (p. 68), spirit and flesh, one of which must be affirmed and the other denied, and Epictetus’ development of prohairesis as a “will” to approve of everything that comes to pass” (p. 76) as an “impression” whose independent reality and power over him he denies (p. 83), a simple “yes” and “no,” leads to the notion that there are not two laws, but one will, divided in two, which either says “yes” or “no” to action, which, in fact, must always divide itself between an affirmation and a corresponding denial, and is essentially free from deliberation and appetite (p. 88). See Augustine On Free Choice of the Will, iii.1.8-10, iii.3.33. Cf. SL, 414 / SKS 6, 384. The poet sees the idea, but his hero does not. EO2, 263 / SKS 3, 250. The Judge here is talking about a life reconciled with civic virtue, a “social, civic self,” in which the isolation of personal life is mediated by civic affairs, and “appears in a higher form.” EO1, 262-263 / SKS 3, 249-250. On this, see Joakim Garff “The esthetic is above all my element” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup, p. 63.

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gins where it concludes:22 Christ’s parousia is “in a sense the most profound tragedy,” we read, and still “infinitely more” (EO1, 142 / SKS 2, 142), since Christ is an “accidental person,” a man like any other, but the only one “with universal significance.” The contradiction embodied in Christ (and, we’ll see in chapter nine, in Adam) develops the aesthetic-objective collision in Sophocles’ Antigone between civic reason and the world of forces, an epic world of blood, divine nemesis and overwhelming passions, of irrational powers de-centering the rational individual and society from without, into a potentially religious collision within the religiously reflected subject. Christ is a tragic idea to which modern subjects must subject themselves if the profound sorrow and profound joy of human life is to be recovered. Although ‘A’ is apparently a creature of aesthetics, it is Christ, he writes, who exemplifies tragedy in the modern age, the unity of absolute guilt and absolute innocence – Olympic light and the mysteries of earth and flesh – in a metaphysical category (EO1, 150 / SKS 2, 149). It will be the Quidam of Stages on Life’s Way, an aesthetic figure caught in a latently religious contradiction, who inaugurates the leap from Antigone’s paralysis to the possibility of tragedy’s properly religious expression in a total, metaphysical guilt. This guilt of Quidam’s, exaggerated dialectically, idealized to the point of universality, however, inflames itself ultimately in the interest of a collapse of metaphysical thinking. It is moved by a desire for self-sacrifice, the recognition of sin and the katharseis of grace, rather than the metaphysician’s love of the Concept.

22

Again, on this point, I differ from Johansen, who thinks that Christianity leaves the tragic behind, rather than realizing its paradoxical essence. For Johansen the true tragic points beyond both Greece and Modernity, but can never be realized, since it is an aesthetic concept. This makes it a paradoxical category, on my reading, which becomes possible as it exceeds its own categories. Johansen would have to conclude, on the other hand, that it is merely hypothetical. It never existed and it never will. Rather, here in Either/Or and beyond, Kierkegaard translates religious latencies in Greek tragedy, in a passage through ethics, and an ethical crisis, which ethics cannot address, into a more developed, religious expression. Johanssen does just what Kierkegaard warns against in the first pages of the essay, dividing modern and ancient tragedy, and inadvertently emptying them both. Rather, ‘A’ implies, we ought to think them together vis a vis their hermeneutical retrieval in a Christian, post-modern age.

Chapter 7 Stages on Life’s Way: Hamartia after Modernity The Impossibility of Eros and the Tragedy of Recollection Quidam, the fictional protagonist of Stages on Life’s Way, more than any other character in Kierkegaard’s ensemble of fictional characters, pseudonymous authors included, embodies the philosophical way of life, at least in the modern sense. In Quidam the abstract force of dialectics pursues the tragically conflicted failure implicit in its convergence with the passions and ambiguity of human experience, necessarily, like a fate, heedless of the suffering this imposes on the dialectician, the individual thinker himself. Stages, however, initially develops the modern problem of abstract thinking amidst the concreteness of Greek marble and the enthusiasms of the grape, through the metaphor of Eros and the recollection of a drinking party entitled In Vino Veritas. Despite the obvious parallel between William Afham’s narration of the drinking party with Apollodorus’ recollection in Plato’s Symposium, neither Socrates nor Plato is ever mentioned. Platonic language was not a Greek enough Greek to find a place in the paeans of this lusty crew. Rather, it is the naive Greece in which thinking was still at home in the world that inspires these speeches. Socrates, for Kierkegaard, put an end to that. As a figure of absolute negation – explains The Concept of Irony – the death sentence carried out by Athens was in one sense a justifiable measure of self-defense. Of course this vision of an innocent Greece is as naive as the dreaming intelligence it imagines. This was not lost on Kierkegaard, as we’ll soon see. For now, in the mouths of the aesthete, Greece returns with all the balmy innocence that fantasy can muster, so that the tormented guilt of Quidam’s diary to follow, when this false innocence collapses, may carry the reflection of ancient tragedy in modernity forward to its proper religious expression in Abraham, to which Quidam’s fatally distorted personality aspires.

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The Preface to In Vino Veritas pays tribute, in fact, to an essential difference between two types of reference to the past: memory (at huske) and recollection (at erindre) (SL, 9 / SKS 6, 17). While recollection, including the Platonic variety, will ultimately be the calling card of a deficient life-view when seen within the authorship as a whole, it is already one step beyond memory, the spiritless observation that for Kierkegaard marks the age. Poetic recollection is the “strenuous and conscientious” birth of ideality in a person (SL, 10 / SKS 6, 18). Recollection is something one lives and breathes, a crafting within which the craftsperson includes himself, while the impersonal objectivity of memory is the indiscriminate (SL, 10 / SKS 6, 18). As experience, anything that qualifies must be intelligible, memorable as experience, subject to the narratives of recollection, or at least the ledgers of memory. But a problem arises for philosophers and the cultures they engender when reason experiences that which lies at the limit of both reason and experience (of an experience, that is, whose conditions are prescribed by reason).1 One of these experiences challenging the authority of the philosopher’s logos is the experience of God as the impossible, the possibility of the impossible. 2 William Afham explains the central problem of Stages along similar lines. Both the recollections of poets and philosophers as well as the mechanisms of modern memory want to recoup a loss incurred by reflection, to recover the hallowed immediacy from which reflection departs, to include within thinking that alleged plenum which came before it. They want to close the irritating gap between thinking and being and get an immediate experience of what is. “That is your problem, there, in the amygdala. That is your sadness!” says the psychologist. “This, this is 1

2

More recently this very Kierkegaardian question has flourished in the debate between the Catholic Phenomenologist, Jean Luc Marion, and his a/theistic compatriot, Jacques Derrida. What is the best description of how an experience of the impossible gets underway? Is it in terms of the Christian mystics hyperousios, as Marion claims, where conceptual “presence” yields to a super saturated “givenness,” whose brilliance undermines the operations of the concept? Or, as Derrida claims, is it in terms of absence and non-appearance, a moment of blindness in which the impossible intervenes in the economies of reason? See Marion “In The Name” in God, the Gift and Post-Modernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon. See Jacque Derrida “Sauf Le Nom” in On the Name. For an analysis of the debate, see John Caputo “Apostles of the Impossible” in God, the Gift, and Post-Modernism. The familiar ring in Heidegger of the same formulation sounds in Being and Time’s analysis of Being-towards-death. Death is “the possibility of the impossibility of anything at all,” the greatest of all possibilities, that which “outstrips” all the others, as God, for Kierkegaard, is absolute possibility. Martin Heidegger Being and Time, sec. 53.

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God!” the pagan proclaims, and so on. Memory and recollection both abide this contradiction between thinking and the loss of immediacy it presupposes, a condition condemning them to the infinite repetitions of a recuperation which is structurally impossible, because both memory and recollection destroy the experience they claim to reproduce. Why, when I try to remember my trip to Denmark, for instance, do I first remember the pictures I took while there? Not the place itself? The better the representation, the more it tends to replace the original. But, by the same token, only what is forgotten can be recollected, again. The art of recollecting also implies a kind of forgetting (SL, 13 / SKS 6, 21). Recollection begins with a loss. According to the doctrine of aesthetic recollection, my trip isn’t represented or remembered in the photos. It returns in and through them as representation. This poetic recollection is the alternative to the moribund scrutinies of memory. It allegedly makes the repetition of an experience once again possible by discerning its essence. The poem, the photograph, the perfect word or phrase, they capture the feeling: what it is to have been there. They are better than actually being there, again, could we go back, because they are rinsed of the accidental, the intrusions of the meaningless, the yet-to-be formed or interpreted. We recollect the essential, while the inconsequential details, the ledgers of memory, are continually being wiped clean. This is the first of a series of dialectical moves described by and through the characters of Stages in which reflection tries more or less legitimately to recoup the lived immediacy of things, such as the joys of childhood or love’s passions (be it erotic or religious), which the objectifying science of memory and its facts fails to grasp. But within the dialectical logic of Stages, we’ll find, this immediacy is always already a romantic abstraction, the fantastic yearning for nature, for instance, which 19th century painters, confined to the stink, soot and noise of cities like Copenhagen expressed in the Rousseauian innocence of their bucolic scenes.3 But this is a fact yet undisclosed to the celebrants at Constantius’ party. The first candidate for thinking ‘the impossible’ as erotic immediacy is the poetic recollection of the aesthete. What is recollected can be thrown away, but just like Thor’s hammer, it returns, and not only that, like a dove it has a longing for the recollection, yes, like a dove, however often it is sold, that can never belong to anyone else because it always flies home. But no wonder, for it was recollection itself that hatched out what was recollected, and this 3

On the relation between the industrialization of city life and the rise of early modernism’s bucolic ideals, see T. J. Clark Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, ch. 2 generally.

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hatching is hidden and secret, solitary, and thus immune to any profane knowledge – in just the same way the bird will not sit on its egg if some stranger has touched it. (SL, 12 / SKS 6, 20)

Recollection creates what it recalls. It is a movement immanent to the genius of the poet himself. The art of recollection, the poet’s art, in this sense becomes an art of the self. The poet interprets reality as a perpetual modification of himself and the fruit of his own creative power. He absorbs and reflects the world in himself, both idealizing and destroying it (a move Judge William, in the name of ethics, will repeat). This interiority, the romantic dreaming of the aesthete, marks a break with the mechanical immediacy in which memory tabulates, monies are exchanged, marriages brokered, etc. This reflective break with immediacy announced in the preface introduces a tension that in Hegelian fashion the successive stages of existence – aesthetic, ethical and religious – staged most clearly in Stages bears out. Poetic thinking is the first of several attempts to seduce human reflection’s elusive Other into the ring of reflection, where the rule of mediation has been established ahead of time and thought can finally return to itself, self-satisfied, like Aristotle’s prime mover or Hegel’s Concept. It is the first misguided attempt at the impossibility of thinking what Climacus will call the “absolutely different,” which, we’ll see in chapter eleven, tragically and paradoxically both grounds and transcends human understanding. The aesthete mistakes reason’s Other for a particular (a particular woman, for instance) in which the Idea, of beauty or enjoyment, in his case, is reflected, through which he can have it. The incommensurability between this Idea and actual experience which poetic thinking contains, although in a repressed form, reflection itself can never resolve, since reflection is already leveraged beyond its means as an element of what will turn out to be a fundamentally religious problem.

“Erotic Understanding” and the Repression of Tragedy In the drinking party that follows, the dream of immediacy reveals itself as the fantasy of erotic love (Elskov), where passion, intoxication, secrecy and evanescence pervade the scene. The participants appear and vanish like ghosts with the night. Their world is one which naturally recedes from view, like dreams or gods upon inspection. Recollection differs from the durable objectivity of memory, in which, like experimenting science, I might repeatedly return to the same observation. In this sense, recollection has an “erotic understanding” (SL, 15 / SKS 6, 23).

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Erotic understanding comes with the initiation in which the poetlover submits to the god of Love. The “work of recollection is always blessed” and “not only the one about to give birth but above all the one who is recollecting is in blessed circumstances” (SL, 19 / SKS 6, 26), says Afham in his speech. Eros presides over Constantius’ symposium as the birthplace of the most rudimentary form of reflection, the romantic reflection of the aesthete, the divine worship of poetic recollection. In the classical spirit recalled by their symposium, like Plato’s Socrates, the work of these poets also has a kind of religious dedication.4 But as a strictly pagan god, the worship of Eros is immediate, meaning the worshipper relates to the god externally. As Eremita announces at the banquet, “‘immediately’ is the most divine of all categories” and “the departure point of the divine in life” (SL, 23 / SKS 6, 29). Worship has not yet become dialectical, that is, a problem for reflection and interiority (as it became in Augustine). 5 Yet the Platonic Eros Afham has on loan, like that of Empedocles or Hesiod, is a mediator.6 It moves between chaos and creation, non-being and being, as the figure of the poet has already passed in Stages from the senseless, reflex of memory to the development of a self within the problematic realm of human freedom. As a mediator, the force of Eros compels the text at least, if not these characters, beyond their immediate absorption in romantic cult where the Idea disappears in the false immediacy of the “here and now” or “this and that,” the most universal and empty of designations. Romantic reflection as a kind of reflective immediacy expresses a contradiction that the aesthete himself cannot recognize. He is too inspired by his god. This divine immediacy demands a blindness and submission from the devotee that makes more robust reflection and the resolution in which reflection concludes, endorsed so optimistically by the ethical figure of the Judge, impossible. Eros, as the Young Man on loan from Constantius’ Repetition explains, cannot be explained. Its mysteries always remain concealed in a darkness (SL, 37 / SKS 6, 42). “Who would not feel alarmed if time and again people suddenly dropped 4

5

6

See JP 3:2408, 5:5699, regarding Symposium, 217e, where In Vino Veritas shows up as a latinized form of Plato’s own phrasing. Noted by Adrian Van Heerden “Does Love Cure the Tragic” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 69. See Augustine Confessions, x.1-26. Augustine’s God is discovered in a turning inward, away from the world, to the immanence of memory. Although, the turn toward immanence leads Augustine finally to the transcendence of this God above. Empedocles, fr. B17; Hesiod Theogony, 120.

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dead around him or had a convulsion without anyone’s being able to explain it” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 40). This is what love is like. Its thinking is terrifyingly archaic. The lover is sentenced to his passion in the same way that the epileptic was once bound inexplicably to the sacred disease. But, comically, this is a violent intervention which the lovers nevertheless celebrate “as the greatest happiness” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 40). When the gods bring death and chaos we “become alarmed,” but when they inspire love “one laughs at it instead, for the comic and the tragic are always in connection” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 41). The contradictions fuelling both tragedy and comedy, between meaning and nonsense, freedom and compulsion, culpability and innocence, make their first appearance in the divine possessions of Eros. In the first of the speeches, the Young Man connects the influence of Eros explicitly to both tragedy and tragic sacrifice. As in the pseudonyms more generally, the essence of the tragic is contradiction: “the tragic is suffering contradiction, and the comic is painless contradiction” (CUP1, 514 / SKS 7, 466). If we were to stop here, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous formulation of the tragic (and the comic) would not be so far from Hegel’s in the Phenomenology, or the Lectures on Aesthetics, which, we can say with confidence were a decisive influence.7 But like A’s treatment of tragic guilt, Constantius’ symposium extends and colors this “painful contradiction” (SL, 38 / SKS 6, 43) beyond Hegel’s purely dialectical expression. The painful contradiction “for the thinking person” is “that there is something that exercises its power everywhere yet cannot be thought” (SL, 38 / SKS 6, 43) – the tragic influence of the god. By refusing love and clinging to thought, by “letting life pass,” our Young Man, we read, makes either a tragic or comic sacrifice (SL, 38-9 / SKS 6, 43-44). Sacrificing life for an impossible idea rings of tragedy, as with an Ahab, for instance, destroying himself and his crew (all but Ishmael, of course, who lives to tell the tale) for the heroic ideal of revenge, but also comedy, should we replace the madness of suffering with the exalted oblivion of a Quixote, spinning out his life in fantasy. It is all a matter of whether the hero suffers his contradiction, fuming and stumbling on bone carved from the maiming jaw, or happily plays the fool for his audience, swiping harmlessly at windmills, scattering defenseless monks to the hills. In both cases, the contradictions exemplified by the Eros of Kierkegaard’s symposiasts lead to the madness pregnant in their attempt to think this power that cannot be thought. 7

See note 3, ch. 6.

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The madness of Eros and the irrational nature of his worship take on a less intellectual and more openly Bacchic tone when the time comes for the fashion designer to make his speech. The fashion designer knows women from experience, as a confidante, and outside of the duplicity of love between the sexes. These women, he says, in truth “form a chorus of the half-mad” to which he is “high priest” (SL, 71 / SKS 6, 70). They are “fanatic” and “bite” one another “like tarantulas,” passing their madness through the medium of blood. His boutique is the “place of sacrifice” where a woman becomes so “loony” that “not even a god could dismay her.” Her religious enthusiasms raise her, like Euripides’ bacchant, to the stature of a god: He who leads the throngs becomes Dionysus – ¡ÏÍÊÇÍÐmÑÒÇпÁÅÇÆÇ¿ÑÍÓÐ.8

To be filled with the god means death, as it did for the Dionysiac on the islands of Chios and Tenedos, sacrificed in his place.9 And, therefore, like the god whose role the bacchant imitatively assumes, one fashionista, the Fashion Designer invites us to imagine, is slain by the rest. The religion of Eros is closer to the Dionysian earth and the mysteries of death and nature than the Olympian heaven.10 Its language “is a natural language” made “not of sounds but of disguised cravings 8

9

10

Euripides Baachae, 115. As cited and translated by Kerenyi as an attestation to ritual fact. Karl Kerenyi Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 203. Walter Otto Dionysus: Myth and Cult, p. 107. Cf. p. 113 (n65a, n66): Plutarch Themistocles, xiii., et al., in Plutarch’s Lives; Porphyry de Abstinentia, ii. 55. Both speak of not only “human sacrifice in his cult but also of the ghastly ritual in which a man is torn to pieces.” For more on human sacrifice in Dionysus’ cult, see Karl Kerenyi Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, p. 202 (37n). We read of both priest’s and beautiful boys sacrificed in Dioysian cult on Lesbos, instead of a goat (Pausanias, ix. 8. 2.). Clement of Alexandria also refers to their mortal rite (Protrepticus, iii. 42.). For a discussion of the paradoxical bacchic joy in death and suffering, the joy of life and that of homophagy as prototypical for tragedy, see J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, p. 108. See Walter Otto Dionysus, p. 176. Otto ties Dionysus together with Eros and shows extensively the connection between Dionysiac cult and the symbology of death, the Erinyes and Hades. “The dying of the god is basic to his nature, since by it Dionysus is plainly associated with the powers of the underworld, and what is done to him is nothing but what he himself does” (p. 191). He is equated with Hades, and, as Zagreus, was first a chthonic deity (p. 191). The sphinx was said to be sent by Dionysus from Hades to Thebes, once a maenad, one of the Theban women Dionyus drove mad (p. 114). Both Dionysus and the Erinyes are worshipped as ÊÃÉ¿ÇËÇÁÇÐ. Aeschylus calls them Ê¿ÇË¿ÂÃÐ (p. 114). “[I]t cannot be denied that the god and his maenads, in their blood thirsty ecstasy of madness, approximate the forms of the world of the dead” (p. 115). Heraclitus attests that “Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the same” (p. 116; fr. B15).

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that” like the masked god himself “are continually changing roles” (SL, 72 / SKS 6, 71). The telos of this nature, the Judge clues us in a few pages later, is a meaning we touch on “in the mysteries” as opposed to an individual’s “act of freedom” (SL, 101-102 / SKS 6, 97). Romantic reflection attempts to sink back into nature in a Dionysia of intelligence. Johannes’ speech in turn brings the Dionysian essence of the erotic into full view. As a devotee of Eros, Johannes “listens with stethoscopic probity” and “discovers the dithyrambic beat of desire as an unconscious accompaniment” to the beloved’s glance, which “no thought, even less any word, is able to pursue” (SL, 78 / SKS 77). As the banquet ends, Afham openly declares the chthonic tenor of the banquet. These love-drunk aesthetes pour a libation to “the gods of the underworld,” a typical ritual substitute for the blood of animals, and hurl away their glasses “into annihilation” (SL, 80 / SKS 6, 80).11 This assembly of poets like the god they worship become ghosts themselves, “surprised by the dawn” with “an unheimlich effect” (SL, 82/ SKS 6, 80). They are “subterranean creatures” (SL, 82 / SKS 6, 80) who disappear into the earth and night like Dionysus slain or the avenging Erinyes, the daimones of the god’s tragedies who cleanse impieties and resolve religious contradictions (i. e., violations) with the shedding of human blood.12

The Judge: Terror and the Encounter with a God The banquet of the erotists has come to a close. Erotic love has its god, but this god is pagan (SL, 99-100 / SKS 6, 95-96), comments the Judge. Falling in love is an earthly “wonder” (Vidunder), which brings the understanding to a halt, “for falling in love is nature’s most profound myth” (SL, 117 / SKS 6, 112). This pre-Christian deity bears every resemblance to the daimķn that leapt upon Oedipus’ fate, the spirits of the irrational populating the world that Homer’s Olympus did its best to destroy. The judge continues to connect Eros with the earth, and, through earth and nature, with daimonic mystery religions such as those of Dionysus and Orpheus. If reflection is to have a ground, it 11

12

See Walter Burkert Homo Necans, p. 25; J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, p. 294. Both single out Dionysiac cult as the place of substitution. The Erinyes were creatures of the underworld. Dionysus, ritually killed in his cult, returns again, like a harvest from the seeds of last year’s threshing, the perpetual indwelling of life in death, at both the vegetable and animal level. See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, pp. 179-181, and chs. 7-10 generally.

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must plunge beneath it “like Orpheus,” or Demeter in the mysteries of Eleusis, bringing “the infatuation of love to the light of day” in a “transfiguration.” But the judge has a few things to add on the subject of religious madness, presenting us with a modification of Love’s pagan inspirations, rather than a wholesale rejection of them (although the altar at which he worships is just the marriage bed, what Kierkegaard would call the second paganism of a lapsed Christianity). The Judge’s worship is a resolute romanticism. His marriage perpetuates “the wonder” (cf. SL, 118, 121-123 / SKS 6, 113, 115-117) of falling in love, a wonder which emanates from god and which man understands through a providence that, like Eros, intelligence cannot penetrate. The beloved “is the god’s gift” and so the lover “must first be proposed to by the god himself” (SL, 121 / SKS 6, 115). This dispensation calls the understanding to a halt, which “stands still” in “believing” the wondrous and worships like a priest (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116). Wonder is the sign that “God is present in the consciousness” for “God cannot be there in any other way” (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116). But erotic wonder must be joined according to the Judge to a madness which “the Jews expressed” “by saying that the person who saw God must die,” “in the same way as the lover does when he sees the beloved and, which he also does, sees God” (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116). The experience of God, the Judge claims, is a terror that drives one mad. At the same time, he sanctifies the pagan wonder of Love in bourgeois marriage and the comfortable obligations of civil society. The marriage-happy judge miraculously weds the immediacy of pagan worship and the fleet foot of romantic love with the patience, sobriety and fear of the Biblical tradition, transforming Greek naiveté with the import of the concept of sin – he weds them, at least, in word. The first sign of this terror comes earlier, in William Afham’s preface to In Vino Veritas, where he alludes to the “terror [det Forfærdelige] in ‘thinking oneself immortal’ which Jacobi comments on” (SL, 10 / SKS 6, 18). Here is a terror worming into the heart of the aesthetic, silently anticipating the religious. The theme of immortality is part of a more general discussion of recollection, which is said to make a man immortal by making his life “uno tenore [one breath],” distilling essence from accident. “This terror only intervenes,” he says, “if one can keep recollection and memory distinct” (SL, 10-11 / SKS 6, 18-19) – if we can think the thought of recollection. The comment is a disruption in the text and goes more or less unexplained. Nevertheless, the single breath which recollection breathes is clearly a matter of relating to

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‘the Idea.’ Aesthic reflection is reflection enough to gather a rudimentary form of terror in the thought of immortality and recollection that “conjures away the present for its own sake” (SL, 11 / SKS 6, 19). Even poetic immortality is one that annihilates. The power of the Idea to destroy marks the first incarnation, in aesthetic garb, of the concepts of guilt and repentance before the Idea dominating poor Quidam (SL, 12,14 / SKS 6, 20,22). One should “feel homesickness for the home even though one is at home,” writes Afham (SL, 13 / SKS 6, 21). Repentance – “a recollection of guilt” (SL, 14 / SKS 6, 21) – in aesthetic terms means the sacrifice of the home one is nevertheless still living in, the lover one is still engaged with, etc., as instruments of the eternity of reflection, the birth of a “new ideality” (SL, 12 / SKS 6, 20) which replaces and preserves them. This possibility fills the aesthete with a base form of terror. What if this loss isn’t compensated? What if there is just loss? How do I know I will get this back? The banquet of In Vino Veritas, for instance, began with the music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. An “invisible spirit” had encompassed them in the dark of the woods; they were possessed as if by some daimķn (SL, 27 / SKS 6, 33). And though this was at first glance a prepossessing admiration which took them in its hand, the recollection of the spirit world invoked by Mozart’s opera also recalled the daimķn of the Commandatore, who, when the dancing is done, returns after death, a modern day Erinye, to drag Don Giovanni to hell. Both the banquet and the poet’s love begin with a loss, a death, that inevitably catches up with the aesthete. In Mozart’s opera it is the ghost of the Commandatore, while in the context of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous cast it is the ghost of depression and anxiety, like Quidam’s, a madness within which aesthetic pursuits collapse under the weight of reflection, as the mind engrossed in its solitude gradually purges itself of any other reality than its own, what one fine reader of Kierkegaard once called “a sorry hedonism” and “a panicked heart.”13 The Young Man, for one, is terrified. He alone senses this danger, the incommensurability of the Idea. His fear is “of such a strange kind that it illuminates specifically the comic,” he says, the unintelligibility of love: the highest a man can attain is likewise ventriloquism by the god, the madness of possession. The comedy is easily reversed, making the ludicrous a tremendous source of fear instead of laughter, a matter of tragically inexplicable violence.

13

John Updike Self-Consciousness, p. 221.

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These terrors of love which Eremita criticized as effeminacy in the Young Man, an element of its religious enthusiasms, are something the Judge has overcome. There is another terror, though, about which he speaks more cautiously. This is the terror of the “justified exception.” One must know the “terrible horror” (“forfærdeligt er det, en Rædsel”) of cutting the “branch of happiness” and subjecting himself to the “deadly torment” (Dødens Marter), we read, of making himself a martyr. “The break itself he must feel as a fatality and a horror” (SL, 177 / SKS 6, 164). These terrors and the madness in which they come are features of a religious encounter dividing the exception against the customary norms and prohibitions that make social life possible. Curiously, perhaps comically, despite his excurses on this justified exception, the Judge ultimately seals the madness of such an encounter in the institution of marriage, preferring its safety, regularity, and civic virtues to the suffering of the exile. The Judge’s defense of marriage as a higher, intensified madness is no mere upping the romantic ante of individual passion. There is a specific type of madness he has in mind: the madness of resolution, and when the climax of resolution and moral responsibility arrives the authentically tragic nature of reason reveals itself. “The language of the marriage ceremony is madness” in comparison with that of lovers. It is “dithyrambic” (SL, 92 / SKS 6, 90) and makes the passionate nonsense of their language (the joyous non-signifying of their laughter and cooing, writes another)14 safe and intelligible by comparison. The wedding tongue is more obscure in its divinity, in the bold venture of its promise, and anyone “who understands but half is bound to lose his senses” (SL, 165 / SKS 6, 154). Resolution is made in a divinely inspired language that drives the listener mad. The speaker is beyond himself, both himself and Other. Language is spoken, but not in the normal sense, not by anyone. With this connubial religion, the Judge raises the implicitly tragic opposition in paganism and its modern variants (i. e., romanticisms and idealisms) between the individual and the universal, actual moral circumstance and its governing Idea (Sensualism for the aesthete, Duty for the Judge), to the higher pitch which his “purification’s bath of resolution” allegedly resolves – though the reader suspects that, unlike Quidam, he has not really encountered the difficulty he describes. While the sensualists congregating in Constantius’ wooded bunker celebrate in their speeches a first hand experience of their god, the Judge’s phe14

Immanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity, p. 263.

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nomenology of religious life seems to take place at what Kierkegaard in the Present Age calls an “observational distance.”15 It does point, however, to a madness and terror in the first person that Quidam, in the diary which follows, records with journalistic rigor – “Whom a god would destroy he first makes mad” (SL, 267 / SKS 6, 249). Through the mounting hysteria of intelligence, Quidam develops existentially the tragic collisions implicit in the romantic devotions of the poet in the somber direction of religion: “It is religious crises that are gathering over me” (SL, 216 / SKS 6, 203). Like the occult gathering of the poets in In Vino Veritas, the possibilities Quidam imaginatively pursues are conjured “secretly;” they are nocturnal, like ghosts, and come to life “when the dead emerge from the grave and live their lives again” (SL, 211 / SKS 6, 198). The terror he manages to produce for himself are creatures of the individual imagination, like the visions of poetic Eros, shrouded by night and coming like the dead to the dead, ghosts drawn to other ghosts. He is a man of passion and imagination, more like a poet than a judge, which makes sense, since the collisions which Stages develop seem to leave the Judge relatively unaffected, the occasion for a healthy, edifying speech notwithstanding. It is in Quidam that the tragedy of logos initiated in aestheticism strives toward the tragic recognition of religious guilt, and a possible reversal and release through the climactic suffering of the intellect.

Quidam’s Guilt, Ancient Greece and “the God” Quidam is a creature of destroyed love. To recover, he must take up the religious, move beyond the pathos of intelligence and similarly be destroyed. This progression from erotism to religion is simultaneously a development in the object of worship from the pagan god of Eros lording over both poets and philosophers, inspiring both a Sappho and a Plato, to the paradoxical Christian god, as well as their corresponding moods. The Greek aesthetic wonder of the philosopher’s Eros joins to itself the Old Testament terror before God, where ‘erotic understanding’ finally encounters the contradiction and limit it had always already been struggling against. Quidam is one of Kierkegaard’s JewGreeks (botched precursor to Abraham, another, and 15

See Adrian Van Heerden “Does Love Cure the Tragic?” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 84. Van Heerden says something similar of the Judge, whose “understanding of the religious begins to ring hollow when sounded against Quidam’s understanding of it.”

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son of Adam, still one more), a borrowed expression which suggests a return to other Greeks than ours, since our Greeks, our enlightened inheritance, is basically philosophical; “not just [to] Plato and Aristotle, but also Sophocles and the great tragedians, who knew a thing or two about disasters and torn flesh.”16 For this progression to take place, the understanding will have to develop a new and tragic relation to the paradoxical experience of religion. This implicates us in a return to origins, the beginnings of Greek philosophy and the question of philosophy’s relation to other fields of thought, poetic and religious. For Kierkegaard, Greek poetry and Greek religion occupy the same space. It was their inability to distinguish between aesthetic immediacy and religious revelation that made the Greeks ‘pagans.’ Greek philosophy is as guilty as the poets of paganism, at least those pre-tragic poets in whom a logos shined rather than blinded, Plato and Aristotle no less naive than Homer, since recollection was a method they shared. It is “[i]n a far deeper sense than Plato and Aristotle [that] one can say that wonder is the starting point of knowledge” (SL, 348 / SKS 6, 323), writes Quidam. “[I]f one understands [forstaaer] to the point of wonder [Beundring],” one reaches “the point where wonder shipwrecks one’s understanding [Forstand]” (SL, 348 / SKS 6, 323).17 Religious wonder, Quidam’s selfdestruction demonstrates, is the end and not the beginning of understanding, as it had been for Greek philosophy. As a “demoniac character in the direction of the religious” (SL, 398 / SKS 6, 369) Quidam’s mad withdrawal into the generic Subject of philosophical reflection “is the condensed anticipation of the religious subjectivity” which lies beyond “the frontier of understanding that posits the misunderstanding” (SL, 428 / SKS 6, 397). The inclosing reserve of the endless dialectical circling of his possible guilt, challenging the stamina of the heartiest of readers, expresses an acculturated depression (SL, 385

16

17

John Caputo Against Ethics, p. 35. The figure of the JewGreek begins with Joyce’s Ulysses. Lyotard takes it up in The JewGreek and Derrida returns to it in Violence and Metaphysics. More recently, John Caputo stakes the claim of his own radical hermeneutics in the same outlands of this mutually excluded figure. Caputo reads Abraham as the Jew miscegenating the Greek legacy of the enlightened primacy of reason. John Caputo Against Ethics, p. 19. But Kierkegaard’s Abraham, and his Christianity, we’ll see, is already both Jewish and Greek. It ought to be noted that the experience of wonder that strikes the understanding is Beundring, a kind of admiration, while the wonder itself, before which the understanding comes to a halt, is Vidunderet, more literally “the Wonder” or “the Awesome.”

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/ SKS 6, 357) absorbing individuals like Quidam in its metaphysical mode of thinking (SL, 476 / SKS 6, 439). What happens when a god, Sophocles asked us, visits himself upon these men of reason? How is this encounter best described? Or, better still, in what way is it possible? Through Quidam, Kierkegaard attempts to describe this possibility given the categories of modern experience, categories that the return of tragedy ought to stretch past their limit. In Quidam, the path of dialectics doubles back to the blindness and destructions of tragedy, pursuing the luminous path philosophy had paved to the comic end in which it tragically falters. As with Oedipus, it is a matter of recognition, an act of knowledge, not physical violence, which exposes Quidam to the tragic contradiction embodied first in Stages by the symposiasts of In Vino Veritas: the moral-ontological center of their world, their god, the Idea of beauty, was an absurd phantom, a projection. Like the scene of the erotists so easily dissolved by first light, once the impossibility of the Judge’s prescription dawns on Quidam, once his engagement fails, the house he has built for himself in the Idea of a resolute love collapses all around him. Anxiety, depression, and then hallucinations set in. Emotional and physical reality, the blindness of the passions and the objectivity of memory, become confused. As readers, we know that Quidam has merely broken an engagement. His catastrophe is purely intellectual. But his collisions are also, importantly, contortions of the body, its perceptions, chest and gut. When the understanding fails, his able body breaks down, exposing the vulnerability of the flesh so often present in tragic scenes, flesh that needs protecting, and the possibility of religion in an encounter with the god.18 The religious madness beyond that of Eros or marriage, a feature of the guilt which brings Quidam to the brink of faith, brings the religious and physical pollution of plague together with the madness of animals (Quidam assumes, here, the journalistic persona of Simon the Leper): Why must I fill the desert with my shrieking and keep company with wild animals and while away the time for them with my howling? Are these then, my companions, are these the equals I am supposed to seek: the hungry monsters, or the dead, who are not afraid of being infected? (SL, 233 / SKS 6, 218)

It is also, once again, tied to the daimones of the dead, the hungry ghosts whose appetites our ancestors in Greece once appeased with 18

See John Caputo Against Ethics, pp. 198, 201. Caputo reads the Polynieces of Sophocles’ Antigone as a paradigmatic figure of the flesh, as opposed to the body.

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libations and sacrifice: “The one who is dead is the most powerful of all” (SL, 265 / SKS 6, 247).19 Unlike the romantic spirits populating the night of Copenhagen’s woods, Quidam is alone in his worship. Though, like the lover, it is madness that establishes the relation to the god, a madness now connected as much with the sickness and terror in man as it is with wonder, and the beatific power of the divine.

Understanding the Tragic: Quidam’s Guilty/Not Guilty Connecting tragedy with wonder, Gorgias, as Plutarch recalls, coined the following motto: The deceived is wiser than one not deceived. As an eminent artist of deceptions he believes might save his beloved from his inability to wed, it would be a fitting epigraph to Quidam’s diary. Instead, we find it adorning the title page of the Judge’s composition, a comic-ironic twist, perhaps, on the part of Kierkegaard, who likewise had the sober hand of the judge pen so much panegyric to the holy madness of resolute choice. Still, if only in word, the Judge does issue many warnings against the excesses of logos. This is advice from which a character like Quidam, who so neatly fits the mould of the madness he describes, would clearly benefit, whose madness is of a distinctly dialectical nature, an excess of reason. This defense of tragic fictions returns in the Judge’s defense of marriage (SL, 119 / SKS 6, 113) as well as Taciturnus’ commentary on the diary (SL, 445 / SKS 6, 412). With the recurrence of this quotation, Kierkegaard seems to name Attic tragedy as the literature which best introduces the figure of religious crisis anonymously dubbed Quidam. So far I have said alot about the tragic nature of a certain kind of religious encounter, about madness, violence, and the defeat of human reason, but not much about how the conceptual structure of tragedy per se applies to Quidam. Applying a specifically tragic structure to Quidam begins with the category that Quidam cherishes most: ambiguous guilt, the Guilty/Not Guilty adorning the title page of his diary, which develops the ambiguity over its torturously protracted course. The awful wonder, for Quidam, in which someone encounters a god, is a matter of coming to realize a guilt. Here the tragic collision of the poet between thinking and the Being whose recovery 19

On the family daimķn and Greek tragedy, see E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 42. The daimķn was thought by Rohde as well as Harrison to be the trace of an ancestor spirit. See Erwin Rohde Psyche; Jane Harrison Themis. Dodds argues against this.

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it desires – a home to which it longs to return – reaches its breaking point in the absolutely ambiguous guilt that, as we saw in Either/Or, builds on a classically tragic conception. Quidam will either expire in madness and social death, like your typical Greek-tragic figure, or conclude his repentance and focus his passion in atonement and a second (senere) immediacy. Since the diary breaks off, we have no way of knowing. As the self-satisfied figure of the Judge explains, the contradiction animating Quidam’s intellectual struggle is a radicalization of the erotic contradiction introduced initially at the drinking party between reflection and the aesthetic feint of immediacy. In this way the wonder of falling in love is taken up into the wonder of faith; the wonder of falling in love is taken up into a purely religious wonder; the absurdity of falling in love is taken up into a divine understanding with the absurdity of religiousness. (SL, 163 / SKS 6, 153).

This sends us back briefly, one last time, to Constantius’ symposium. The Young Man’s terror, it turns out, was no mere effeminacy. “Eros,” he already explained, “is the greatest contradiction which lets itself be thought” (SL, 33 / SKS 6, 38) (my trans.). This terror applies as much to the erotist as it does to any enlightened subject, any agent for whom the Idea matters and who retains the hope of grasping it immediately, in the world. Experience will always crush these men of reason in the vice of contradiction. Thinking, in its search for immediacies, its drive from reflection back through choice to a truth consonant with Being or Reality (e. g., the ousia of Love, the Good, etc.), stumbles tragically into self-parody. Love is an empty signifier, the Young Man claims, and the experience of love signifies nothing, returning us to the formula, still unexplained: the comic is the painless contradiction – the tragic is the pathos-filled contradiction. With the Young Man as our interpreter we can begin to make out the elements of this contradiction: sense, on the one hand, and, on the other, nonsense, empty speech, signification without any intuition to confirm it, without a signified. At first, it is the comic aspect of the contradiction that fascinates the Young Man. The comedy is an effect of the scepticism which he proudly claims characterizes the age (sceptics and romantics, for Kierkegaard, historically, are part of the same crowd). Because the young man is all reflection, “the third party, observing love,” because he is an observer to himself, all love is ludicrous to him. To be more precise, though, it is not love but the object of love, which has the Young Man stymied. This is where his contradiction resides: “What is it that one loves?” (SL, 34 / SKS 6, 39). A very Augustinian question, a very Der-

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ridean, Augustinian question. 20 Like the Bishop before him and that other, more recently departed, Algerian, Kierkegaard’s Young Man has no intelligent response. And herein lies the contradiction between reflection and the instant of passion, or, better put, the pathos-filled movement that gets experience (paschein) under way. Like the knight of faith, “[t]he lover cannot explain anything at all” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 41). The beloved is everything, a regulative ideal against which all values are measured, the Atlas-shoulder bearing up the lover’s world, but this everything vanishes into a nothing when the time comes to explain its ‘why’ (which is also its ‘what’). The world endlessly falls. A kiss is not a promise. A promise cannot express itself as a kiss. “The symbolic,” for the lover, “doesn’t mean anything at all” (SL, 36 / SKS 6, 41, my emphasis), and yet for the erotist the beloved becomes life’s most powerful symbol. It is comic, ludicrous, to claim that something meaningless – the cooing, clawing, automatic flesh of lovers – simultaneously means everything. This touches on the question of the unconscious acting on man.21 Constantius further explains this tragic-comic confrontation with the irrational in a proto-Freudian anecdote. “Suppose, for instance, that the pope started coughing the very moment he was about to place the crown on Napoleon’s head or that in the solemn moment of exchanging vows the bride and bridegroom began to sneeze – the comic would be apparent” (SL, 42 / SKS 6, 45). A psychopathology of everyday life, for example, spoils the comedy by giving the logos (an account, a ‘reason’) for just why reason might fail and the body take over in the moment of an absolute choice, a choice that reason itself gaurantees (“Yes, I believe I will marry you,” is what we really mean). It is no longer funny that the bride and groom are sneezing when we discover that the minister’s hands, quite accidentally, have curled themselves into a potently sexual metaphor, and that both bride and groom are superstitious virgins, terrified of the wedding night ahead. But a sneeze, we might hear the Young Man lament, is no less a promise than a kiss. Yet 20

21

quid ergo amo cum deum meum amo – “What do I love when I love my God?” See John Caputo “Apostles of the Impossible” in God, The Gift and PostModernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon, p. 198. Cf. Jacque Derrida Circumfessions, p. 122. This can be a god, as it was for Oedipus, or the mechanism of instinct, or perhaps something else acting on/in man, like History in Hegel and Marx, or even language, as with Lacan’s ‘Symbolic.’ Through characters like Quidam, and later Abraham, Kierkegaard returns psychologism to its archaic roots, interpreting anxiety and depression, as well as desires, as the expressions of divine possession, a matter of the involuntary in a “free, rational being.” SL, 42 / SKS 6, 45. He understands these passions intentionally, defining them in terms of their religious object and/or aim.

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this, absurdly, is what finally signifies the marriage. In the eyes of the observer, love, like a misplaced sneeze, is painlessly comic. To the lover it is tragic. He suffers so the audience might laugh. The source of his pain and their laughter, the contradiction embedded in the sneeze, is identical. Were the Young Man on that altar, a misplaced sneeze would be a tragic omen of the impossibility of marriage Quidam recognizes so painfully, fulfilled in the nuptual sealing of the lips. As the speeches on love continue their round, the relation between the comic and the tragic becomes clearer and also more clearly connected to the theme of crime, including the sexual. A cuckold like Othello, Constantius explains, is comic in relation to his wife because the pain he suffers is meaningless (SL, 49 / SKS 6, 52; SL, 51 / SKS 6, 53). A woman has no ethical collateral with which to act against him. She is like a child. Serious child crime is in a sense impossible. The more elaborate the crime, the more ludicrous the effect. It brings the child’s powerlessness in the realm of moral responsibility more clearly into view. The comic effect is a matter of the impossible. Because a woman is no rational agent and therefore has no ethical credentials, to attack her, to summon her to some confrontation, to force repentance from her would be a further humiliation, intensifying the comic effect of his predicament, its senselessness. For this reason, Constantius continues, Aristotle is right when he debars women from tragedy (SL, 54 / SKS 6, 56) (and, he may as well have added, children too). Like a table or a chair, they cannot meaningfully be punished. Their crimes cannot be repented or forgiven. But in relation to other men and the world whose governance we expect to find reflected back to us in a meaningful and moral order, this impossibility has a tragic effect (SL, 51 / SKS 6, 53). A man like Othello cannot avenge the infidelity against his wife and so he kills himself instead. If a small child were to commit a murder, another child for example, then by Constantius’ logic there is a joke in it somewhere. At least, he believes, this is where comedy and tragedy touch. And, maybe, in certain company, a certain mood, we might admit it. Still, in this example, the comic face changes its aspect; it turns tragic when we think of the victim’s family. Not because it is sad. The tragic is not ‘the sad’ or death per se. The tragic intervenes in the economies of justice (of reward and punishment, punisher and punished, pleasures and pains)22 when 22

For a theory of the roots of justice in the pleasurable dispensation of pains, as substitute repayment for an unpaid debt, see the second essay of Friedrich Nietzsche The Genealogy of Morals.

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there is no crime with which to charge the killer and no court to indict him, when there can be no punishment to balance the scales – when in some sense we can’t take him seriously or make sense of his crime. And this, quite seriously, is tragic.

Quidam’s Tragic Hamartia: Religion, Aesthetically Confused This comic-tragic circumstance is a crucial element of Quidam’s tragedy, the impossibility of repenting the murder into which his ethically frenzied mind has distorted his broken engagement (a blood sacrifice, we’ll examine more closely in a moment). Because he does not know why he will not undo this crime, return to the engagement, or even whether the crime has been committed, or will be in the future, he cannot repent. His situation is a radicalized version of King David’s, who in Taciturnus’ commentary sends a messenger out on a murder only to decide soon after that the murderous command be rescinded. He sends a second messenger to call back the first, but can’t know for some days whether the murder has been carried out or not (SL, 451 / SKS 6, 417). David, anyway, had reached a decision, decided against the kill. Quidam has not. “Suppose I become her murderer,” he writes. But as a figure of indecision, Quidam will never choose. His messenger will never return. He neither rescues his beloved nor kills her, assuredly. He neither marries her nor does not marry her. Quidam has no real insight into the religious impulse which turns the donation of love into an abomination of the ethical, which could make a man kill. He has no insight into the religious nature of his collisions, and so, likewise, no chance for atonement. Therefore the pain of repentance continues without end (SL, 345 / SKS 6, 321). Like Oedipus before him he has committed, at least in the juridical sense, no crime. Still, there is an offense, unintelligible and without explanation, and he suffers the consequences. It appears like a plague, a pollution infecting the intelligence, now, rather than the womb of Copenhagen soil or those of its society women. Though he knows not what, he believes there is some ghostly thing he is guilty of. He waits like Thebes upon the Oracle and the oracular intelligence of their king for this thing to emerge. The ineffable quality of this guilt ought to be a clue to its religious nature. But obsessed with the fact of a literal crime, Quidam is unable to move past aesthetics. He strands himself in the no man’s land of the demonic (a break with the Idea of the Good and the social order it organizes), and in his hyper-intellectual

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case a withdrawal into the dialectical gymnastics of ‘guilty/not guilty’ with which he fills his diaries. The objective contradictions unfolding visibly for the spectator through the crime and suffering of tragic figures like Oedipus and Antigone, between the archaic religion of the family and the rational one of the state, repeat themselves subjectively in Quidam’s tortured soliloquies. The conflicts into which Quidam must “plunge” on the outlands of the human and on the brink of religion are, he writes, “within me” (SL, 259 / SKS 6, 241). “O silence, silence, how can you bring a person into contradiction with himself” (SL, 290 / SKS 6, 269). Both comedy and tragedy for Quidam are features of interiority. Where the intelligence witnesses freely to its own mechanism, the tragic collision becomes great comic material. Imagine, a husband says to his wife, one morning, in bed, “you’ll never guess what you said in your sleep last night.” Through his eyes she can see and know herself as this mindless, sleeping thing – a corpse, almost, just lying there – breathing, twitching mechanically, and yes, maybe even speaking. The idea of this kind-of-dead and automated creature speaking, like the classically clumsy zombie, is funny. Even the worst, another man’s name, for instance, on his wife’s lips, by lunch-time is a tidy little joke for the husband. Sleep paralysis, on the other hand, where the mind is anchored to a body which, like the dead, refuses to wake, though virtually the same phenomenon, anyone who has experienced can confirm has the terror of the tragic. In this way comedy acts as a prophylactic against tragedy by acknowledging and accepting through laughter the traumas of sense the world offers: the inanity, for example, of agonizing for hours over what brand, of the hundreds available, of bread to buy, which is as funny for the observer as it is sad and frustrating for the mind stuck – with no criterion for rational choice – in such an impossible decision. The struggle between thought and action, possibility and actuality, freedom and choice, teeters between the tragedy of a soul whose essential appetite for logos is stuck like Simon the Leper with a language of empty syllables and the comedy of a passionate individual, a certain style of philosopher, for example, whose conceptual leaps while evincing all the manners of thought merely accompany the organ grinding of the academy with the drone of a voice, rather than the tapping of a monkey’s feet, no more intelligible to himself or others than the animal. Even more than the nonsense of animal language, of lovers, philosophers or talkers in their sleep, it is the perfectly grammatical constructions of a desouled body, the robotic freedom of Kubrick’s HAL for instance, an uncannily human artifact which makes us both smile and

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squirm, which best exemplify the tragic-comic in its relation to rational man. “Real competence in the comic,” which trains in “the most profound suffering,” “with a word magically transforms the rational creature called man into a Fratze [charicature]” (SL, 245 / SKS 6, 229). Like the epileptic or the neurotic, or Quidam’s Leper who “voluntarily” bears his “fate” and “freely suffer[s] necessity,” the rational animal from this perspective becomes a puppet who holds his own strings, as if puppets weren’t ludicrous enough, as in the calculative eroticism of a Don Juan, each of whose “1,003 mistresses” indicate that the mass of them as a whole “have no value” (SL, 293 / SKS 6, 272). The comedy and tragedy of this is made pathetically clear in Fellini’s version of the Don Juan Story, Casanova, where the ideally romantic myth collapses finally into the sexually mechanical body of Casanova’s erotic contest. The famous lover circles the baroque salon, satisfying woman after woman in an endless repetition of the same. He moves like a toy that the child winds in its hand and sets free only to joy in the speed and accident of its panic, the blindness of its mechanism. But this contradiction, for Kierkegaard, would not be enough to make Quidam properly tragic. It is too conceptual, too Hegelian. Religious terror is always in some sense about spilling blood. “In the name of pleasing the Lord, of propagating this seed, of fathering a whole generation, surely something must be killed, cut, and burned. What, after all, is religion all about?” 23 Quidam is not just a failed erotist, but also, in his twisted love, a murderer. As a an eminently modern figure, he ties Kierkegaard’s religious problematic to the ancient one of blood-guilt and the sacrifice appeasing it. On this ancient model, through the repetition of a crime the criminal becomes the sacrificial victim. His killer becomes an agent of justice in its earliest form, the bloody economy of the talios (social balance, of vengeance and merit) in which, as we saw in chapter one, the cult of Dionysus and its tragic stage were invested especially heavily.24 This crime of blood – like the crime of Periander’s incest with his mother, another 23

24

John Caputo Against Ethics, p. 197. See ch. 9 generally, “JewGreek bodies,” for Caputo’s phenomenology of the flesh of sacrifice, of religion’s desire for flesh, as well as the impulse of flesh to tend to other flesh, as in the case of Antigone and Polynieces. See J. P. Guepin The Tragic Paradox, pp. 151-159. Also, on the sexualization of ritual killing, particularly the killing of women, see Walter Burkert Homo Necans, pp. 58, 60 f., and ch. 7 generally: “[S]exuality is always intimately involved in ritual.” “Precisely because the act of killing is sexually charged, sexual abstinence is frequenly a part of preparing for sacrifice, for war, and for the hunt.”

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tragic figure from Quidam’s diary whose words recoiled upon him in madness, becoming an “inhuman monster” – “two who could not be contained in one person” (SL, 324-327 / SKS 6, 302-304) – is a cut that places the guilty one outside the bounds of civil society. The criminal must be excluded, driven out, sacrificed, lest terrible things ensue from the skies. Like Oedipus, Kierkegaard’s exceptions have “ventured out into the world from which mankind shrinks” (SL, 180 / SKS 6, 167). Horror marks out their territory and preserves it from the mass hand of the profane, who shrink from it instinctively. Quidam is for the moment a botched precursor of Abraham, what the Judge describes as the unjustified exception (justified, perhaps, in de Silentio’s Abraham). While Oedipus was forced into this position, Quidam, like Abraham, must choose his horror. They are both Pauline hybrids of Oedipus for the modern world, after Christianity, where it is now the inner life of thought and will that predominates. But rather than answer God’s terrible invitation to meet him atop Mt. Moriah, Quidam concocts his own terrors through the hypertrophy of an intellectual imagination. He has skipped the starting point of actuality and raced ahead towards pure dialectics, whose contradictions mean nothing without the flesh of the world in which to coil. Quidam’s terror is the terror of deliberations (Overveielses Forfærdelse) (SL, 183 / SKS 6, 170) – the paroxysm of choice in which his existence has been suspended. The terror acts on him from within, rather than without, because “the terrible” (det Forfærdelige), he says, “requires of my honor that I must think it” (SL, 272 / SKS 6, 254). The encounter with the terrible happens on the landscape of Quidam’s interior. According to his own reports the form of this terror is absolute, a sort of pure, phenomenologically reduced terror, an ideal terror when compared to the relative fears that claim actual objects, one acquired through the infinite variation of the imagination.25 “Actuality cannot terrify me” (SL, 323 / SKS 6, 301), he diarizes, because “the dreadful terrors of the imagination far outweigh the terrors of actuality” (SL, 328 / SKS 6, 305). Religious intelligence transports this daimoniac “out into the extremities” (SL, 346 / SKS 6, 321). Ancient tragedy, too, like the ritual of the ephebia, was a way for the city to explore its boundaries and limits. As Artemis of the hunt led the adolescent ephebe (preparing to enter into the life of the city) into the outland of the animal where the laws and customs of civil Greek society were temporarily suspended, 25

For imaginative variation as an essential tool of Husserlian phenomenology and the eidetic reduction, see Edmund Husserl Cartesian Meditations, iv, par. 34.

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Dionysus did the same, first on the mountain, and then, once civilized by Athens and inducted into Olympus, in the theatre. Murder, incest, and violences in general committed against the polis, in the context of religious rite, provided an experience of the limit of human society. The reality of these crimes clarified the political necessity of marking and preserving this limit while, at the same time, allowing the wildness beyond it, the home of divinities, for the Greeks, beyond human convention, to penetrate and revitalize the interior, if only for a moment. 26 Like Oedipus or the Bacchants, and perhaps Socrates as well, Quidam is a figure with “the courage to venture out into the extremities,” and in still another resemblance to both the Theban king and the Athenian gadfly, this courage is a matter of acting without a knowledge, a contradiction which stands ambivalently (as does Socrates at the end of the Symposium) between both the tragic and the comic. While Oedipus approaches the terrible warily, Quidam seeks rather than resists the tragic encounter with the terrible. Kierkegaard’s personae generally appear to have the same lust for the abyss.27 Quidam’s “depression hunts for the terrifying in all directions” (SL, 374 / SKS 26

27

See J. P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet “The Masked Dionysus” in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece and also Walter Burkert Homo Necans, p. 21. Burkert writes that “[f]eelings of fear and guilt are the necessary consequences of overstepping one’s inhibitions; yet human tradition, in the form of religion, clearly does not aim at removing or settling these tensions. On the contrary, they are purposefully heightened. Peace must reign within the group, for what is called for outside, offends within. Order has to be observed inside, the extraordinary finds release without. Outside, something utterly different, beyond the norm, frightening but fascinating, confronts the ordinary citizen living within the limits of the everyday world. It is surrounded by barriers to be broken down in a complicated, set way, corresponding to the ambivalence of the event: sacralization and desacralization around a central point where weapons, blood, and death establish a sense of human community. The irreversible event becomes a formative experience for all participants, provoking feelings of fear and guilt and increasing desire to make reparation, the groping attempt at restoration. For the barriers that had been broken before are now all the more willingly recognized. The rules are confirmed precisely in their anithetical tension. As an order embracing its opposite, always endangered yet capable of adaptation and development, this fluctuating balance entered the tradition of human culture. The power to kill and respect for life illuminate each other.” See Charles Taylor Sources of the Self, pp. 449-455. Taylor places Kierkegaard in the same category as Nietzsche, that of the “post-Romantics.” They share many features of romanticism, passionate individualism, for example, the expressive subject, who, like the artist, creates both himself and his world. But the post-romantic picture of the self is no longer a return to the innocent effusions of Nature as a moralvital source. Instead, the self is a site of conflict, even evil, transforming the still reasonable subject of the romantics, descended from the Renaissance Platonism of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the optimism of Rousseau, into a point of contact with

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6, 347). All “advice about keeping the terrible away is simply nauseating” to him, “because this advice does not understand what the terrible is” (SL, 374 / SKS 6, 347). There is a conception of the terrible that drives “the guilty one” towards rather than away from it. This conception is undoubtedly connected with God as the Wonder, with the rehabilitation and transfiguration of erotic love through the experience of madness of which the Judge spoke with such convincing sobriety. “The security of the infinite” is acquired “gradually with each instance of the terrible,” through an intimacy with “the thought that what he most fears will happen to him.” Sexual crime, like Periander’s incest, or Desdemona’s adultery, threatening the social fabric and individual identity, but especially murder, become the object of this terror in Quidam. “Suppose I become her murderer” (SL, 370 / SKS 6, 343). Though Quedam (his beloved) is safe and sound, soon enough “the most terrible crisis occurs. It seems [to him] as if [he] were a murderer” (SL, 313 / SKS 6, 290) – “I have a murder on my conscience, he writes” (SL, 394; cf. 331, 432, 447, 451 / SKS 6, 367; cf. 308, 400, 414, 417). Quidam’s tragic guilt, of course, bears no real blood. There is no crime, only the thought of crime, its interiorization. The “finishing blow of terror” “falls most tellingly when it strikes with his own guilt” (SL, 424 / SKS 6, 393). Though his guilt strains in the picture-less direction of religion, it nonetheless figures in the shape of Quedam, the fiancé he betrays for his melancholy retreat into himself. But do we know for certain that Quedam even exists? All we have is Quidam’s word – not the most reliable of narrators, by his own admission. In the diaries, anyway, Quedam has become a ghost that Quidam conjures himself (SL, 424 / SKS 6, 392). The relief of this guilt depends upon his recognizing the difference between the aestheticized fantasy of murder which the mind easily grasps, and the religious reality of a guilt of a different order, whose representation, conceptual or otherwise, is impossible, and against which the mind pointlessly strains: the unity of absolute innocence and absolute guilt which ‘A’ had identified in the figure of Christ. The difference between the possibility of murder and the deed itself may be great for some, like King David in Traciturnus’ story, but for Quidam actuality has been overtaken by possibility. Possibility, the possibility of guilt, correspondingly becomes relativized in its adequation to actuality. Quidam aestheticizes a non-human source which, though majestically powerful, takes no heed of human aims.

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his guilt and with “the purposeful passion of repentance” “sees terrors that do not exist” (SL, 426 / SKS 6, 395). But he cannot finish repenting because even the simple, objective guilt of murder remains, in its spectral character, undecided. Is she dead? Will she die? Might we still marry, live happily? A vague sense of doom attended by anxieties and despair, of halting indecision, introduces a tragic cut in Quidam’s present which divides it between the innocence of the past and the potential guilt which the future represents, were her body to float one day to the surface of one of Copenhagen’s lakes. Crimes committed in the past can be revealed, repented and atoned for along aesthetic lines, as in drama. All potentially dramatic guilts are capable of being purged, as with Oedipus’ mortification and exile. But there is no definitive discovery in religious drama. Reversal is always immanent. This is the lesson Quidam fails to learn, whose failure he suffers as a dialectical exhaustion which as the diary ends appears infinitely postponed. He is “unwearied in nonsense” (SL, 390 / SKS 6, 361). Quidam’s crimes are fantastic, loose shapes hovering alongside countless others in the inspired imaginations of a lunatic. They stand in for something which always escapes representation: the loss itself which representation or conceptualization always incurs, the sham presence of poetic inspiration in which the Young Man could also smell the offending aroma of sacrifice, the site of loss where the Idea resides, be it the false enjoyments of romanticism, the abstractions of the ethical universal or the joyful suffering of religion. Through his meditations on the terrible Quidam “becomes expert in practicing this thought,” wondering terribly “in his assurance of God’s love” (SL, 375 / SKS 6, 348) and exercising without conclusion the failure of reflection to recover its ground, the collision between reflection and actuality, the gate of choice through which he is no more able to pass than the eye of a needle.

The Unity of Comedy & Tragedy: Philosophy and the Beginning of the Religious The paganism which gave us the collisions of tragedy, Frater Taciturnus (author of the fictional character of Quidam) explains, culminates in Socrates (SL, 422 / SKS 6, 391). Socrates is the pagan precursor of Quidam’s modern tragedy and the unity of comedy and tragedy which Quidam suffers (SL, 366 / SKS 6, 342 ). The “atopos tis” (SL, 419 / SKS 6, 388) of Socrates, this strange one “without place,” according to his

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admirer and student Taciturnus is a happy Oedipus, whom a comicirony protects against both tragedy and comedy. Because he stakes no rational claims of his own, Socrates can never become ludicrous, like Euthyphro, for example, proudly willing to commit a terrible impiety without knowing why. He can avoid tragedy, too, for the same reason, affirming no meaning which might be reversed, eroded or destroyed. He is the “dialectically infinitized spirit” who, like Taciturnus, singing his praises, from his ironic distance sees both the tragedy and the comedy in the same situation (SL, 420 / SKS 6, 389). Socrates dwells on the border between paganism and religious understanding where a new “mental fortitude” is now able “to see the comic and the tragic simultaneously in the same thing” (SL, 422 / SKS 6, 390). But this unity of comedy and tragedy retains the paradox of his thought project, the ethical pathos preserving him against the mediations of Athenian politics. He preserved the infinity of thought as a negativity against the diverse fetishes of his age which feigned discover truths where there were no truths to be found. Like Socrates, with the comic in view, that is, the day trading in junk bonds of sophistry, (making a) living off of unfounded truths, a life of reason without reason, Quidam’s religious pathos separates him from the world and gives him the power and space to see and avoid stumbling into a comic role himself (SL, 367-368 / SKS 6, 341-342). Quidam, we read, knows a woman who feared being buried alive. For every possible precaution she imagined implementing against this living burial, the same imagination furnished its failure. Quidam, one day, lets slip a solution as deafeasible as any of her own, and, suddenly, accidentally, dispels her fear. That is funny, he thinks. When, in this way, the mind fails to see itself failing, when the mind Quixotically mistakes failure for success –windmills for soldiers, security blankets for security – then you have a stumbling into the comic. But it is not merely funny. Quidam does not know “whether to laugh or cry” over this woman, whose situation should remind him so much of his own. Her fear and imagination, like Quidam’s own penchant for thinking the terrible, has no determinate end in sight. Their fear is categorical, total, and it is their passionate idealizing that ensures that this fear will never find its end in any one particular safety, or, in Quidam’s case, any one particular guilt. That there is no solution to the problem at all is tragic. The woman is no safer than before, nor are we. Our vulnerabilities are endless. The palette of our possible sufferings is infinitely colorful. As with the woman, Quidam’s forgiveness would be a joke, a misunderstanding and a false solution. His crime remains unintelligi-

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ble, a phantom which only visits him. He has fallen out of context. A second intelligibility and a return to human life only become an option with the advent of the religious and the ablutions of paradox. The contradiction which Quidam embodies has its telos in a “new ideality,” a “religious ideality” (religieus Idealitet) where it continues to be endured “by virtue of a relationship with God” (SL, 423 / SKS 6, 391). Unlike Taciturnus, our Socrates, Quidam “sees the comic, but with passion, so that out of that he chooses the tragic.” “[T]his is the religious,” Traciturnus admits, “and something that I, who see there both elements in equilibrium, cannot understand” (SL, 434 / SKS 6, 402). The vacuum of the ethical consciousness in which Traciturnus and Socrates are suspended draws Quidam past its “metaphysical” solution “into the religious” (SL, 435, cf. 440 / SKS 6, 402, cf. 407). This is a “higher passion” in which an apprehension of “the unity of the comic and the tragic” (SL, 440 / SKS 6, 407) bears on actuality, as the ethical collapses upon itself, a sophistic form of pure negativity. 28 And so “what the tragic hero is in the aesthetic, the religious prototype (of course I am here thinking only of devout individuals, etc.) is for the religious” (SL, 439 / SKS 6, 406). “Religiousness begins” (SL, 422 / SKS 6, 390) with this “higher passion” that moves beyond the Socratic unity of comedy and tragedy. It is a pathos-filled return to the tragic-comic scene of rational politics which Socrates half-quit, in spirit, and then finally in body.29 Quidam, unlike Socrates, suffers the unity of comedy and tragedy, though without completing the religious movement which begins with this newfound pathos. As a figure of religious passion in the selfenclosed form of the daimonic – that is, as possessed, unexpressed and unfree – Quidam, Taciturnus writes, nevertheless does express a “purely Greek” fascination with “the crisis of actuality” (SL, 449 / SKS 6, 415). Or, put another way, he expresses the Greek problem of action, choice and the limits of reason. He is particularly engrossing for Taciturnus in that he survives the actual crisis yet “succumbs,” like Oedipus, “by his own hand.”

28

29

In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard reads Socrates generally as the self-conscious culmination of sophistry, as pure negation. In the Apology, Plato has Socrates explain that only a man who quits politics is safe to pursue thought and the investigation of political ideas wherever it might lead. With no political ties, debts, or enemies, the philosopher is free to tour every possible channel of the intellect. In the Phaedo, of course, Socrates chooses physical death, which, he thinks, will be the final liberation of the soul from the body in which it was mixed.

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I fancy the blissful gods creating a person like this in order to have the enjoyment of the dialectical delight in it. They give him powers in relation to the realm of actuality, so that he conquers there, but then an interiority in which he himself runs wild. (SL, 449 / SKS 6, 415) (my trans.)

The depression and anxieties haunting Quidam are the concentrated possibility of this higher passion of faith, a tragic modification of the ironic unity of the comic and the tragic (SL, 450 / SKS 6, 416) and its detached, ethical pathos.

Translating Aesthetics Religiously: Discovery, Reversal and Tragic Guilt The relation between heterogeneous elements, in Oedipus, for example, the elements of Oedipus the King and Oedipus the blind exile, translate one into the next when Sophocles removes the obstacle for the understanding: the “third element” (SL, 416-417 / SKS 6, 385-386) which the shepherd eliminates by identifying Oedipus as the same child of Laius on which the oracle pronounced its terrible fate. But within a religious context, the third element, whose dissolution might relate the disparate elements of a tragically ambiguous self, subjectively guilty yet objectively innocent, cannot be given. The oracles have vanished. Providence refuses to betray its mysteries. It was the Judge, of all people, who linked the deceptions of tragedy celebrated by Gorgias to the defeat of understanding reason. The remark “is an eternal truth,” he says, “and a proper response whenever the understanding goes astray in its own thoughts and precisely out of fear of being deceived is thereby deceived” (SL, 119 / SKS 6, 114). In what circumstances does the understanding fall into such self-deceptions? Well, it seems, when religious enthusiasm inspired by the mysteries, one of which is erotic love, by the illusions typical of the masked god and his theatre, and by the madness, holy or unholy, wonderful or terrible (though often both) with which the god announces himself to the understanding, come on the scene: “It is indeed true that it takes a quite different kind of wisdom to remain in the blessed deception of ardour and of mystery and of erotic love and of illusion and of the wonder than to run away from house and home split-naked, half-sappy from sheer sapience” (SL, 119 / SKS 6, 114). Ecce Homo; ðccķ Dionysos. “Behold, the man,” Pilate exclaimed of Jesus in the gospels;30 “Behold, 30

John 19:5.

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Dionysus, son of Zeus,” exclaimed the god 500 years earlier in the opening lines of Euripides’ Bacchae. In both cases, God’s “intervention” manifests itself in a suffering from which also develops a sense of blessedness, “that there is a purpose, a plan, that the annihilated one will be rescued. But at the critical moment, the one selected cannot know about it” (SL, 182 / SKS 6, 169). Suffering is a split (as Johannes Climacus defines it in the Postscript’s discussion of ‘Religiousness A’), and the rupture in intelligence is a suffering in which providence stakes a claim. Fate resolves this misunderstanding by announcing itself, and it is the “power of a chance word” (SL, 365 / SKS 6, 339) like that of Sophocles’ lowly, banished shepherd who nevertheless returns to destroy a king, which also threatens to destroy Quidam. The polyvalence of language is as crucial to Quidam’s tragic encounter with providence as it was to Oedipus’ encounter with fate. As Taciturnus explain, the tragic is that the two lovers do not understand one another (SL, 420-421 / SKS 6, 389-390). The comic, of course, is that they love one another in a misunderstanding which they don’t recognize. Because she is oriented aesthetically, and Quidam is an ethical-religious figure, the same word – ‘Love’ – has a tragic ambiguity crossed by the three stages of aesthetics, ethics, and religion. It was this word which lured Quidam into the predicament of guilt. It is this word that properly understood, which is to say, understood religiously, might absolve him. Still, how, in the sphere of the religious can the right words be spoken? The tragedy of Quidam’s which the chance word reveals is wholly interior. There can be no literal shepherds. Providence does not communicate, as had fate, directly, by means of an oracle. Kierkegaard transforms the “fate” (Skjebne) of pagan tragedy into the always indirect language of “providence” (Forsyn), in a modern Christian context where the objectivity of science has long since banished this superstition. The temporary mystery of fate and the visible gods recede into the invisible, absolute mystery of time, an infinitely stubborn oracle, in a sense, which speaks in the absolute intimacy of an individual encounter with god. Its language can never be deciphered or publicly announced. It never shows its cards, even when the play ends. It is a purely private intuition, like Augustine’s, which is why religious tragedies must fail on stage, as Taciturnus (anticipating T. S. Eliot by fifty years) thought of Hamlet (SL, 453 / SKS 6, 418). If Hamlet is kept in purely esthetic categories, then what one wants to see is that he has the demonic power to carry out such a resolution. His misgivings have no interest whatsoever; his procrastination and temporizing, his postponing and his self-deluding enjoyment in the renewed intention at the same time as there is no outside hindrance

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merely diminish him, so that he does not become an esthetic hero, and then he becomes a nonentity. (SL, 453 / SKS 6, 418)

“Even if the age of oracles vanished long ago, there is still one thing […] the most profound person, if he talks about it, talks mysteriously – that is: time” (SL, 384 / SKS 6, 356). But this mystery cannot be represented on stage, or anywhere else for that matter. Quidam’s guilt or innocence, as a kind of religious drama (Hamlet + religion, Kierkegaard implies)31 remains undetermined, obscure, and often irritating and disappointing for the reader. Everything, then, is in order. As an aestheticization of religious drama, it is meant to frustrate, as Hamlet had frustrated Kierkegaard. It is this wishy-washy hope that his conflict can be resolved in time, that he can get the girl, avoid the murder, that prevents him from making the religious decision his personality demands. He has a tendency to relapse into the position of a kind of Hamlet, thinking his guilt in aesthetic categories, though aesthetically he is a total failure. He is a hero with no obstacles, defeated anyway. Like Hamlet, he is “neither a religious hero nor an aesthetic (tragic) hero but something in between. Neither fish nor fowl. A hybrid creature. In short an aesthetic-religious mess.”32 The mystery of time that the pagan Oracle embodied as the disclosable returns in Quidam as a subjection to paradox that time itself and the publicity of theatre cannot resolve. Human time and the achievements it houses, not to mention its catastrophes, “are a jest for a providence that has legions of angels in reserve,” writes Taciturnus, observing his creature Quidam from above (SL, 411 / SKS 6, 381). 31

32

See Richard Kearney “Kierkegaard on Hamlet: Between Art and Religion” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup. Kearney’s article picks up on a number of points at which Hamlet and Quidam overlap, though he never says so explicitly, focusing instead on the following features in Hamlet which he wants to extend biographically to Kierkegaard himself. I substitute Quidam. In Stages on Life’s Way, “Hamlet’s misgivings” are said to “take on a purely psychological form of ‘dialectical repentance’” (p. 228). This, of course, is exactly how Quidam’s own stunted repentance is repeatedly described. Both Hamlet and Quidam are “neither properly esthetic nor properly religious” (p. 229). Both are characters of inclosing reserve, “too interior, subjective, shut-up, and inactive to be properly tragic” (p. 231). “Hamlet, like the ghost who confronts him, is riven with undecidability – and so is unable to mourn (his father), to love (his mother), to desire (Ophelia), or to act (by taking revenge on Claudius)” (p. 236). Both have a “summons to amend a wrong that cannot be atoned for” (p. 232). Richard Kearney “Kierkegaard on Hamlet: Between Art and Religion” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup, p. 230. Again, Kierkegaard speaks here of Hamlet, not Quidam.

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Religious dialectic must “reflect itself in the individuality” (SL, 413 / SKS 6, 382), undergo an “infinite reflection” (SL, 414 / SKS 6, 383) where the collision takes place within the self, no longer a matter of good or bad fortune, of oracles and the poet’s mimùsis. The aestheticizing of ethics in tragedies and the categories of fate and chance was why Boethius was so indignant about poet-productions and Solon forbade plays as a deception, why Plato wanted them banned from the State, according to Taciturnus (SL, 442 / SKS 6, 409). Kierkegaard, perhaps unexpectedly, places himself as philosopher in this intellectualist tradition. Yet, according to Kierkegaard’s staging of Stages, a mature, religious understanding of tragedy will bring the “noble intelligence”33 of a Hamlet or a Quidam, modern counterparts to the heroic mind of Oedipus, into contradiction with themselves, rather than the world. As subjects of collision – seething with imaginary demons, incommensurable with actuality, in pursuit of a religious ideality which outstrips the worldly objects it projects itself upon, e. g., the wonders and terrors of ambition and its defeat, of love and loss, fantastic murders, possible guilts, hypochondriacal illness, etc. – they fall not to Laertian rapiers, but to a spiritual consumption feeding on them from within. The ethical, home for both Hegel and Kierkegaard to the Ideas which the Greek tragic hero serves (i. e., ‘Family’ or ‘City’), secretly wants to enter into alliance with the religious (SL, 438 / SKS 6, 406), which like aesthetics slows down its “boundless speed,” its ability to decide instantly according to the rule. 34 The religious takes the objective conflict between ùthù in tragedy and turns it inward. Where the “development takes place […] the scene is in the eternal, in thoughts and dispositions that cannot be seen, not even with a night telescope” (SL, 442 / SKS 6, 409). Religion is what happens to the abstractions of ethics (i. e., Kantian duty, Hegelian Reason) when they develop roots, content, when they return to the mundane struggles with actuality, 33

34

G. W. F. Hegel Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 1231. Hegel speaks of modern tragedy, of which Hamlet is both a type and an exception: “But this mere affliction is empty, and, in particular, we are confronted by purely horrible external necessity when we see fine minds, noble in themselves, perishing in such a battle against the misfortune of entirely external circumstances.” See G. W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, 284. For Hegel, tragedy is the birth of ‘the ethical’ from out of the unconsciousness of social custom (Sittlichkeit), the beginning of ‘culture,’ where the Idea develops the unreflected content which, in tragedy, it sacrifices in figures like Antigone. But for Kierkegaard, the conflict of ethical ideas in tragedy should be magnified in the religious, joyfully retained, somehow, instead of reconciled historically, in the Concept.

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the soil in which they begin, which never, for Kierkegaard, measures up to a single Idea. 35 The Idea in actuality is something, aesthetic or religious, we suffer. “[O]therwise it is culpable and it is the sufferer’s own fault,” tutors Taciturnus. But this has already proven too ‘ethical’ and human-centered a conception to do justice to the exigencies of actuality and the inevitable collisions in which it engages reason, as demonstrated by the cast of Stages. Yet, with the real drama introjected onto the stage of individual reflection, history, – that something such as this actually happened – IS “dissolved in the ideality” (SL, 439 / SKS 6, 406). Aristotle was apparently right to say that tragedy is more philosophy than history. But how is its Idea, once religiously distilled, to be communicated? From the standpoint of religion, the resolution of the ethical conflict in time, the harmonious adequation of the ideal and the actual, can only be represented “by a deception” (SL, 445 / SKS 6, 412). The question of deception implicates not only Greek tragedy, but also Quidam and his pseudonymous author, not to mention Kierkegaard himself. The tool of deception, or, we might simply say, fiction, which religion borrows from tragic play, leverages an experience upon the audience which religion magnifies in the relative irrelevance of historical fact. It is the idea that matters, an intellectual development. The less the audience attends to “the facts” the more intensely they experience the idea of the play, the more intensely they respond, ideally, in a kind of katharsis. And so Kierkegaard gives us Quidam, a fog of a mind in which all facts seem to disappear.

Katharsis: Sickness, Health and the Tragic Effect of Religion Not only is the category of tragedy (and comedy) an omnipresent filter through which the figures of Stages explain the religious education in paradox and the possibility in Quidam of a catastrophic regeneration, but the central themes of Aristotle’s reading of tragedy – the pity and fear of katharsis – return explicitly in Frater Taciturnus’ observations on Quidam’s diary (SL, 454-465 / SKS 6, 419-430). While the essay on tragedy in Either/Or privileged compassion, Taciturnus and Stages on the whole privileges the emotional counterpart of fear. We can read Stages as a companion to the essay on the relation between tragedy 35

On the failure of both utilitarianism and deonotology as the hallmark moral-philosophical failures of our age, see Alasdaire Macintyre After Virtue, ch. 5 generally.

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in ancient and modern times, supplementing its work on pity with the development of tragic fear. While sympathy is necessary to draw the victim of tragedy and the observer together, though “the tale is told of you” (SL, 478 / SKS 6, 440), “[t]he religious healing [Helbredelse] consists first and foremost in arousing fear [Frygt]” (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432). Mundane fear, in typically Greek-tragic fashion, is best expressed for aesthetics in the annihilation of a house: Our lord can certainly bring danger and misery to your house; indeed, he can take your property, your beloved, your children, and he will surely do it if it is beneficial for you – ergo, since he has not done it, then there is no danger. (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432)

Taciturnus quotes Aristotle’s greek directly on the relation of tragedy to the spectator: ÂÇqÃÉÃÍÓÈ¿ÇÔÍÀÍÓοϿÇËÍÓÑ¿ÒÅËÒ×ËÒÍÇÓÒ×ËοÆÅÊ¿Ò×ËÈ¿Æ¿ÏÑÇË by pity and fear accomplishing its catharsis of such emotions. (SL, 460 / SKS 6, 425)

He sees in the Aristotle passage a potentially religious discovery (SL, 461-462 / SKS 6, 426-427). Fear and compassion become something different when “in turn the religious person has another conception of what awakens fear, and his compassion is therefore in another quarter” (SL, 461 / SKS 6, 427). The religious point of view departs from an inversion of the tragic destruction of a house, an objectless object for our pities and our fears, which discovery can never reveal: [T]he greatest danger is that one does not discover, that one is not always discovering, that one is in danger, even if one otherwise had money and the most lovable girl and adorable children and was king of the country or one of the quiet ones in the land, free from all cares. (SL, 468-9 / SKS 6, 432-433)

The usual enemies and conflicts typical of tragedy by which the hero is divided and destroyed disappear. “The superiority of the enemy before which the hero in the tragic drama falls,” the “hard-hearted fathers” of Romeo and Juliet and all “unhappy lovers in the tragedy,” or “betrayal by the person one trusted,” Othello’s Iago for instance (SL, 471 / SKS 6, 434), yield to an ambivalence or guilt which is totally one’s own. The fate in which the ancient hero suffered an aesthetically ambiguous hamartia, an initial innocence, through the discoveries of plot, yielded to an ambiguously innocent guilt over some crime. The sanctified revision of Aristotle’s formula for katharsis concerns a “guilt” (Skyld) which is “sin” (Synd), an ambiguously innocent hamartia to which everyone is exposed, foreshadowed in the Either/Or essay as the metaphysical category of a total guilt (which returns in the “Reli-

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giousness A” of Climacus’ Postscript). 36 The paradox of sin, we’ll find, does not yield to dramatic disclosures. It is already the job of tragic theatre to purify the spectator “of all low egotistical elements” (SL, 461 / SKS 6, 426) and develop his “eye for the idea” (SL, 461 / SKS 6, 426). The religious tragedy “purifies” (renses)37 the passions of pity and fear further through a “turning inward” in relationship with god (SL, 462 / SKS 6, 427). By making tragedy a matter of an irresolvably paradoxical idea, the religious author releases its ethical-religious potential from a formerly aesthetic confusion. Taciturnus lays down the theory for a radicalizing of tragic katharsis now within the post/modern category of the religious, beyond the mediations of aesthetics and the stage, as well as a purely discursive reason. He uncovers this radicalizing of Aristotle’s katharsis as a latency in Aristotle himself. Pity and fear in the Aristotelian sense are above the aesthetics of the pulpit, he writes, and metaphysical systematizing (SL, 463 / SKS 6, 428). “The religious speaker,” like the tragedian, with the benefit of Aristotle’s aesthetic categories can purify “these passions through fear and compassion” “by letting heaven remain closed, in fear and trembling” (SL, 464 / SKS 6, 429). It “ennobles” them, protecting them against the swoon into “an aesthetic absorption into something universal” (ethics and system function as variations of the aesthetic) (SL, 465 / SKS 6, 430). This, of course, points us toward the tragedy of Abraham, in de Silentio’s book by the same name, to which we’ll soon turn. Like Abraham, Quidam was faced with the problem of choice. What Quidam lacks and suffers is resolution. The judge’s admonition that decision-making “is the resolution’s bath of purification (Renselses-Bad)” (SL, 164 / SKS 6, 153), 38 subjected to a rewriting in the “strange tongue” of Abraham or Quidam, a more private language, less friendly than the Judge to Kantian universals, prepares us for A’s idea that tragic katharsis is the religious healing which the culture of modern Europe and its empty subjects require. They need a true grasp of what it means to choose, and to be able to do it – passionately, 36 37

38

CUP1, 29 / SKS 7, 35. Here Kierkegaard uses the word at rense, in the passive, which the Hongs translate as purifiy. The sense of the word, even more specifically in relation to the katharsis debate, is one of ‘purgation.’ It is interesting to see Kierkegaard use both the words for purgation and a more literally religious purification (at luttre) in the katharsis context. The Judge here invokes the lustral baths of archaic Greece: “As beautiful as the Greek’s bath before a banquet.” The Hongs direct us to Plato Symposium, 174a.

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concretely, to make a beginning. Stuck in the aesthetics of the romantic evasion of ethics, or of an idealizing ethics itself, the non-existence of the “esthetical-metaphysical” destroys in its abstraction the reality it recollects philosophically. Religious ideality remains the only path from the abstract possibilities and conclusions in which the culture is engrossed back to the passionate concreteness of actuality, where human life remains in a terminal state of beginning. Quidam, before the reader’s very eyes, returns katharsis from its surrogate home on the stage to its birthright of religion. “Do not dampen my fervor, do not put out its fire[,]” he writes in the diary, “it is still something good even if it must be purified [maa luttres]” (SL, 232 / SKS 6, 217). Quidam embodies the tragic-religious collision between reason and experience charged with the God, which nevertheless qua experience must somehow be recorded, recalled. Taciturnus exacerbates the collision in Quidam between reflection and its limits, where representation, conceptuality, fails. He brings him to this point of rapture by inflaming both imagination and understanding with the tragic passion of fear. The theatre of Quidam’s interior purifies this passion subjectively by inciting it to its highest pitch, these lonely midnights, as he writes in his diary. If Quidam could recognize his guilt as sin, if his grasp of hamartia could shift from the visibility of crime to the metaphysical crime of original sin, which, like tragic guilt, is only ambiguously one’s own, Taciturnus explains in the commentary, his repentance would conclude in sin’s forgiveness (Syndsforladelse). Neither tragic hamartia nor its Christian counterpart are crimes for which ethics or the law can hold you responsible, which you could redeem on your own through some form of penance. They both represent a taint which only a foreign power can remove, as in the motions of grace which ‘A’ names in his essay. But the forgiveness of sin is not over something particular. It implies a break with immediacy (SL, 481 / SKS 6, 443). Forgiveness is a total reflection and rebirth, the New Testament metanoia 39 in which everything particular is affected, all immediacy absorbed and transformed by the projection of a new ideality embracing the individual’s existence as a whole. Quidam describes this rebirth more in terms of ascetic practice, ultimately, than the spontaneity of the katharsis model which seems to dominate his religious healing. But Quidam’s ascetics while preparing him for the kathartic return, through choice, to actuality, tend to shut him up tighter and tighter within himself, to cure the suffering “by 39

Johannes Climacus pursues this concept in Philosophical Fragments. PF, 18 f. / SKS 4, 227.

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making it worse” (SL, 479 / SKS 6, 441). Quidam likens himself to the “Pythagorean” who “could not step on the earth more anxiously than I in fear of, as they say, taking any step” (SL, 301 / SKS 6, 281). His repentance has lapsed ascetically into self-torment, a “sin like other sins” (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432). The preparations may be ascetic, but the healing, if it comes, will be spontaneous, as in the ecstasies of Dionysus’s mysteria, or those of Eleusis and the Corybantics’ Kybele. Although “Religious healing is accomplished by repentance” (SL, 468 / SKS 6, 432), “if healing is to begin for the existing person, the moment must come when one lets the act of repentance go” and proceeds to atonement (SL, 451-2 / SKS 6, 417). Still, in order for katharsis to take place, for the tragic emotions of pity and fear to arise, the audience members must identify with the tragic character. Interiorizing the lead in a tragedy to the point of a Hamlet or a Quidam, or, their more courageous analogue, father Abraham, risks undermining this effect. Aristotle warned the poet of disturbing the effect through a poor choice of protagonists, or, more specifically, miscasting their hamartia. Yet perverting tragic guilt in such a way that suffering is inaccessible is just what Kiekegaard does. The sanctifying of tragedy converts a sympathy for the conquering hero, majestically framed for the theatregoers in Athens by a robust Nature, illuminated by the Mediterranean sun, into one for the suffering hero alone at his desk, trembling beneath his lamp at the sight of his pen.40 “The esthetic hero is great by conquering [at seire], the religious hero by suffering [at lide]” (SL, 454 / SKS 6, 419). The difference between the aesthetic and the religious hero is a matter of what sort of catharses, what sort of sacrifices, solicit an audience. Quidam fails. As an aesthetic hero, he sacrifices himself, yes, but neither for Love, Politics, nor for anything else, apparently, because there is nothing apparent he struggles against. His real failure is that this failure remains unconcluded.41 Marriage and society remain an option with which he continues to torture himself. For this reason, only in the 40

41

Sir John Shepphard The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. In the preface to his famous translation and commentary on the Tyrannus, Sheppard inisists that the staging of the play should respect the robust nature by which the theatre in Athens was framed, the mediterranean sun which lit the plays. See Joakim Garff “ ‘You Await a Tyrant whereas I Await a Martyr’: One Aporia and its Biographical Implications in A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, pp. 138, 142. In this important article, Garff identifies heroic action in the modern age of levelling not with individual achievement, which is no longer possible, but with heroic failure, “a will to powerlessness, which, please note, as will is no less heroic than that of the hero.” Here Garff connects the distinction between

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religious could he attain the heroic, were he to make a terrible sacrifice of the girl and the ethical along with her. This sacrifice we could pity as a suffering pure and simple. The religious hero and the daimoniac alike become “supranatural” through “sacrifices” (SL, 455 / SKS 6, 419). But the daimoniac “demands” his blood as part of some larger economic exchange, while the religious hero merely “makes sacrifices” (SL, 455 / SKS 6, 420). He has nothing to gain. If Quidam were a tragic hero for whom in some devil’s bargain the girl’s life was the price of his greatness (another Marguerite, like that sacrificed by Goethe’s Faust), the “nemesis” of the world-order would avenge this death, as on the tragic stage. An authentically criminal variant of Quidam could have become, in this way, a purely aesthetic hero (SL, 455 / SKS 6, 420). But Quidam, as a prologue to the hero of Abraham, wants nothing from the world except, at times, to return to the small part of it Quedam keeps warm. Still, katharsis beckons him out into the spiritual equivalent of the sea, the wilds of nature where we experience something “in such a way that there are no escapes” (SL, 379 / SKS 6, 352). It is a cathartic, Abrahamic leap away from the ascetics of repentance that prepared it. This is the beginning of the fear of God. The raging storm. A hungry howling of wolves. If God is an Idea the relation to which inaugurates a religious ideality, we must conceive it amidst the robbery of our minor safeties, our “confidence in nightwatchmen and policemen and the efficacy of distress signals” (SL, 379 / SKS 6, 352). We must expose ourselves to a new quality of danger, the other side of a limit, a tragic vision of human life from a perspective other than man’s. If Quidam lacks this “resolution’s bath of purification,” Abraham has no doubt had his dip.

“two ages” in the literary review with the modern and classical ages of Either/Or’s essay on tragedy.

Chapter 8 Fear and Trembling: Tragedy, Comedy and the Heroism of Abraham In a journal entry entitled Plan from early in the year 1943, Kierkegaard sketched the first of the four alternate versions of the Abraham story with which Fear and Trembling begins. “Abraham’s conduct,” he wrote, was “genuinely poetic, magnanimous, more magnanimous than everything I have read about in tragedies.”1 And so from its inception Abraham would be defined both with and against the figures of ancient tragedy. Kierkegaard himself at first found it hard to distinguished between them, as the imagery of the sketch testifies: “[A] nd when he again turned to him, he was unrecognizable to Isaac. His eyes were wild. His countenance was chilling. The venerable locks of his hair bristled like furies above his head.”2

Tragedy, Comedy and the Knight of Faith Despite these supplementary gestures from the journals, the apparent rejection of ancient tragedy in Fear and Trembling as mere aesthetics represents the authorships most direct challenge to my thesis. Fear and Trembling’s apparent dismissal of Attic tragedy spares not a word for the movements Traciturnus described connecting the accidental pathos of tragedy to the tragic will of a religious passion, which only takes volunteers, through the Socratic alignment of tragedy and comedy. But the Biblical knight, no longer operating within aesthetic categories such as fate, suffers more tragically than the tragic hero himself. In fact, de Silentio tips us off to the analogy between the tragic 1 2

Pap. IV A 76 / SKS JJ:87. Cf. JP 5:5640. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 255. Garff presents an illuminating juxtaposition of the two texts. “If we compare the published version with the sketch, it is immediately obvious that Abraham’s inhuman brutality had originally been depicted in much more elaborate fashion.” For the sketch itself, see SKS 4, 107.

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hero and Abraham by inserting the dying Socrates of the Phaedo as an “intellectual tragic hero” in the interstice between the militantly mute Agamemnon and Abraham, who like Socrates must speak. If we can establish his kinship with the tragic hero, however distant and broken, Abraham will confirm the hypothesis in Stages of a justified exception constructed on a tragic model, a religious hero who follows through in an overturned Socratism on the tragic guilt that crippled poor Quidam. De Silentio first introduces the category of tragedy, along with comedy, in the following sentence, alluding to a parishioner whom one Sunday, the preacher, with his sermon on Abraham, convinces to sacrifice his own son: “The comic and the tragic make contact here in absolute infinitude” (FT, 29 / SKS 4, 125). This nebulous statement as Stages indicated is the key to understanding the return of tragic pathos in the religious sphere as the “highest passion” of faith (FT, 121 / SKS 4, 209). To see the Socratic-ironic unity of the comic and the tragic and then take it up passionately, this was the beginning of religious subjectivity, Taciturnus explained. Quidam was unable, but Abraham is the figure in which this passionate collision takes place. Imagine: a parishioner wants to imitate Abraham and slay his own son. The preacher who rises to his best in persuading the man from murder proves that on Sunday he really “did not know what he was saying” (FT, 29 / SKS 4, 125). Here is the comic. Abraham is the terrible joke which the preacher tells without realizing it, making a fool not of Abraham, but rather himself, and if the comic contradiction is dialectically-tragically reversed, tragic criminals of his parish. But the massacre that would follow if they undertook the killing heroized in Abraham’s story is not tragic simply because someone dies. It is tragic because their sacrifice is a botched sacrifice. Because it can never express the meaning they intend. There is no expression for human sacrifice in the polite society of bourgeois Copenhagen, microcosm of enlightened Europe, only murder. They are sacrificed for nothing, a comic misunderstanding of the Sunday sermon, a discrepancy between the meaning intended (the signifying) and the significance of the deed accomplished (the signified). Every Manson, all sacrifice, comes off as a freakish threat, a tragic loss with comic reasons. In this sense, they do become like Abraham, 3 containing the possibility of 3

The Akedah is often read as the story of the Jewish rejection of human sacrifice. Keirkegaard inverts the story, demanding Abraham’s value as a justified killer. He returns to the violence of paganism, before the civilizing of Jewish ethics.

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both the comic and the tragic. That Abraham loves his victim more than himself only makes his act that much more deranged. Having established the category of the tragic, de Silentio goes on to oppose the Greek “tragic hero,” i. e. Euripides’ Agamemnon, who suffers a “spiritual trial” (Anfægtelse), to the knight of faith represented by father Abraham.4 Abraham suffers an “ordeal” (Prøvelse), he says, in an “absolute relation to the absolute” (FT, 56 / SKS 4, 150). This places him outside the mediations of ethics, the law and custom in which alongside his city Agamemnon understands himself. As an individual shipwrecked outside the safe waters of the universal, there are no maps to guide Abraham atop Mt. Moriah. The goal that Agamemnon pursues, the envoy of his conquering navy to Troy, justifies the means of killing a daughter, the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the gods of the city. 5 He is intelligible and ultimately forgiven. In fact, the poets go so far as to eulogize his loyalty to the state, the telos which guides him, over the more limited considerations of family and its gods. Agamemnon’s suffering and the tragic choice between family and state forced upon him by the gods ultimately ennobles his violence, both at home before Aulis’ refluent tides, and later on the plains of Troy. They are both the acts of a conquering general, the pagan hero familiar from Stages, who conquers, rather than the religious hero who suffers. We can identify Abraham’s suffering, on the other hand, with the absence of the same elements of intelligibility, forgiveness, and a lack of poetic possibilities. Put simply, there is no point to the slaying of Isaac. Or, if there is some meaning in it, it is a secret lost on Abraham, which he therefore cannot disclose. There is no reason – only the madness of faith. The killing is an excess which no ethical calculus can recoup because there is no “outcome” which can account for Abraham’s ordeal. There is no overweening health or bravado for the poets to admire, only a black-breasted infertility, the sickness of the climb and the horror of the kill. Even before introducing Abraham as the bearer of a redoubled tragic pathos, de Silentio prepares us by imagining a paradoxical Agamemnon, a non-Greek in Greek’s clothing, transformed by the new Judaeo-Christian categories adorning Abraham. This paradoxical Agamemnon would have sacrificed Iphigenia while the Argive fleet sailed competently to Troy (FT, 58 / SKS 4, 152). In order to save the 4

5

De Silentio is reading Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, and not Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which the text makes clear. The slaying of Iphigenia followed the ritual model of maiden’s sacrifice, which often preceded the shedding of human blood in war. See note 21, ch. 9.

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paradox, the middle term of the ethical (what Taciturnus called the “third element” in a tragedy) which mediates and therefore saves the temporary exception of the tragic hero is removed. Like Abraham, his crime becomes unintelligible. In addition to giving us this imaginary construction of an Abrahamic Greek-tragic hero, with his other Agamemnon, de Silentio also briskly connects their geography, placing Mount Moriah’s peak “sky-high over the flatlands of Aulis” (FT, 61 / SKS 4, 155) where Agamemnon killed his daughter. He connects Agamemnon and Abraham via the stretch of the solitary climb up the mountain, imagining the Greek as the Jew and baptizing the Jew in Greek waters that extend from the shores of Euripides to those of St. Paul, since “every more thorough thinker, every more earnest artist still regenerates himself in the eternal youth of the Greeks.” (FT, 55 / SKS 4, 148).6 Yet, if we can’t understand Agamemnon, we can’t pity him, or fear him, since both emotions depend upon identification with the hero (FT, 61 / SKS 4, 155). When the heroic courage of sacrifice for the state becomes the absurd courage, Like Abraham’s, which appends “the little phrase: but it will not happen anyway – who then would understand them?” (FT, 59 / SKS 4, 153). Instead of jettisoning the tragic mechanism of katharsis altogether, de Silentio replaces the emotions of pity and fear with one already familiar from Stages: “One cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches him with a horror religiosus, as Israel approached Mount Sinai” (FT, 61 / SKS 4, 155). The ancient tragic stage was a vehicle for the pleasurable relief of difficult emotion, like the Globe of Shakespeare, where the poet’s secret turmoil, he imagines, brought him this power of the word to tell other’s dark secrets, driving “out devils only by the power of the devil” (FT, 61 / SKS 4, 155). But Abraham, an enigma to his poet de Silentio, has only horrified observers. The poet himself cannot penetrate his secret, and so the higher pathos of Abraham isolates both the reader and wouldbe poet and turns them back upon themselves. 6

On the question of Hellenism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, See John Caputo and Michael Scanlon “Apology for the Impossible: Religion and PostModernism” in God, The Gift, and Post Modernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon, pp. 9 f. “Tertullian’s famous rhetorical question, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem’ has returned with new energy to the theological scene, not only in terms of recent criticism of onto-theology but as a pervasive perception that Athens has been for too long the tutor of Jerusalem as regards proper speech about God.” Kierkegaard, we’ll see, explicitly endorses a Christian Hellenism, despite the fact that St. Paul himself was not in dialogue with classical Greece per se, though the language he wrote was ripe with its influence.

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The teleological suspension of the ethical which the Abraham story contains, that though guilty of murder, in another sense this guilt has been forgiven, introduces a paradoxical telos into ethics capable of accommodating both an innocence before God and guilt before the law. Like the religious agos of Oedipus, the terrible avenue to vision of a god, “if one does not know the terrors, one does not know the greatness either” (FT, 75 / SKS 4, 167). Abraham’s life – even to himself – reads “like a book under divine confiscation” (FT, 77 / SKS 4, 169). It is a story that turns Abraham, like the reader, back upon themselves. Both the tragic hero and the knight concentrate themselves in a collision with the ethical (FT, 78 / SKS 4, 170), but the individual tragic hero ultimately takes refuge in the universal, a higher telos affirmed by the third element – the middle man of the state – as divine. The difference, then, is that the “wondrous glory” of the knight says “‘You’ to God in heaven,” addressing him in the second person, face to face, “whereas even the tragic hero addresses him only in the third person” (FT, 77 / SKS 4, 168), with the objectivity of the state in which, through sacrifice, he includes himself. The transition from hero to knight takes place in the leap from the third-person to the first-person encounter, the epiphany where the god appears, a parousia where the knight of faith “has simply and solely himself, and therein lies the dreadfullness” (FT, 78 / SKS 4, 170). This contradiction intensifies consciousness inwardly to the point that the individual himself becomes the object of tragic understanding: the knight of faith is the paradox (FT, 79 / SKS 4, 171). The seed of tragic katharsis contains a deeper suffering which the stage cannot address, intensified and focused in an absolutely private encounter with a god, a religious horror like Quidam’s meant to solicit and cathart the same in the reader.

Peripateia and Anagnķrisis: Demonic Silence and the Pitch of Madness The repetition of the tragic hero in the knight also repeats the immediacy in which Greek thinking and art, especially tragedy, are allegedly stuck, returning us once again to the question of mediation in Greek tragedy, or, in the Aristotelian language to which de Silentio returns, discovery (anagnķrisis). The mediating discovery relieves the mystery of fate and resolves the agonizing contradictions by which the tragic figure has been scandalized and made unintelligible. But Ab-

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raham’s faith is a “later immediacy” (FT, 82 / SKS 4, 172) (en senere Umiddelbarhed), not as Hegel claimed of religion (and Kierkegaard was well aware), the naive first immediacy of representation (Vorstellung) for Reason to reflect into Concept (Begriff).7 Faith is not a second but a third immediacy, one which has passed through the “later immediacy” of the demonic in which the tragic hero must act, with his back turned to the good, closed in upon himself.8 Kierkegaard returns once more to Aristotle’s Poetics, again quoting the Greek: ÂÓÍ ÊÃË ÍÓË ÒÍÓ ÊÓÆÍÓ ÊÃÏÅ ÎÃÏÇ Ò¿ÓÒq ÃÑÒÇ ÎÃÏÇÎÃÒÃÇ¿ È¿Ç ¿Ë¿ÁË×ÏÇÑÇÑ [two parts of the plot, then, peripety and discovery (recognition), are on matters of this sort]. Whenever and wherever it is possible to speak of recognition, there is eo ipso a prior hiddenness. Just as the recognition is the resolving, the relaxing element in dramatic life, so hiddenness is the tension-creating factor […] In Greek tragedy, the hiddenness (and as a result of it the recognition) is an epic remnant based on a fate in which the dramatic action vanishes and in which it has its dark, mysterious source. (FT, 83-84 / SKS 4, 173-174)

Through the Poetics’ theme of discovery de Silentio goes on to distinguish the features of the knight against those of the tragic hero, dividing tragedy religiously against itself. The point is to have “aesthetic hiddenness and the paradox appear in their absolute dissimilarity” (FT, 85 / SKS 4, 176). But he makes this point using the essentially tragic feature of discovery. With Aristotle’s language in the background it is impossible not to see the religious hiddenness as a radicalized version of the daimonic mystery aesthetically concealed by ancient tragedies, the religious ‘Or’ to Greek tragedy’s ‘Either.’ Modifying hiddenness in such a way that discovery can never be made, the tension between the hidden and the disclosed never dramatically exhausted, de Silentio erects a religious stage in the reader’s interior more tragic than tragedy itself. Tragedy conceals a relation “to the idea” (FT, 84 / SKS 4, 174), the unifying element of “heroic resolution” (FT, 86 / SKS 4, 176) which the present age has lost. This hiddenness can be disclosed, and its collisions relieved. The hero individually affirms the universal will, the idea of the family or the state, as Oedipus voluntarily went into exile, and Socrates drank the hem7

8

On his concept of religion as Vorstellung, as opposed to Begriff, see G. W. F. Hegel Encyclopedia, pars. 1-5; G. W. F. Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 462 f., 466, 471, 477, 485, 488; G. W. F. Hegel, the Logic of the Encyclopedia (the “Lesser Logic”), pars. 1-6. As Stages on Life’s Way explained, if Quidam were a tragic hero, he would have to be daimonic. But Quidam is already too religious for aesthetic daimonism. His is a daimonism of repentance.

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lock, instead of fleeing his sentence as he could have. The gap between the individual and the universal, the immediacy of family and its gods and the category of the state, where the tragic figure emerges, can be closed. This is not the case with religious hiddenness and the paradox (FT, 85 / SKS 4, 175). The knight lives for a paradoxical idea that the reversals of plot can never reveal, concealed even from him, a reversal that is always possible but never actualized, always infinitely and anxiously postponed. Though de Silentio opposes the incommensurable Idea behind Abraham’s resolve to the finite ideas such as family and state behind tragic-heroic resolution, Abrahamic resolution shares with the hero’s deliberation the daimonic feature of concealment and the impenetrability of the hero’s choice. Abrahamic resolution imposes the tension of the choice, the collision between the individual and all moral categories, not just for the time being, but as long as the hero lives. The tragic hero cannot judge by the result, de Silentio tells us (FT, 63-64 / SKS 4, 157). Yet he must begin, despite the scandal and collisions which define his choice. Despite eventual Greek applause for Agamemnon, spurred on by the poets, “the result (insofar as it is finitude’s response to the infinite question) is incongruous with the hero’s existence” (FT, 63 / SKS 4, 157). De Silentio forces us here to identify Abraham as the essential hero, a radicalized Greek general estranged from all his customary causes, like the paradoxical Agamemnon de Silentio conjured himself a few pages earlier. While the Greek Agamemnon’s initially paradoxical ambivalence between the particular obligation as a father to Iphigenia and the universal one to the gods of the state is relieved in the higher telos of the state, the paradox embodied in an Abraham similarly divided between family and religious obligation is unimpeachable. There is no result which could make sense of what he chooses to become. Anciently the silence and withdrawal of the daimonic, de Silentio wrote, was in the plot, not the individual. Again turning tragedy against itself, converting its aestheticisms (in this case the overt representation of the gods) into the modern, religious language of interiority, he introduces this hidden remainder within the objectivities of plot into the self-enclosure of Abraham’s self-secret purpose. “Silence is the demon’s trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible the demon, but silence is also divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual” (FT, 88 / SKS 4, 178). This makes Abraham, the figure of unimpeachable hiddenness, always isolated, for whom the result is always postponed, a would-be hero for modernity rather

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than Jerusalem, and, at least for the duration of his climb, another daimoniac agonizing over the Good. The inability to speak, and, conscious of this or not, to give an account of who one truly is – what one truly does and suffers – is a daimonic feature shared by all tragic heroes, from Oedipus and Agamemnon to Hamlet, Quidam, and finally Kierkegaard’s Abraham, an effect of the soul’s hijacking by a kind of daimķn. Until he decides, Agamemnon is stranded outside of the universal, a place where two passions collide, either love of Family or love of the State, either dedication to the chthonic gods of the hearth and fear of the avenging Erinyes or to the Olympic gods of the state. Oedipus, too, like Agamemnon, in the time it takes the drama to unfold, awaits his removal to the outlands of plague and blindness, carried there by the daimķn at work within his power to reason, a phantom presence discernible only through the shuddering identified by de Silentio’s title. He is stranded outside the moral-ontological center that, for the Greeks, was Greece itself. The merman is Fear and Trembling’s crowning exemplar of the daimonic. He can sacrifice Agnes for a greater good and with perfect intelligibility become “a grandiose tragic hero” (FT, 97 / SKS 4, 186). The demonic, in this case the tragic hero, at least potentially “has the same quality as the divine, namely that the single individual is able to enter into an absolute relation to it” (FT, 97 / SKS 4, 186). There is “deep [tragic] contradiction in the daimonic,” that this daimoniac would “save a person with the aid of evil,” but for the sake of the good, that he would, like Quidam, like Kierkegaard himself, drive his love away. Crime and justice ambiguously coincide. He would “belittle her, ridicule her, make her love ludicrous, and, if possible, arouse her pride […] spare himself no anguish” (FT, 96 / SKS 4, 185) so that she may be saved from evil. The daimonic figure is one of exception, both inside and outside of convention – high and low, wise king and blind outcast – a poor pious Socrates with power enough to threaten a state – an Abraham, both the father of faith and a barren criminal. But the merman can speak. He can sacrifice himself and Agnes for the greater good by confessing the evil he embodies. Agamemnon’s slaying of Iphigenia is not without its consolations. He knows how the ritual goes because other fathers like him have passed it down for generations.9 Dialogue gives him an alibi in his reasoning since “everything permitted to be said against him has been said ruthlessly” (FT, 114 / SKS 4, 202) and his rationale for acting has endured. His conflict with the world is pro9

Again, regarding maiden sacrifice, see note 21, ch. 9.

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visional, and, not before long, over and done. The struggle, also, directs his energies away from himself. But religion makes the knight of faith’s collision into a knot which no ethics, not even tragic ethics, can untie (FT, 99 / SKS 4, 188). There is no dialogue, no dialectic of lines, finally, to mediate his exception – “he speaks in a divine language, he speaks in tongues” (FT, 114 / SKS 4, 202).10

Abrahamic Madness: Modernity and Tragic Logos What, finally, then, is Abraham’s fate, whom God blessed and cursed in the same breath (FT, 66 / SKS 4, 158)? If Greek fate for Kierkegaard equals a blind necessity, imposed from Zeus’ distant perch on Olympus, then Abraham has none. The knight of faith, rather, as had Oedipus, becomes contemporary with the god.11 His anxiety is the “anxiety, the distress, the paradox” of seeing “Christ walking about in the promised land” (FT, 66 / SKS 4, 158). Abraham suffers an encounter with the divine on the level ground of a promise: the murder of your son will be no murder; your loss will be no loss. But to meet the god, as it was for Oedipus and his precursors in Dionysian myth, is to be destroyed. Like Oedipus, blinded by the tragic knowledge of the gods with which Teiresias lived like a stooped, melancholy Silenus, Abraham ought to be a figure that blinds us (FT, 23 / SKS 4, 119). Ab10

11

In the final section of Fear and Trembling, Problema iii, de Silentio returns once more to Aristotle for a story from the Politics which sheds last light on Greek tragedy and the Knight’s paradox: A bridegroom, for whom the prophets foresee a calamity whose origin is his marriage, suddenly decides, at the last moment, not to come for his bride. FT, 89 (89n) / SKS 4, 178 ff. Pol., 1303b-1304. The details of the story are enough to show that he courts disaster by trying to avoid it, the classic tragic equation, and that, as with Aeschylus and Sophocles, this disaster stems from a “contact with the divine,” though “in a double manner – first by the augurs’ pronouncement and next by being condemned as a temple thief.” He pollutes the sacred. But the problem with Oracles for de Silentio is that they are intelligible to all. They don’t “eventuate in any private relation to the divine.” FT, 93 / SKS 4, 183. Though the idea of an impersonal fate does operate within Greek tragedy, fate also takes on a more archaic, less enlightened signification. Rather than one’s apportionment within an order determined aforetime on Olympus, one’s destruction comes at the hands of the more personal and less stable forces of the daimonic. For distinctions between the varieties of daimķn, see E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 39-42. See page 21, note 37, for the connection between the daimonic force of tragedy’s avenging Erinyes and Zeus’ moira. See also Walter Burkert Greek Religion, p. 181.

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raham, writes de Silentio, was “the first to know that supreme passion, the holy, pure, and humble expression for the divine madness that was admired by the pagans” (FT, 23 / SKS 4, 119). He refers us here to the holy madness of which Plato speaks in the Phaedrus: the madness of prophecy, of purifications and initiations, of poetic inspiration, and the erotic madness of the philosopher touched by truth. The enthousiasmos of holy madness in general was originally a Dionysiac experience.12 De Silentio translates this pagan madness in which man is possessed by the god of deathlessly ever-dying nature into an encounter with the eternal god of spirit. Abraham abandons “the terrifying battle with the raging elements and the forces of creation in order to contend with god” instead of nature (FT, 23 / SKS 4, 119). The divine mysteries of nature become the spiritual mystery of man himself. At the center of this mystery stands reason and the Delphic maxim both Oedipus and Socrates had tragically embraced: gnķthi seauton – know yourself, though each discovered in himself a monster beyond reckoning.13 De Silentio substitutes for the god-inspired dances of the bacchant a more subtle religious movement in which the pedestrian strut of a tax collector might express the sublime leaping and dancing of infinity (FT, 41 / SKS 4, 135). There is another figure, though, occupying the role of mediator between the carnal madness of the pagan-esthete and the spiritualized madness of Abraham: the intellectual tragic hero. The intellectually or spiritually significant tragic hero – de Silentio gives Socrates as an example – must have last words. It is in this enthusiasmic logos, a logos that is also entheos, possessed of a god, that this hero consummates himself and achieves immortality before the moment of biological death (FT, 116-117 / SKS 4, 204-205). He affirms himself beyond the struggles of bare animality. Abraham, another spiritual development in the scheme of heroes, from the mute Agamemnon to the logos-enriched Socrates, also has a need for last words. After all, his ordeal is a matter of religious ideality. Having leapt past the duplicitous reason12

13

See Hackforth’s commentary, Plato Phaedrus, 243e-245c. Cf. Walter Otto Dionysos: Myth and Cult, pp. 133, 135. Otto confirms that “[m]adness is a cult form which belongs to the religion of Dionysus.” – “Dionysus is the god who is mad.” Cf. Karl Kerenyi Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Inedestructible Life, p. 131. Cf. Walter Burkert Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 112. Burkert qualifies that both the cults of Dionysus and Phrygian Kybele, otherwise known as Mater, or Magna Mater, which fused early (p. 25), were typified by these mad ecstasies. “Terror,” he says, “has become manageable for the initiate” (p. 97, re: Plato Republic, 560de). Still, he concludes that “mania is the special province of Dionysus” (p. 104). For the monster of the self, see Plato Phaedrus, 229e.

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ing of both aesthetics and ethics, Abraham must now define himself in the absolutely foreign language of a god. Hence his ironic statement to Isaac that God will provide the burnt offering. Abraham’s total presence is affirmed in these last words (FT, 118 / SKS 4, 207), spoken in the “strange tongue” (FT, 119 / SKS 4, 208) of irony that both speaks and says nothing (FT, 118-119 / SKS 4, 207-208). The tragic task of naming the unnameable forces human thought and language beyond itself, into a “strange responsibility that consists neither of responding nor not responding,” writes one reader. “Is one,” after all, “responsible for what one says in an unintelligible language, in the language of the other.”14 If there is to be a religious development in the figures of tragedy beyond the Greek-dramatic sphere there must be a sympathetic innovation in how tragedy is to be understood. Apart from Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, which de Silentio singles out of the German tradition, the move past the Greeks will be facilitated by the Greeks themselves, who “presented far better” these “movements and positions” which he explores in Abraham (FT, 88 / SKS 4, 178).15 The collision in Abraham is not between two opposing logoi, as it was for Hegel, but rather between thinking itself, which in the figure of Hegelianism has come to embrace all of world-history, including knights of faith, and the absolute paradox, an irrational element which both disrupts and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, conditions this history. The elements of this collision are not two expressions of a single reason that a more historically or even individually-therapeutically developed thinking can somehow mediate, like two dialogical voices unified in the dialectic of lines. Hegelian tragedy gives us a rupture 14

15

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, pp. 73-77. The notion of naming that which cannot be named, of speaking about that which must be unnamed, is another theme at the center of contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion. See Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of ‘de-nomination’ in “On the Name” in God, the Gift and PostModernism, ed. by Caputo and Scanlon. For Kierkegaard’s attention to Lessing’s interpretation of katharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics, see Pap. IV C 110 (1842-43). Cf. JP 4:4826. Curtius’ translation and commentary on the Poetics, Aristoteles Dichtkunst, was also an essential source for Kierkegaard. See Pap. IV C 103, 105, 119, 120, 124 / SKS Not12:2, Not12:4(a), Not12:11, Not12:12, Not12:15(a). Cf. JP 1:808; 4:4835-4836. But his attention to the original is clear, which he owned as part of the complete Bekker edition. See the entries from Pap. IV C 103-125 / SKS Not12:2 – Not12:16, generally. Cf. JP 1:143144, 808-809; 4:4826-4839; 5:5604-5606. For example, in the margins of his journal entry on Curtius’ commentary, Kierkegaard corrects one of Curtius’ citations in Aristotle’s Greek, relating a passage from the Poetics to the Ethics. Pap. IV C 124 (1842-43) / Not12:15(a).

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within the universal Subject of reason itself, in the Concept’s struggle towards self-knowledge, contested by a newborn reflection, violently, amidst the innocence of self-same Greece. For Kierkegaard, however, “it is human reason that is in question, and the adjective is not redundant.”16 Abraham’s sacrifice, rather than launching ships, wrecks the Hegelian ship of the universal Subject against a paradox which human reason cannot mediate, which both transcends and tragically grounds the reason compelled to claim it.17 It exposes this reason to the groundlessness of its grounds, the darkness and unpredictable depths of the sea it foolishly tries to chart, not by humiliating reason formally (the paradox is no logical contradiction),18 but by insisting on its finite human nature and, through a paradoxical offense, forcing the eyes of this fragile body toward a religous reality the heart and stomach cannot contain. That reason has become human bespeaks not only a conceptual limit where we encounter the absurd, but also its flesh (sarx) in the pre-modern sense of St. Paul and Luther.19 The flesh in which one suffers offense at the paradox that in god both man and god have turned against their nature incorporates every dimen16 17

18

19

Merold Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 88. See Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death. Derrida generalized Abraham’s sacrifice as a structure of authentic choice per se: “What the knights of good conscience don’t realize, is that ‘the sacrifice of Isaac’ illusatrates – if that is the word in the case of such a nocturnal mystery – the most common and everyday experience of responsibility” (p. 67). “Such is the aporia of responsibility: one always risks not managing to accede to the concept of responsibility in the process of forming it. For responsibility demands on the one hand an accounting, a general answering-for-oneself with respect to the general and befor the generality, hence the idea of substitution, and, on the other hand, uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence, and secrecy. What I am saying here about responsibility can also be said about decision” (p. 61; cf. p. 77). Still, I wonder if this isn’t allegorizing away the mysterium tremendum which Derrida so loves in the Abraham story, and which, perhaps, needs Jahweh, a god, real smoke, warm blood. “Translated into this extraordinary story, the truth is shown to possess the very structure of what occurs every day” (78). But as Derrida writes himself, “taking it to be a fable still amounts to losing it to philosophical or poetic generality; it means that it loses the quality of a historic event” (p. 66). Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, p. 100; Robert C. Roberts Faith, Reason, and History, p. 67; C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, chs. 5, 6, & 7; For the opposite reading, see Alastair Hannay Kierkegaard, pp. 106-108; Louis Pojman The Logic of Subjectivity, pp. 100-102; Brand Blanshard “Kierkegaard on Faith” in Essays on Kierkegaard, ed. by Jerry Hill. On the Pauline Abraham, see John Caputo “Instants, Secrets, and Singularities – Dealing Death in Kierkegaard and Derrida” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Matustik and Westphal, p. 219.

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sion of an individual’s existence.20 The absurd and the paradoxical here have a tragic-comic structure, one defined, as we’ve seen, by contradiction. “[I]t lies in the conjunction of elements that are ordinarily incongruous,”21 such as Hamlet’s oath on a pair of fire tongs or killing a beloved son for no apparent reason – or, here, the union of the human and the divine in a single miscegenated nature. Abraham’s absurd circumstance and the paradox of his innocence, though madness from the human perspective, are not simply irrational, though neither as one reader astonishingly concludes are they “ultimately in the service of reason,” catalyst for its fulfilment in man.22 The idea they evince “never originated in the mind of man” (as goes the passage from first Corinthians [2: 6-9] which Kierkegaard once preached) and only takes root there through a violence. 23 That some 20

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See Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, pp. 107-111, for a discussion and citations in Luther and St. Paul. Westphal reads Kierkegaard’s critique of reason as “ideology critique” of modern, instrumental notions of reason, and a return to the value-laden reason of the praxis of the Greeks, á la Habermas. But this fails to address the failure of all forms of human reason for Kierkegaard, including those pre-modern notions which St. Paul and Luther employ, for whom, as with the pagan Greeks, a purely objective rationality had not yet been conceived. Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, p. 102. For the example of Hamlet, see CUP1, 458n, where Climacus gives numerous examples of comic contradiction. Cf. C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, p. 100. Evans echoes this distinguishing of “incongruous” from “logical” contradiction with Kierkegaard’s examples of the comic. See C. Stephen Evans Passionate Reason, pp. 97. Like Westphal, though in a deeper, more far reaching, and so more problematic degree, Evans socializes the irrationality of Kierkegaardian paradox (p. 118). It is not human reason per se which the paradox crucifies, but the selfish human reason dominant in the enlightenment, unwilling to recognize its own limits. Were a non-anthropocentric concept of reason introduced, the paradox, though “above reason,” as in Acquinas and Kant, would no longer be “against reason.” Our relation to the paradox is like the physicist’s relation to theoretically impossible discoveries in both nature (p. 105) and man (p. 110), through encounters with radically new phenomena such as “a brain that thinks,” after which, barring a prideful dogmatism, he comes to a new understanding. But in order to substantiate these claims, Evans denies faith’s necessary conjunction with offense (p. 80), which Climacus defines clearly enough (CUP1, 611 / SKS 7, 554; cf. CUP1, 203-204 / SKS 7, 186-187), and tends generally to conflate divine and human reason (p. 79) (and, therefore, as in the examples of physical science, natural and religious reality). Lastly, he manufactures a notion of “imperialistic reason” (p. 90) which nowhere appears in Kierkegaard’s texts. If this imperialistic reason can be pacified, he writes, “reason evidently can conceive the paradox in some sense” (p. 79). His more recent Faith Beyond Reason echoes the same sociological reading (pp. 94 f.). See Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, pp. 86, 89, 99. Westphal distinguishes between the human and divine “modes of thought,” within which Abraham is simultaneously either insanely mad or madly correct. The reality within

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ideas are simply not assimilable to human productions, to the speech and civil orders we establish, is the insight into tragedy which Hegel’s philosophical bias suppressed, the ‘epic element’ which exceeds the dialectic between characters, the play of contrary voices (which, like contrary motion between the right notes, can nevertheless produce beautiful harmonies). 24 It is that thing25 which never appears, unrepresentable, unverifiable, unknowable, a ghost-like thing too vaporous for science to get a grip, what the Greeks knew in its incipient form as the darkness of fate, the mystery of time and the oracle. The real tragedy of logos is that this elusive thing must be named, this unnameable thing, although the present age is now too clever to allow mysteries to show. This takes us another step back in the line of tragic primogeniture. First Oedipus, then Abraham, but finally Adam – the first of men (like Sophocles’ Oedipus) – will be the figure in whom Kierkegaard gives an account of this “religious ideality.”26 Expressing this inhuman Idea, language and idea are compelled to voice their own failure, witnessing to a god which Vigilius Haufniensis, one of de Silentio’s supporters and supplementarians, identifies in the following chapter with the paradoxical logos behind dialectics. This logos, we’ll find, belongs to dogmatics. It consummates the problem of the irrational and the tragic ambiguity of innocence and guilt in the Augustinian notion of a hereditary sinfulness erected “between human reason and the truth.”27

24

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which man encounters religious paradox, he gleans from Climacus’ Postscript, is after all a system for god. The sermon of 1844 is included in Johannes Climacus, trans. Croxall, pp. 159-173. Merold Westphal The Critique of Reason and Society, p. 89. Westphal points out that irrationality for Kierkegaard can refer both to the failure of a finite human reason, or the violation of its “established orders,” a moral offense. See Jacques Derrida Spectres of Marx, pp. 6, 74 f. In this book on ghosts, Derrida describes the ghost of Hamlets father as a “Thing that is not a thing.” The spectre of Hamlet’s father, like that of Marx in Europe, signals the vulnerability to the ghosts of past and future which always haunt the present, the impossibility of the present every being fully identical with itself. See Richard Kearney “Kierkegaard on Hamlet” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup. Kearney ties Spectres of Marx to Kierkegaard’s reading of Hamlet. See CA, 17n / SKS 4, 324. Haufniensis reads Fear and Trembling as a work concerned with the birth of this “religious ideality.” Merold Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 97. Cf. 114: Reason is the “wrongness of fallen humanity,” as in Romans 1:18-23.

Chapter 9 The Concept of Anxiety: Fate and the Tragic Logos of Second Ethics The Domain of Logos Haufniensis is that peculiar Kierkegaardian construction, the author without any claims.1 His psychology, though “the only science that can help a little,” still admits that it “explains nothing, and also that it cannot and will not explain more” (CA, 51 / SKS 4, 356). It is a “strange tongue” indeed, like Abraham’s, which in the very act of speaking recants what is spoken. But that is the kind we are dealing with here. The whole problem can be deferred to the larger one of the authorship in Kierkegaard, which I set aside for the moment, until the final chapter. It is enough to observe that in dealing with the problem of logos Kierkegaard not only speaks in the false logoi of the various pseudonyms but explicitly has this double talk openly discount itself as either worthless, incomprehending, or a fiction of someone’s imagination – in some cases the imaginary imaginations of other fictive characters, such as Taciturnus’ invention of Quidam. Does it make any difference then whose position is nearer to or farther from the flesh and blood Kierkegaard, when, as Haufniensis confesses, his “deliberation ends where it began” (CA, 162 / SKS 4, 461)? It is a claim that could easily find its way into the mouths of any number of the pseudonyms. A better question and the subject of Haufniensis’ introduction is the proper domain of “ÉÍÁÍД (CA, 12 / SKS 4, 321), which in culture as in the authorship tends to divide itself into contrary voices, each with its own claim to the ground they must share. The whole stretch of the introduction is a contestation of the Hegelian appropriation of religous faith within the larger design of speculative thought, and an assertion of Paul’s JewGreek logos over the term as it stands in both 1

See the preface, CA, 2-8 / SKS 4, 313-316, as well as the Postscript’s postface, where none of his authors, Kierkegaard writes, add anything new.

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its inaugural Greek innocence and its Greco-German offspring.2 Logic’s (i. e., Hegel’s) appropriation of the two sciences of ethics and dogmatics, Haufniensis argues, has denatured them both (CA, 12 / SKS 4, 321). Ethics concerns the relation between the idea and actuality (CA, 16 / SKS 4, 324) and dogmatics, similarly, concerns the actuality of faith. With what right, Haufniensis asks, can a philosophical logic claim logos [the dogmatical] (CA, 12 / SKS 4, 321) or ethics for that matter as its own? Logic, in itself, is harmless. The trouble starts when motion is introduced. Motion makes logic illogical and ethics unethical (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321). This is true at least of the “first ethics” which in the muck and mire of a philosophical logos has collapsed comically along with the philosophically appropriated dogmatics into so much nonsense. Kierkegaard, as a student, wrote such a comedy: The Battle between the Old and New Soap-Cellars, described by its author as a “heroic-patriotic-cosmopolitan-philanthropic-fatalistic drama in several episodes.”3 It featured a Mr. Von Jumping Jack (a veiled Heiberg, captain of Hegelian philosophy in København intellectual circles) in which the senseless Hegelian chatter bandied about by his fellow students is mercilessly lampooned. The problem with logic is that logically speaking, as with the impotence of Von Jumping Jack’s wit, nothing “comes about” (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321). Motion is either non-existent or immanent in a conclusion which logic itself presupposes. Logic, and by this he means Hegelian dialectic, in this sense is always already finished. Logically, you can never begin. All talk about motion in logic is talk about nothing. Ethics and dogmatics only start to make sense when freed from the speculative-philosophical enterprise. Ironically, Haufniensis’ objection to logic is a logical one. The conflation of logic and ethics disturbs the metaphysical stasis of logic in such a way that logic must fail. Whatever is logical, is (reminding us of Stages’ ironic declaration that “everyone knows what a human being is,” “the observer knows what everyone is”).4 As if exposed to a terminal virus, the encounter with “the other” (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321) 2

3 4

As the founder of the church, Paul wrote his letters in the Greek of the philosophers. But Paul, of course, began as Saul, the Jew. Somewhere between Greece and Judaism, that is where the early Christianity of Paul can be found, and, I believe, Kierkegaard’s as well. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 81. SL, 471-472 / SKS 6, 434-435: And “precisely in that I again see the unity of the comic and the tragic,” Taciturnus continues.

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of actuality reverses speculative-philosophical Ethics (“first Ethics”) wherever it is introduced. 5 Preserving ethics and dogmatics from the dizzy logos of philosophical logic implies a defense of the limits of this logic against confused Hegelian journeymen smuggling foreign categories, such as actuality, under their coats. Fortunately, dogmatics has already prepared a suitable defense against the confusions of mediation (CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321). It is through the canny application of a dogmatical emetic to this disoriented logic that a “second ethics” may be saved from the same confusion, preserving experience from a logos too comprehensive for its own good. This alternative ethics requires a more humbly inconclusive logos, such as that ‘A’ ascribes to tragedy – a “more” that is not epic, this time, but religious. The uncanny element which logic ultimately fails to contain, which repentance must grasp if repentance (like Quidam’s) is to end, is sin (hamartia). Without explaining just how, Haufniensis implies that the sin of the New Testament and the motion that a “first Ethics” can’t contain, the motion of creation, i. e., freedom,6 are bound together. Like the khora of Plato’s Timaeus to which Derrida has directed our attention, sin has its place as “no place” (CA, 14 / SKS 4, 321).7 The category containing sin is contradiction (CA, 14 / SKS 4, 321), immediately suggesting an analogy to comedy and tragedy in the sphere of aesthetics. And so the aestheticizing of sin always leads to either the comic or the tragic, for just this reason. It is either “light-minded or melancholy” (CA, 14 / SKS 4, 321). But the comic and the tragic have no enemy, we read, only “a bogeyman at which one either weeps or laughs” (CA, 15 / SKS 4, 322). The leap from aesthetics to religion requires that one vanquish this spook – the “magic picture” of fate (CA, 159 / SKS 4, 458) – and replace it with something more worthy of its characteristically religious mood: “earnestness” (CA, 15 / SKS 4, 322). When earnestness vanquishes the ghosts of the pagans, their 5

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See CA, 13 / SKS 4, 321. “The other” is distinguished from “the negative,” which Ethics generates internally, ahead of time. For clarity’s sake, I am dropping this hint which properly pursued would take us deep into the Philosophical Fragments. It is enough to say that in the interlude of the Fragments, where the question of motion is explored more deeply than anywhere else in the authorship, it is kinùsis as creation, a sign of God’s freedom, that stymies the recollective accounts of motion in both Greece and 19th century Germany. Jacques Derrida “Khora” in On the Name, pp. 89-127. For Derrida’s Kierkegaardianism, see John Caputo “Dealing Death in Kierkegaard” in Kierkegaard in Post/ Modernity, ed. by Matustik and Westphal.

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superstitious tendency to aestheticize the divine, sin is what remains. Sin is the absolutely irrecuperable remainder, infinitely more resilient than the epic variety operant in tragedy. Sin “retains a dialectical remnant that no finitude can remove, just as no man will lose faith in the lottery if he does not lose it by himself but is supposed to lose it by continually losing when he gambles” (CA, 160 / SKS 4, 458). This dialectical remnant is clearly a development of the contradiction in tragedy and comedy. Sin belongs to ethics only insofar as ethics is “shipwrecked,” that is, “with the aid of repentance. If ethics is to include sin,” which it must, “its ideality comes to an end” (CA, 17-18 / SKS 4, 324-325). Here begins the “religious ideality,” “the ideality that precisely is the ideality of actuality” (CA, 17n / SKS 4, 324) (an idea which Haufniensis politely credits to Johannes de Silentio). Dogmatics, unlike the “pseudo-ethical” temptations (CA, 17 / SKS 4, 324) of metaphysics, logic or the sub-science of psychology, “proceeds from actuality” (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326). For this reason the category of sin which dogmatics contributes to the problem at hand does not, like Ethics, deny the presence of sin (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326) by removing it ahead of time, childishly repeating the comfort in face of its reality: you don’t exist, you don’t exist. The unscientific “new science” which Haufniensis introduces to save ethics (CA, 20 / SKS 4, 327) rests on the actual existence of sin which dogmatics presupposes, as opposed to the abstract foundations of metaphysics, its principles of demonstration, the entities it backs into aporematically. Extending it to the point of collapse, the new science closes the gap between actuality and the elusive ideal of Ethics stricte (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326). It begins with actuality “in order to raise it up to ideality” (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326). It begins with the contradiction, not with “ideal demands” but with “the penetrating consciousness of actuality” (CA, 20 / SKS 4, 327) – the consciousness of the actuality of sin. Haufniensis distinguishes this opposition between a “first ethics” which presupposes metaphysics and the “new science” or “second ethics” founded dogmatically (CA, 24 / SKS 4, 331) according to the model of Greek theatre and its connection with Aristotle: It is common knowledge that Aristotle used the term ÎÏ×ÒÅ ÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿ [first philosophy] primarily to designate metaphysics, though he included within it a part that according to our conception belongs to theology. In paganism it is quite in order for theology to be treated there. It is related to the same lack of an infinite penetrating reflection that endowed the theatre in paganism with reality as a kind of divine worship. (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 328)

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Ancient Greek metaphysics is a kind of theatre.8 Both ancient theatre and ancient philosophy purported a divine immediacy in which these thinkers happily, albeit naively, absorbed actuality. The genesis of the second science prescinds from the first science defined by Aristotle, and rehierarchicalizes the Greek model he established, to clarify this “ambiguity” (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 328) in paganism between theatre, philosophy, and religion according to dogmatic concepts. The Greeks and Germans can keep their ‘first philosophy’ (or, as Aristotle sometimes calls it, first science), and by ÎÏÍÒÅÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿ understand the totality of science which we might call “ethnical,” whose essence is immanence and is expressed in Greek thought by “recollection,” and by secunda philosophia [second philosophy] understand that totality of science whose essence is transcendence or repetition. og ved ÎÏÍÒÅÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿ forstaae den videnskabelige Totalitet, man kunde kalde den ethniske, hvis Væsen er Immanentsen, eller Græsk talt, Erindringen, og ved secunda philosophia forstaae den, hvis Væsen er Transcendentsen eller Gjentagelsen (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 328).

The three spheres or stages of existence with which readers of Kierkegaard are familiar are a clarification of what Haufniensis calls Greek ambiguity. As their gods were worshipped in the theatre, literally or figuratively, the theatre of ritual, the ritual of theatre, the Greeks also idealized the possibility of virtue, the immanence of the idea in existence (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326) (or, Being in Becoming, to stay truer to the Greek categories). In doing so, they confused aesthetics and ethics metaphysically, since they had no religion in the true sense. By introducing this second philosophy, or second ethics, Haufniensis attempts to distinguish the theatre from metaphysics, that is, reflective immediacy from the idea stricte, and both from the worship which the Greeks distributed promiscuously throughout the ambiguous overlap of their world-views in these different practices. The addition of sin to the Greek equation instantly separates the elements in this mixture. Its paradoxical nature overwhelms both the metaphysical conservations of thought and the expression of aesthetic ideas in dramatic poetry or any of the arts, not to mention collective rite. What, then, is the nature of this paradox, hereditary sin?

8

Haufniensis confirms the allusions in Stages, for example, that everything other than religion, including ethics (under the aegis of the logos of metaphysics [i. e., ethics in Kant and Hegel]), is in some sense a mode of aeshetics, by including the ethnical in the category of recollection, a typically aesthetic mode of understanding.

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Oedipus and Adam In Kierkegaard’s concept of Adam we see the tragic contradiction between the individual and the universal intensified, traced back genealogically as crime to the first man. The problem is always including Adam as both member and father of the race (CA, 33 / SKS 4, 340), both sin’s genus and its species, as Oedipus was both husband and son to Jocaste, father and brother to Antigone and Ismene, Polynieces and Eteocles. As human history’s universal condition Adam cannot have been present within it. “Adam’s sin conditions sinfulness as a consequence” while the sin of every other man “presupposes sinfulness as a state. Were this the case, were Adam to actually stand outside the race, the race would not have begun with him but would have a beginning outside itself, something that is contrary to every concept” (CA, 30 / SKS 4, 336). He is both inside and out, “a past that was never present.”9 Yet as an individual he contributes to this history he fathers as would have his son, Esau, or anyone else. Adam is the khoric figure occupying the place outside of history which is likewise history’s beginning. He is both “himself and the race” (CA, 28 / SKS 4, 335). With Adam as a figure of enhanced tragedy Haufniensis confirms the anthropology at work within A’s hypothetical reform of Greek theatre and, along with it, modern culture. Adam becomes the essence of the human, paradoxically safeguarding his descendants from the philosophical authority of essences, but dooming them to repeat his collisions. He is the individual from which springs both the universal necessity of the race and the freedom of individuals like us to continue to articulate it responsibly. The no place of beginning, the leap where the individual begins, like Adam, “in the same moment” is “the place where he should begin in history” (CA, 34-35 / SKS 4, 341-342). Every individual, not just Adam, must “begin anew with the race” (CA, 34 / SKS 4, 341). Radicalizing this tragic collision between the individual and the universal with which he breaks transports the problem of the irrational from the open air of the theatre, the visible stage of a civic rationality, to the invisible interior of a subjectivity exaggerated to its limit. While tragic guilt for the ancients was the objective matter of a predetermined fate, Adam’s collisions are a matter 9

See Jacques Derrida “Differánce” in Writing and Difference, from which the phrase is borrowed. In a Derridean context, it refers to the ‘A’ within differánce, which represents a structurally linguistic gap within all languages, acting as their “quasitranscendental” condition.

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of the freedom of an individual will divided against itself in its share of sin’s universal inheritance. The church once knew, Haufniensis writes, how to let thought collide with the unthinkable (CA, 27 / SKS 4, 334). He admires this energy as opposed to the modern thinking in which the church coddles reason, the way that reason in Medieval times coddled the church.10 Sin, a revised, fulfilled tragic guilt, re-establishes this collision of the understanding which destroyed Oedipus, no longer the fact of one man’s guilt, but the paradoxical idea of the race’s. The wise king wondered: “perhaps [through some crime] our race had angered the gods long ago.”11 Kierkegaard answers plainly, “it was Adam’s.” But that answer is not an answer, only another riddle which there are no wisdoms wise enough to solve. Thinking this paradox perpetually sends us back to the well of myth from which Greek poetry draws. Because it offends the understanding, “ergo it is a myth” (CA, 32 / SKS 4, 339). Haufniensis uses one myth against another to demythologize what he calls the myths of understanding (Forstands-Myther). The myth of Adam is the anti-myth to the demythologizing power of reason. The present age, he says, reduces Adam to myth in the interest of mythology’s eradication (CA, 46 / SKS 4, 352). Understanding itself is a myth, a story that must in defense of its false claims to actuality humiliate the category to which they both belong. But there is an important difference between the myths of reason and those of religion. The “myth of the understanding” disturbs or confuses the concept. Like Hegel’s logic, it is ultimately illogical, while a religious myth “allows something that is inward to take place outwardly” (CA, 47 / SKS 4, 353). As in the Oedipus story the meaning of “the Sexual” (det Sexuelles Betydning) in the Adam story is crucial. “To speak humanly about the sexual” is an art, writes Haufniensis (CA, 67 / SKS 4, 372). Though in the role of Christian psychologist he is more interested in the birth of the sexual per se, in a metaphysics of sexuality, than the actual experience of it.12 In ignorance, we read, before the fall, the sexual distinc10

11 12

See Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy?, pp. 255-258. The function of medival philosophy was to explain and support church dogma. In modernity, the situation is often reversed. It is now the function of religion to adapt itself to the claims of reason, as a survival mechanism, perhaps, but more importantly as a way of spreading reason’s dogma. Religion has been enlisted in the service of reason. Oedipus at Colonus, 964-965 (my trans.). Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, p. 38: “If Vigilius is a psychologist, he is supplementing his practice with a good bit of metaphysics.”

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tion, like that between soul and body, simply did not exist (CA, 48 / SKS 4, 354). Sin revealed the sensuous as the sexual, a splitting and relatedness within Adam (the first man) as man-woman (CA, 48-9 / SKS 354-355). As the Bible tells us, Eve was a piece of Adam. Human history begins auto-erotically, and so sexuality here relates directly to the invocation of history: “without sin there is no sexuality, and without sexuality, no history. A perfect spirit has neither the one nor the other” (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354). A perfect spirit like Adam before the fall is androgynous, like tragedy’s Bacchus, who “represents the similarity between manly and womanly beauty” (CA, 65 / SKS 4, 370) – “and therefore the sexual difference is cancelled in the resurrection, and therefore an angel has no history” (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354). Kierkegaard anticipates Freud’s Oedipal equation in which sexuality = crime a half century before the Austrian master. The Fall through sin into sexuality and likewise history is also the fall into sexual difference, the anxiety of castration, directed just above the waist now, rib-level, rather than below.13 All contradiction, Haufniensis writes, is a task. The sexual task, therefore, is that of becoming sexless (CA, 49, 69 / SKS 4, 354, 373) as the task of history is to end it. Sexuality expresses the “synthesis of the psychical and the physical” (det Sjelelige og det Legemlige)14 as a contradiction, related to spirit (Aanden) as a third, which, in one day putting an end to history, will resolve this alienation of the soul from the body as well (CA, 43, cf. 71-72, 122, 136-137 / SKS 4, 348 cf. 376-377, 386, 437-439). The tensions of sexuality and the tensions of history will expire together. But the end of history, of history as desire, conflict, alienation, and misunderstanding, can’t be accomplished, as Hegel would have it, in a series of intellectual approximations. It is only possible as a leap that the nature of man’s situation as a finite spirit and therefore a sexual and historical being precludes, caught up as it is in the ¿ÎÍÈ¿Ï¿ÂÍÈÇ¿ ÒÅÐ ÈÒÇÑÃ×Ð – “the eager longing of creation,” a sign of its inherent imperfection (CA, 57-58 / SKS 4, 13

14

For good treatment of castration anxiety in Freud, see Ernest Becker’s reading in The Denial of Death. The recognition of sexual difference and separation from the mother produces castration anxiety, and the Oedipal desire for sexual union, like that between father and mother. Taking the father’s place, the child can eliminate this traumatic difference sexually by reuniting with the mother himself. More literally, this is closer to the difference between soul (Sjæl) and body (Legeme) than mind and body. Kierkegaard is interested in the moral problem of the embodied soul, not the intellectual problem of a mind obscured by its habitation in a body. It is a Greek problem, in other words, and not the modern one of Descartes.

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361-363). It will be the impossibility of Adam’s sin that provides the condition of possibility for this leap, paradoxically inviting us to sin as our way to salvation. But this mythical language of sex, generation and history only expresses outwardly what is really an unobservable, inward phenomenon. The task is not to abstract from the sexual or to annihilate it, but to spiritualize it (CA, 80 / SKS 4, 383). Herein lie all the moral problems of the erotic, writes our psychologist, referring us back to the classical moral psychologists who understood the relation between desire and reason as their fundamental challenge. But this element of Kierkegaard’s thought must wait until the following chapters. The problem of Adam is the tragic one of sex, generation and inherited crime, the crossing of father’s and sons, a viral establishment of the human family in which this family is at the same time criminally distorted. But while ancient tragedy aestheticized its characters into an ambiguously objective existence governed by the abstract necessity of fate, the modern Christian problem at work in Kierkegaard’s Adam is that of the individual himself, each of whom is the same contradiction, both himself and the race (sig selv og Slægten), an individual who has the Idea as a task (CA, 28 / SKS 4, 335). This brings us back to motion and to the concept of sin as the inroad to the question of motion, to the birth of a second ethics from the debauched science of man exemplified in Hegel’s ethics.15 Beginning was the true task of Adam, as it is for us now. His contradiction is the primordial task as event from which the history of the race and its individuals are derived, the original double from which the one, the idea of man, descends into metaphysics (CA, 30 / SKS 4, 336). Haufniensis’ analysis of sin is an attack on the entire Greek-philosophical conception of essence and motion, from Parmenides to the modern science of nature and the physiologized notion of the human psuchù,16 as well as the ontological history that in Hegel reduces mo15

16

The science of man which dominates our times, Darwinism, was the occassion for biology and, as a consequence, bio-psychology, to become historical. This would have been unthinkable without the precedent of Hegel’s philosophy of history, developed half a century earlier. For Kierkegaard’s relation to the birth of experimenting psychology and the naturalizing of man as an object of scientific study in the 19th century, see Chenxi Tang “Repetition and Nineteenth-Century Experimental Psychology” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002. Wilhelm Wundt opened the first laboratory for experimenting psychology in 1879, in Leipzing, 35 years after the publication of The Concept of Anxiety. This was the culmination of a movement that may be traced back to Goethe’s research

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tion to the stasis of the Idea which governs or grasps it. The individual and the race are born simultaneously in the cut of sin between existence against Idea. To write of beginnings, of Adam’s beginning, is also to write about innocence. Innocence (Uskyldighed) for Haufniensis must be distinguished from its Hegelian impostor, immediacy (det Umiddelbare). Immediacy is a logical concept, while innocence belongs to ethics (CA, 36 / SKS 4, 343). The concept of innocence comes into existence, he writes, with the corresponding concept of the guilt in which innocence is lost. There is a forgetting at its origin, a loss. Again, like the sexual difference and its genealogical gap, which likewise leaves us open to historical difference, the difference between innocence and guilt is a moral gap that has never been occupied. It is the loss of innocence that makes these ethical concepts possible. Innocence comes into existence “for the first time” “as that which it was before being annulled and which now is annulled” (CA, 36-7 / SKS 4, 343345).17 Like the doubling of the individual and the race in the paradox of Adam, innocence and guilt reflect another doubling, that of knowledge (Viden) and ignorance (Uvidenhed). “The fact that ignorance when viewed from without is regarded as something defined in the direction of knowledge is of no concern whatever to ignorance” (CA, 37 / SKS 4, 345). While mediation presupposes the immediacy it reflects, presupposes and therefore contains, this innocent unconsciousness is cancelled by transcendence. It doesn’t flower naturally, gradually, like history, into knowledge. It is not the Hegelian nothing of beginnings which presuppose their ends, or rather, which the self-directed end presupposes. The immediacy which comes to life gradually, embryonically, like the stuff of life is something given to the animal. “In innocence, man is not merely animal, for if he were at any moment of his life merely animal, he would never become man” (CA, 43 / SKS 4, 349). There never was any graduation from immediacy to mediacy, from blood and marrow to the essence of man. “The moment he becomes man, he becomes so by being animal as well” (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354). Animal innocence is a romantic

17

on the physiology of perception, in the Farbenlehre (1811). It doesn’t cross over into psychology until the mid 30’s and 40’s (pp. 101-102), when Kierkegaard’s career gets into full swing. Tang’s point, that Kierkegaard is criticizing the birth of a new science at the time of his writing, is an important one. Nietzsche echoes in the first essay of The Genealogy of Morals, decades later, that the split between altruism and egoism, good and evil, does not impose itself on premoral man. Of course, he never read Kierkegaard.

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fantasy invented along with the metaphysics of man, a dreaming culture painfully projecting the illusion of a pristine nature left behind. Still, innocence is something, albeit something lost (CA, 37 / SKS 4, 345). While immediacy is the false beginning of aesthetics, already recouped by the Judge’s correspondingly abstract idea of the ethical, or the history of Geist, which both presuppose immediacy as the immanently superceded, Adam is the true beginning, without romantic illusions or the sophistical detachment of a Socrates or a Hegel. He embodies the paradox that does not reveal itself to the sober scientists of reason or the starry-eyes of poets but preserves itself as a task for each individual to repeat in the earnestness of religion.

Adam’s Fall: Contradiction and the Fate of Logos What of that leap from Adam to history, to us? As the tragic hero or his modern counterpart, the genius, falls to fate, so Adam’s innocence falls prey to the “foreign power” of anxiety (CA, 43 / SKS 4, 349). The individual who succumbs to anxiety does so tragically since it is in the “impotence of anxiety” that “the individual succumbs, and precisely for that reason he is both guilty and innocent” (CA, 73 / SKS 4, 376). His fall is not something he does. It is an impotence he performs, a failure, a loss of power. But rather than a god or fate, as it would have been on the tragic stage, anxiety displaces the individual from within through a similar dawning of ignorance. In anxiety the “whole actuality of knowledge” projects itself as “the enormous nothing of ignorance” (CA, 44 / SKS 4, 349). It is “a word” that concentrates this ignorance, three words, in fact, which innocence cannot understand: good, evil and what it means to die (CA, 44-45 / SKS 4, 349-350). It is through logos, the word, that innocence encounters the possibility of guilt and slips into the domain of a first ethics, as it learns to speak this foreign language from whose tragic hand it innocently feeds. And so the same paradoxical doubling we encountered in Adam as the father of the race returns again as the acquisition of moral language, i. e., the problem of learning to speak the language of guilt – ‘good and evil’ – which begins with prohibition. Before the fall, these three words would have been nonsensical, garden chatter, the laughter of his animals. In coming to morality, Adam faces the problem of generating new meaning, of hearing something new, which Plato first expressed in the Meno. But this implies a challenge to metaphysics gen-

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erally which emerges first with Kierkegaard:18 how can thinking avoid the metaphysician’s dictatorship of thought in which all thoughts, everything intelligible, has already been had ahead of time? The answer comes in the strange form of a dogmatics of language. The moral authority whom Adam hears in the garden is language itself (CA, 47 / SKS 4, 353). Language is the teacher who dodges the metaphysical blow of the Meno, where Socrates reduces all learning to recollection of a pre-established essence using geometry as his model. Yet, strangely, it is also Adam himself who speaks. Haufniensis exploits the myth of Adam in the direction of linguistics and cognition, discovering in him the paradoxical structure of its origins, that is, how one gets from non-language to language, from the unnamed and unknowable particular – this thing, here, now – to the abstract fluency of the universal, without presupposing language or the concept itself as an intermediary step. The ambiguous double behind knowledge and non-knowledge is now that of speech and silence, echoing that of man and animal, universal and individual, being and becoming, soul and body, and even man and woman. But the question of each of these leaps is unanswerable, another one of philosophy’s trick questions, posed linguistically, yet presupposing something unspeakably prior which it now attempts in vain to call forth or recollect (like the aesthete recalled his evanescent god in the thiasos of Love-worship, like Quidam tried desperately to recall his paradoxical guilt). As soon as the philosopher answers the question he lapses into the comic. Philosophical enthusiasm makes him absent-minded enough that he needs a good natured, level-headed wife whom he can ask as Soldin asked Rebecca when in enthusiastic absent-mindedness he also lost himself in the objectivity of the chatter: “Rebecca, is it I who is speaking” (CA, 51 / SKS 4, 356). To quote another German well interested in the limits and fallacies of logic, another reader of Kierkegaard, philosophy had better keep silent when it comes to the world outside of propositions, which is to say, the world of experience, as opposed to “all that is the case”19 – but especially concerning ethical-religious realities: “He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright. What 18

19

For more on Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and the end of metaphysics, see John Caputo Radical Hermeneutics, ch. 1. See also John Caputo “Kierkegaard and the Foundering of Metaphysics” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Repetition is Kierkegaard’s solution/reply to Greek recollection, which he also identifies with Hegelian mediation. Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, prop. 1, p. 7.

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we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” 20 Still, if there is a language paradoxical enough with which to approach the elusive contours of sin (a trope for human existence as such), the Jewish Greek of St. Paul provides it. But before we can examine the relevance of Pauline ‘concepts’ for Kierkegaard’s return to tragedy, we first have to explore the relation between Greece and Greek-tragic categories and their repetition in late modernity.

Innocence and Immediacy: from Greece and Judaism to Modernity According to Haufniensis, the reign of beauteous health in Greek culture, the rejection of suffering, expressed a false unaccomplished synthesis of psuchù and the corporeal in which spirit, the necessary “third” of the relation, was denied (CA, 65 / SKS 4, 370). Aesthetically adequating the soul to the body, the beautiful body became a false picture of the triumphant psuchù. And so Socrates announces the death of this culture and the birth of the new with the sincerely comic suggestion that “we love only ugly women” (CA, 69 / SKS 4, 373). Spirit’s recognition of the “foreign” nature of the sexual, its penetration of the “concealed sham of the erotic” that the “immortal spirit is determined as genus,” expresses itself in the maxim that “the erotic is both beautiful and comic” (CA, 69 / SKS 4, 373). Making sport of beauty, spirit disposes of the contradiction by undermining it ironically from within in the comic-ironic resolution to love only the ugly. Greek innocence, such as this, cannot be gained. It can only be lost. Haufniensis’ perspective on Greece is more radical than it might seem. On the surface it might simply allude to the obstinacy of history and the inevitability of a hermeneutical rather than objective understanding of the past. Even a move backward is a move forward, since we always elaborate on the past from a new standpoint, the empty standpoint of the ‘now’ from which the past is retrieved in a future interpretation (CA, 86 / SKS 4, 389). We can never attain the past in its pure state. Even more cannily than this, however, in a hermeneutics of even greater suspicion, Haufniensis implies that this Greece, at least for us, never existed. We had never attained the past. The dialectics between innocence and guilt, ignorance and knowledge, the historical ‘then’ and ‘now’ and the false abstraction of all claims to immediacy, 20

Ludwing Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, props. 6.54 and 7, p. 151.

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poetic or philosophic, all point directly to this conclusion. Our Greece is a reflection of eternity in the fracture of the moment, the mirrors of past and future (CA, 85 / SKS 4, 388). The first innocence, the innocence of Greece, of reflective immediacy, is false not in the sense of being incorrect, but, rather, ontologically unjustified. It is nonsense, as opposed to the contradiction of sin, a token without a type, a postcard we send our future selves in the empty punctum of the now from some place that never was. The dialectic of innocence and guilt repeats itself in the dialectic between Greece and Christianity, one culture predicated on the ignorance of sin and the other on it’s ontological priority for man. But it is the difference between the two, Haufniensis suggests somewhat surreptitiously, which makes the distinction possible. The possibility of innocence, of Greece, emerges when this innocence is lost. Greek time is past time (CA, 90 / SKS 4, 393), the time of recollection. But the eternal as the past is an abstract concept (CA, 90 / SKS 4, 393), whether it is culture we are recollecting or the erotist’s idea of Beauty, the philosopher’s Truth, or the dazzling face of the Good. The time of Greece exemplifies a mythic past that was never present, a false Hegelian image of immediacy, like the romantic vision of nature and the pure, pornographic passion of the animal, constructed of the distance between an unclaimed now and an imaginary then. And so the second innocence, likewise, must move beyond this distinction. This “victory of love” in which the sexual is forgotten and a true innocence accomplished, “recollected only in forgetfullness,” is also the communal leap of the repetition of cultures in which the “cheerful eroticism” of our imagined Greece is consigned to oblivion (CA, 80 / SKS 4, 383). It is through the relation to fate that this first becomes possible, through tragedy, the art form in which the harmonious Greece of the poets and philosophers first revealed its cracks, and Greece itself first became a thing of the past, even to itself.

Fate without Fate: Providence and the Moment In Greece, Haufniensis tells us, this anxious relation to spirit as possibility was external (CA, 96 / SKS 4, 400). It expressed itself in the complements of fate and the oracle. The genius-lover of romanticism and the Napoleonic hero are Kierkegaard’s most vivid examples of the alteration from the outer conflict to the inner, from tragic fate to paradox and sin. So we’ll focus now on this world-historical genius, anoth-

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er intellectual, whose struggle with the Idea lapses from the promise of religion into the satisfaction of an inferior desire, not the appetites of eros, as with Kierkegaard’s aesthetes, but instead ambition, the spirit of conquest, which drives Napoleon’s fatal winter march east, through Europe and into Russia. For Kierkegaard, this genius, obsessed by ambition and his own fate, like the anxious, melancholy aesthete, fails to understand the collision which has him in its grip. They both see the relation between self and world, individual and universal, as something relatively mediable. They both believe they can realize their Idea in action, in a conquering, be it the maw of the Volga or the fertile crescent of a young maiden’s thighs.21 Fate here has a distinctly Hegelian ring, defined by Haufniensis as a necessity which is not yet conscious of itself (CA, 97 / SKS 4, 401). In relation to the next moment, this necessity operates in the disguise of an accident. And so it is an accident, for instance, when Oedipus is rescued as an infant from Kithaeron. It is an accident when he kills the man who attacked him at the crossroads, wandered past the sphinx and, after toppling her into the gorge, takes his victim’s place in the queen’s bed. The necessity unfolding is unapparent. It is an accident when he utters his fateful curse upon the criminal, upon himself. Fate is this “unity of necessity and accident” (CA, 97 / SKS 4, 401). Since fate rests in the ambiguity between necessity and accident, the oracle, the Greeks only advent into fate’s mysteries, becomes the most ambiguous of institutions. Unlike the modern weather report, which shamelessly makes up in precision what it lacks in accuracy, the oracle emphasized restraint and, like a modern fortune-teller, palmist or astrologer kept its numbers up by keeping its predictions nearly as opaque as fate itself.22 “This is the inexplicable tragicalness of the 21

22

Traditionally, the sacrifice of young maiden’s like the Seducer’s Cordelia has always been connected through religious ritual to the hunt. See Walter Burkert Homo Necans, pp. 63-67: “Man declines to love in order to kill: this is most graphically demonstrated in the ritual slaughter of “the virgin,” the potential source both of a happy union and of disruptive conflict with the group,” namely jealousy. “In renouncing love, one’s frustration can be transformed into aggressive ability.” “The maiden sacrifice provided the basis and the excuse for the subsequent killing, and the restitution that followed referred mainly to her “disappearance.” This ritual form is reflected clearly in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, which preceded the Trojan war as “the sacrifice of Polyxena follows it.” See Grethe Kjær “The Concept of Fate in Stages on Life’s Way” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 246. Kjær draws this parallel between ancient and modern paganism, evinced in the practices of astrology, palmistry, fortune telling or omens.

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Greeks,” not the oracle’s ambiguity, but the anxious devotion to its proclamations, each of which “in turn might signify the exact opposite.” Their tragic character lay, for Haufniensis, in their obsessively “not being able to forbear counsel with it” (CA, 97 / SKS 4, 401). The object of their anxiety was the oracular ambiguity driving this tragic paradox, between fate and necessity, which Christianity discovered and radicalized in the tidy phrase: “I became guilty by fate.” The ambiguous omnipotence of fate and oracular language remained ambiguous “because these powers, like fate, are nothing” 23 – a bogey of man’s invention. Haufniensis diagnoses the culture of oracles with repression. He sees in fate an attempt to retain control of disaster by positing through the oracle (or perhaps the church, or modern science) a world-order one has access to, which affords humanity the possibility of evasion. But as the story of Oedipus is meant to show, the attempt to control fate through the oracle is bound to recoil. By resisting the oracle Oedipus abandoned Corinth and travelled to Thebes, where the oracle, of course, was ultimately fulfilled. Like sinewy German dialectic all opposition to the oracle is eventually absorbed into its logic. But, as Napoleon can attest, there is no depending on it. The star presiding over Napoleon’s great victory over Austria and Russia at Austerlitz didn’t protect him from the starless skies over Moscow (CA, 100-101 / SKS 4, 403). 24 And so finally the oracle means nothing. It is a hollow omen and an empty signifier – an elaborate, cultural fetish. Yet, unsettling as it is, the oracle is the object of a more manageable fear than that which it replaced. The ethical-religious concepts of guilt and sin, however, drive out this all-present nothing by inventing the single individual “as the single individual” (CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401).25 I cannot be made guilty by fate, at least not on pagan terms. Paganism is too “light-minded” for the contradiction (CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401). And so the Oedipus of the Colonnus maintains his innocence. This is absolutely Greek, Haufniensis would say. It takes a thinking as absurd as Christianity’s to magnify this ambivalence in tragedy to the point of breaking. Only 23

24 25

Grethe Kjær “The Concept of Fate in Stages on Life’s Way” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Stages on Life’s Way, p. 247. For more on the allusion, see the Hong’s note 44, on page 247. Yet, this “all present nothing” returns as the “levelling power” of fate in modernity. See TA, 84, 86, where Kierkegaard identifies leveling as a daimonic force and ‘et Mere,’ the epic remainder of Greek tragedy he treats in the Either/Or essay. Cf. Anders Holm “Reflections Correlative to Fate” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, p. 162.

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when a properly metaphysical guilt breaks forth from the ambiguities of tragic culpability is fate cancelled and providence posited (CA, 99 / SKS 4, 403). Fate is directed outwardly, a relation to the contingencies of “fortune, misfortune, esteem, honor, power, immortal fame – all of which are temporal determinations” (CA, 101-102 / SKS 403-404). When providence announces itself the shadow it casts in fate recedes. It is not the Russian army that defeats a genius like Napoleon, or Thebes which conquers Oedipus, both of whom take up the mantle of fate. It is a word, “the significance of which no creature, not even God in heaven, understands (for in a certain sense God in heaven does not understand the genius), and with that the genius collapses in impotence” (CA, 100 / SKS 4, 369). The genius is a man apart from the rest not by virtue of his deeds, but like Oedipus, through his understanding. Like Adam, he stands at the beginning, is, a beginning (CA, 105 / SKS 4, 407). He lives all that is past, an individual who retrieves the universal of the race, its Idea, and drives it forward. He is “predominantly subjectivity” (CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401), the “omnipotent Ansich” (CA, 99 / SKS 4, 402) of idealism set over and against the whole world order, 26 a master who slaves for the Idea, trying to justify himself in it through worldly deeds whose outcomes are governed essentially by the ambiguity of omen. The transcendental freedom of genius is a world unto itself which creates its own rules, thinks what it thinks, makes what it makes, kills what it kills. But this modern pagan collapses when the support of his colossal intelligence topples under the anxiety over fate, when the understanding “rises up with the explanation that it became guilty” (CA, 98 / SKS 4, 401) – its interpretation of that mysterious word fate uttered, which even god could not recognize and for which the omens had been just tropes. But this word was the whispering of genius to itself: “I am somehow responsible for all of this.” The genius of reflection can only be undone by the genius himself. Haufniensis preserves this hero of modern tragedy (a tragedy, again, which dramatically always fails, because the modern tragic contest has no external forces which its protagonist must suffer, only the invisible pain of ethical responsibility and its struggles with the Idea) by releasing him from his ominous fates and introducing him into a new religious category. Here the fates reveal their deeper significance, 26

One is reminded of Fichte’s Ich Ich (I – I). See CA, 153 / SKS 4, 436 f., on construing the self and its relation to eternity metaphysically – the comedy of a metaphysical ‘I.’

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the more profound mystery of individual guilt and sin (CA, 110 / SKS 4, 411). When guilt is freely chosen this freedom returns as repentance (CA, 109-110 / SKS 4, 410-411). The genius struggles unwittingly against himself and, finally, he loses. Which is to say, he wins. This omnipotent Ansich was a world. When this world collapses, like anything of cosmic significance, a planet or a star, there is a massive vacuum, an unbearable lightness where Being abstains. But the total guilt of this collapse introduces with it an innocence qua lapsed and the possibility, distinctly religious, now, of its recovery. He becomes the “genius who is religious” (CA, 107 / SKS 4, 409), whose “special gift” or “talent” is “that of willing” (CA, 114 / SKS 4, 417). By recognizing divine dispensation, even if its secrets remain unfathomable, like those of fate, the genius can reconcile himself, take this gift up freely and decisively as his own responsibility. 27 The accidents of fate have vanished. There is only providence and comportment – the way I hold myself, my style – which in chapter eleven we’ll find becomes an essential part of Kierkegaard’s ethics. With the actuality of guilt and the “sin-consciousness” (CA, 110 / SKS 4, 411) driving repentance emerges the new possibility of forgiveness and the second innocence. But for this possibility to become real there must be an interruption within the immanence of the subject. Guilt and sin are both states originating in the subject, consequences of pride’s disobedient turn away from God, the rejection of this power and freedom grounding one’s own. 28 Forgiveness is a foreign power, like the “foreign power” of anxiety through which the genius stumbles into self-declared guilt. A self-forgiving guilt is just short hand for the spiritual autism of Hegel’s world-historical tautologies, the Pelagianism Haufniensis explicitly rejects (CA, 34, 37 / SKS 4, 341, 345).29 Haufniensis warns that the “crazed repentance” in which this subjectivity struggles toward its limit is “a sophism no dialectic can defeat” (CA, 116 / SKS 4, 418). This is logos gone haywire, which, therefore, no logos can pacify. As in the case of Quidam, the eloquence of an intel27

28

29

I follow Kjæer on this point. See Gretha Kjæer “The Concept of Fate in Stages on Life’s Way” in International Kierkegaard Commentary – Sages on Life’s Way, p. 249 f. This notion sin as the turn away form god and pride belongs originally to Augustine. See On Free Choice of the Will, bk. iii generally. Kierkegaard pursues the despairing rejection of God’s establishing power in SUD, 14, 20, 49, 144 / SKS 11, 130, 136, 164. The Pelagians whom Augustine rejected believed man could obtain forgiveness of sin without god’s merciful grace, under his own power.

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lect and imagination inflamed by the consciousness of sin assimilates every one of reason’s appeals. Forgiveness must come as a rupture. The repentance of a genius like Quidam’s is “the highest ethical contradiction” (CA, 117 / SKS 4, 420) – the Christian inheritor to the tragic art. The contradiction is that ethics requires ideality and repentance gives none. Repentance refuses to barter away the existence which ideality quickly explains. Yet the deliberation of repentance delays action, while action is “precisely what ethics requires” (CA, 118 / SKS 4, 421). Another problem with repentance, though, as Quidam demonstrates, is that without the aid of dogmatic concepts repentance only ambiguously recognizes what it means to remove. This is what makes the dogmatic contribution of the doctrine of inherited sin so crucial. It resolves the tragic ambiguity by magnifying the contradictory terms of tragedy to the point of absolute distance: absolute innocence objectively – absolute guilt subjectively. What had once been a matter of fate is now one of individual freedom. But this makes the circumstances more tragic, not less. Only when repentance has exhausted itself in reflection, arriving at sin – “the dialectical point where as posited it will annul itself by new repentance and then collapse” (CA, 118 / SKS 4, 421) – does the tragedy end and innocence begin again, for the first time, in the practice of faith. Faith achieves the synthesis which for dialectics remains impossible, since the impossibility of the synthesis was the hermaphroditic origin the binary logic of all dialectics (e. g., man-woman, knowledgeignorance, guilt-innocence, good-evil, speech-silence, animal-man, Christian-pagan) worked so hard to suppress. Sin and faith are the recovery of a dizzy freedom in the concreteness of action, in spite of the essential mystery and terror which choice involves: that engagement in marriage might contain a murder, that the wonder of childbirth might foreshadow the terrible crime of incest or the horror of a living burial. The madness of agoraphobia, a form of what Haufniensis calls inclosing reserve, from the perspective of an Oedipus or Antigone suddenly becomes perfectly intelligible – not because their fates were fore-ordained, but because only through suffering the impossibility of choice can God’s providence alert the individual personally to his presence and give them the power to choose.

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Guilt and Logos at the Limits of Reason: Christianity, Sacrifice and Katharsis The Christian development of Greek-tragic hamartia allows the necessity of the hero’s exclusion to become self-conscious and therefore deliberate. The Greek of the Concept of Anxiety again and again is the Greek of the New Testament, that is, a Jewish Greek, Saul’s Greek, that Greek through which Saul became Paul. 30 In tragedies, be they pagan or Christian, shepherds, literal or figurative, move their human flock through the word. The power of the word to name, to identify, likewise reveals a gap in the underlying logos – as the shepherd’s identification of Oedipus with the infant whom Laius had abandoned on Mt. Kithaeron reverses all of reason’s claims. But while Greek tragedy assigned Oedipus the khoric place in which a divine logos was displaced into both itself and the human, as a stuttering within it, the divine logos for Kierkegaard no longer reveals itself as it had to the Greeks. The wake of modernity has stranded us on these human fragments, which with Hegel have grown out of all proportions, replacing the gods and embracing all of world history. The difference which shipwrecks the logos this time around is a contradiction immanent to this universal Subject, which upends the abstract dialectics of reconciliation and salvation and forces each person back into the concrete task of becoming just that, a human being, where Quidam goes mad in the Concept and Abraham begins his trek up the mountain. This existential contradiction is the hamartia of St. Paul rather than Aristotle. We should translate this Greek word as ‘sin’ and not ‘error.’ It is a paradox – rather than a mistake to correct – at the heart of human reason, which reason’s most treasured categories – those of ‘universal’ and ‘individual’ – presuppose. It is the beginning and the end of human thinking, not in Hegel’ sense, a Greco-Germanism in which the whole is immanent in the parts, the ideal in the actual, but an upended Hegelianism which can never get started because the beginning is where reason stalls, and if there is to be any beginning at all, reason must recognize the excluded, expose itself to the abyss at its foundations. This failure of the “esthetical-metaphysical” (CA, 119 / SKS 4, 422) (and in this odd term we should see Judge William’s prudence, Kant’s imperative, Bentham’s calculus, Hegel’s Concept, all of them self-satisfied idealists, successful recollecters, modern pagans 30

Jacques Derrida The Gift of Death, p. 58. Cf. pp. 57 f. Derrida remarks on the significance of Paul as a “great Jewish convert.”

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in whom the Idea and existence can be comfortably joined), a very long cultural hiccough interrupting tragedy and Christianity, with the emendations of sin restores “the significance that tragedy engendered by showing that the individual was not the source of the tale but had, in fact, fallen into the hands of another.”31 Now, mirroring the tragic vision of the aesthete in Either/Or, “the individual’s identity does not ‘as with Wilhelm’ rest upon his identifying with his own history, but rather upon his identification with a stranger’s storytelling,” with the Old Testament and Shakespeare. 32 A strange storytelling: “Language, the word,” like it damned the tragic hero, likewise saves the genius developed religiously from the suicide path of inclosing reserve (det Indesluttede) (CA, 124, 159 / SKS 4, 425, 458). “Let x signify the demonic, the relation of freedom to it something outside x. The law for the manifestation of the demonic is that against its will it ‘comes out with it’” (CA, 124 / SKS 4, 425). What is this word, then, in which the strange begins to speak, the utterance of which breaks “sorcery’s enchantment” and wakes “the somnambulist” from his dangerous sleep (CA, 127 / SKS 4, 428)? It is a name: Oedipus, son of Laius, and so on … Tom, Dick, or Harry. 33 “[A]nd therefore the somnambulist wakes up when his name is spoken” (CA, 127 / SKS 4, 428). He doesn’t stumble any longer, like the hero or the genius, accidentally, against the necessities of fate. Suffering and possession by a daimķn, the “foreign power” of anxiety, along with the proper distortions of intelligence have given him his terrible vision of providence. He chooses freely, not to be what he wants, but to be who he is. The language that calls your name and breaks the muteness of inclosing reserve is not the language of communication, that sane language where the transparency of ideas shift places from one head to 31

32

33

Joakim Garff “The esthetic is above all my element” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup, p. 63. Garff sees the failure of Judge William’s position in the second volume of Either/Or as the failure of modernity to learn the above lesson from tragedy. Joakim Garff “The esthetic is above all my element” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Jegstrup, p. 65. See EO1, 28 / SKS 2, 37. But this seems to require the fragmentation of myth and logos which Garff identifies with the modern position and Judge Wilhelm. This is what makes Wilhelm the editor of his own story. But the fragmentation, on the contrary, for A, is what makes all human productions historical. They are always incomplete, made of what was “left behind,” and then, again, “left behind” for the next generation. Kierkegaard often refers to the growing mass of merchant bourgeouis as Tom, Dick, and Harry.

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the next. 34 Inclosing reserve, like Hamlet, has “an understanding but no tongue.” Its victim has become “shut up” in himself, wrapped up in his collisions and submerged in an “intoxicated state.” He is no longer “master of himself” but rather a mixture in which one element looks upon the other, like “someone who was once insane and has retained a memory of his former state” (CA, 128 / SKS 4, 429). He is divided against himself like Aristotle’s akratic, the natural state of the soul, he thought, as reason begins to mature. But the maturity of reason for Kierkegaard fails to accomplish the predestined authority over the passions that Aristotle hypothesized, the consolidation of the soul’s multiple voices under the single voice of reason. Instead, the Idea, since its embryonic stages in the aesthete’s reflections on his own passions and pleasures, has up to this point unknowingly pursued its own destruction. The self-destructive nature of human logos finally comes to light in Christian understanding. It places the individual at the hands of language per se, another trope for the divine condition that lies behind the play of man’s dialectics. This is Adam himself, unknowable yet necessary, impossible but required (CA, 47 / SKS 4, 353). What would it mean for Adam to be equivalent to a kind of language, not in the ordinary communicative sense as a kind of tool, since man “was not the inventor of language” (CA, 47 / SKS 4, 353), but as a paradoxical leap from the nothing35 of immediacy to the stuff of intelligence, from the eternally mute body of the animal to the loquacity of the human? The archù-language of ‘Adam’ would embody the leap of man into his own history, that leap invoked by/invoking sexual difference (CA, 49 / SKS 4, 354), the parrying between the individual and the race without conceivable beginning or end, archù or telos. “To understand and to understand are two different things,” writes Haufniensis; “for a man to understand what he himself says is one thing, and to understand himself in what is said is another” (CA, 142 / SKS 4, 443). Absorbed in the grammar of faith understanding becomes concrete, free and 34

35

For an explanation of this conventional understanding of language, see Jacques Derrida “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 311-314. He takes Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human language as its exemplar. This question of the leap, essentially from non-being to being, is the question dealt with at CA, 82-82 / SKS 4, 385-386, traced by Haufniensis back to Plato’s Parmenides. This is exactly the leap which anxiety and faith are meant to accomplish in the realm of freedom. Plato, however, posed the problem spatially and in metaphysical terms, thinking being and motion representationally. Still, his concept of exaiphnùs is one which Haufniensis happily puts to his own ends.

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disclosed, yet in a way that holds itself back, caught up in the performance of the tragic paradoxes embodied in the first of men: The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, of the individual himself – not the pure self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness that is so concrete that no author, not even the one with the greatest power of description, has ever been able to describe a single such self-consciousness, although every human being is such a one. (CA, 143 / SKS 4, 442)

Haufniensis prioritizes logos over being, not the logos of the concept, but that of action and the self-understanding that takes place in and through action, not contemplation – through doing, not being. Caught up in the performance of a contradiction he understands the paradox more like a swimmer knows how to swim than a physicist knows how a swimmer swims, terrified at the 70,000 fathoms below and wondering at his ability to glide above them. Faith’s “capacity to understand” introduces a new logic that from the human perspective must appear as “the logic of insanity.”36 “[I]t is not a question of being inconsistent or illogical, but of deciding what form one’s consistency or logicality may take.”37 To understand in this way would be to know the god’s language, to have absorbed this logos through experience which, confirming Quidam’s encounters with a terrible god, Haufniensis describes consistently in terms of violent possession. The eternal is “the wine of life” which when we drink it turns the present “into something different from what a person wants it to be” (CA, 152 / SKS 4, 451). The terror of immortality that haunted both Quidam and the poetic Young Man removes its kindly aesthetic cloak and presents itself in all of its destructive and reconstructive force. This begins aesthetically in the poet’s “profound, unexplained sorrow” and the anxiety with which the “light-heartedness” of the Greek’s “plastic beauty trembled” (CA, 65 / SKS 4, 370) – the anxiety of the hero over fate and his visits to the oracle. It proceeds with the modern genius and his omens, concluding finally in what Climacus calls the crucifixion of the understanding, a cross for which, by this time, the understanding is ready to furnish the nails, the katharsis in which “anxiety enters his soul and searches out everything finite and petty out of him, and then leads him where 36

37

Training in Christianity, pp. 58, 81, as cited by Westphal. Of course, faith seeking understanding is a familiar theme from Augustine, which Kierkegaad applies. Westphal gives an account of this other intelligibility of faith. Merold Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 90. J. N. Findlay “The Logic of Mysticism” in Religious Studies 2. As cited in Merold Westphal Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, p. 90.

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he wants to go” (CA, 159 / SKS 4, 458). In his notion of the logos that heals, Climacus will return to an ancient analogy between logos and medical treatment (older, even, than philosophy) in which illnesses of the soul, especially the perversion of emotion, are subject to the healing power of words. 38 Following the model tragic plot, anxiety, Haufniensis tells us, discovers and reverses the deception of all finite ends in a tragic encounter with the god (CA, 155 / SKS 4, 454). Reflected inwardly, this encounter has now become a matter of how we experience time. Chronological, historical time (Tiden), the difference between Greece and Christianity, for instance – 1800 years between Christ’s appearance and Kierkegaard’s age – is a derivative, objectivized form of temporality (Timelighed). It is grounded in an interpretation of temporality based on the “present.” Construing time in terms of presence implies a “spatialized” understanding built on an “infinitely contentless” now point through which “every moment, as well as the sum of the moments, is a process (a passing by).” This is the time of calculations, of regimens and examinations, work deadlines and paid vacations (which, of course, are always on the clock). But “no moment is a present, and accordingly there is in time neither present, nor past, nor future” (CA, 85 / SKS 4, 388). Within this ersatz ‘time’ lies the possibility of both ancient and modern tragedy, the tragic collision depicted by the ancient tragedians of the time of the gods with that of men: [W]hile it is beautiful to listen to a brook running murmuring through life, it is nevertheless comical that a sum of rational creatures is transformed into a perpetual muttering without meaning. (CA, 94 / SKS 4, 398)

This comedy, as we know, with only a small shift in perspective, becomes tragic. The contradiction between reason and nonsense is comic from the outside, like the mynah mimicking the profundities I loose as I pass by its cage. But, from the inside, it is tragic, a soul trapped inside a body, a human tongue lodged in the mute skull of an animal. This was the Nebuchadnezzar of Quidam’s diary, an exemplary tragic 38

See Martha Nussbaum The Therapy of Desire, p. 49. Nussbaum cites Iliad, ix. 946: Achilles’ heart, “swollen up” with the “bile” of anger, Pheonix heals with the divine logoi that go behind strife and exercise a healing function; Pindar Nemean Odes 8.49 in the Odes of Pindar: his “charm” produces freedom from a troubled soul; Aeshylus Prometheus Bound, 377: “for the sickness of anger, logoi are the doctors.”; Empedocles, in frs. B111 & B112, claims to write poems that provide pharmaka for human ills. See also R. G. A. Buxton Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho.

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figure39whose desire for reason (i. e., for meaning, the meaning of a love, a crime, a death) distorted itself in its expression into something monstrously foreign: a self-annihilating logos. There is a specifically tragic form of suffering in this frantic and failed attempt to speak – possession by an Other that must be expelled through the mouth in the physicum of words, or even more quiet gestures, traced by the hand, for instance, in pen and ink. It is easy to see in Haufniensis’ halcyon description of time as a babbling brook the obverse image of what a future reader referred to as the “harassed unrest” which our age has become.40 An abstract misrepresentation of time as something spatial – something out there, misrepresentative because based on a representation rather than an experience or “thought” (CA, 85 / SKS 4, 388) – has terminally diminished our sense of reality. The moment has been emptied. But ‘the moment’ in another sense given to it by St. Paul contains an excess. It is overfull (CA, 90 / SKS 4, 393).41 The lived flow of human time and history – ‘temporality’ (Timelighed) – is an overflow, a wash from the violent intervention of eternity, the wake of its “attempt at stopping time” (Tiden) (CA, 88 / SKS 4, 392). History, our history, begins with the spontaneous irruption of the eternal in the purely sensuous and ahistorical ‘time’ of spiritless nature (CA, 89 / SKS 4, 393) – for which, ironically, time has no signficance – an abstraction from the concrete ‘temporality’ born of this ‘moment.’ The explosiveness of eternity’s moment in time is the beginning of a human temporality that the same generative power all but brings to an end. This experience of the god in time reprises a vision familiar from tragedy about the limits of the possible: No, in possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful. So when such a person graduates from the school of possibility, and he knows, better than a child knows his ABC’s that he can demand absolutely nothing of life and that the terrible, perdition, and annihilation live next door to every man, and when he has thoroughly learned that 39 40

41

SL, 351 / SKS 6, 326. See Martin Heidegger “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 150. “The fullness of time” is a favored phrase of Kierkegaard’s, from Galatians 4:4. For Quidam, “The fullness of time is approaching” after his “year of preparation” and proto-religious disciplines. SL, 202 / SKS 6, 189. Here in the Concept of Anxiety it is tantamount to the notion of “the moment.” CA, 33n, 90 / SKS 4, 340. It returns in Climacus’ Fragments as a trope for the “decisive moment” in which the god appears as teacher, providing the condition of learning, the mark of truth against which the learner recognizes themselves as untruth. PF, 18 / SKS 4, 227.

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every anxiety about which he was anxious came upon him in the next moment – he will give actuality another explanation, he will praise actuality, and even when it rests heavily upon him, he will remember that it nevertheless is far, far lighter than possibility was. (CA, 156 / SKS 4, 455)

Punished by madness, the person who has this experience will choose, madly, despite the terror that choice implies. His choice is impossible without it. Typically the poet restores the harmony between the time of gods and that of men. Haufniensis, alternatively, displaces this resolution and relief into which the contradictions of comedy and tragedy and the anxious evasions of eternity’s event disappear (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453). In the dramas of human life this resolution would be another deception, he believes, more fodder for aesthetes and pagans. The pseudonymous theory of tragedy he completes is more pessimistic than the Greeks – whom for Haufniensis abide a false harmony between the flux of the temporal and eternity’s self-same repose – because this harmony, despite its temporary tragic distortion, Greek thinking eventually restores. “The teaching of Christianity cannot be more sharply illuminated by any opposite than that of the Greek conception that the immortals first drank of Lùthù in order to forget” (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453). Plato’s doctrine of recollection, the conception of the world as an implicitly ordered, meaningful place, a trope for the eternal ideas which the right instructor can jog from the philosopher’s memory, was a dream of reason which Greek tragedy disturbed, but a bastard of logos itself, preserved its yet religious authority in its endings.42 The language of the gods, eventually, was something men could learn to speak. Philosophy, too, gave the logos natural to men’s souls power as a god.43 Greece needed a St. Paul, apparently, and then a Kierkegaard, to finish the job tragedy had started. Christianity divorces the contesting logoi of tragedy completely and, in the process, subjects the human logos to a destruction from within, before the kathartic language of the gods can intervene and clarify the scene.

42 43

See page 31 and note 65. Both Plato and Aristotle consistently describe reason in terms of god and divinity. For example, Aristotle Met., 1074b15. “[T]hought is held to be the most divine of all phenomena[.]” Cf. Plato Republic, 500d, 517d. The practice of philosophy makes men ordered and divine, like the form of the Good to which it seeks to know, an object of divine study. Cf. 518e, 589d, 590d. Reason is divine, and its virtue belongs to divinity. Cf. 611e. The philosophical element of the soul, that which desires wisdom, is immortal and akin to the divine.

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Closing the Greek byroads of recollection naturally leads to the question of education, which Kierkegaard was focused on as an explanation for the limp spirit of his times. The Concept of Anxiety concludes with a Greek fragment concerning the autodidact: “¿ÓÒÍÓÏÁÍÐÒÇÐÒÅÐÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿Ð [one who on his own cultivates philosophy]” is “in the same degree ÆÃÍÓÏÁÍÐ [one who tends the things of God]” (CA, 162 / SKS 4, 460). The cultivation of philosophy as an art, care, or cultivation of the self is at the same time a cultivation of god. In chapters ten and eleven, we’ll see just how the philosophical tragedy Kierkegaard has pseudonymously staged concludes in a renewed sense of Greek virtue and its care of the self, which, as a kind of science in Aristotle, had once embraced tragedy to death. Kierkegaard similarly embraces Aristotle to death, absorbing his method in fundamental ways but rejecting the rational foundation of his ethics, recasting the project in the dark light of a reason tragically conceived, a tragic model of virtue for the present age. Quoting Hamann in a note on the final page, Haufniensis quietly adjusts the tune of this project to a tragic drum. The archaic themes of plague and ritual purification which Aristotle expunged return in as much technicolor as a psychological manual will allow. “This impertinent disquiet, this holy hypochondria [of anxiety] is perhaps the fire with which we season sacrificial animals in order to preserve us from the putrefaction of the current seculi [century]” (CA, 162n / SKS 4, 461). Kierkegaard, via Haufniensis, reverts the logos of philosophy to that of myth and tragic cult. In the deniers of faith, should it descend on the Pentheus of our age – the heroic mind of a Hamlet or a Quidam – this holy madness is terminal. But in the devoted it leads to a higher logos, the ‘religious ideality’ of a second ethics. “Whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music and when the apprentices of finitude lose their minds and courage” (CA, 161-162 / SKS 4, 460-461). The sublime moment in which this dance reaches its frenzied peak – for those who are able to sustain it, to avoid betraying its secret movements in the petty anxieties of hypochondria or other “finite evasions” (CA, 158 / SKS 4, 457) contrived by the daimonic (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453) – smuggles the lance of eternity past the border guards of the finite. The eternal breaks in upon the individual in time and “all contradiction is cancelled, the temporal is permeated by and preserved in the eternal” (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453). And then the moment passes. The whole terrible motion begins again. “To think eternity earnestly” (CA, 154 / SKS 4, 453)

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for Kierkegaard – and this, he councils, is our present task – means constantly dancing St. Vitus’ dance.44

44

St. John’s or St. Vitus’ dance was a dancing sickness which spread through medieval Europe, a case of ecstatic possession among Christians analogous to that of the Bacchants of Ancient Greece. It developed into an annual ritual, and, in some places, even a festival. See E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 272 (appendix).

Chapter 10 Moral Psychology in the Pseudonyms, Search for a Method Repetition: The Psychologist While psychology in Kierkegaard’s hands remains a valuable tool in the care of the self, as it had been for Plato and Aristotle, he never lays this science of the soul bare in any conventionally scientific way. Before in chapter eleven we can examine its actual use, the singularity of his authorship demands an exposition of its principles and method, since at this point it would be false to presume that we understand what ‘psychology’ means for Kierkegaard. There are three psychologists on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous record, Constantin Constantius, Vigilius Haufniensis, and Anti-Climacus. A fourth, Frater Taciturnus, works in “imaginary [experimenterende] psychological constructions.” Reading these four figures together, it immediately becomes apparent that Kierkegaard has very strict ideas about the nature of psychological investigation, its inherent limits, and the potential dangers implicit in the naturalistic turn modern psychology is consolidating as his authorship gets underway. The psychologist for Kierkegaard does not come by his profession accidentally. He has a distinct personality type with a particular world-view whose significance only becomes apparent when contextualized alongside other representative types. We can begin by looking at Constantin Constantius, that formerly passionate Stoic whose “venture in experimenting psychology” (R, 125 / SKS 4, 7) leads the reader from the melancholy of the Young Man who has fallen into his council to the religious pathos of Job. Between these passions in the cool parentheses of his study remains Constantius, an inspector whose analyses of the passions are only possible given his Stoical remove and purely “objective theoretical interest” (R, 180 / SKS 4, 52). The Young Man he takes into his confidence describes this calculative mood at which Constantius has long trained (R, 180 / SKS 4, 52) with

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an equally passionate protest to its morbidity: “Is it not, in fact, a kind of mental disorder to have subjugated to such a degree every passion, every emotion, every mood under the cold regimentation of reflection!” (R, 189 / SKS 4, 59) – “It is true, every word is true, but it is a truth so very cold and logical, as if the world were dead” (R, 191 / SKS 4, 27). In addition to this world-murder, the Young Man accuses the observing psychologist of nourishing himself morbidly on the victims of his science. “When a girl becomes unhappy, then along come all those ravenous monsters wanting to satiate their psychological hunger and thirst or to write novels” (R, 194 / SKS 4, 65). What Nietzsche later sniffs out in the Birth of Tragedy Constantius demonstrates voyeuristically in his studious relation to the Young Man, “just as enchanting to the eye as a young girl,” (R, 135 / SKS 4, 13) – as well as the observation of young girls themselves in the outskirts of Copenhagen (R, 147 / SKS 4, 24) and at the theatre (R, 167 / SKS 4, 41): there is an essentially erotic passion underlying the apparently dispassionate inspections of science. They are two variations on the same interest in “the interesting.” Constantius’ psychological interest is the cynicism in which the path of the erotist and romanticism dead ends, a truth observed by no less keen an eye than Constantius’, a poet of our own, when she writes that “all romantics meet the same fate some day, cynical and drunk, and boring someone in a dark café.”1 And though he’s no drinker he does spend plenty of time, as did Kierkegaard himself, languishing in cafés. His fate was sealed in the moment that the poetic zeal of his youthful passion failed him: At one time I was very close to complete satisfaction. I got up feeling unusually well one morning. My sense of well-being increased comparably until noon; at precisely one o’ clock, I was at the peak and had a presentiment of the dizzy maximum found on no gauge of well-being, not even on a poetic thermometer. My body had lost its terrestrial gravity; it was as if I had no body simply because every function enjoyed total satisfaction [...] Every mood rested in my soul with melodic resonance. Every thought volunteered itself jubilantly, the most foolish whim as well as the richest idea [...] All existence seemed to have fallen in love with me, and everything quivered in fateful rapport with my being. [...] As stated, it was one o’clock on the dot when I was at the peak and had presentiments of the highest of all; when suddenly something began to irritate one of my eyes, whether it was an eyelash, a speck of something, a bit of dust, I do not know, but this I do know – that in the same instant I was plunged down almost into the abyss of despair, something everyone will readily understand who has been as high up as I was and while at that point has also pondered the theoretical question of whether absolute satisfaction is attainable at all. Since that time, I have abandoned every hope of feeling satisfied absolutely and in every way, abandoned the hope I had 1

Joni Mitchell “Last Time I Saw Richard” on Miles of Aisles.

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once nourished, perhaps not to be absolutely satisfied at all times but nevertheless at certain moments, even though all those instances of the moment were no more, as Shakespeare says, than “an alehouse keeper’s arithmetic would be adequate to add up.” (R, 173-174 / SKS 4, 46 f.)

And so now, rather than passionate himself, Constantin has become a psychologist, which is to say, an erotic scrutinizer of passions in both himself and others. He is a theatregoer, an “observer” who delights at a distance, whose “duty” and “art” like the aesthete’s is “to expose what is hidden,” seduce it into the open. He shares not only the form of poetic existence but also the mood, his observation producing “the same melancholy effect as being a police officer” (R, 135 / SKS 4, 12).2 He later muses himself that “mental activity and pastimes of the imagination” are “the most perfect substitutes for all erotic love,” “not at all accompanied by the inconveniences and disasters of erotic love,” evincing “a definite similarity” to what is most beautiful in its bliss (R, 183-184 / SKS 4, 54-55). “The observer,” however, unlike the beat cop, has a poet’s capacity for imaginative variation. The ledgers of his psychological practice are not those of objective memory, but rather the poetic recollection practiced by the aesthetes of In Vino Veritas, gathered in their worship of Love. For Kierkegaard’s psychologists, “[w]hat holds for the poetic production also holds for the scientific.” 3 [W]ith the first shudder of presentiment, my soul has simultaneously run through all the consequences [...] an observer should be so constituted, but if he is so constituted, he is also sure to suffer exceedingly. The first moment may overwhelm him almost to the point of swooning, but as he turns pale, the idea impregnates him, and from now on he has investigative rapport with actuality. If a person lacks this feminine quality so that the idea cannot establish the proper relation to him, which always means impregnation, then he is not qualified to be an observer, for he who does not discover the totality essentially discovers nothing. (R, 146 / SKS 4, 23)

The psychological observer discovers the totality by absorbing the living idea of that which he observes, abstracting from the fragments of individual experience to the categories which govern all phenomena within one or another category (since “the phenomena within the category obey it as the spirits of the ring obey the ring”).4 The idea pene2

3

4

Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, p. 54. Melancholy, in Kierkegaard, expresses a frustrated desire for an impossible, erotic object. Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaard’s Psychology, p. 4. See page 7, pages 1-15 generally, on Kierkegaard’s methodology, which it is “more natural to compare to the psychoanalyst.” CA, 127n / SKS 4, 428. See Kresten Nordentoft Kierkegaard’s Psychology, p. 11. He has a similiar reading of the categorial in Kierkegaard’s psychology as an abstraction

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trates him not just intellectually, but also emotionally, until finally the living nature of his object reveals itself through his poetic-intellectual capacities. The phenomena completes itself and acquires its meaning in and through the psychologist’s artful experience and potential mastery of himself, through what Constantius later describes as “the passion of possibility” in which personality first begins to develop (R, 154 / SKS 4, 30-31). The psychologist has an “artistic eye for life” (R, 217 / SKS 4, 84) that he concentrates inwardly on himself. The scientific technique of psychology is likewise an art of life in the ancient, Socratic sense of a technù tou biou – an art of the human and care of the self. 5 The object of Constantius technique is human life, which he thinks in terms of moods, of happiness, first of all, but also the unhappiness of recollection (R, 131 / SKS 4, 9) against which he measures the possible happiness of repetition (the repetition of former happinesses he always fails to achieve) and the infinite mix of other possible passions. “Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy” (R, 131 / SKS 4, 9) – “he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is.” “Life is a repetition” which one must have the “courage to understand” and the “desire to rejoice in” (R, 132 / SKS 4, 10-11). Psychic Collision as Object of Study: Reason, Language and the Passions Constantius defines the poet-lovers whom he studies in terms of “poetic collision” (R, 140 / SKS 4, 17), “a dialectical resiliency productive of mood” (R, 229 / SKS 4, 95). This principle of the poetic concerns the

5

from lived experience, though without the naive 19th century pretense of disinterested self-observation (p. 3). Since psychological phenomena always refer back to ethically engaged individuals, studying them requires, rather than precludes, involving oneself in the experiment. Technù in the ancient sense refers to what we would call both ‘arts’ and ‘sciences.’ See Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 94-99. Science in the strict sense developed by Aristotle, epistùmù, would apply only to mediate knowledge of immutable things, such as, in modern physics, claims about natural reality underly the applied science of medicine and the sub-science of psychiatry. See the distinction at EN, 1140b2, 1112b27. But even in Aristotle the two terms can be used interchangeably, as in Met., i.1. Cf. R, 145 / SKS 4, 22. Constantius makes a similar claim about the “art” of being a man. “Only he who actually can love, only he is a man. Only he who can give his love any expression whatsoever, only he is an artist.”

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same Idea we have been tracking in other pseudonymous works. The Idea “was indeed in motion” (and it is the ‘Idea’ that gives every motion and emotion significance) via the passionate collision of the poet’s love (R, 140 / SKS 4, 17). For the poetically minded, the actual woman, for instance, always suffers “the wrath of the idea.” She always comes up short, “for no beautiful woman can be as exacting as the idea” (R, 141 / SKS 4, 18-19). The aesthetic objects of poetic eros are the visible form of something the soul seeks elsewhere (R, 141 / SKS 4, 18-19). And though sober Apollo was leader of their muses Kierkegaard’s poets are dominated by the “dark passions” which break out wildly when actuality fails to sustain their erotic idea (R, 139 / SKS 4, 16-17). The erotist has fallen into contradiction with himself (R, 179 / SKS 4, 50) and so his governing Idea becomes something he suffers. His “soul has a religious resonance,” leaping with a “dithyrambic joy” one moment, contorted in an anguish the next, which he finds expressed most purely in Job, whose tragedy is more tragic than the tragic plays of the mad god themselves (R, 204 / SKS 4, 73).6 The Young Man’s letters to Constantius speak of the healing which Job’s words work on the “mute nausea of passion” in his “wretched soul” (R, 204 / SKS 4, 73). Job becomes a model for moral psychology at the extremities of religious experience. His “significance is that the disputes at the boundaries of faith are fought out in him, that the colossal revolt of the wild and aggressive powers of passion is presented here” (R, 210 / SKS 4, 78-79). The Young Man explains this to the psychologist by grafting Job’s tragedy on to a Sophoclean root. “Nowhere in the world has the passion of anguish found such expression. What are Philoctetes and his laments, which remain continually earthbound and do not terrify the gods? What is Philoctetes’ situation compared with Job’s, where the idea is continually in motion?” (R, 204 / SKS 4, 73). It is no wonder that the tumultuous language of Job has an appeal for such a passionate Young Man, and a kathartic effect (R, 210 / SKS 4, 78-79). But most important is the psychological insight that, as the Concept of Anxiety, we’ve seen, echoes, it is the language itself that heals the passions. “These I understand; these words I make my own” (R, 206 / SKS 4, 74). Job’s anguish and horror become his “just as one becomes ill with the sickness one reads about” (R, 206 / SKS 6

R, 204 / SKS 4, 73. “Nowhere in the world has the passion of anguish found such expression. What are Philoctetes and his laments, which remain continually earthbound and do not terrify the gods. What is Philoctetes’ situation compared with Job’s, where the idea is continually in motion.”

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4, 74). “Half a word – and my soul rushes into his thought” (R, 205 / SKS 4, 74). This passionate appropriation of the language of suffering echoes the psychologist’s own description of how the passionate rift with the Idea anguishing the Young Man’s soul might be healed, in the midst of suffering a tragedy:7 In a mountain region where day in and day out one hears the wind relentlessly play the same invariable theme, one may be tempted for a moment to abstract from this imperfection and delight in this metaphor of the consistency and sureness of human freedom. One perhaps does not reflect that there was a time when the wind, which for many years has had its dwelling among these mountains, came as a stranger to this area, plunged wildly, absurdly through the canyons, down into the mountain caves, produced now a shriek almost startling to itself, then a hollow roar from which it itself fled, then a moan, the source of which it itself did not know, then from the abyss of anxiety a sigh so deep that the wind itself grew frightened and momentarily doubted that it dared reside in this region – then a gay lyrical waltz – until having learned to know its instrument, it worked all of this into the melody it renders unaltered day after day. (R, 155 / SKS 4, 32)

The picture of an education of the passions in which the soul is tuned like an instrument is an ancient one, an essential part of the classical moral-psychological tradition.8 Constantius tips us off to the Greek influence on his method by placing himself in the figure of the sage, lamenting that “if only” the Young Man had had some of his wisdom things might have come off better, since “it is always good to have done everything human sagacity can prescribe” (R, 216 / SKS 4, 84). As we’ll see in the final chapter, ‘sagacity’ is typically a trope in the authorship for Greek eudaimonism. Like the Greeks, Constantius believes that practice in a logos is how one forms not just a mental life, but a ‘bios’ in the fullest sense – a form of life – from the toes on up: “My friend is a poet, and this romantic faith in women is intrinsic to a poet. With all due respect, I say that I am a prose writer” (R, 218 / SKS 4, 85). 7

8

See R, 155 / SKS 4, 31-32: “It is tragic or comic if the individual makes the mistake of living out his life in it,” writes Constantius, “It” being the “shadow-existence” of the imagination which precedes the development of personality. “Only the imagination is awakened to his dream about the personality; everything else is still fast asleep. In such a self-vision of the imagination, the individual is not an actual shape, but a shadow, or, more correctly, the actual shape is invisibly present and therefore is not satisfied to cast one shadow, but the individual has a variety of shadows, all fo which resemble him and which momentarily have equal status as being himself.” R, 154 / SKS 4, 30-31. For another description of the young man as tragic-comic figure, see R, 229 / SKS 4, 70. Werner Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, pp. xxvii, 293.

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Experiments in Sympathy: A Theory of Psychology in The Concept of Anxiety If Kierkegaard gives us Constantius as the exemplary scientist of the soul, Haufniensis, both a psychological and religious writer, delimits the category of Constantius’ science from the distance of the dogmatician. No clinician himself – without a single patient, such as Constantius’ Young Man – Haufniensis provides the theory which grounds Constantius’ practice. But hereditary sin, the issue of his psychological deliberations, “exceeds any and all science” (CA, 9, 16 / SKS 4, 317, 324). This makes him a paradoxical scientist, operating outside the boundaries of his own discipline. Approaching the object of his observations becomes a fragile enterprise. He goes through great lengths to secure the possibility of an encounter which might yield some credible discovery by first distinguishing sin according to the Aristotelian categories of possibility and actuality. Psychology cannot study sin as it actually exists. The subject of psychology “must be something that remains in restless repose” (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 329) as opposed to the restlessness of freedom from which dogmatically sin is said to arise. Psychology therefore can study predispositions, such as character, and such a “predisposing presupposition, sin’s real possibility, is a subject of interest for psychology. That which can be the concern of psychology and with which it can occupy itself is not that sin comes into existence [bliver til],” or, what it is, “but how it comes into existence,” its possibility. “Psychology can bring its concern to the point where it seems as if sin were there, but the next thing, that sin is there, is qualitatively different from the first” (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 329). That psychology stops at “coming into existence [Tilblivelse]” is a necessary humiliation for psychologists who would arrogate more insight into existence than their science justifies with a simple “confusion” of “the concept” (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 329). This “last disappointment reveals the impotence of psychology and merely shows that its service has come to an end” (CA, 22 / SKS 4, 329). It is “unwittingly in the service of another science that only waits for it to finish so that it can begin and assist psychology to the explanation” (CA, 23 / SKS 4, 330). Dogmatics provides the ontology of sin which psychological explanations require, furnishing the ‘ideal’ conditions of possibility for the ‘real’ possibility of sin embodied in states of character. While the second ethics, which presupposed dogmatics, “has the actuality of sin within its scope,” “here psychology can intrude only through a

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misunderstanding” (CA, 23 / SKS 4, 330). Psychology must for its own sake restrict itself in principle to the domain of possibility. To remain significant psychology must remain within its own quarter (CA, 39 / SKS 4, 345). “[I]t must guard against leaving the impression of explaining that which no science can explain and that which ethics explains further only by presupposing it by way of dogmatics” (CA, 39 / SKS 4, 345). When it does apply itself correctly, further stipulations apply. “The psychological explanation”9 must “remain in its elastic ambiguity” by avoiding explanations (like Baader’s) of the leap from the possibility of sin to its actuality (CA, 39n-40n / SKS 4, 345-346).10 The moral-psychological question of how to cultivate our desires, as relevant classically as Kierkegaard suggests it remains for us today, for Haufniensis presupposes the leap which dogmatics explains through the paradoxical doctrine of Adam’s sin. If ethics is to apply itself to the problems of desire, it must first persuade science to step aside and, second, convince this unscientific psychology that it explains nothing of the actual phenomena it studies, the grasp of which depends on language it cannot justify. It begins and concludes in a mystery whose possibility, as observer, it is merely allowed to describe. It is “the only science that can help,” “yet it admits that it explains nothing, and also that it cannot and will not explain more” (CA, 51 / SKS 4, 356). Its quarter is the observatory, though there are no figures below its deck, only the shadow-existence of possibilities. “Further than this, psychology cannot go, but so far it can go, and above all, in its observation of human life, it can point to this again and again” (CA, 45 / SKS 4, 351).

Haufniensis on Greek Virtue and the Analogy with Medicine Psychological observation, for Haufniensis, like the ancient moralpsychological tradition tends to parallel the medical art. The observer he warns must “exercise the caution of physicians” (CA, 71 / SKS 4, 9

10

Kierkegaard refers us to Usteri’s psychological explanation of the Fall, Entwickelung des Paulinischen Lehrbegriffes mit Hinsicht auf die ubrigen Schriften des Neuen Testamentes. The Danish translation was part of Kierkegaard’s library. ASKB 850. Franz Baader is Kierkegaard’s example of one who oversteps the boundaries of his science, by scientifically using the theology the science itself purports to explain, specifically the doctrine of concupiscientia [inordinate desire]. CA, 40 / SKS 4, 346. “At this point psychology has already gone beyond its competence.”

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376). The objectivity of the physician, however, would be out of place.11 The observing psychologist has to cultivate the kind of “sympathy” that “admits rightly and profoundly to oneself that what has happened to one human being can happen to all. Only then can one benefit both oneself and others.” Haufniensis continues, “The physician at an insane asylum who is foolish enough to believe that he is eternally right and that his bit of reason is ensured against all injury in this life is in a sense wiser than the demented, but he is also more foolish, and surely he will not heal many” (CA, 54 / SKS 4, 359). The doctor of the mind or soul ought to bring a sympathy to his work which blurs the professional distinction between doctor and patient, subject and object, artist and art. Through these experiments in sympathy the psychologist develops a “general human flexibility” whose examples, though they lack “factual authority,” have “an authority of a different kind” (CA, 54 / SKS 4, 359). This requires a poetic originality (such as Constantius’) whose dexterity with the Idea can “create both the totality and the invariable from what in the individual is always partially and variably present” (CA, 55 / SKS 4, 360). The imaginative powers of the poet relate the individual to the Idea without reducing him to “notarized facts” or subordinating psychological reality to “a rule” (CA, 54 / SKS 4, 359). Nothing but a “general practice” (CA, 55 / SKS 4, 360) can provide this orientation in human life and the “inquisitorially sharp eye” (CA, 55 / SKS 4, 360) behind “true psychological-poetic authority” (CA, 54 / SKS 4, 359). Psychology – like poetry, lyric poetry in particular – is both a study and an exercise in the passions. The psychologist “imitates in himself every mood, every psychic state that he discovers in another,” which are his own creations “by virtue of the idea” (CA, 55 11

See CA, 62 / SKS 4, 367. Haufniensis further distinguishes the existential psychologist from the physician, whose domain, he suggest, is nature. The difference in attitude then corresponds to a difference in object, human life, on the one hand, and natural life on the other. Cf. CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423. The physician’s “medical-therapeutic” diagnosis mistakes the psychological for the purely “physical-somatic,” comically treating it with “powders and with pills, and then with enemas!” For a similar rejection of naturalistic psychology, see CA, 135 / SKS 4, 437. Throughout the authorship the gap between the psychologist and the physician is essential. He recognizes that medicine has taken a turn from the Greeks, and so greek medicine is given impunity from his criticisms of the medical approach today: “Yet in our day one fears what Socrates somewhere prescribed, to be cut and cauterized by the physician in order to be healed” (CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423). If there is a kind of therapy required, it is the cutting and burning of the embodied soul, which he points to at Plato Gorgias, 479a.

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/ SKS 4, 360).12 He “fictitiously invents the passion” which appears “in a preternatural magnitude” (CA, 56 / SKS 4, 360). What was first described as “predisposing presuppositions” takes on the emotional language of passions and mood, equated by Haufniensis with “states” of the soul, or, to return to Aristotle’s language, hexeis. When he muses that “to speak humanly about the sexual is an art” (CA, 67 / SKS 4, 372) we can easily surmise that the art he refers to here is closest to the moral psychology of the ancients, a vertiginous adaptation of the Aristotelian technù of human passions, deprived now of the solidity of its metaphysical ground. He connects the sexual directly to “all the moral problems of the erotic” (CA, 80 / SKS 4, 383) and adds that “[i] f an observer will only pay attention to himself, he will have enough with five men, five women, and ten children for the discovery of all possible states of the human soul” (CA, 126 / SKS 4, 427). These states of soul implicating the psychologist himself in the moral problem of the passions have a distinctly Greek ring, and so it ought to come as no surprise when Haufniensis connects this “state” to Aristotle’s notion of movement (CA, 82n / SKS 4, 351).13 Unlike the necessary “state” of plant life studied by science (CA, 21 / SKS 4, 329), psychological states pertain to actuality and historical freedom. The mood or passion which most interests Haufniensis is anxiety, the “psychological state” preceding sin (CA, 92 / SKS 4, 395). “Ethically speaking, sin is not a state. The state, however, is always the last psychological approximation to the next state. Anxiety is at this point always present as the possibility of the new state” (CA, 114-115 / SKS 4, 417). If psychology studies states as possibilities, Haufniensis enlists the Greek language of virtue (states of character, as Aristotle defines it) to study a specifically modern phenomenon that only comes into focus, he believes, within dogmatic categories: anxiety as the psychological state which precedes the actuality of sin as a condition of possibility (CA, 113 / SKS 4, 414). The intellectual education of the passions in terms of ancient Greek virtue is an essential part of Haufniensis’ project. Understanding must develop the virtue of courage, which cannot happen until the “appetites of the wishing soul” have been subdued (CA, 102 / SKS 4, 404). Otherwise the passions, as in the classical psychologies, can get the upper hand. The individual can “lose the reigns of government,” 12

13

See CA, 76 / SKS 4, 379. He speaks similarly of appropriating psychological states as the task of investigation. See CA, 82n-84n / SKS 4, 386-387. He refers us to both Plato and Aristotle, actually, but finds in Plato a metaphysical reduction of “the moment” of motion/freedom to “silent atomistic abstraction.”

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dragging “the individual along like a woman whom the executioner drags by the hair” (CA, 115 / SKS 4, 417) – “The body is the organ of the psuchù and in turn the organ of the spirit. As soon as the serving relation comes to an end, as soon as the body revolts, and as soon as freedom conspires with the body against itself, unfreedom is present as the demonic” (CA, 136 / SKS 4, 438). The loss of rational freedom depends upon freedom’s conspiracy with the body against itself. It is never a matter of the modern Cartesian dilemma of body versus mind, but rather of the tarrying of ideas in which the direction of the body’s passions are at stake. Building on Constantius’ insight, Haufniensis claims that different types of logos lead to either virtuous or vicious states in the soul. Anxiety, we read, as it drags the individual away from the expansiveness of the “passion of freedom” (CA, 120 / SKS 4, 423) and deeper into the self-enclosure of sin becomes the playground of an “ingenious sophistry” (CA, 113 / SKS 4, 415). It incites a crazed repentance whose “passion is far more powerful than true repentance,” in which the passions have been gripped by anxiety over sin, “a horror” whose “elementary eloquence” cannot be stopped “by words and phrases” (CA, 116 / SKS 4, 418-419). Instead, “the highest passions” here have taken the reigns of understanding. They force it to speak a fanatical language bordering on the senseless, such as the gestural language of hypochondria (symptoms as signs of something physical that point, physically, to nothing) and capriciousness (CA, 124 / SKS 4, 425). It is a battle of logoi in which the idea collides with itself, forcing the individual into the passionate self-enclosure of “the demonic,” the state and “possibility” from which “the sinful act can constantly break forth” (CA, 123 / SKS 4, 425). Haufniensis follows in the manner of the ancient moralists with a list of the vices this can produce, which “appear in connection with the sensuous in man (addiction to drink, to opium, or to debauchery, etc.) as well as in connection with the higher (pride, vanity, wrath, hatred, defiance, cunning, envy, etc.)” (CA, 116 / SKS 4, 418-419). The enterprise of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle famously record, began with wonder. In his own theory of the passions, Haufniensis alludes to Descartes’ theory of the affections and points out that “the fundamental error of recent philosophy” is that “it wants to begin with the negative,” that is, with a disembodied doubt, rather than the Greek passion of wonder (CA, 146n / SKS 4, 445). And so a philosophy of the passions, ironically, may demand that the philosopher himself undergo a certain education of the soul, in which the passion of wonder is re-established as a positive beginning for reflec-

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tion, rather than the vacuum of skepticism. If wonder is the original philosophical mood, Haufniensis defines its telos in terms of earnestness.14 He describes this earnestness as “the deepest expression for what disposition is” (CA, 148 / SKS 4, 449), “the acquired originality of disposition” (CA, 149 / SKS 4, 450). Borrowing from Rosenkranz’s Psychology, Haufniensis gives a definition of disposition (Gemyt) which no doubt sends us back to the Greeks in whose wonder psychological reflection originated: […] that the feeling unfolds itself to self-consciousness, and vice versa, that the content of the self-consciousness is felt by the subject as his own. It is only this unity that can be called disposition. If the clarity of cognition is lacking, knowledge of the feeling, there exists only the urge of the spirit of nature, the turgidity of immediacy. On the other hand, if feeling is lacking, there remains only the abstract concept that has not reached the last inwardness of the spiritual existence, that has not become one with the self of spirit. (CA, 148 / SKS 4, 449)

The collaboration of emotion and reason, their mutual value and dependence, was, as we’ve seen, an exceptional feature of Aristotle’s psychology. Moral education was a matter of educating the passions of the body as well as the intellect, not merely enslaving the former to the latter, or passing through them on the way to another kind of knowledge.15 The individual phronimos had to learn to feel at the 14

15

See John Davenport “Toward an Existential Virtue Ethics: Kierkegaard and Macintyre” in Kierkegaard After Macintyre, pp. 276-283. There is nowhere near room enough to compare in detail the status of the passions for Aristotle, their potential complicity with reason, with their status for Plato. But it may be worth making some preliminary qualifications as well as gestures toward places in Plato’s texts from which this question can be broached. In the Republic the appetites are clearly blind and, while not without cognitive features (as in the case of Leontius’ pensient for looking at the dead bodies of pale, young boys, 440a2-3), remain mindless slaves either to reason or their own mad fatality. T. H. Irwin Plato’s Moral Theory, pp. 123 f., 193-195; Jonathan Cooper Reason and Emotion, pp. 128-130; Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, p. 205 f., and on Aristotle, pp. 307-309. On the cognitive features of the irrational parts of the soul, see Terry Penner “Thought and Desire in Plato” in Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 99-101, 110. A similar disestablishment of the irrationality associated with having a body takes place at Timaeus, 69cd, where the immortal daimķn of reason is said to have attached to it a mortal psychù containing terrible passions. This other kind of soul is distinct from it, has a different origin, and is kept separate so as to avoid contamination. Alternatively, the implicitly rational desire of erotic appetite in the Symposium, as well as the mad eros of the Phaedrus, which actually holds sway over reason, seem to represent possible exceptions to the more explicit psychology of the Republic. On the daimķn of eros in Plato’s Symposium as a mediator between animality and divine rationality in human being, see E. R. Dodds “Plato and the Irrational

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right times, towards the right objects and people, with the right motive, and in the right way, since feeling brought with it propositional Soul” in Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 220 f. Dodds directs us to Symposium, 202e, 207ab, but comments that Plato “remained throughout his life faithful to the principles of his master[,]” for whom knowledge remained an “affair of the intellect” (218). While even the lowest forms of eros in the Symposium are tropes for the divine illuminations of their philosophic counterparts, the desires of the body are ultimately supplanted by those of the mind. Dodds also directs us to Phaedrus, 249e, where erotic madness is made “the best of all enthousiaseis.” The language of madness Plato introduces to explain the eros of philosophy and the illumination to which it leads, as well as the emphatic persistence beyond the body of the passions of the lower parts of the soul, represented as horses drawn by the charioteer of reason, makes the Phaedrus the biggest challenge to the more conventionally dualistic and rationalistic interpretations of Plato’s doctrine of the soul. Beyond the citation, Dodds does little to relieve this tension. Guthrie, however, resisting the tendency to admit two Platos, a rationalist and a mystic, makes a strong case for the “fundamentally consistent” simplicity, independence and superiority of the purely rational soul in Plato – inclusive of the Phaedrus – a simplicity only compromised incidentally in its commingling with the mortal body. See W. K. C. Guthrie “Plato’s Views on the Nature of the Soul” in Plato II, ed. by Vlastos, pp. 242. While the soul of Republic, iv includes bodily appetites and passions as merù or eidù, the psychology of book x echoes the dualism of the Phaedo, and provides a qualification of that of book iv as merely provisional. Plato Republic, 611a ff. Guthrie translates, “soul in its truest nature is not like this – full of variety, dissimilarity and inconsistency. We see it like this now because it is damaged by its connexion with the body, but ought to consider it in its purity. Then we should find it a much more beautiful thing. We must look only at its love of wisdom [íÇÉÍÑÍíÇ¿], and understand that it is akin to the divine and immortal and everlasting. For a similar division between the independence of a divine, immortal reason from the passions of the body, with which it strives, cf. Plato Phaedo, 79d and Sophist, 228b. While the psychology of the Phaedrus and its glorification of a kind of madness may appear inconsistent with these other dialogues, even in the Phaedo, Guthrie alerts us, the most dualistic of texts, Plato writes that a corrupt soul retains the taint of the corporeal even after disincarnation. Plato Phaedo, 81a ff. Similarly, see Plato Gorgias, 524de. The Phaedrus’ representation of the lower parts of the soul as persisting beyond the life of the body reflects the same capacity in the Gorgias and Phaedo that souls have to retain traces of the bodily appetites and passions to which they were enslaved while incarnated. The souls of the gods, compared like the other souls to horses and charioteers, are said to be “all good” and “of good “origin,” while “the nature of the others is mixed.” Plato Phaedrus, 246a. And while talk of madness may incite some to attribute to this older Plato a kind of rapprochement with a passion beyond reason, Platonic eros, even in its ecstasies, is always moving in the direction of knowledge, a divine knowledge unburdened by the passions associated with the human body. For a reading of the Phaedrus as recantation of Plato’s earlier psychology and the introduction of a new psychology, with a proto-Aristotelian attunement to the inherent value of mortal passions, see Martha Nussbaum The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 213-223.

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weight.16 For Haufniensis, psychology is also a matter of educating the soul’s passions, which, as in Aristotle, have a kind of intelligence. Melancholy, for instance, “has a meaning,” and likewise with the more developmentally essential mood of anxiety which has “the same meaning” “at a much later point” (CA, 42 / SKS 4, 349).17 One must learn to be anxious in the right way: “[w]hoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate” (CA, 155 / SKS 4, 454). This education returns us once again both to the moral-psychological tradition which Socrates institutes and the medical tradition from which he borrows, along with his students, Plato, but especially Aristotle, who developed his itinerancy into a full-fledged theoretical apparatus.18 Going back to Greece sheds new light on the medical model that in modern times has reduced the matter of the soul to the physicum of “pills, powders, and enemas” (CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423). Haufniensis recognizes that medicine has taken a turn from the Greeks and so Greek medicine is given impunity from his criticisms of modern medicine: “Yet in our day one fears what Socrates somewhere prescribed, to be cut and cauterized by the physician in order to be healed” (CA, 121 / SKS 4, 423). If there is a kind of therapy required, it is the cutting and burning of the embodied soul, which Haufniensis here points to in the Gorgias.19 Anxiety becomes the “serving spirit” that cuts and cauterizes, leading the individual where he wants to go. “[H]e bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as a patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters his soul and searches out every16 17

18

19

Aristotle EN, 1106b18-24. In general, the theory of anxiety, like the interpretation of the passions of wonder and fear in the other works, define in typically Aristotelian-Greek fashion a mood in terms of its object. Emotions are not merely disturbances in the individual’s body. They define the object intentionally – signify a meaning – and the object, in turn, shapes the mood and character of the individual as related to it. On the meaningfulness of moods, see Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, p. 160. On the objectless object of anxiety, cf. p. 50, and on the impossible object of melancholy, pp. 79-80. Lastly, see p. 112, where McCarthy argues that the objects which Kierkegaard’s moods intend are ultimately tropes for the self in its richest, religious dimension. The theory of education in The Concept of Anxiety is largely mimetic. The child internalizes a moral sense, as in the Nicomachean Ethics, by example and imitation: “the power of the example.” CA, 75 / SKS 4, 379. See Plato Gorgias, 479a.

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thing and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go” (CA, 159 / SKS 4, 458).

Ecstatic Virtue This education, compounding the wonder of the Greeks with the specifically modern passion of anxiety, after modernity, comes with a little amendment to Constantin’s sagacity. This place of rest, “the shrewdness of calculations” (CA, 160 / SKS 4, 459), like all the rest, “is mere chatter, although in the eyes of men it is sagacity” (CA, 158 / SKS 4, 457). Prudence “becomes helpless and its most clever combinations vanish like a witticism compared with the case that anxiety forms with the omnipotence of possibility” (CA, 161 / SKS 4, 460). “Greek ethics,” exemplified, as we’ve seen, and will continue to discover, most often by Aristotelian concepts, “was not ethics in the proper sense” but retained an aesthetic factor which Haufniensis once again dismisses as the “babble” of a “bargaining” mentality. “This appears clearly in its definition of virtue and in what Aristotle frequently, also in Ethica Nicomachea, states with amiable Greek naiveté”20 (CA, 16-17 / SKS 4, 324). Silencing this chatter means a reform in Greek ethics that Climacus himself will consolidate, where the passions that the soul must practice – absurdity, fear and wonder21 – become ecstatic, a possession rather than a self-possession, where the ideas it inculcates dead end in paradox rather than the transparency of dialectic.22 “What is the good?” – An ancient question that Haufniensis believes “comes closer and closer to our age.” The aestheticism of virtue ethics, its concreteness, on the one hand, makes it the most viable alternative to the failed idealisms of modernity. It also, however, requires a rehabilitation, since it tends to squander the idea in the particular, as with Aristotle’s claim that “virtue alone does not make a man happy and content, but he must have health, friends, and earthly 20

21

22

See Pap. V B 49 (no SKS). Cf. JP 3: 3653. The draft explains virtue by the ideal of kalogathia (meaning noble and good, and used of nobles and gentlemen) which Aristotle invokes at EN, i.8. See CA, 17n / SKS 4, 324. “[T]he religious ideality breaks forth in the dialectical leap and the positive mood – ‘behold all things have become new’ as well as in the negative mood that is the passion of the absurd to which the concept ‘repetition’ corresponds.” See Plato Republic, 532b, 533c. Dialectic is the form of reasoning which can provide its own ground, which can give a full acount of itself.

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goods and be happy in his family” (CA, 16-17 / SKS 4, 324). “As all ancient knowledge was based on the presupposition that thought has reality, all ancient ethics was based on the presupposition that [the ideal of] virtue can be realized” (CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326).23 But Kierkegaard’s insistence on the tragic limits and futile desires of the understanding makes virtue in the ancient sense an impossibility. “Ethics” must have “altogether different categories” than either the scientificmetaphysical or the aesthetic, which pagan philosophy collapsed into one aesthetical-metaphysical outlook (CA, 17 / SKS 4, 324). Since “no science can say what the self is without again stating it quite generally,” “each man who is mindful of himself knows what no science knows, since he knows who he himself is, and this is the profundity of the greek saying ÁË×ÆÇ ÑÿÓÒÍË [know yourself][.]” “It is about time to seek to understand it in the Greek way, and then again as the Greeks would have understood it if they had possessed Christian presuppositions” (CA, 78-79 / SKS 4, 381-382). And so Haufniensis returns us once more to the passage from Xenophon’s Symposium with which the Concept of Anxiety concluded, with which Haufniensis, echoing the Socrates who first uttered these words, describes his own education: “The true autodidact is precisely in the same degree a theodidact, as another author has said, or to use an expression less reminiscent of the intellectual, he is ¿ÓÒÍÓÏÁÍÐÒÇÐÒÅÐÔÇÉÍÑÍÔÇ¿Ð and in the same degree ÆÃÍÓÏÁÍÐ[“A self-cultivator of philosophy” and in the same degree “a cultivator of god”]24

Christianizing the Method: Post-Modern Medicine in The Sickness Unto Death The physicians’ model returns once again in The Sickness Unto Death, the last of the psychological works. Its ties to ancient Greek ethics, in which the lines between philosophy and medicine remained blurred, are even more pronounced. In Sickness Anti-Climacus continues to reinforce the distinction between a natural and a supernatural healing. “For example, we say that someone catches a sickness, perhaps through carelessness. The sickness sets in and from then on is in force and is an actuality whose origin recedes more and more into the past. 23

24

See CA, 111 / SKS 4, 413. Haufniensis echoes in a note that “according to Greek thought” the good is conceived from its “external side (the useful, the finitely teleological).” My translation. See Xenophon Symposium, i.5.

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It would be both cruel and inhuman to go on saying, ‘You, the sick person, are in the process of catching the sickness right now.’” “To despair, however, is a different matter. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense;” (SUD, 16-17 / SKS 11, 132-134). Despair – like the unfree subjection to the passions diagnosed earlier by Haufniensis – is a sickness one chooses. Yet this author, like the last, retains ‘the medical’ as an essential analogy: “Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed; even if only medical experts understand it, it must never be forgotten that the situation is the bedside of a sick person” (SUD, 5, cf. 19, 22, 23, 48, / SKS 11, 118, cf. 135, 138, 139, 163). But what use in this case is medical expertise when the traditionally organic aetiologies are no longer applicable? No longer merely expertise of the body, the psychologist occupies himself with the health and sickness of the soul (SUD, 23 / SKS 11, 139). Referring the psychologist to the soul, we’ll find, is no mere spiritual vagueness. It is the specifically Greek-philosophical conception of the soul that Anti-Climacus has in mind for his psychology, the exploration in reason, character and moral responsibility inaugurated by the Socratic doctrine of a care of the self. 25 “Morality is character;” he writes elsewhere in Greek-aesthetic spirit, “character is something engraved (Õ¿Ï¿ÑÑ×)[.]”26 As in modern medicine, technical expertise is required of the psychologist if only because the apparent health of the patient can easily be imaginary (SUD, 23 / SKS 11, 139). Somewhere inside the staunch body of the triathlete who “feels fine” the physician detects a life-threatening tumor, a potentially fatal imbalance of enzymes in the blood, etc. The physician of the soul, likewise, must be able to detect imaginary health, and, if possible, convert this fantasied thriving into actual well-being. Anti-Climacus, like the other psychologists on Kierkegaard’s staff, defines the pathology he studies – despair – in terms of contradiction. This contradiction is again one of desires, an ambivalent straining, simultaneous, toward both life and death (SUD, 18 / SKS 11, 135). The “inconsistency” of contradiction is always a risk for the soul in which “spirit” is present. While consistency is achieved in “something higher, at least an idea,” when this idea is lost along with “the total25

26

See SUD, 29 / SKS 11, 145. Psychological phenomena like despair “must be considered primarily within the category of consciousness.” TA, 77 / SKS 8, 75.

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ity in which he has his life,” “the mysterious power that bound all his capacities in harmony is diminished, the coiled spring is slackened; everything perhaps becomes a chaos in which the capacities in mutiny battle one another and plunge the self into suffering, a chaos in which there is no agreement within itself, no momentum, no impetus” (SUD, 107 / SKS 11, 219). As “in the realm of the bodily,” a “good healthy body” is able to resolve physical contradictions, “so also with faith” and the soul (SUD, 40 / SKS 11, 155-156). The “good health of faith” resolves the contradiction between the “powers” of these now dissolute ideas, exemplified by the ambiguously tragic concept that “downfall is certain, but that there is possibility nonetheless” (SUD, 40 / SKS 11, 155-156). As with Aristotle, this is a matter of passion, though no longer as stakes in a contest between rational and unreasoning desires, but rather in the passionate conflict within reason between opposing ideas. AntClimacus undoes the Platonic objection to the Socratic claim that virtue can be reduced to knowledge, that no one both knows the good and acts against it. It is not a physical pathos, but rather a “passion of the understanding” whereby the one who despairs is able to understand that “help is possible” (SUD, 39 / SKS 11, 155), that conflicting ideas (practical ideas, related to desire and action) can be harmonized. Where consciousness is an issue, and therefore a patient seeks psychological rather than physiological care, distinguishing categorically between melancholy, for instance, or anxiety, and a broken arm, feeling is always to be found in connection with knowing and willing (SUD, 30 / SKS 11, 146). Sickness in the soul is liable to distort any and all of these elements, whose tripartite distinctions are loosely, though clearly, Greek. 27 The Greeks are a valuable resource for the psychologist, writes Anti-Climacus. Unlike the paganism of Christendom (that is, enlightened Europe), Greek paganism was qualified “in the direction of spirit” (SUD, 47 / SKS 11, 160). It was the field of a burgeoning consciousness that peaked in the figure of Socrates, who without Christian concepts was ultimately unable to complete the revolution he inaugurated from within Greek culture. He lacked the resources to establish a concrete ground for the subjects of the first enlightenment, liberated by rational reflection from the objective determinants of family, state, and their religious accompaniments. Nevertheless, whereas modern thinking 27

See Plato Republic, iv. The soul divides into logistikon, thumos, and epithumia – the rational, spirited (angry, fearful, or honor-loving) and appetitive elements.

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tends to explain itself away, objectively-mechanically, in terms of biology, history, etc., the Greeks engaged the problem of reason with all the passion and imagination that the healthy soul exudes. Their investigations themselves were a model for the health they meant to produce. Still, they fell short of their mark because of the emptiness of their definition of sin (hamartia) as ignorance (SUD, 88 / SKS 11, 196) or error.

Sin and Akrasia The Socratic notion that sin is ignorance marks the essential difference between Greece and Christianity (SUD, 89 / SKS 11, 203). The Socratic definition is representative – “genuinely Greek” (SUD, 88 / SKS 11, 202) – in its ambiguity with respect to knowing and willing. In other words, its being essentially Greek lies in the fact that understanding the good is equivalent to doing it (SUD, 92 / SKS 11, 205). Without a conception of the will (SUD, 90 / SKS 11, 203) and a way of distinguishing it from understanding the Greek model fails to explain, he believes, how “a later ignorance,” a temporary failure to know, such as akrasia, can arise. 28 The emptiness of the Greek definition ought not to be dismissed, however, but rather used “to bring out the latter [Christianity’s] in its radicality” (SUD, 88 / SKS 11, 202). Christian psychology, as was the case in the tragic Christian drama inwardized in conscience, is a modification of Greek conceptions. Because an overweening knowledge is the tragic-comic source of the present age’s confusions, the Socratic technù of the human soul, oriented against the pathologies of ignorance, a model developed more

28

This at first seems an odd conclusion, since both Plato and Aristotle are clearly moved by the commonsense objections to the Socratic view that knowing the good will always translate into doing it. There appeared to be many obvious cases in which we seem to know the good and still act in spite of that knowledge. The taxonomy of the soul in Republic, iv and Aristotle’s analysis of akrasia, in EN, vii, which we analyzed earlier in detail, DO provide explanations of this “later ignorance.” Their relative success of failure is another issue, but Kierkegaard never says explicitly just where these explanations fall short. It may be that his sense of the collision involved in this “later ignorance” outstrips the ebb and flow of reason in the Greek soul overtaken, temporarily, by the passions: first rational, then not, and then, again, rational. Neither Plato nor Aristotle can account for the experience of the authentic simultaneity of knowledge and vice, or, to put it another way, reason and irrationality. This, Kierkegaard appears to argue, requires the dogmatic concept of sin.

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technically by Plato and then Aristotle, is the perfect place to return for a new beginning. The revision of Greek ethics should not make the Greek mistake of overemphasizing the role of the intellect. On the other hand, neither should it renounce the role that intelligence plays, and make the health of the soul a matter of willing alone. “There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing, and in comprehending a person one may err by accentuating knowing exclusively or willing exclusively” (SUD, 48 / SKS 11, 163). Introducing the “tiny little transition” from knowing to doing reinvokes the whole problem of self-mastery (SUD, 93-94 / SKS 11, 206-208), 29 though with the addition now of a “dialectical determinant.” Christianity adds this determinant in its concept of a will brought into stark psychological relief by the stain of original sin. It adds the paradox of hereditary sin to establish the limit of reflection, and with it a place where thought stops and the will may begin (SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206). [A]las, for speculation’s secret in comprehending is simply to sew without fastening the end and without knotting the thread, and this is why, wonder of wonders, it can go on sewing and sewing, that is, pulling the thread through. Christianity on the other hand, fastens the end by means of the paradox. (SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206)

Though, to ignore the influence that thought has on the will, and vice versa, would be to fall into the error against which Anti-Climacus cautions. 30 The gap between knowing and willing which Christianity introduces “is not always quick” – it is not “fast as the wind.” “Quite the opposite,” he tell us, “this is the beginning of a very long-winded story” (SUD, 94 / SKS 11, 207-208). Within this story falls the time of training, the askùsis to which the philosopher originally subjected the souls in his care. The passions must learn to see correctly (SUD, 65 / SKS 11, 180). 31 A mood like despair is no “mere feeling.” It is an ac29

30

31

See Vincent McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, pp. 135, 160. McCarthy ties the question of emotion and mood to the ancient Greek practice of philosophy as a love of wisdom, describing the Christian life-view in Kierkegaard as a successful “mastery of moods” to which the esthete is otherwise “victim.” “In the past we have traced in this study, we have observed subjectivity awakening, victimized by a series of moods and challenged to master them and their deeper meaning.” Reversing Repetition’s Young Man, who falls ill with the sickness he reads about, ignoring the time of actuality, Anti-Climacus mocks the person who collapses thinking sin into being in sin, ignoring the role of the will. See SUD, 65 / SKS 11, 180. “- if someone were to speak that way to him, he would understand it in a dispassionate moment, but his passion would soon see mistakenly again, and then once more he would make a wrong turn – into despair.”

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complished way of viewing the world, an interpretation of its myriad details as together signifying one thing and not another. It is, in this sense, “an act” (SUD, 62 / SKS 11, 171). If we can speak of Christian virtue in Kierkegaard, its goal, as in Aristotle, would be perceptual, replacing blurred perceptions with keen ones. The question of akrasia (acting against reason, choice or, to move beyond the Greek, the will) returns once more with an additional concept: the distinction between the Greek “not being able” (akķn) and the Christian not “willing” (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). The Greek concepts of being able (hekķn) or unable (akķn), Anti-Climacus recognizes, fall short of the notion of willing per se. At best, the terms can be translated as voluntary or involuntary, that is, with or without coercion. I can do something, uncoerced by an outside force, without having willed it in the fullest sense. I do not will sitting down to lunch, or lazing in the park, when the weather and my fancy strike. To think of such impulses as “chosen” confuses the issue of deliberate actions, such as practicing philosophy, or Christianity, with the stuff of lunches and naps. But, with no recourse to any real language of the will, this, he claims, is what the Greek model does. Emended by the paradoxical concept of hereditary sin, the relation between reason and the passions takes on a radically new but still patently Greek tone. Christianity adds that man is “unwilling to understand.” Against the entire ancient philosophical tradition, Christianity claims (incidentally, along with tragedians like Euripides) that though a person knows what is right, they may will what is wrong. This is the notion of “defiance” (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). Christianity cannot be arrived at intellectually. It is either willed or not willed (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). Sin, then, is still a kind of ignorance. It is a willful ignorance of the paradoxical sin which Christianity revealed, a refusal to accept a reality that as Haufniensis descibed strains the understanding to its breaking. This refusal to believe therefore affects not just the “will” but also “the individual’s consciousness” (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 208). Here re-emerge the two possibilities which Aristotle distinguished as incontinence and intemperance. Anti-Climacus explains them both in a single scenario in which the irrationality of a kind of passiveness slowly gains power over the active, rational part of the soul: Willing is dialectical and has under it the entire lower nature of man. If willing does not agree with what is known, then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite of what knowing understood (presumably such strong opposites are rare); rather, willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: “We shall look at it tomorrow.” During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure;

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alas, for the good must be done immediately, as soon as it is known […] but the lower nature’s power lies in stretching things out. Gradually, willing’s objection to this development lessens; it almost appears to be in collusion. And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree completely, for not knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that what it wants is absolutely right. (SUD, 95 / SKS 11, 207-208)

The “duplicity in all passionateness” can force the individual into a kind of ventriloquism which makes “the passionate one understand later, almost to the point of madness, that he has said the very opposite of what he intended to say” (SUD, 111 / SKS 11, 223). The goal of ethics and the instruments of its psychologies, as with the ancients, is self-mastery (enkrateia), not just managing the slaves in oneself, but converting them to the right rule of the understanding, avoiding the “imaginatively constructed virtues” which subordinate the false sovereign to “the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment” (SUD, 69 / SKS 11, 184). The slaves, though, on this model, no longer represent the irrationality of appetite and emotion. There are no actual slaves, like the ones that gain the upper hand in the soul as Plato and then Aristotle define it, only the will not to know (not to know, paradoxically, sin, that which cannot be known). Though Kierkegaard believes that all of Greece evaded this problem with an intellectual sleight of hand between knowing and willing, the possibility of the problem remains a child of Greek imagination. It is only within the scope of this tradition, no matter how transgressive, in which his Christian psychological method makes sense. The Virtue of the Irrational As providence replaced fate in The Concept of Anxiety, faith radicalizes and replaces the ancient Greek category of virtue. After the emendations of Greece by Christianity, “the opposite of sin (‘spirit’s consent’ to ‘the turbulence of flesh and blood’) is not virtue but faith” (SUD, 82 / SKS 11, 197). The antithesis “sin/faith” “reshapes all ethical concepts and gives them one additional range. At the root of the antithesis lies the crucial Christian qualification: before God, a qualification that in turn has Christianity’s crucial criterion: the absurd, the paradox, the possibility of offense.” If Socratic ignorance was “the veneration for God” “on guard duty” at “the frontier between God and man, keeping watch so that the deep gulf of qualitative difference between them was maintained” (SUD, 99 / SKS 11, 213), he nevertheless worshipped his god by taking dialectical care. The Christian

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on the other hand “is an invention of a mad god” (SUD, 126 / SKS 11, 238). Taking care of this god, of the self before this god, requires a far less moderate tone. Yet Anti-Climacus ultimately parses the practice of faith that Christian virtue demands in the judicious Greek language, that of Plutarch, where the collisions of tragedy are exaggerated rather than soothed philosophically, where the ethical telos becomes the impossible appropriation of a divine logos which Kierkegaard once again connects with tragedy and sacrifice: – O my friend, how have you been tried in life! Cudgel your brain, tear away every covering in your breast and expose the viscera of feeling, demolish every defense that separates you from the person you are reading about, and then read Shakespeare – and you will be appalled at the collisions. But even Shakespeare seems to have recoiled from essentially religious collisions. Indeed perhaps these can be expressed only in the language of the gods. And no human being can speak this language. As a Greek has already said so beautifully: from men, man learns to speak, from the gods, to be silent. (SUD, 127 / SKS 11, 238-239)

Proper understanding works itself down into the stomach of the soul. Though the art (like all arts) aims at mastery, its goal is not a moderation of the passions, but their proper incitement. The believer outloves the lovers. “[W]hen it comes to enthusiasm, the most rapturous lover of all lovers is but a stripling compared with a believer” (SUD, 103 / SKS 11, 216). No longer concerned with reasons, the enraptured belief of the lover simply loves, describing his love, perhaps, enthusiastically, but never justifying it. That would be “to inform against himself as not being in love” (SUD, 104 / SKS 11, 216). This joyousness of love is most joyous “when it sacrifices everything” (SUD, 127 / SKS 11, 238), when it renounces conservation, economy, the ne quid nimis of Aristotle’s golden mean, the “summa summarum of all human wisdom” (SUD, 86-87 / SKS 11, 200). Faith seeks the quid nimis (SUD, 84 / SKS 11, 198), the divine excess in which human calculations and concepts breach their limit. Though “god is indeed a friend of order,” “[h]is concept is not like man’s, beneath which the single individual lies as that which cannot be merged in the concept; his concept embraces everything, and in another sense he has no concept. God does not avail himself of an abridgement” (SUD, 121 / SKS 11, 233). 32

32

God is an actuality to which no concept is adequate, recalling the aesthetic apprehension of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, struck by the beauty of an object to which no concept is adequate, one which exceeds the limitations of imposed by the concepts of understanding, and in that way mirrors the freedom (i. e., creative power) of god in the world of experience.

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Anti-Climacus with his psychology lays the groundwork for a new ethics of tragic virtue in which the individual practices a passion for the impossible, a venturing instead of the “prudence” (SUD, 34 / SKS 11, 151) of “worldly wisdom” (SUD, 56 / SKS 11, 172), where the criterion of the self is not what it is immanently, as with the Greeks, but, with God as the criterion, the transcendence that “a person is not” (SUD, 79-80 / SKS 11, 193-194). The subjectification of the ancient hamartia, an objective guilt one innocently suffered, shifts the individual of the post/modern age into gear for a new activity over and above paganism, whose actions Anti-Climacus understands as passive reactions to the external world (SUD, 99 / SKS 11, 212). He defines the radicalized hamartia of sin finally in terms of a dramatic script, one easily seen as tragic: Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author’s writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error – perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production – and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: no, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second rate author” (SUD, 74 / SKS 11, 187).

These protests within the grammar of his script remind us of Oedipus, whose moral disciplines, now, would will his own erasure, whose education would conclude in a recognition of failure, a choice to be in the wrong. The task this Christian psychology sets for the individual amounts to performance in a divinely ordered play that from man’s perspective is always incomplete. Yet its Idea, a transcendence, must be absorbed by the soul, transforming the passions and establishing the order which god loves, an order now open to revisions, new constellations of ideas, passions and projects rooted in the history of the soul as a practiced state. Like any author worth his salt, God expresses a life view in his work through its essential unity. 33

33

In the Book on Adler Kierkegaard distinguishes between the premise author and the essential author. A premise author makes a beginning, but fails to work out the conclusions, to draw the work into a unified whole. This echoes Kierkegaard’s claim in From the Papers of One still Living that the author of novels must have a life-view with which he imbues a unity in the work. The essential author has conclusions “toward which he conducts the read, even if he does not make them explicit.” See McCarthy The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, pp. 147, 151, and ch, 7 generally. McCarthy correctly extends Kierkegaard’s views on authorship in From the Papers of One Still Living and The Book on Adler to the cultivation of a unified life-view in one’s actual life. He identifies this cultivation with “self mastery,” what

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A Botched Model For Askêsis: Stages’ Quidam and the Exercise of the Passions Frater Taciturnus, our last of Kierkegaard’s psychologists, in addition to reconfirming the general picture of the soul divided between contrary passions for conflicting ideas, gives us a torturous illustration of the kind of practice a Kierkegaardian moral psychology requires. Although Quidam’s diary is ultimately the record of a failure, it still provides a rich picture of what a post/modern Christian ascetics might look like, and how its aims ought to be understood. Where Quidam fails, others, if they learn from his errors, might succeed. Taciturnus’ goal will be to outline categorical types, as Constantius and Haufniensis described the psychologist’s intuition of an ideal ‘totality’ in the individual: in “actual life the case is that passions, psychical states, etc., are found only to a certain degree. This, too, delights the psychologist, but it is also another kind of delight in seeing passion carried to its limit” (SL, 191 / SKS 6, 179). This requires experiments in the domain of fiction, like the Quidam Taciturnus generates, where the ideal personality can be achieved. All three stages of existence – aesthetic, ethical and religious – demand a practice, an askùsis in which the soul’s passions rehearse one or another idea, or life-view. As William Afham explains in the preface to the erotist’s symposium, “to bring about a recollection for oneself takes an acquaintance with contrasting moods, situations, and surroundings” (SL, 13 / SKS 6, 21). But the ethicist also has his own selfstyled practice. The Judge’s Reflections on Marriage defend the “dark passions” of jealousy and anger when a “noble love” is befouled. He considers this condition of the soul “love’s ethical sorrow over someone who has died” (SL, 135 / SKS 6, 128). Likewise, there are other passions he rejects, such as “the icy passion of wittiness. For there is a hell whose heat blights all life; but there is also a hell whose cold kills all life” (SL, 135 / SKS 6, 128). The ethical then is not a matter of extinguishing the passions, but cultivating a moderation between extremes which avoids the “wild revolt of sensuality” (SL, 180 / SKS 6, 168) unleashed on the Faustian who imprudently rejects the sensual outright only to have it recoil upon him. Quidam’s struggle is the familiarly poetic one of passionate contradiction. In keeping with the maieutics of Greek ethics his internal Greek moralists since the sophists called enkrateia, and recognizes in this a return to Greek philosophizing.

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strife bears witness to the possibility of a birth: “Is this the way it is to be a mother? wailed Rachel when the twins’ struggle began in her womb, and many a person has said this to himself when he obtained what he craved: is this the way it is?” Quidam connects this division in the self with contrary desires, frustrated by a faulty perception of their objects. “And is it not as if there were two natures struggling within me[?]” (SL, 215 / SKS 6, 201). The solution “depends upon” “the positing of life’s pathological element absolutely clearly, legibly, and powerfully” (SL, 291 / SKS 6, 270). It depends in other words upon a good logos of the pathù, a logos which Quidam no doubt lacks. “What I have shaped myself to be with all my passion seems to be an error, but I cannot be remade now” (SL, 320 / SKS 6, 297). The problem of desire, this “contradiction in passion” (SL, 302 / SKS 6, 281), as with Aristotle, can only be resolved through a kind of ascetics which first needs the right idea to guide it. Each of these ideas, equipped with “its reasons,” in Quidam’s case “wants to provoke [the] mind to rebellion” (SL, 305 / SKS 6, 284). To become “free in his passion” (SL, 414 / SKS 6, 384), as Taciturnus puts it, would have demanded Quidam practice the right reasons, which he surely did not. And although the Judge happily concludes that maturity can arrive in the split second of decision, the “opportune moment of love” where “eternity intervenes” (SL, 165 / SKS 6, 154), the character of Quidam suggests otherwise. The Judge himself provides a clue to the false independence and speed of his decisions in the figure of the justified exception, exemplified by Abraham, rooted in an actuality against which he inexplicably collides. He “must feel the torture of misunderstanding just as the ascetic constantly felt the prick of the hair shirt he wore next to his bare body –” (SL, 180 / SKS 6, 168). 34 Quidam, an unjustified exception, whose romantic shoots of imagination and intelligence never had time to plant roots in the soil of experience, likewise develops the theme of ascetics. He cultivates the “internal and the psychical that determined the mood, […] the optative passion, the impatient longing, the soul’s emotion of expectancy” (SL, 205 / SKS 6, 192). Quidam explains how to handle the fitful, selfenclosed soul of the daimoniac, which the masterful intelligence can subdue, without recognizing that the soul belongs to him: “[t]he art is 34

For other references to religious “asceticism” in Quidam, see SL, 252 / SKS 6, 234: “ascetic renunciation;” SL, 253-254 / SKS 6, 235-236: Quidam practices “the flexibility of passion” like “Simon Stylites,” the Christian ascetic, who stood “on a tall pillar […] bending himself into the most difficult positions and frightening away sleep and searching for terror in the crises of balance.”

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to speak about it a little […] and thus to hold a consuming passion in the conversation’s firm control so that, just like an equestrian, one can guide it with a sewing thread and, just like a drive, swing around in a figure eight” (SL, 218 / SKS 6, 204) (adj. tr.). Quidam gives us another equine description of ascetics, this time tying it to the development of a “life view.” “I have taken fifteen years to form a view of life for myself and to mature in it” and “cannot suddenly be altered” (SL, 373 / SKS 6, 346). “[F]or fifteen years and a day” Quidam “has improved himself in handling thoughts dialectically, just as the Arab handles the snorting steed” (SL, 377 / SKS 6, 350). The image of the horse and driver is borrowed from Platonic psychology, where reason must learn to properly conduct the passions. 35 But in Quidam we face a character called to incite his passionate nature rather than subdue it philosophically. A potentially religious subject like Quidam “disciplines” his “soul” so that it may keep itself “at the peak” of its “wish” (SL, 247 / SKS 6, 231). In the case of religious subjectivity the governing ethical Idea must be a passionate one, something one suffers, a division in the self, and so the risk of rebellion from below is far more urgent. Quidam exemplifies the pathological consequences for personality in the case of such a rebellion, where the crucial balance between knowing, willing and feeling is lost. Quidam practices the wrong thing, “like a person who wanted to take his examen atrium [final comprehensive examination] and had studied beyond measure for seven others but had not studied what was prescribed and therefore failed” (SL, 223 / SKS 6, 208). Like the Christian ascetic, Simon Stylites, he incites a “crises of balance” (SL, 253 / SKS 6, 235) – only to succumb. The “Pythagorean” (SL, 301 / SKS 6, 281) practice to which he subjects his passions remains suspended in the thinnest atmosphere of the optative – when it was a practice in the indicative of actuality that was required. Quidam has his own theory of the delicate relation between theory and practice implied by ascetics. “To grasp a theory is just like embracing a cloud instead of Juno, and it is also unfaithfulness to her. But to use a theory as a means of exercising, to unbuckle the soul in it so as to give one’s energy new elasticity, that is permissible – indeed, it is what one ought to do (SL, 263 / SKS 6, 246). Quidam’s ascetics, however, are ironically ineffective, a practice in impotence, like this romantic-philosophical love of clouds. He himself admits, “[i]t is difficult to test oneself in possibility; it is like someone’s testing whether he has a strong voice without dar35

See Plato Phaedrus, 246a-247c.

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ing to use his voice” (SL, 295 / SKS 6, 274). Putting the psychological methods and theory of these four pseudonyms into actual practice calls for a new voice to enter Kierkegaard’s stage, that of Johannes Climacus, in whose ethics of eternity, the second ethics which Haufniensis theorized, unfolds the possibility of a tragic practice in religious subjectivity.

Chapter 11 Ethics Contra Ethics: Climacus on Eternal Happiness and Tragic Virtue Eternal Happiness in Philosophical Fragments Socrates was a hero for Kierkegaard, an individual thinker to whom he returned perpetually for inspiration. As we saw in chapter four, it was Socrates who consolidated if not introduced a newfound sense of the soul, elements of which had been developing for about a century in the early science of Ionia, among Greek physicians and sophists, and especially in the alien religious beliefs of so-called shamans having immigrated to Greek soil. This soul was both personal and rational, as well as divine, and it could be found in states of relative sickness and health. For Kierkegaard, we need go no farther in our talk about the soul than Socrates. It is the ground on which character is at stake, and no more. With the technical psychologies of Plato and Aristotle enters a metaphysics of the soul in which humanity claims to grasp what human being Is. Kierkegaard’s moral psychology does everything it can to reverse philosophy’s tendency to deprive this mystery of its force. Yet despite their Socratic investment in ignorance and the inviolable religious mystery at the heart of human nature, Aristotelian practical and metaphysical categories pervade both Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript. In particular, I want to examine the role of eternal happiness as the telos of Kierkegaard’s ethics and its inflection by his return as philosopher to the spirit of tragic poetry – the ‘Salighed’ corresponding to Greek ‘eudaimonia’ – as well as the special kinds of knowing which the practice of human happiness implies. Climacus begins the Fragments with a Platonic question, “Can virtue be taught?” (PF, 9 / SKS 4, 219), referring us to four Platonic dialogues: Protagoras, Gorgias, Meno, and Euthydemus. He reminds us, as did his companion, Anti-Climacus, that Socrates defined virtue as insight and that according to Socrates’ star pupil, rather than learned,

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this insight must be recollected. A Platonic1 retreat into the past easily explains “the contradiction of existence” (PF, 10n / SKS 4, 220). The contradiction of existence is that through education and choice one becomes what one is, or, put the other way around, what one is not. Recollection presupposes a necessary motion, backwards in Plato, forwards in the teleologies of Aristotle and Hegel, through which becoming must pass uncreatively (PF, 10n / SKS 4, 220; PF, 80 / SKS 4, 280 f.). This doctrine of recollection also implies an interpretation of the soul, and so Plato’s Meno moves quickly from a demonstration of recollection to that of the soul’s immortality (PF, 9-10 / SKS 4, 219-220). But if the individual is to become something new, to learn something new – and in the case of virtue, to learn and to become something new are identical – the soul must be rescued from its annihilation by ancient Greeks and modern Germans in foregone, metaphysical conclusions. As with Socrates, the learner must acquire virtue’s self-knowledge on his own. While the objective knowledges of science and history (i. e., Plato and Hegel) reside in a common fund, when it comes to virtue, investing in this fund pays dividends in disaster, mediating the real authority of individual character “in a common lunacy and in a commune naufragium [common shipwreck]” (PF, 12 / SKS 4, 221).

Habit and the Idea of Ethics Fragments amends the Socratic-Greek understanding of virtue with Christian categories in order to preserve the time of moral education against the eternal gravity of recollection under which the Greeks labored. Climacus recognizes along with Aristotle and Plato that understanding is a passion, always moving toward a goal, an object of desire. But whereas Greek desires tend to fulfill themselves in a perfect actuality, for Climacus “the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something thought cannot think” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243). Climacus exposes the secret progress of ‘the Idea’ we have witnessed, chapter by chapter, from the erotics of the aesthete to the ethi1

See CUP1, 205 / SKS 188. Climacus distinguishes between Socrates the pragmatist and Plato the idealist, who institutes the doctrine of recollection.

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cal universal and finally to religion. The Idea has a desire of its own: to exhaust itself, in us. It invents itself upon the thinker like the poem upon the poet, “insofar as he, thinking, is not merely himself” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243). Climacus, who identifies himself as a poet, describes his own poetizing of the god turned man in terms of this immanence which is likewise a transcendence. “So perhaps it is not a poem at all, or in any case is not ascribable to any human being or to the human race, either.” – “[F]orgive me my curious mistaken notion of having composed it myself. It was a mistaken notion, and the poem was so different from every human poem that it was no poem at all but the wonder” (PF, 36 / SKS 4, 243). Cultivating virtue in the soul, the possibility of eternal happiness, the individual learns to express an authorless idea, one not his own. Happiness is not a capacity the individual has ahead of time, not a skill one learns and preserves like gardening or karate. It is only when the individual retires his tools and prepares to be hohned by the Idea of a divine Other that virtue can begin to take shape in the soul. “But because of habit,” he continues, “we do not discover this” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243). Climacus, then, is interested in cultivating different habits, paradoxical habits that make life harder, not easier, in which the stride of thought is constantly stumbling and interrupted. “Similarly, the human act of walking, so the natural scientist informs us, is a continuous falling, but a good steady citizen who walks to his office mornings and home at midnight probably considers this an exaggeration, because his progress, after all, is a matter of mediation – how could it occur to him that he is continually falling, he who unswervingly follows his nose” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243). He abbreviates Greek philosophy as the anthropomorphizing of truth. Its impulse toward knowledge, with the Greeks, took aim first at human being, as a potentially universal measure to be “sought, or doubted, or postulated, or brought to fruition” (PF, 38 / SKS 4, 244). Philosophers tend to subordinate the originary wonder of “the unknown” to “their own wondrous understanding,” the wonder of the latter, in truth, an echo of the former – an “acoustical illusion” (PF, 53 / SKS 4, 256). And while Socrates may have initiated this movement he also cautioned against its excesses, or even progress. As late as the Phaedrus, Socrates was still “not quite clear about himself, whether he (a connoisseur of human nature) was a more curious monster than Typhon or a friendlier and simpler being, by nature sharing something divine” (PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243). The paradox that reason, according to Climacus, desires, is none other than the self of reason that Socrates devised, only to impose

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self-knowledge upon itself as the crux of its own failure. Socrates got as far as himself as difference, the self-asserting difference of irony. The true nature of this difference as sin and the identification of god as “the absolutely different” upon which this difference depends had yet to arise (PF, 47 / SKS 4, 253). With the Christian concept of sin the possibility emerges of an absolute difference which man cannot generate, a wonder which the progress of human science can never cancel, which invades the blood of all his arts, especially the art of man himself (or, in modern terms, psychology). This “unknown against which the understanding in its paradoxical passion collides and which even disturbs man and his self knowledge” must have a name. Climacus calls this unknown “the god,” though “it is only a name we give to it” (PF, 39 / SKS 4, 245). Practicing the passionate failure of reason means practicing the relation to the god. But Climacus’ god is “not a name but a concept” (PF, 41 / SKS 4, 246), 2 a ‘wisdom’ and ‘goodness’ in which the individual begins to develop a deliberate (and therefore ethical) relationship to himself and his world. There cannot be any immediate or direct proof of God’s existence within the order that the concept itself determines. 3 It is an ideality presupposed by belief (PF, 42 / SKS 4, 248) which saturates experience, an omnipresent existence which “is also unknown and to that extent does not exist,” at least not for the understanding (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 249). And so the question of moral virtue returns in the proof for God’s existence, where the understanding relates to the frontier of the unknown, which “is expressly the passion’s torment, even though it is also its incentive” (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 250). What must be recalled – “the absolutely different” (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 249) – cannot be recalled. Or, if it is to be recalled it must be recalled in some other 2 3

See SUD, 121 / SKS 11, 233. Here god begins to sound like the Ideas of Kantian Reason, concepts to which no object is adequate. But God for Kierkegaard is not a feature of human reason, as the Philosophical Fragments make clear. As an Idea, God works against human reason from the inside, exposing it destructively to its limit. While Kantian Reason thinks thoughts which cannot be confirmed empirically (i. e., God, the immortality of the soul, infinite time), Climacus’ god is a concept which one experiences immediately, given belief, but which no concept in the determinative sense can contain. As he puts it, there is “an absolute relation between the god and his works.” God saturates his creation in such a way that his presence is total and therefore cannot be distinguished from it, cannot be proven. This is closer to Kant’s analysis in the Critique of Judgment of the aesthetic object to which no concept is adequate. For more on Kierkegaard’s relation to Kant, see Ronald Green Kierkegaard and Kant, the Hidden Debt.

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way than understanding’s proof. Climacus’ god returns through the unfamiliar and the unowned, a stranger the understanding welcomes in fear and trembling, as the Greek feared Zeus in every outcast beggar (from which came their rule of hospitality),4 as Thebes came to fear its Oedipus and Athens its Socrates. The understanding meets the paradox in a second understanding, a “mutual understanding” “present in the moment of passion,” in which the first understanding “will[s] its own downfall” (PF, 47 / SKS 4, 252). This passionate mis/understanding follows the analogy of the pagan-religious passion of eros. Though self-love “lies at the basis” of the love of another, “at its peak its paradoxical passion wills its own downfall” (PF, 48 / SKS 4, 253). Self-love is taken up into the climax of erotic love as “spolia opima [spoils of war]”. The “moment of passion” is precisely where erotic love persuades the self-love in which it began to surrender. As it is the passion of eros that provides the mutual understanding between lovers, “[s]o also with the paradox’s relation to the understanding, except that this passion has another name, or, rather, we must simply try to find a name for it” (PF, 48 / SKS 4, 253). In both cases one understanding passionately submits to another (or, alternatively, an Other). The question, then, is one of names, of naming desires at the point of ecstasy where their formative concepts bend. “If the paradox and the understanding meet in the mutual understanding of their difference, then the encounter is a happy one, like erotic love’s understanding –” a “happy passion” (PF, 54 / SKS 4, 257) which has yet to be named (PF, 48 / SKS 4, 253). But this passion has no need of names. “[E]ven though my happiness does not have a name – if only I am happy, I ask no more” (PF, 54 / SKS 4, 257). 5 If the difference, alternatively, is misunderstood, the understanding suffers offense (PF, 49 / SKS 4, 254). But the matter of names and language is fraught with pitfalls for the student of virtue. A student who submits himself to the literal teaching and cherishes “every instructive word,” “every syllable so that nothing would be lost,” cannot actually “follow” (PF, 60 / SKS 4, 263). Names are distracting and yet “the via negationis [the way of negation]” is also foreclosed, as is the “via eminentiae [the way of idealization]” which begins with the name (PF, 44 / SKS 4, 250). The student is left in the aporetic space where names are both impos4 5

Homer Odyssey, ix. 304-305. See also PF, 59 / SKS 4, 261, where the happy passion is identified loosely as faith. “[T]hat happy passion to which we shall now give a name, although for us it is not a matter of the name. We shall call it faith.”

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sible and required. And so we get a paradoxical name, an ironic name which both speaks and says nothing, as so often they remind us, do Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. The name of the happy passion is faith, “although for us it is not a matter of the name” (PF, 59 / SKS 4, 261). If as Kierkegaard writes in his journals “[f]aith’s conflict with the world is not a battle of thought with doubt, thought with thought,” but rather “a battle of character,”6 then winning this battle means habituating oneself to something which at every step resists and upends habituation, acquiring faith as “a person’s second nature” (PF, 96 / SKS 4, 294). To have this nature in advance, as Plato proposed in the doctrine of recollection and the “transmigration of souls,” insofar as this nature “refers to a given historical fact in time” “is just as plausible as to be born twenty four years old” (PF, 96 / SKS 4, 294). Socrates’ care of the self ran up against the stumbling block of individual human difference, ironically unable to decide whether he was a man or a monster, a site of potential knowledge or futile ignorance, forever stranded from the truth he tried to generate between himself and other men.7 Climacus, in thinking through the problem of eternal virtue – that is, whether it can be taught, if we take its historicality seriously – crosses the limit to dialectics which Socrates approached, but, deprived of Christian concepts, beyond which he could not pass. The frivolity of this pamphleteer seizes upon Aristotle’s metaphysically sober “insistence on the absolute and absolute distinctions” (PF, 108 / SKS 4, 305) in order to draw the most absolute distinction between the virtues, to the one side, of dialectics, literature and history, and, on the other side of a limit, Christianity. The Christian difference this comic poet-dialectician discovers undermines the independence of dialectics, along with all other human forms of reflection. From this precipitous vantage point he describes what lies in such a foreign space: “[n]o philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (which is for memory) has ever had this idea – of which in this connection one can say that it did not arise in any human heart” (PF, 109 / SKS 4, 306) (cf. Corinthians I, 2:7-9). The higher madness of Christianity “is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical – indeed, precisely by means of the historical – has wanted 6 7

JP 2:1129 / SKS NB11:69. See PF, 91 / SKS 4, 289. When climacus writes that antiquity had a “passion for distinctions,” he gestures to the epigraph to Concept of Anxiety, where Socrates is praised for maintaining the distinction between knowledge and ignorance, which the Hegelian relativizes ambiguously.

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to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness” (PF, 109 / SKS 4, 306). It bases the virtue and happiness of eternity on something historical, whereby it is actually developed and acquired, whereby it becomes his and his alone. It strains against the stultifying habits of recollection, assimilating this primordial difference to the thought it itself engenders, to philosophy, poetry, or even the history of thought itself.

Parousia and the Idea of Virtue This point of departure for education in the virtues of eternity is a god’s presence in time, the parousia of the New Testament (PF, 55 / SKS 4, 258). The “god’s presence is not incidental to his teaching but is essential” – This presence itself “is precisely the teaching.” The word itself – parousia – contains an ambiguity to which Climacus, without mention, devotes the best energies of this humble pamphlet on the question of eternal happiness. The Greek prefix ‘para’ can signify a ‘being-present,’ as with the verb ‘pareinai’ (to be present). Or it can signify a ‘being-other-than,’ the presence of an absence or evasion, as with the word which this particular pamphlet puts to such exhaustive use – ‘paradoxos’ – meaning contrary to opinion, appearances, or expectation (hù doxa). That the god’s appearance, in what Climacus calls “the moment” (referring us indirectly back to Haufniensis’ psychology of the traumatic advent of a god), was a historical event, means that the moment has “decisive significance” (PF, 13 / SKS 4, 221) – that time matters. “Would this not be strange indeed! If it were otherwise, if the moment did not have decisive significance” (PF, 16 / SKS 4, 224). Climacus illustrates the point fittingly via a passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1114a): The depraved person and the virtuous person presumably do not have power over their moral condition, but in the beginning they did have the power to become the one or the other, just as the person who throws a stone has power over it before he throws it but not when he has thrown it (Aristotle). Otherwise the throwing would become an illusion, and the person throwing, despite all his throwing, would keep the stone in his hand, since the stone, like the skeptics’ “flying arrow,” did not fly (PF, 17n / SKS 4, 226).

The image of motion and the flying arrow as well as the force of the stone’s throw impress upon the reader the near impossible difficulty of becoming an ethical individual, of realizing the wondrous potential of the human, a difficulty eulogized in both Aristotle’s and Kierkegaard’s

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texts. It is arduous work. It demands patience, upon which the individual builds strength of character, but also precision. Like the bowman, virtue must take proper aim, and choice must follow through in the right way. The teacher-god of Climacus’ essay educates, first, by giving the student the condition for learning. He provides the student with the possibility of recognizing his ignorance, and that this ignorance, at some point, has been chosen. “Let us call it sin” (PF, 15 / SKS 4, 224). By making sin a historical matter, the historical event of parousia orients us towards the future. It discloses the possibility of choice rather than foreclosing on it, recollectively, in a poetic-philosophical nostalgia for essence, one which modern science perpetuates every time it tells us what we are, i. e., a naked ape, a brain-state, an accident of mathematically-physical nature, etc. A problem born of history needs the same history to resolve it, since the conditions for the problem itself were historical. In this way the student seeks out the same teacher, once more, as “a reconciler who takes away the wrath that lay over the incurred guilt” (PF, 17 / SKS 4, 226). In a state crippled by the sin of his choosing, he solicits the teacher’s grace. The first teacher whom Climacus visits is Socrates, the example of the highest pedagogically between one person and another, in which the ignorance of the teacher throws the student, as teacher, now, back upon himself (PF, 24 / SKS 4, 231). This Socratic ignorance turns out to be of the same tragic variety that Oedipus suffered, a zealous discipline of himself which Socrates generously extended to others and “in which he loved the divine” (PF, 23-24 / SKS 4, 231-232). This divine love was a kind of masochism that punished the human with “the same divine jealousy” (PF, 23-24 / SKS 4, 231) that a century earlier had fuelled the gods’ vengeance (nemesis) on the tragic stage, diligently guarding the borders of mortality. If Socrates’ gentle prodding had been the sting of a gadfly, the god now has a need for bigger tools and grander effect. The victim of Socrates’ wit may have been turned around a bit, as Alcibiades describes in the Symposium, though better off in the long run, but the student of the god whom no man represents, not even Socrates, the student whose “heart pounded as violently as Alcibiades, more violently than the Corybantes” (PF, 23-24 / SKS 4, 232), risks much more than dizziness – he risks death. In fact, he seeks it out.

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The Fate of the Self “This was indeed the god’s concern, for the shoot of the lily is tender and easily snapped” (PF, 30 / SKS 4, 237) like “the individual’s tender shoot” – and “to see the god was death” (PF, 30 / SKS 4, 237). Yet the god gives the moment its decisive significance by entering into it. Again, as Haufniensis theorized in The Concept of Anxiety, it is the excessive presence of the god that produces the moment, catastrophically, through a fullness which time cannot contain, an incommensurable love and vitality entering into an incommensurable self nourished by them. Like the tiny oak nut that soon splits the clay pot, the wine that overfull bursts the wineskin, “when the god plants himself in the frailty of a human being,” what happens “if he does not become a new person and a new vessel,” an infinite vessel capable of infinite containment (PF, 34 / SKS 4, 240)? If the student resists the god’s art, if he cannot be remade, the results are shattering. If the student of virtue does not resist the invention of this god, the consequences are equally shattering, but the fragment of this other shattering can be healed through choice. The paradox of this god – which can also be called “the moment” (PF, 51 / SKS 4, 256) – discloses the possibility of choice by claiming that the understanding rather than the paradox itself is the absurd (PF, 52 / SKS 4, 256). The paradox is the wonder that makes room for the sober “foolishness” (PF, 52 / SKS 4, 256) of the only possible decision, to be the creature god made. It was Jesus, as Climacus’ describes him, who best exemplified this simple how, though perhaps any well-adjusted vagabond would do: “he went his way as one who owns nothing and wishes to own nothing, as unconcerned about his living as the birds of the air, as unconcerned about house and home as someone who has no hiding place or nest and is not looking for such a place” (PF, 56-57 / SKS 4, 259-260). Although, as the companion discourse explains, man is not mere nature, not a lily or a bird, a similar way can be inculcated in him. 8 “The question is this: may a human being express the same thing? – for otherwise the god has not realized the essentially human. Yes, if he is capable of it, he may also do it” (PF, 57 / SKS 4, 260). Though the Greeks mistook the transcendence of the divine for a sublimnity in the self (PF, 45 / SKS 4, 260), this regeneration in Christ’s image nevertheless becomes a matter of something like Greek tem8

See “The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air” in Without Authority.

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perance, the virtue of the irrational parts of the soul with which, by analogy, Aristotle explained, all the virtues function, and upon which the keenness of a phronetic eye depends. “If he can become so absorbed in the service of the spirit that it never occurs to him to provide for food and drink, if he is sure that the lack will not divert him, that hardship will not disorder the body and make him regret that he did not first of all understand the lessons of childhood before wanting to understand more – yes, then he truly may do it, and his greatness is even more glorious than the quiet assurance of the lily” (PF, 57 / SKS 4, 260). First the appetites and then the will must take their cue from this paradoxical understanding that the god provides. Unlike the Greeks, “human willing” in the light of sin “is efficacious only within the condition” (PF, 62-63 / SKS 4, 264-265), since man does not immanently possess the condition for self-knowledge and actualization.9 He must voluntarily “close his eyes,” though not like Oedipus, blinded forcibly by the god, or like the philosopher departing Plato’s cave,10 blinding the eye of the body by the light of the soul. In matters of virtue the passions are not the enemy. They are the moving cause of change and rebirth (a key concept of Climacus’ on loan from the New Testament).11 This rebirth or metanoia, against the disembodied nous of philosophy, marks the return through faith and choice to the passionate knowing of a concernful body. This becoming, explains Climacus, is “an extremely pathos-filled matter” (PF, 21 / SKS 4, 230), and faith is precisely this “happy passion” which unites the contradictories of eternity and history, being and becoming (PF, 61 / SKS 4, 263). Between the historian’s knowledge of the temporal and the philosopher’s knowledge of the necessary and eternal (PF, 62 / SKS 4, 264) there stands faith, on the frontier of the understanding where choice be9

10

11

Climacus discusses this largely in terms of Socrates, for whom virtue, a feature of the intellect, could be recollected. But even in the Platonic-Aristotelian scheme, where virtue becomes a matter of the relation between intellect and the passions, man, as an essentially rational creature, in whom reason is naturally authoritative, would for Climacus possess the condition of his own perfection. Again, like Hegel, the Greeks would fall under the category of a kind of Pelagianism. See Plato Republic, vii. Plato discusses the difference between normal human vision and the philosopher’s perception of essence, which makes ordinary vision equivalent to a kind of blindness. Leaving the cave, there is a temporary blinding. Climacus, too, refers to the “eye of the soul” in which the student sees the god, eyes closed, as if, Platonically, he possessed the condition himself. This mistakenly turns the god into a “form.” PF, 63 / SKS 4, 265. PF, 19 / SKS 4, 227 f.

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comes possible, where the pristine character of ideas is spoiled by the facts, and that of facts by the ideas always already interpretatively at play, such as the concept of ‘fact’ itself.12 As in the classic, Aristotelian account, choice is a matter of deliberation, grounded and concluding in an intelligent perception. The superfluity of reports on whatever matter happens to be under consideration, Climacus observes, is just the understanding’s “attempt to put off deliberation with chatter” about the facts (PF, 93 / SKS 4, 291). Neither the eye of the body nor the recollective eye of the metaphysician’s soul, the god “opened for [the follower] the eyes of faith” in which the flesh that “the follower has seen and touched with his hands” do matter. They don’t matter enough, however, that were he to fail to recognize the teacher, one day, he would also fail to believe, and not in such a way that their significance could be revealed without the condition that the god provides (PF, 65 / SKS 4, 266). In this “external form” (PF, 65 / SKS 4, 266) there is both everything and nothing to see. The presence of the god to his contemporaries is mediated by the condition (PF, 68 / SKS 4, 269) – absent to those present, and present to those not. Climacus complicates the perspicacity of Aristotle’s phronetic eye, making it dialectical, now, with respect to its object. Yet, at the same time, in terms of its passion and concreteness, moral life remains aesthetic, as in the original Greek establishment to which Climacus’ ethics both return and strive beyond.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript: Climacus’ Tragic Ethics A Return to the Passion of the Greeks In the section entitled Actual and Ethical Subjectivity, Climacus repeatedly introduces the image of the Greek thinker as a standard of measure for his assault on the thinkers of modernity. Greek philosophy “was not absent minded” (CUP1, 309 / SKS 7, 282) – “The Greek philosopher was an existing person” (CUP1, 309 / SKS 7, 282). The Socratic model which readers of Kierkegaard tend to isolate in his admiration for the Greeks only represents the more general moralreligious spirit of Greek philosophical thought, that its beliefs, especially its commitments to the divinity of the soul, could move the thinker “to suicide or to dying in the Pythagorean sense” (CUP1, 309 12

For an intellectual-historical discussion of the concept of ‘the fact,’ see Alasdaire Macintyre After Virtue, ch. 7.

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/ SKS 7, 282). The soul’s practice in death by which Socrates defines philosophy in the Phaedo, Climacus recognizes, was part of a broader practice which extended beyond the borders of philosophy per se to the Orphic-Pythagorean religious exercises and ideas embedded in the philosopher’s bios, or way of life.13 To philosophize was an act (CUP1, 331 / SKS 7, 303) of “concrete thinking” (CUP1, 332 / SKS 7, 304); Socratic dying was such a thought in concretio.14 For this reason “every Greek thinker was essentially also a passionate thinker,” since “existing, if this is not to be understood as just any sort of existing, cannot be done without passion” (CUP1, 311 / SKS 7, 283). Climacus echoes Kierkegaard’s psychologists, emphasizing the need to return to the study of mood both in oneself and others. “It must walk along every path, must know the habitat of every error,” that is, “where moods have their hiding places, how passions regard themselves in solitude” (CUP1, 428 / SKS 7, 389). Happiness depends upon the self-regarding intelligence of the passions, but also the inherently mysterious nature of mood which is “like the Niger river in Africa; no one knows its source, no one knows its outlet – only its reach is known!” (CUP1, 236 / SKS 7, 214). This is why Aristotle has to be Climacus’ best choice from the catalogue of Greek moral philosophy. He is the classical thinker most committed to thinking the life of the mind in its passionate reality, where thought does justice to the thorny particularity of life as it moves, and the desire, human or divine, which drives it. From Socrates to the Stoics only Aristotle leaves room in the soul for the passions to assume a positive role in the good life on their own terms. Happiness, in fact, at least the mortal kind, for Aristotle, is impossible without them. He devised a new category of thought to contain what Climacus calls the “concrete thinking” of the Greeks, which Climacus cites directly with uncharacteristic precision: “Abstraction is disinterested, but to exist is the highest interest for an existing person. Therefore, the existing person continually has a telos and it is of this telos that Aristotle speaks when he says (De Anima, III, 10, 2) that ËÍÓÐÆÃÍÏÃÒÇÈÍÐ[theoretical thought] is different from 13

14

For a more recent echo of the same idea, see Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 38. Hadot quotes Plutarch: Socrates suicide’ in the Phaedo was an act of philosophy. This, argues Hadot, is the natural, Greek way to understand not just Socrates, but both Plato and Aristotle’s authorships, as well as the Stoics, as exercises in philosophy, not theory. See CUP1, 168 f. / SKS 7, 155 f. Climacus discusses the act of thinking death, where the individual thinks what is thought by developing it existentially, taking it up in his living.

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ËÍÓÐÎÏ¿ÈÒÇÈÍÐÒ×ÒÃÉÃÇ [practical thought in its end]” (CUP1, 313 / SKS 7, 285).15 Distinguished by its absorbtion in the body’s passions, Aristotelian practical thought returns us once again to the matter of desires in the soul and the ends that they crave.

The Aesthetics of the Self Like Socrates and the students of his philosophical way of life, for Climacus the task “ethically understood” is “to become a whole human being” (CUP1, 346 / SKS 7, 317). “In existence, the important thing is that all elements [of the human being] are present simultaneously. With respect to existence, thinking is not at all superior to imagination and feeling but is coordinate” (CUP1, 346-7 / SKS 7, 317). The true, the good, and the beautiful were unified in the Greek way of life and thought, exemplified best in the celestial visions of Plato’s Symposium. Cimacus reunites the truth, goodness and beauty that the modern hierarchicalizing of discursive knowledge above moral intuition and the grasp of perception divorced – not in the conceptual architectonic of a Kantian reason, as objects of the distinct faculties of understanding, reason, and aesthetic judgment,16 but in the already simple, impenetrably dense medium of a fully human life. Knowledge, morality and art come together in the space of contradiction where thinking struggles infinitely with existence as an ethical task. “The task is not to elevate the one at the expense of the other, but the task is equality, contemporaneity, and the medium in which they are united is existing” – “The true is not superior to the good and the beautiful, but the true and the good and the beautiful belong essentially to every human existence and are united for an existing person not in thinking them but in existing” (CUP1, 348 / SKS 7, 318). Existing – like ethics, like poetry – is an art, a technù. Classically, the virtues of art and practical wisdom were both a function of the deliberative faculty, to logistikon, whose object unlike the objects of science and intuitive knowledge, the virtues that comprise philosophical wisdom, are by definition contingent. The ends of ethics, like all arts, 15 16

Aristotle DA, 433a. See Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgment, introduction, sec. ix. The principles of morality are determined by the faculty of reason, the practical determinant of desire, those of knowledge by the understanding, and those of beauty, as with all feelings of pleasure and displeasure “independent of concepts and sensations,” by judgment. These three “powers” cohere in a “systematic unity.”

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are external to it.17 Both Aristotle and Climacus locate this end in the actual life that the individual leads, the state of virtue in the soul and its expression in specifically human action. It is in this sense that the ends of practical thought differ from those of theoretical thought: the means about which practical thought deliberates are likewise its ends. Its goal is to actualize the specifically human capacities for thought and the passions they inflect in the best possible way. And so this “subjective thinker” is “not an ethicist even if he is also an ethicist.” He is “not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist” (CUP1, 351 / SKS 7, 320) – if not like Aristotle’s ethicist, then, at least like his phronimos, a practitioner of moral wisdom relieved now of Aristotle’s view of man as a potential product of practical science or the metaphysical psychology grounding it. Collapsing Aristotle’s distinction between the ‘art’ or ‘science’ of ethics and the act of phronùsis, Climacus’ revival of the ancient task of virtue identifies the artist and the art, the thinker and his thought, not by abstracting the concrete, as had Greek ethics, he believed, but rather by moving in the opposite direction and “understanding the abstract concretely” (CUP1, 351 / SKS 7, 321). The ethical task was to invest the Ideal with the inevitable collisions and discrepancies, but most of all the passions, of rational man. Like Aristotelian virtue and the happy life it engenders – crafting the soul in the intertwining of logos and action, acting for the right reasons, reasoning about right action – the deliberate transformation of desire into human action is an end in itself where the individual “understands himself in existence,” (CUP1, 351 / SKS 7, 321) the “prodigious contradiction” between thought and being in which he always remains (CUP1, 123 / SKS 7, 118).18 Climacus defines the way in which the individual, subjective thinker takes up this sense of existential paradox performatively, in terms of ‘style’ (CUP1, 357 / SKS 7, 326). Style is a category applied as easily to Greek ethics as to their Christian retrieval by Climacus, a point he doesn’t fail to recognize. “To understand oneself in existence was the 17 18

See Aristotle EN, 1140b6. See Frederick Copleston History of Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 338. “Aristotle’s treatment of the virtues betrays the fact that he was under the influence of the predominantly aesthetic attitude of the Greek towards human conduct, a fact that appears in a clear light in his treatment of the “great-souled” man. The notion of a crucified God would have been abhorrent to him: it would most probably have seemed in his eyes at once unaesthetic and irrational. On the aesthetics of Greek ethics, cf. Jaeger Paideia, vol. 1, p. 35. “In early Greek thought there was no separation between ethics and aesthetics.”

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Greek principle,” but “also the Christian principle,” except that with the Christian appropriation of Greek ethics “this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficulate to understand together with existing” (CUP1, 352353 / SKS 7, 321-322). If the essence of the Greek philosopher’s style was the passion it expressed, the style of subjective thinking after the dialectical, after Hegel, after modern “scientific scholarship (CUP1, 556 / SKS 7, 506),” ought to express “a new pathos” born of dialectics’ fatal return to the pathos-filled (CUP1, 555 / SKS 7, 505). Once again, we are returned to the doctrine of hereditary sin which accentuates existence paradoxically, and the god in time through which eternity also becomes paradoxical (CUP1, 353-354 / SKS 7, 322-323). These two elements together make the believer’s existence “even more passionate than that of the Greek philosopher,” because this paradoxically accentuated existence “yields the maximum of passion” (CUP1, 354 / SKS 7, 323). His eternal happiness, the “absolute good, has the remarkable quality that it can be defined only by the mode in which it is acquired” (CUP1, 427 / SKS 7, 388). Its definition is as long and multiple and idiosyncratic as the individual lives by which it is appropriated – a kaleidoscope of mimùseis where the representing and the represented coincide. We only grasp its concept via the kind of groundless representation Nietzche’s Zarathustra later celebrates; all imagining, image through and through; all copy – a religious “imagination imagining itself imagine.”19 Aristotle theorized the potential deliberateness of the passions and this deliberation returns as an essential element of Climacus’ paradoxical virtue, though transformed into an art of possibility that action both requires and against which it defends. The “art is to think every possibility; the moment I have acted (in the inner sense), the transformation is that the task is to defend myself against further deliberation” (unless, that is, it must be repeated) (CUP1, 341n / SKS 7, 313). Climacus defines the movement through choice from the posse of “thought action” to the esse of “actual action” in Aristotelian terms of “ÈÇËÅÑÇД (CUP1, 342 / SKS 7, 313).20 But this “concrete eternity in the existing 19

20

William H. Gass Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, p. 5. Willie’s wife is a personification of language, a whore who, like language, is available to everyone, and also, like language, sings wonderfully for those who solicit her with care. The line belongs to her. Kierkegaard’s Aristotle was heavily influenced by his reading of Tennemann’s Geschicte der Philosophie. The Hongs, in their commentary to this citation, provide a translation of the relevant section, iii, pp. 125-127, where the way in which the “ac-

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person” whereby continuity is achieved obtains through “the maximum of passion,” not Greek temperance. Climacus models this “idealizing passion which anticipates the eternal in existence” (CUP1, 312 / SKS 7, 284) on Aristotle’s ideal of the unmoved mover, who provides his own “ÒÃÉÍÐ [end, goal] and ÊÃÒÏÍË [measure, criterion]” (CUP1, 312 / SKS 7, 284). But he consolidates the personality under the authority of an idea of happiness that, adjusted to the requirements of the age of indolence and reflection, depends upon the aggravation of the passions, their enlargement as opposed to their mildness. Though no romantic himself, this is part of Kierkegaard’s romantic inheritance.

Eudaimonism, Again Applying these categories hijacked from metaphysics to the ethical, Climacus draws the sagacity oft criticized in the authorship together with Aristotle’s eudaimonism and deliberation’s art of possibility: It has been said that the good has its reward in itself, and thus it is not only the most proper but also the most sagacious thing to will the good. A sagacious eudaemonist is able to perceive this very well; thinking in the form of possibility, he can come as close to the good as is possible, because in possibility as in abstraction the transition is only an appearance. But when the transition is supposed to become actual, all sagacity expires in scruples. Actual time separates the good and the reward for him so much, so eternally, that sagacity cannot join them again, and the eudaemonist declines with thanks. To will the good is indeed the most sagacious thing – yet not as understood by sagacity but as understood by the good. (CUP1, 342 f. / SKS 7, 313)

Eudaimonism suffers from what in Philosophical Fragments Climacus terms the “acoustical illusion.” Just as the understanding mistakenly believes that its limit in the unknown is a difference oriented by the understanding’s identity – while in truth its identity is a mere echo of the absolute difference of the god, whose identity and concept cannot possibly be realized – the eudaimonist confuses his rewards with wisdom and the good. In reality it is the good that defines this wisdom, and the rewards of actuality, as far as the conserving good sense of eudaimonists are concerned, is always something different, 21

21

tualization of the possible” is emphasized likely seduced Kierkegaard into the perversion of introducing Aristotle’s doctrine of kinùsis from the Physics (200b) and Metaphysics Æ into the domain of practical thought. Not atypically, Kierkegaard takes what he wants, does with it what he wants, and moves on without apology. See CUP1, 421 / SKS 7, 383. Making the same point, Climacus explains using the example of illustration that “identity is a lower view than contradiction, which is more concrete.” In Aristotelian fashion, we begin with what is closest, but progress

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something deferred. The gap sin places between the Idea of the Good deliberation tries to specify and the actuality of choice introduces a break and a suffering into eudaimonism which the classical, Aristotelian form cannot contain. Classically, the transition from reflection to action is totally smooth, the naturally self-accomplishing immanence of desire, like the flourishing of the lilies and birds in Kierkegaard’s discourse, or the waxing and waning of the moon. Climacus expresses this “existence-contradiction” (CUP1, 380 / SKS 7, 347) radicalizing Greek passions and virtue in terms of a similar radicalizing of the worldly telos borrowed from eudaimonism, the absolute telos of eternal happiness (CUP1, 386 / SKS 7, 351). And though Climacus insists that any thought operating with the same categories as paganism cannot be Christianity (CUP1, 368 / SKS 7,336), the equation for his own ethics could easily be ‘paganism + the leap.’ The absolute telos like Aristotle’s chief good is a guiding reason that “cannot be included” among the particular, secondary goods one chooses (CUP1, 393 / SKS 7, 358). It must “absolutely transform” (CUP1, 393 / SKS 7, 358) existence as a whole, which it can do only by remaining outside of it and allowing one’s own existence to tranform itself “into a testimony to it” (CUP1, 394 / SKS 7, 359). It does this as the one thing which is willed absolutely “for its own sake” (CUP1, 394 / SKS 7, 359), namely, existence itself, which paradoxically resists assimilation into a foregone, concluding Idea. Aristotle’s pagan error, for Climacus, was that he relativized this absolute telos aesthetically by rendering the accomplished human life equivalent to it, reducing it to a certain ordering of what was already ready to be disposed.22 Rather than demanding the absolute venture of this life, happiness became the actualizing of a prior possibility – what one already was, and possessed – in which it was latent (CUP1, 404-5 / SKS 7, 368-369). Climacus erects his first defense against the worldliness of Aristotelian moral wisdom by attempting a redefinition of “the path of virtue.” He distinguishes its path from the aestheticizing “path of pleasure”

22

towards what is real. For Climacus, we begin with identity, our own abstract perspective, but this identity is constantly annulled by the existence in which ethics forces it to begin. “[T]he principle of identity is only the boundary; it is like the blue mountains, like the line the artist calls the base line – the drawing is the main thing.” Justice, then, in the Republic, is a matter of giving everyone their due, in the popular sense, and in the philosopher’s sense, setting the elements of the city and the soul to their own proper work. Cf. Aristotle EN, 1131b17, 1132a2. Justice is defined similary in terms of distribution, both in the arithmetic and geometrically proportionate sense (of redistribution and distribution) of the mean.

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(CUP1, 403 / SKS 7, 367) that “sets forth a telos in time,” reducing the teaching about virtue into “a doctrine of sagacity” (CUP1, 404 / SKS 7, 368). He thinks eudaimonism against itself, rescuing the eudaimonist’s concept of virtue from the “eudaimonistic thinking” in which virtue falls flat. All worldly wisdom, he claims, can be summed up by the Delphic inscription which Aristotle defends philosophically in his ethics: ne quid nimis [nothing too much] (CUP1, 404 / SKS 7, 368). The doctrine of the mean, defining virtue against excesses to be avoided, is the antithesis of Christianity (see CUP1, 524 / SKS 7, 477). “It would be almost the wittiest objection, tinged with humor and devoid of any attack on the historical and eternal truth of Christianity, that would simply excuse itself from relation to it with these words: ‘it is much too much, Your Reverence, that the god allows himself to be crucified’” (CUP1, 404 / SKS 7, 368). The rescue of virtue in the classical sense (a state of character) accomplishes what the student of Aristotle could not. This student “trusts in the asseverations of all the philosophers” which prompt “him to want to be jolly well included, to want to make an intellectual transaction, a profitable stock-exchange speculation, instead of a daring venture[.]” The virtue ethicist “prompts him to make a simulated movement, a simulated pass at the absolute, although he remains completely within the relative, a simulated transition such as that from eudaimonism to the ethical within eudaimonism” (CUP1, 423, cf. 602 / SKS 7, 385, cf. 547) (my emphasis). The motion Climacus describes from eudaimonism to the ethical within it authenticates this absolute that eudaimonism simulates. How then can this transition actually be accomplished? If worldly knowledge establishes the limits which every human being ought to abide (CUP1, 468 / SKS 7, 379) it only aids religious understanding in locating these limits which it must happily leap past. And so the last time Climacus invokes this release of the ethical within eudaimonism, it is eudaimonism’s “sagacity,” its ne quid nimis, where he locates the obstacle. 23 Climacus turns the ‘means as ends’ theory of Aristotle’s inside out, so that the means, now, though they are still the ends, while before moderate, are never enough. The end is always a transcendence one suffers and fails to achieve, rather than an immanence in the enlightened activity natural to rational man. The ‘end’ of eternal hap23

See CUP1, 602 / SKS 7, 546. “Just as some have deceitfully wanted to form a transition from eudaemonism to the ethical through sagacity, so it is also a deceitful device to want to identify becoming a Christian as closely as possible with becoming a human being and to want to make someone believe that one becomes that decisively in childhood.”

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piness is immanent in the ‘means’ of a human life as a self-defeating transcendence. What the eudaemonist never acquires is infinite abstraction. But this is “the first step of the ethical” (CUP1, 426n / SKS 7, 388) – which understood eudaemonistically “is lunacy.” Climacus, then, were he less ambivalent about his pagan inheritance (labouring less under what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence), might just as easily describe his own ethics as a lunatic development of eudaemonism. Having uncovered the first step to the ethical within eudaemonism, a step that was no step, but rather the preliminary leap of a Judge’s madness, he posits the second leap of faith’s higher madness, a move back through choice to the second lunacy of action and responsibility. Teleology, albeit paradoxically, is essential to Climacus’ account. He has set himself the task of describing an ethical framework that can function with no end in sight, no overarching logos of its own, no archù or origin accounting for its telos. The representations and concepts in which the religious speaker trades operate “with the lack of an end.” Their end is always a failed end, “the absence of a result” (CUP1, 442 / SKS 7, 402). But the lack of an end, again, put another way, amounts to the phronetic telos always under revision and concretized in the life of action, the perpetual idealizing of action which Climacus insists on. The danger and difficulty for the phronimos, or here, ethical-religious subjectivity, is that only a paradoxical idea refuses to betray the contours of actuality. Authenticating the classical notions of moral wisdom, happiness, and the virtue underlying them required the introduction of companion Christian notions, the twin paradoxes of hereditary sin and the god’s parousia. “The religious speaker who does not know how the task appears in everyday life and in the living room could just as well keep quiet,” although, describing everyday life, one will “become hard pressed by the inadequacy of language” which “compared with existing in actuality” is “very abstract” (CUP1, 465 / SKS 7, 423). Frustrated by the paradoxes of religious understanding, the poetic speaker, even the Sunday preacher, communicates this “one and only concrete understanding” metaphorically, at best. It is, after all, “the most difficult understanding” (CUP1, 470 / SKS 7, 427). Like the phronùsis which aims at eudaimonia the thought of eternal happiness is a form of comprehension in which the difficulty of the simple is maintained not as an objectivity or a thought-problem, as “the mathematician describes a circle” (CUP1, 429 / SKS 7, 390), that of a what, but the how of action and choice. Any what will suffice, as the idea which joins “its view with the particular moment on the

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particular day, with this and that particular state of mind, with this and that particular circumstance” (CUP1, 495, cf. 611 / SKS 7, 449, cf. 554).24 In classical Greek fashion Climacus’ example comes from the medical art: the “usefulness” of his “medicine” “depend[s] simply and solely on the way it is used, so that the manner of use is actually the medicine” (CUP1, 188 / SKS 7, 173). But returning to a more primordial stratum of Greek culture, he joins the image of medicinal healing with that of ecstatic katharsis.

The Telos of Eternal Happiness: Tragedy, Madness and Religious Encounter The Greek assumption that “the God-relationship was the harbinger of madness” (CUP1, 484 / SKS 7, 439) is more to Climacus’ taste than the graduated ascent of the philosopher’s intellect. To see the god was death to the Jews, and madness to the Greeks (CUP1, 484 / SKS 7, 439) – a tragic fact for those who sought him out in cult, or unintentionally solicited him through tragic crime. The logic might be reversed. To see death, to go mad and leave the human behind, meant to see the god.25 Long before the Greeks built the stages for their tragedies, crime was ritualized in these outlands of the human, playing out the tragic ambivalences of passion (of sexuality and violence) – that, possessed by these passions, we are both ourselves and not ourselves, both responsible and not for what we do. 26 The same dialectic returns 24

25

26

See Aristotle EN, ii.9. Aristotle also defines phronetic undertstanding in terms of both difficulty and particularity. And the reasons for choosing likewise breakdown into “what, at what time, in what way, for what purpose and towards whom.” See John Caputo “The Experience of God and the Axiology of the Impossible” in The Experience of God, a Post/Modern Response, ed. by Hart and Wall, p. 37. “Here, at this limit point, in extremis, when we are or when someone we love is struck by a potentially fatal disease, a qualitative shift takes place in our experience and we enter another domain where things slip out of our control. Speaking in strictly phenomenological terms, the things that are not under our control, where we have run up against the limits of our own powers, are the raw materials of religion, the stuff of which it is made, the occasion upon which the name of God makes its entry.” I wonder, though, if treating God as an epistemological limit, a noumenon, is not still a bit too Kantian for Kierkegaard, for whom God is more than a metaphysical prescription about the limits of knowledge, for whom the reality of God is experienced. Walter Burkert Homo Necans, pp. 77-78, 72. “In the pictures showing the god [re: Dionysus, Artemis, Hera] and his sacrificial animal side by side in almost inner communion, we recognize the heartfelt ambivalence of sacrifice which made it pos-

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in Climacus’ ethics, complete with a mad god of tragic circumstance. Holy madness was a mark of ethical earnestness in the throes of its highest enthusiasm (CUP1, 137 / SKS 7, 128). In the Postscript, the “absolute difference” (CUP1, 492 / SKS 7, 446) of the god of Fragments takes on lived reality in the believer’s humility and worship before him. Philosophy’s job was to discover this difference. “Dialectic in its truth” leads the way past one knowledge to another, “where in unknowing the difference between knowledge and non-knowledge collapses in absolute worship, there where the objective uncertainty resists in order to force out the passionate certitude of faith, there where in absolute subjection the conflict about right and wrong collapses in absolute worship” (CUP1, 490-491 / SKS 7, 445-446). The philosophical contradiction between reason and unreason dissolves before the god, along with the conventional categories of morality, overwhelmed by a larger force which for the moment transforms the strength of the collision, redirecting its force in the direction of a different activity, that of a worshipful, religious subjectivity. The (objective) contradictions of reason are passionately redoubled in a “tragic assimilation” “into the religious person’s consciousness,” (CUP1, 483 / SKS 7, 438) who themself, before a paradoxical god, becomes the contradiction.27 The task of philosophy concludes in a ‘repetition’ of the tragedy it originally suppressed. While Kierkegaard’s retrieval of tragedy no doubt borrows creatively from Aristotle’s interpretation, the Poetics also provide the target at which his religious destruktion28 of aesthetics takes aim. “Aristotle remarks in the Poetics,” writes Climacus, “that poetry is superior to history, because history presents only what has occurred, poetry what could and ought to have occurred, i. e., poetry has possibility at its disposal.” 29 The same idea recurs with thinly veiled reference to Aristotle in the section in Stages on Life’s Way entitled The Tragic Needs History More than the Comic Does; the Disappearance of this Difference in the “Imaginary Construction.”30 Here Taciturnus retrieves

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sible for the Greeks to create tragedy.” “Mutually deteriminant and interwoven, both [sexuality and death] are acted out in the sacrificial ritual, in the tension between renunciation and fulfilment, destruction and reparation.” See chapter 7, above. The same movement was also described by Frater Taciturnus. Climacus restates the same schematic at CUP1, 520-522 / SKS 7, 472-473. I use the term in the hermeneutical sense given it by Heidegger. See Being and Time, sec. 75. CUP1, 318 / SKS 7, 290. SL, 437-446 / SKS 6, 404-413.

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the aesthetically absorbed ideality of Aristotle’s theatre that Climacus criticized (echoing Haufniensis), applying it as an instrument of tragedy’s religious reflection. The philosophical nature of tragedy discerned by Aristotle needs to be critically reflected upon, making it a subjective rather than an objective issue, as for Quidam it became a matter of choice and the Idea. But it is not until the Postscript that Kierkegaard explains this outright. Climacus discusses the meaning of comedy and tragedy for the issue in Fragments in a long note to the section by that name, using Aristotle’s Poetics as a foil and criticizing his aesthetisizing of the Idea (CUP1, 514 / SKS 7, 466n.). He adds a dose of reflection to Aristotle’s conception of comedy, magnifying the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical until ‘the Idea’ emerges explicitly, and with it the difference is posited between the tragic-aesthetic, its loss in the universal ideality of ethics, and its return in the concrete ideality of religion. According to Climacus, what applies to the comic equally suits the tragic: “The tragic and the comic are the same inasmuch as both are contradiction, but the tragic is suffering contradiction, and the comic is painless contradiction.”31 The Aristotelian definition (Poetics, V): ÒÍ Á¿Ï ÁÃÉÍÇÍË ÃÑÒÇË gÊ¿ÏÒÅÊ¿ ÒÇ È¿Ç ¿ÇÑÕÍпË×ÂÓËÍË;È¿Ç=ÍÓÔÆ¿ÏÒÇÈÍË [The ludicrous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others] is not of such a nature that it does not allow whole families of the comic to be secure in their ludicrousness, and it does indeed become doubtful to what extent the definition, even in relation to the comic it embraces, does not bring us into collision with the ethical. His example: that one laughs at an ugly and distorted face if, please note, this does not cause pain to the one who has the face, is neither entirely correct nor so aptly chosen that with one stroke, as it were, it explains the secret of the comic. The example lacks reflection, because, even if the distorted face does not cause pain, it is indeed painful to be so fated as to prompt laughter merely by showing one’s face. 32

This note demanding that the spectator reflect ethically on the idea behind one or another tragic-comic fate, the pseudonymous authorships last word on tragedy and comedy, goes on to orient the complementary arts with respect to time and telos. The temporal nature of tragic suffering and the anodyne of comedy “consist in the relation of the contradiction to the idea” (CUP1, 515516 / SKS 7, 466-468). The comic contradiction is painless because 31

32

See CA, 19 / SKS 4, 326. Vigilius Haufniensis, the pseudonym to treat “religious ideality” most explicitly, explains that rather than the Greek actualizing of the idea, it is the idealizing of actuality, a project which is always incomplete, and deliberately engaged with human life. CUP1, 514n / SKS 7, 466.

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comedy sneaks out of its contradiction through a back door, while the tragic interpretation sees the same contradiction and “despairs over the way out” (CUP1, 516 / SKS 7, 467). Where comedy retreats philosophically into recollection, a tragic logos pushes onward into the unknown. Viewing the idea ahead, is pathos; behind is the comic, although the “subjectively existing thinker” is always as “bi-frontal as the existence situation itself” (CUP1, 89 / SKS 7, 88). Even in the face of his tragic striving a relation to the contingency of the past – to one’s history, the history of one’s choices – is required. “A pathos that excludes the comic is therefore a misunderstanding, is not pathos at all” (CUP1, 89 / SKS 7, 88). “From a pathos-filled perspective, one second has infinite value (CUP1, 92 / SKS 7, 90),” since, in this moment, I can say Du [the familiar ‘You’] to God (CUP1, 90 / SKS 7, 88); while “from a comic perspective, ten thousand years are but a prank, like a yesterday, and yet the time the existing individual is in does consist of such parts” (CUP1, 92 / SKS 7, 90). In the comic, time evaporates insignificantly into a self-negating history, one already accomplished, a necessary Hegelian future built recollectively-Platonically into the past. An ethics grounded in philosophies of immanence, Climacus parries, cannot teach us how to live, because its teachers are always “dead and gone,” even in relation to themselves (CUP1, 147 / SKS 7, 136) – or, but this amounts to the same thing, they never were. The education that tempers the comic vacuum of an ethics of pure thinking with the weight of the future, of choice and responsibility, bids the airtight thinking of philosophers of immanence farewell, breathing now the unfamiliar atmosphere where the I-Thou takes place. The “relationship with God” renounces these vain attempts at human understanding “in order always to be able in divine madness to give thanks” (CUP1, 178 / SKS 7, 164). But Climacus is no irrationalist or mystic. While this divine madness may drive philosophers to the end of their philosophical wits, particularly German philosophers, Climacus ought to be “understandable to every Greek and to every rational human being,” every “existing spirit” (CUP1, 191 / SKS 7, 176). In this madness the understanding reconciles itself religiously to an experience of the irrational that from the Christian perspective, employing its logos, makes sublime sense of human life on a strictly case by case basis. Climacus identifies the healing effect of grace and mercy, analogized by ‘A’ with the effect of ancient tragedy, with a renewed, religious version on the verge of taking shape in the wake of a modernity dominated by an unwittingly comic and despairing self-interpreta-

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tion. The concept of sin that Socrates lacked (though “his merit was precisely to emphasize that the knower was existing,” the existing denied by the “back door” of Platonic “recollection” [CUP1, 208 / SKS 7, 192]) guarantees that flight backward is impossible (CUP1, 583, 208 / SKS 7, 531, 192). Historical damage must be repaired within the arc of that same history. Fantasied solutions that fall behind or beside the conflict leave the conflict itself unaffected. This is as true for personal psychological collision as it is for the world-historical kind, and Climacus would include them both in the category of the historical. The consequence of war, for instance, must be dealt with at both levels. Post-traumatic stress and guilt in the soldier, who, taking human life, undoes the moral framework of the society in which he was raised, like the physical and economic devastastion of a bombed out country, continues to determine the personality of that soldier, or that place, until the trauma is dealt with, no matter what philosophy they adopt. 33 We “ought to interpret the contradiction as tragic” because this “is precisely the way to its healing” (CUP1, 520 / SKS 7, 472). We must recognize that we are creatures of other creatures’ damage. Even though there is no “way out” from the tragic, “no remedy for repentance that disregards repentance,” or, like Quidam, is unable to complete it (CUP1, 524 / SKS 7, 473). We choose it, or at least ought to, not accidentally like Oedipus, but deliberately, trained as much in the ascetic, phronetic art of philosophy as we are in the ecstatic catharses of tragic poetry and religion. Climacus concludes ancient tragedy’s historical repetition (to borrow a phrase from Constantius, its “recollection forward”) with the invocation of its sinister numen in the figures of the Erinyes, an aesthetic expression for the “total guilt” of the religious. “Therefore the Furies were visible, but their visibility made the inwardness less terrible and because of their visibility a boundary was established for them: the Furies did not dare to enter the temple.” – “But the visibility of the Furies symbolically expresses the commensurability between the outer and the inner, whereby the guilt-consciousness is finitized, and satisfaction consists in the suffering of punishment in time, and 33

The same idea could be justified psychoanalytically, on both a personal and cultural level. Entire worlds are constructed around repression, entire histories, and those worlds, however diminished and painful, remain undisturbed unless the content of the repression becomes conscious. For a psychoanalytically historical account of modern culture, which Freud himself invites in the closing remarks of Civilization and its Discontents, see Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, as well as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.

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the reconciliation consists in death, and everything ends in the sad exaltation that is death’s mitigation, that it is all over now and there was no eternal guilt” (CUP1, 542 / SKS 7, 493). The Furies are a trope for the terror of the coming of a god which no literature expressed better than tragedy. It was said that Aeschylus’ representations of them were so horrifying that they incited pregnant women to miscarry. 34 But “[i]f the terror in the old days was that one could be offended, the terror these days is that there is no terror” (CUP1, 215 / SKS 7, 196). We have a choice between terrors, the banal or the religious. These days, the terror of the religious can function, ironically, as a balm. The liberating force of an ancient terror returns with the tragic advent of a god, though one freed by modern conceptions from the aesthetic relativizing of myth and theatre; a god who comes in the form of a terrifying, impossible Idea which one not only thinks but lives and practices; an Idea which grasps the imaginations and passions of the body as well as the intellect, liberating our age from the unholy madness of a calculating abstraction, the insane banality and comedy of a melancholy science. 35 The Christian thinker like his Greek ancestor, with a look forward now, rather than back, relates himself to the Idea. So long as he lived, the Greek philosopher practiced its accomplishment, not intellectually, since the Greeks had no scholarly journals or professional aspirations, but in the whole human being, the life of the body, its appetites, desires and imaginations, and, of course, its reason. Like the student of Greek virtue, 36 Kierkegaard’s religiously subjective thinker prac34 35

36

See Ernest Rhys’ introduction to The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus. Natural science was a source of comic despair for Kierkegaard. See Pap. VII 1 A 189 / SKS NB:76A. Cf. JP 3:2811. “Of all the sciences, natural science is the most vapid, and it has amused me to consider how year after year something that once caused astonishment becomes trivial … What excitement was aroused by the use of the stethoscope! […] Then someone else will invent an instrument for listening to the beating of the brain. It will arouse enormous excitement until, in fifty years’ time, every barber can do it. Then, at the barbershop, after you have had a haircut and a shave and have been stethoscoped (because by then this will be quite ordinary), the barber will ask, Perhaps you would also like me to listen to your brain beating?” Cf. Pap. X 4 A 32 / SKS NB:23-32 and Pap. VII 1 A 182 / SKS NB:70. Cf. JP 1:1086 and 3:2807. “[N]ew cultural consciousness” will “make natural science its religion,” and with this apotheosis of science comes the “dreadful” explaination of human life in terms of “natural necessity.” Kierkegaard would exclude Plato from this group. Socrates, of course, is the prototypical existential thinker, as well as Aristotle, in his practical philosophy. Kierkegaard tends to ignore Aristotle’s teleology, the metaphysics in which he inscribes man’s destiny. Even kinùsis, the transition from possibility to actuality which Kier-

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tices this Idea existentially as an end in itself governing all others, since it is “in the very moment of passion that [one] gains the momentum to exist.” To deliberate and choose means revitalizing and revising the role of the passions in human life and the habits of intelligence in which they’re formed. This passion for this Idea protects the individual against “the power and bondage of habit,” which through sheer frequency and inertia chisels away at the transition from thinking to acting, making it “faster and faster” “at his expense” (CUP1, 340 / SKS 7, 312). But, departing from Greece, Climacus warns that so long as one exists the Idea lies somewhere ahead, instead of comically behind in a foregone eternity – so long as existence matters, the choices, victories and defeats which one can never reclaim in their purity. The experience of sin compels our look forward, subjecting us to the exigencies of time, making us it’s creature. Now matter how longingly I recall time past, sin forces me “to exist, situated at the edge of existence, by virtue of the absurd” in a god-relation which begins internally, where the “thought-passion” finally “understands what it means to break in this way with the understanding and thinking and immanence,” an immanent transcendence, as opposed to the GrecoGerman “foothold of immanence, the eternity behind” (CUP1, 569 / SKS 7, 517). There is a “solitary wellspring,” writes Climacus, “in every human heart, that wellspring in which the god resides, that wellspring in the profound silence when all is quiet” (CUP1, 183 / SKS 7, 169). The ethical in eudaimonism breaks out from this divine exuberance, where the “enthusiastic ethical individuality uses the understanding to discover what is most sagacious in order not to do it” (CUP1, 568 / SKS 7, 516). This god-relation, though anathema to habit in any traditional sense, must still be habituated, take root in the soul. Keirkegaard’s Christianity inserts these three little steps of sin, faith, and grace in the classical account of the action from which habits are formed. The consciousness of sin – that all of god’s creation, especially my own and the god who wells from within, is a contradiction – intensified dialectically through repentance and expelled once more through the resolution of faith, habituates us to “the greatest possible risk” (CUP1, 572-573 / SKS 7, 519-520). This uncanny intelligence governs a hexis through which the mood and reality in which a god appears,

kegaard irreverently violates in his crucial appropriation of it now applies to human freedom. CA, 82 / SKS 4, 385.

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the danger of the encounter, become more and unfamiliar rather than better rehearsed. The story, though, despite the revisions, is still the classical one of being human, minus the being. We might say, instead, becoming human, which Climacus insures is an infinite task. “It is really the godrelationship that makes a human being a human being” (CUP1, 244 / SKS 7, 202). 37 Despite the requisite inwardness, a kind of aesthetics paradoxically claims the god-relationship in its highest form, where a god, once again, comes upon man from the outside.38 This religiousness demands a quasi-theatrical return to illusion, not backward to poetry’s “illusion before the understanding,” but rather forward to “the happy illusion” of religion, between which “worldly wisdom” and “sagacity” perform their vaudeville (CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414). From a lack of imagination, a paucity of illusion, Aristotelian vaudeville succumbs to the illusion of “probability” and “the reliability of a finite teleology,” replacing the deliberate deceptions of poetry with the more sober prevarications of philosophy, an initiation into a deception which the teacher as well as the student embraces as authentic. The religious illusion, on the other hand, embraces the reality that all of man’s truths construct themselves in this false dichotomy between fact and fiction, which the religious exposes, placing man in the gap where construction takes place (the construction of differences, for instance, between real and constructed) not by his hands, but by the hands of a divine Other/author. Both illusions, that of poetry and the ne quid nimis of Aristotle’s moral psychology, dissolve “as soon as the infinite stirs” (CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414). Although Climacus criticizes eudaimonism for its calculating sagacity, the deeper claim is that its wisdom, limited aesthetically to happiness and pleasure, is not enough. 39 The wisdom in happiness and pleasure from a more developed religious perspective amounts to suf37

38

39

See CUP1, 566 / SKS 7, 515. This is the paradoxical god. “The paradox is connected essentially with being a human being, and qualitatively with each human being in particular, whether he has much or little understanding.” See CUP1, 561n / SKS 7, 510. In Religiousness B, “the upbuilding is something outside the individual; the individual does not find the upbuilding by finding the relationship with God within himself but relates himself to something outside himself in order to find the upbuilding. The paradox is that this apparently esthetic relationship, that individual relates himself to something outside himself, nevertheless is the absolute relationship with God.” Kierkegaard rightly identifies eudaimonism with the pursuit of happiness and pleasure, a view he recognizes in Chryssipus as a developmentally late example of an older model. Pap. IV A 246 (n. d. 1843) (no SKS). Cf. JP 5:5636.

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fering and stupidity, as the pain and foolishness of religious illusion40 relates to the eternal wisdom and happiness that “comes afterward” (CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414). In ancient eudaimonism all choice is worked out deliberately, dialectically. On Climacus’ re-reading dialectic remains a necessary step, but only as negative proof of Christianity’s difficulty (CUP1, 430 / SKS 7, 391). The deliberations of dialectic begin and end in a mystery that ecstatically compels its downfall. To commit oneself earnestly to the ethics of Salighed is to be “touched by god” – “in the throes of madness,”41 or salig. And so “Let us go to the theatre to be deceived, let the actor and spectator cooperate beautifully to fascinate and to be fascinated in illusion: it is magnificent” (CUP1, 417 / SKS 7, 379), not because theatre brings us any closer to an absolute, but rather because the illusions of theatre and tragic theatre in particular prepare us for the radicalized illusion of the religious. Its art of fiction exposes the stupidity behind sagacity’s representation of reality as solid ground, a representation which, ironically, the poet’s distinction between reality and play negatively confirms.42

40

41 42

The eternal happiness (Salighed) at which Climacus’ ethics aims bears the anglosaxon root of our “silly” (salig). Ibrahim Khan Salighed as Happiness?, p. 85. For ‘salig’ as ‘divinely mad,’ See Ibrahim Khan Salighed as Happiness?, pp. 86 f. See CUP1, 457 / SKS 7, 414. Climacus distinguishes the illusion of poetry, of immediacy (which poetry confirms, in which its poetry-reality distinction dwells), the illusion of obtusity/sagacity, all from the happy illusion of the religious.

Chapter 12 Kierkegaard and the Tragedy of Authorship It would be unfair to conclude a study of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous debt to tragedy without some attempt to place this debt structurally within the authorship as a whole. It goes almost without saying that the religious ideal presented in the signed works – some universally edifying, others specifically Christian – cannot be a tragic one.1 The eternities of Religiousness A or B (the first, pagan-philosophical, the second, Christian) dissolve the tragic collision between time and eternity into the second term in which all wounds are healed: Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair (WL, 44 / SKS 9, 36). In this victory of eternity over time in Works of Love we hear an echo of the odes to eternity in which Greek tragedies tend to conclude. Kierkegaard as author, however – like the figures suffering this education in eternity on the tragic stage – remains irrevocably temporal, a point of which he was all too conscious. Despite the solace of the Christian ideal which the authorship allegedly strives to present, mortal language can express the eternal logos of the religious only through a kind of failure. Until kingdom come our mortal perspectives, this applies to authors most of all, must remain tragic. An analysis of Kierkegaard’s writings on his authorship – On My Work as an Author, The Point of View on My Work as Author, and Armed Neutrality 2 – shows that the struc1

2

See PV, 115 / SV1 XIII, 601. Not yet Christian, and therefore, also essentially poetic and pagan, “the point of departure of the upbuilding discourses is in the upbuilding, that is, in the universally human.” In their historical introduction to The Point of View, the Hongs explain the genesis of these works: Kierkegaard originally wrote “The Point of View” in 1848 to be published simultaneously with the second 1849 edition of Either/Or, wanting to maintain the counterbalance of signed and pseudonymous works in his authorship. Pap. X 1 A 147. Cf. JP 6:6361. But the possible publication of this work and the issues it raised concerning direct and indirect communication agonized him. Pap. X 1 A 501. He decided to postpone its publication, but not so decisively that he didn’t consider

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ture of the authorship itself in Kierkegaard’s case is classically tragic, not as a means of representing images or ideas, but as a ritualized act of literature in which human language and concepts fail and, through the sacrifice of the author cum protagonist, a God appears.

Kierkegaard as Self-Described Religious Author “The authorship, regarded as a totality, is religious from first to last” – so begins On My Work as an Author, the only autobiographical work Kierkegaard published under his own name. 3 His pseudonymous poets and philosophers, On My Work reports, have all along been instruments of a divine education always already absorbed in a movement from the pagan to “the essentially Christian” (OW, 5 / SV1 XIII,

3

over the course of the following year publishing the piece under two different pseudonyms, Johannes de Silentio and A-O. “The Point of View” was of a piece with the other signed works on the authorship accumulating over the course of the same year, including “Armed Neutrality,” but also “A Note” (“The Accounting”), and “Three Notes.” In 1849 Kierkegaard considered publishing an eponymous “On My Work as an Author,” consisting of “Point of View,” “Three Notes,” “A Note” (“The Accounting”) and “The Whole in One Word,” along with another volume in which “Armed Neutrality” would appear as an appendix to “The Sickness Unto Death.” Pap. X 5 B 143. It was not until two years later, however, that Kierkegaard published On My Work as an Author, a very truncated version of “Point of View,” describe the Hongs, which included “The Accounting” as well as part of the third of the “Three Notes” as a preface. The Point of View for my Work as an Author along with an appendix of the remaining “Two Notes” and a “Postscript” to these “Notes” was published four years after Kierkegaard’s death, by his brother, Peter Christian. It wasn’t until the first edition of Kierkegaard’s Efterladte Papirer that Armed Neutrality saw publication, although, as the subtitle suggests, Kierkegaard had already reworked it and included it in On My Work as an Author as “My Position as a Religious Author in ‘Christendom’ and My Strategy.” The “First and Final Explanation” of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript might also be included. In addition, the Poscript’s Appendix, “A View of a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature,” also belongs to that group of Kierkegaard’s writings on Kierkegaard’s writings, although here we are dealing with the pseudonymous work of Johannes Climacus. A pseudonym, of course, cannot unlock the secret of pseudonymity. But the “Explanation” Kierkegaard provides in the Postscript only problematizes The Point of View’s account of the essentially religious nature and construction of the authorship as a whole. See Joakim Garff “The Eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View with Respect to Kierkegaard’s Activity as an Author” in Kierkegaardiana 15, p. 32. The “third party” position of “reader” Kierkegaard assigns himself in the Postscript undermines the authorial privilege which in The Point of View authorizes his claims about the true, religious nature of the authorship as a whole.

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494). The true author has enlisted them in a common aim: “to make aware of the religious” (OW, 12 / SV1 XIII, 501). The posthumous The Point of View for My Work as an Author begins with as unabashed a declaration: “The content, then, of this little book is: what I in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author” (PV, 23 / SV1 XIII, 517). Like On My Work, it also insists on the essentially religious nature of the authorship as a whole, subjecting the thoughts and passions of the pseudonyms, pagan and Christian alike, to a calculated ordering after the fact. This ordering explains everything in terms of the strategies of seduction, at first, and, more fundamentally, communication. From Either/Or forward Kierkegaard has levied the instrument of poetic appeal on the unwitting reader, soliciting them sensuously on behalf of a religious Idea, to which the aesthete, once caught up in the momentum of the authorship’s concept, must eventually yield. The movement of the writings was allegedly completed in advance, like the man, Climacus jokes, who tumbled 24 years old from his mother’s womb (PF, 96 / SKS 4, 294). Kierkegaard presents himself as such a man – cut off from life by a titanic reflection whose “task” was religion (PF, 97 / SKS 4, 295). But for a philosopher so determined to head off all human conclusions at the Hegelian pass, the story, surely, cannot end here. No surprise, then, The Point of View immediately problematizes its “direct communication” and “report to history” in which the authorship receives its concluding interpretation. The essence of the Christian authorship, Kierkegaard tells us, is “self-denial” – more strict an effacing than the ironic strategy of pseudonymity. We can never have a complete explanation of his work as an author because concluding the true nature of the authorship would make his God-relationship public (PV, 25 / SV1 XIII, ) – a structural impossibility. Writing for Kierkegaard IS the God-relationship and so the truth about his authorship must remain irremediably concealed. Like the secret of Abraham’s faith and his justification for killing Isaac, it is in principle unable to be disclosed.

The Aesthetic and Religious Duplexity of the Authorship As in the pseudonymous works, theatre, in The Point of View, remains a dominant metaphor for the aesthetic dissipations of the age. It stands in for various types of reflection through which the feeble subjects of the age of enlightenment bow out of the exigencies of ac-

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tion and choice. Hegel and his enthusiasts, such as Martensen, are no less theatrical – comic, in fact – than the coterie surrounding Heiberg and the Danish theatre (no less influenced by the German master):4 The medium for being a Christian has been shifted from existence and the ethical to the intellectual, the metaphysical, the imaginational; a more or less theatrical relationship has been introduced between thinking Christianity and being a Christian – and in this way has abolished being a Christian. (AN, 130 / SV1 X5 B107, 289 f.)

Kierkegaard’s writings on his writings struggle both to remove this ambiguity between the dramatic-poetic and the religious – to purge actuality of these aesthetic-philosophical abstractions – and, simultaneously, to deepen it. The Point of View insists on the essential “duplexity” (Dupliciteten or Tvetydigheden) of his authorship as both aesthetic and religious (PV, 29 / SV1 XIII, 521). The duplexity in the most literal sense was never an either/or between aesthetics and ethics. It was the both/and of poetry and religion. Kierkegaard was careful to both open and close the authorship not only with doubled names, “false” and “true,” but more importantly the doubles of “pagan” and “religious.” In 1843, the pseudonymous literary-moral essays of Either/Or landed on the shelves at Reitzel’s. Its surreptitious companions, Kierkegaard’s Two Edifying Discourses, followed after another three months. Five years later Fædrelandet serialized Kierkegaard’s little essay on theatre, “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” signed ‘Inter et Inter,’ three months after the publication of Christian Discourses (PV, 30 / SV1 XIII, 522). There is no chronological progression from the concealment of aesthetic and philosophic pseudonymity to the religious disclosures and satisfactions of a second authorship. There is only one authorship whose true nature will not be disclosed through signatures or dates. 5 4

5

Heiberg was a celebrated playwright, director of Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, and husband to the eminent actress, Johanne Luise Heiberg, as well as a philosopher and poet. Already a central cultural figure in the Copenhagen of Kierkegaard’s young adulthood, Heiberg’s philosophical journal, Perseus, was “the express organ for Danish Hegelianism.” Jon Stewart Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 91. For more on Heiberg’s aesthetic appropriation of Hegelian philosophy as theoretical justification for the practice of ‘speculative drama,’ see George Pattison Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious – From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, pp. 16-26. Works such as Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity show us that a pseudonym could signify the excessively accomplished Christianity of the author’s perspective as easily as it could the pagan deficiencies of works born of seducers, optimistic philosopher-types, and other variations on the aesthete. Although, if Anti-

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While the insistence on duplexity means to substantiate the claim that this religious author did not develop into a ‘religious author’ from an esthetic one – that though he is “hardly anything but a poet” (OW, 18 / SV1 XIII, 507) the religious upbringing of the reader, himself foremost, has held permanent sway over these flights of passion and imagination – inadvertently, it winds up doing double service. The original doubledness of the author invites a question: is it really possible for Kierkegaard to corral the multiple voices of his authorship under the religious designs of the self-same author of the The Point of View? Always already double, originating in a liminal space between poetics and religion, from what reserve can Kierkegaard summon identity enough to authorize a univocally religious interpretation of the authorship – to own some works and disown others? Even when Kierkegaard does sign works such as Works of Love, Christian Discourses, and the Eighteen Edifying Discourses (1843-1844) as well as the Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), which are expressly religious and often Christian, he authorizes those ‘discourses’ and ‘reflections’ in a highly qualified way. Christian composition accommodates an exceptional kind of author: one without authority (and in that sense, they tend toward the Socratic). On My Work qualifies the entire authorship as “without authority” and Kierkegaard “rather as a reader of the books, not as the author” (OW, 12 / SV1 XIII, 501).6 Like those writings in which he plays the role of editor the signed works are neither pseudonymous, since his name appears, nor veronymous in the strong sense, since, as an individual he cannot be held accountable for what has been written. In order to assign authority in the strong sense – the kind of legal authority I have to responsibly commit a crime, enter into a contract, etc. – his reading public must be able to identify the author – ‘Kierkegaard’ – that the signature announces. The identity of the author is not a matter of police line-ups – recalling a face – putting a face to a name (fairly easy, in Kierkegaard’s case, given his infamously eccentric pro-

6

Climacus represented too accomplished a Christianity for Kierkegaard to claim it as his own, his perspective was also too technical, conceptually, too philosophically complex, to qualify as Christian. Dialectics are paganism. The Christian, for Kierkegaard, is always the simple. In On My Work as an Author he distinguishes the religious author’s aim: “to reach, to arrive at simplicity.” PV, 7 / SV1 XIII, 495. And again, in The Point of View: “The movement is not from the simple to the interesting, but from the interesting to the simple – becoming a Christian.” PV, 94 / SV1 XIII, 579. See PV, 78 / SV1 XIII, 563. “[I]t is all done without authority,” writes Kierkegaard. “[T]eacher I am not – only a fellow pupil.” Cf. PV, 118 / SV1 XIII, 604.

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file). Authorship is a matter of consciousness. The author does not give himself away in the unambiguous language of the birthmark. The term does not pick out the physical author of a text (as demonstrated in cases of dictation). It picks out a source of ideas. More difficult, then, will be the matter of locating the single individual – ‘Kierkegaard’ – not legally or historically – attaching a certificate at birth or baptism and tracking him physically – but rather as an author in terms of thought.

The Duplexity of Author-Consciousness Kierkegaard grounds the problem of his authority as a writer in a classically tragic paradox at the center of his authorship. He both knows and does not know what he does. What I cannot understand is that I can now understand it and yet by no means dare to say that I understood it so accurately at the beginning – and yet I certainly am the one who has done it and with reflection has taken every step […] To that extent, then, what has developed earlier, that all the esthetic writing is a deception, proves to be in one sense not entirely true, since this expression concedes a little too much along the line of consciousness. Yet it is not entirely untrue, because I have been conscious […] from the beginning. (PV, 77 / SV1 XIII, 562)

The duplexity in the authorship runs deeper than distinctions between signed and unsigned or aesthetic and religious work. The duplexity resided in the author himself. An ambiguous double – poet-Christian – was there from the start, both reflected out of aesthetics, and yet, not.7 This original duplexity between the poetic and the religious was not a matter of theatrics on the part of the author, an aesthetic requirement of the age for religious writings to satisfy. The distinction between a ‘real’ and an ‘artificial’ location for the author cannot be made since the duplexity was no mere matter of appearances and stagecraft. Kier7

This unstable aesthete mirrors the ‘A’ of Either/Or’s essay on tragedy, too conscious to remain an aesthete, yet not reflected enough to leave poetry behind. Kierkegaard’s literary-religious passion placed him in the same tragic circumstance. Not yet religious, but too self-conscious to abide the life of pagan immediacy, ‘A’ was propelled toward a life-view and categories of experience in which the experience and language of tragedy was no longer possible. Yet, the pagan language of tragedy was the only tool available. Tragedy, too, had its goal beyond itself, and so – anonymous, forgetful of its name – was unaware of its true form, did not yet know itself. This is a recognition only available, historically, once the relative ambiguity of tragic guilt yields to the total ambiguity of Christian sin. For a full explanation, see chapter one, above.

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kegaard begins in two places at once. The duplexity was “assimilated in the author’s consciousness” (PV, 85 / SV1 XIII, 569). A single author – ‘Kierkegaard’ – is nowhere to be found. The work of both poets and religious authors for Kierkegaard is the presentation of an allegedly redemptive Idea (as opposed to ‘the facts’ of existence mechanically reproduced, or merely ‘probable’ reconstructions of them). It is only as possibility that an Idea – aesthetic or religious – presents itself. Both aesthetic and religious writing occupy the category of possibility for Kierkegaard, but possibility is not just one of twelve concepts on Kant’s table of Categories.8 It is something to which the individual is exposed – which he lives – an infinity disturbing the self from within. It is through this infinity of possibility that God’s transcendence first announces itself. In the time of writing the author assumes the dizzying position of a possible perspective, one not actually his own. The anxiety and thrill of navigating the thinner air of the infinite propels his writing forward into spaces that have up until that point remained not just unconceived, but inconceivable.9 The Kierkegaardian author does not know – until pressing pen to paper he departs from the pre-established densities and relative mobilities of the finite – what possibilities await his readers (of which he is, in a sense, one).10 Describe Kafka’s castle, for instance, before reading the book. It is not a matter of physical space, adjustments made to pre-established architectures. ‘The Castle’ is no representation of a physical structure. ‘The Castle’ is an aesthetic idea that no one before Kafka wrote it into being could have conceived – not even, on Kierkegaard’s account, Kafka himself. As a Christian author Kierkegaard sought a perfected version of the transparency through which aesthetic authors express the passion of infinity resonant in the ideal possibilities presented in their work. 8

9

10

Immanuel Kant The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 113. The secondary literature at times traces Kierkegaard’s interest in the categories of actuality and possibility, and their relation to necessity, to Kant or Leibniz. The evidence, though, supports a dominantly Aristotelian influence. While Kantian or Leibnizian ‘necessity’ may have thrown scant light on the issue, it is clearly a Christian modification of Greek concepts, and kinùsis in particular, that primarily motivates the authorship in its treatment of the “change” or movement from possibility to actuality. See CA, 82n / SKS 4, 386 and PF, 73 / SKS 4, 273. Haufniensis explains the metaphysics of this motion in Concept of Anxiety in terms of the “annulment” of actuality in possibility, and, through choice, the annulment of possibility in the move back to actuality. Choice, then, is a double negation. See PV, 12 / SV1 XIII, 500. Here, in On My Work as an Author, the Idea reveals itself as virginally to him in the act of writing as it does to the reader.

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In the case of religious writing the resonance is also a disillusioning and a catharsis, and so Kierkegaard was forced for maieutic reasons to disappear more completely than your average poet. He explains the process in a metaphor likening the reader to a writing tablet, previously inscribed, and the author to a catalyst through which the true meaning of these significations are clarified:11 “Likewise, there is also a difference between writing on a blank piece of paper and bringing out by means of chemicals some writing that is hidden under other writing” (PV, 54 / SV1 XIII, 541). Religious authors approach their readers through a deception in which the standpoint of the reader dissolves into that of the author, absorbed into the body of the reader’s thoughts like an undetectable liquid in their drink – and then their blood. We come to works of literature with languages of our own, through which the author must speak if he is to gain entrance to our delusions (PV, 54 / SV1 XIII, 541) and work on them from within. Authors speak through our language, not theirs, until our meanings blur and slip and their web like a hammock suddenly abandoned spins and flips, a battery of signs pointing now in an unforeseen direction. Pursuing the logic of Kierkegaard’s image of the writing tablet the author must be the chemical itself, transparent, useless apart from the bond of reader whose edification proceeds through a series of stains: aesthetic, ethical, and religious – dissolving with each application one into the next.12 Turning back the final page of a work of Kierkegaard’s the reader should wince – blinded – as if rubbing the startling chemical of him from their eyes. The poetic-religious duplexity of the authorship amounts to this tragic reversibility of the reader’s language and situation. It is only possible insofar as the author qua author does not exist. It is only possible insofar as his writing, like the colorless, odorless chemical applied to the tablet of the reader, is nothing – akin to the khora of Plato’s Timaeus, a transparent medium for some other appearance. As the fictional characters brought dramatically to life on stage thrive from the recusal of the playwright – whose face, if shown, 11

12

Freud makes similar analogies throughout his writings, from the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) to “Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925). For a discussion, see Jacques Derrida “Freud and the Scene of Writing” in Violence and Metaphysics, pp. 196-231. See PV, 7 / SV1 XIII, 496, as compared with PV, 43 / SV1 XIII, 531. This maieutic theory of authorship applies both to the indirection of the pseudonyms, soliciting and undoing the apathetic reader’s base curiosities, sensual and intellectual, from within, as well as banishing the illusion of Christianity into which Christendom had fallen, also removed “indirectly,” undone from within.

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deprives them of their own – the possible perspective Kierkegaard affords the reader remains only so long as he recedes anonymously into shadow, goes unnamed.

‘Double Anonymity’ and the Single Individual To what extent can the concept of anonymity rescue us from the double binds of ‘pseudonymous-signed’ and ‘aesthetic-religious’ to which Kierkegaard condemns his readers? Readers of Kierkegaard in english translation have since his arrival been herded by commentators through the impossibly narrow gate of these Eithers and these Ors.13 13

It was Walter Lowrie, that earliest of Kierkegaard’s champions in english, who set the terms under which pseudonymity would be regarded. He contended that both before and after the so-called first authorship concluded, the pseudonyms could be read back into Kierkegaard himself. See the Lowrie’s translation of The Concept of Dread, p. vif., as well as his translation of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. xvi. According to his critics, the harshest of which is likely the deconstructionist Roger Poole, Lowrie makes an epiphenomenon of the pseudonyms and of the indirect nature of the authorship more generally. Poole labels these readings exemplified by Lowrie, which impose a fixed, univocally religious meaning onto the essentially mobile texts of the pseudonyms, “blunt.” According to Poole’s analyses of Kierkegaard, blunt readings ignore the formal, literary elements of his texts, distracted by a sham philosophical component, merely one of their multiple effects. Poole follows Louis Mackey, whose Kierkegaard: a Kind of Poet (1971) first countered Lowrie’s indelicate hermeneutic, insisting that the literary reading of Kierkegaard was primordial, and all others derived. It is at the level of structure and style that the truth of Kierkegaard’s indirect communication lies, the “conceptual reality” that the texts of each pseudonymous voice embodies, writes Poole. See “Towards a Theory of Responsible Reading” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002, p. 407. Later, in Kierkegaard: the Indirect Communication, pp. 11-13, Poole writes that “the pseudonyms themselves are fakes, the dummies that mime and simulate a drama of inwardness which is at one unendurable and inexpressible […] They do not mean but are, and the rules of their being have to be discovered by the reader.” Deconstructive readers such as Poole reject the univocally religious interpretation of the authorship such as Kierkegaard offers in The Point of View, siding instead with the Kierkegaard of the appendix to the Postscript, where he insists on the total independence of his dramatically constructed pseudonyms. See Roger Poole The Indirect Communication, pp. 4, 24, 263. But Poole distinguishes himself from other deconstructive readers, such as Joakim Garff, in his insistence on “the reality of the self” independent of these texts. While he deems even signed texts such as Christian Discourses and The Point of View indirect, the journals, for Poole, are apparently exempt from the post-structuralist motto he otherwise can’t help but refrain: Il n’y a pas de hors texte. The famous Gilleleje entry in which Kierkegaard longs for an idea for which he might live or die (Pap. I A 75 / SKS AA:12.2-12.10 /

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Kierkegaard introduces the concept of anonymity most explicitly in condemnation of the abstraction of the press and other large-scale communications between nobodies. Instead of this anonymity, the JP 5:5100) becomes the skeleton key to the authorship as a whole, for it reveals “the fact that, for Kierkegaard, the self is a reality so intensely present, that one has a duty to know how to deal with it, direct it, understand it.” “Towards a Theory of Responsible Reading” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2002, pp. 440 f. Poole does briefly suggest that the ‘self’ of The Point of View is one of many selves between which Kierkegaard dramatizes the possibility of selfhood. He is careful to note, in fact his entire study is in a sense meant to demonstrate, that the authorship remains indirect even after 1845, despite the proliferation of religous works, several bearing Kierkegaard’s signature. Roger Poole The Indirect Communication, p. 263. But Poole conspicuously fails to address The Point of View, where the final accounting of the authorship takes place most fully. Perhaps this is because he does want to draw a fixed boundary around Kierkegaard’s texts, to mark them off from Kierkegaard himself, the young man in the Journals who does, after all, explain to Poole the meaning and purpose of the Indirect Communication. Fenger was the first to take a direct crack at The Point of View, the thickest and ostensibly least flexible joint in Kierkegaard’s authorial armor. See Henning Fenger Kierkegaard: the Myths and their Origins, pp. 19, 26, 31, and ch. 1 generally. Fenger discovers in Kierkegaard’s recollection of the authorship a loose patchwork of attempts to edit, after the fact, his humiliations in the Corsair (beginning in 1846) into the plan of his writings. This deception, though, is not a deception, because Kierkegaard is “someone for whom the boundary between illusion and reality has been erased.” He revises his stories and others as “an actor-poet, who writes his own role” and it is “neither Kierkegaard’s fault nor responsibility if the learned men, the scribes, docents male and female, have taken him at his word.” Kierkegaard’s The Point of View, on Fenger’s reading, suppresses the independence of the pseudonyms to rewrite not only literary history but also personal identity. Cf. Joakim Garff “The Eyes of Argus: The Point of View and Points of View with Respect to Kierkegaard’s Activity as an Author” in Kierkegaardiana 15, p. 40. Garff, with an unmatched command of the near-endless mass of source material in the Papirer, concludes decisively that in Kierkegaard’s case literary history and personal identity are inextricably interwoven. Consequently, The Point of View should be read as “documentafiction,” and Kierkegaard, the author whom it represents, becomes merely its central character. It is a radical view, but Garff’s reading of The Point of View is persuasive. No one else marshalls more convincing text, or spends as much time carefully teasing out the implicit from the explicit, the unconscious from the conscious, and poising content against form. For instance, Pap. X 1 A 510 / SKS NB11:204, p. 328 / JP 6:6431: “All the material about my activity as an author is absolutely unusable, because it is obvious that in bringing it up I only dig deeper into the interesting instead of coming out of it, and it will seem the same to my contemporaries.” ‘The interesting’ here functions as a Kierkegaardian synonym for the aesthetic. What’s more, Kierkegaard had considered publishing The Point of View under the aesthetic pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio. Pap. I A 78 / SKS AA:12.4.1, cf. 300. Cf. JP 5:5103. There were other pseudonymous interventions Kierkegaard had had in mind for the central work on his authorship. An

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author, he warns, ought to be interpreted as he was in antiquity: “an individual human being, no more and no less, which also an author certainly is, no more and no less –” (PV, 57 / SV1 XIII, 544). This ‘bad anonymity’ inherent in what Kierkegaard labels ‘the Press’ relieves the writer of the burden of responsibility by abstractly identifying him with a represented “Public” (PV, 110 / SV1 XIII, 596). [With] the help of the press an anonym can say what he pleases day after day […] the slightest part of which he perhaps would not in the remotest way have the courage to say personally in a situation of individuality, can instantaneously address thousands upon thousands, can get thousands upon thousands to repeat what was said every time he opens his, well, it can hardly be called a mouth, opens his craw – and nobody has responsibility […] – nobody, an anonym the author, an anonym the public, at times even anonymous subscribers – consequently nobody! Nobody! (PV, 110 / SV1 XIII, 596)

Because Kierkegaard is so critical of this type of anonymity – recapitulated perhaps more famously by 20th century critics of mass society like Heidegger, Arendt and the Frankfurt school – it is easy to overlook the virtues he assigns to an alternative form, its dialectical counterpart. There is a theory of “double anonymity,” good and bad, implicit in the theory of authorship which needs to be explained: “this unpublished preface survives in which the author ‘A-O’ undermines Kierkegaard’s authority, again, as a creature of fiction. “I have now dared to make this poetic experiment. The author himself speaks in the first person, but bear in mind that this author is not K. (M. A.), but my poetic creation. – I certainly have to apologize to Mr. K (M. A.) that I have dared, right under his nose, so to speak, to conceive of him poetically, or to make a poetic creation out of him. But this apology is … all that I need do. For as a poet I have, in fact, completely emancipated myself from him. Indeed, even if he were to declare that my conception was factually untrue in any particular aspect, this would not mean that it was poetically untrue. The conclusion could also, of course, be reversed: ergo, K. (M. A.) has not measured up to or realized the poetic truth.” Pap. X 2 A 171 / SKS NB14:8a. For a more moderately deconstructive view than Poole’s, see Joel Rasmussen’s Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love. Cf. John Caputo How to Read Kierkegaard, pp. 72-73, where Rasmussen is invoked in the name of a more mildly deconstructive approach to the either/or of theology/philosophy in Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard can share many of the views expressed by the pseudonyms, “some of which are to be found verbatim in his Journals,” without revoking the pleasures we take in their literary-philosophical play. Moderate readings such as this leave the difference between the textual ‘I’ and the empirical ‘I’ intact. Garff’s more radical view insists on the erasure of this difference. This seems right. Our interest as readers is never in Kierkegaard the man, but rather Kierkegaard the writer, an ideal, poetically produced figure. A truly empirical Kierkegaard would leave us cold, offended: Kierkegaard at his breakfast table, or on the toilet; Kierkegaard clearing his nose. All men’s sheets, genius or not, after a few nights’ sleep share the same rank odor. Their muddy boots evince the same absence of literary clues.

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doubleness [Dobbelthed] is precisely the dialectic of the single individual. The Single Individual can mean the most unique of all, and the single individual can mean everyone” (PV, 115 / SV1 XIII, 601).14 The bad anonymity of the crowd draws the good anonymity of the single individual – the individual writer, for instance, to the reader, or the individual reader, to the writer – into painful relief. Kierkegaard imagines for us pseudonymously this individuality so radical that something so uniquely one’s own as a name can be forgotten, “which signifies not so much forgetting his name as the singularity of his nature [væsen]” (CUP1, 120 / SKS 7, 117). The solitary existence of the ‘I’ is so bare that even this intimacy is foreign to it. Single individuals as well as those captives of modernity’s daily-rag-reading mobs are liable to these bouts of anonymity – the self-forgetting that characterizes the light-headed, occasionally, but authors on a regular basis and also the reader, “That Single Individual” to whom Kierkegaard dedicates his work: Dear Reader! Please accept this dedication. It is offered, as it were, blindly, but therefore in all honesty, untroubled by any other consideration. I do not know who you are; I do not know where you are; I do not know your name. (PV, 105 / SV1 XIII, 591)

The Point of View concludes by (pseudonymously, in the voice of “his poet”) unveiling the identity of this anonym: “if no one else was that, he himself was and became that more and more” (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII, 582).15 The task of literary production was to become this anonymous single individual (PV, 118 / SV1 XIII, 604) which according to the “supreme criterion is beyond a human being’s grasp.” Kierkegaard strove to become his own best reader, transformed by the solvent of his prose. So where does that leave ‘Kierkegaard’ the author? The name: ‘Kierkegaard.’ It pointed vacuously, an empty signifier, to an essential futility at the core of this individual. He understood early on in “depression’s understanding” in his “innermost being” 14

15

My concept of ‘double anonymity’ is inspired by a loosely related notion in Merleau-Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 448. “[E]ach one of us must be both anonymous in the sense of absolutely individual, and anonymous in the sense of absolutely general. Our being in the world is the concrete bearer of this double anonymity.” See PV, 123 / SV1 XIII, 609. Socrates was the first and last to use this category of the single individual in a “dialectical and decisive way” He also bore an anonymity rooted more deeply than false names. The referent for this “Socrates” could not be unambiguously picked out. He did not know, Kierkegaard reminds, “whether he was a human being” or a Typhon-like monster. PV, 141 / Pap. X5 B 107, p. 301. On this Socrates, see Phaedrus, 229d-230a.

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that he “actually was good for nothing” (PV, 81 / SV1 XIII, 566). And so he became “an observer” – “idle” – “not really living” – “entering into a person and coming out of a person” (like his staff psychologist, Constantius). With a lepidopterist’s thrill he pinned Copenhagen to his plate. This empty character, Kierkegaard, was in life as in art actually a series of “false” characters consumed by imitation (the dissipated form of the elusive “repetition” [mimùsis] that his Constantin Constantius tells us brings a person from depression back to life) (PV, 82 / SV1 XIII, 567). “I actually am reflection from first to last” (PV, 83 / SV1 XIII, 567) – always two things at once, dialectical through and through – so isolated by reflection, so lonely, that, like Nietzsche, he multiplies and makes company of himself.16 But the trajectory of Kierkegaard’s writings traces a repetition in which this ‘bad anonymity’ characterizing the abstract subjects of the age of reflection converts into the ‘good anonymity’ of the would-be single individual, passionately imitating this Ideal. Since it remained “beyond a human’s grasp,” Kierkegaard remained from first to last no one.

Divine Possession and the Madness of Authority Yet the personal existence of Kierkegaard, this nobody, perhaps for more than any author, bears on the form of his literary production. It would lead him toward a dramatically tragic possibility, both literarily and personally. Of course, in a market town like Copenhagen, where authors of Kierkegaard’s stature could be numbered on one hand, this biographical element might be a simple de facto inevitability. It was easy enough to preserve his pseudonymity, for instance, as the authorship began. A five-minute appearance at the Royal Theatre, welltimed, and all of Copenhagen could note an idleness incompatible with such Herculean literary labors. Satisfied in his ruse, he returned to his writing desk to complete Either/Or. Was he merely exercising the incidental advantage of a readership small enough to manipulate into reading him the way he preferred, or is there something peculiar to his authorship which makes an intimacy with his person essentially 16

Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 18. “I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last human being. No one talks to me other than myself… For my heart refuses to believe that love is dead, cannot bear the terror of the loneliest loneliness: it compels me to talk, as though I were two” (notes, 1872). Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche Ecce Homo, p. 678, where Nietzsche’s self has a “double origin.”

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relevant? That he was, in fact, an exceptionally colloquial author, one whom, to understand, one has to imagine possibly running into at the theatre? It is not that his personal life is the hermeneutical key to the authorship, but that, rather – as Garff persuades through his exhaustive biography – his personal life was as much art and as much a means of communication as were his writings. The two were essentially cooperative. In neither case do we get the true Kierkegaard – if, by true, we mean that artist standing freely outside of and above his art. The writings, Kierkegaard himself insists, cannot function outside of the stylistic choices governing his personal life: to appear lazy, to appear insane, etc. This explains the subtitle of The Point of View: “A Report to History.” Through a historical report, Kierkegaard the author supplies future readers with the chapter missing from the collected texts: the representation of the author himself. If the author of the aesthetic-philosophical works had to disappear ironically-maieutically, “my personal existing,” Kierkegaard wrote, “had to be conformed to the turning point in my entire work as an author, inasmuch as it poses the issue: becoming a Christian” (PV, 63 / SV1 XIII, 549). The turning point he refers to follows the publication in 1846 of The Concluding Postscript. For the proper deception to take place, the Christian author required another “existence-form” to support “that kind of work as an author” (PV, 65 / SV1 XIII, 551). “I had to try to give my contemporaries another impression of my personal existing.” The artistic and moral functions of his work, however, were inseparable from his life not merely as he dramatized it for others, but as it was lived. The final stage of the authorship closes the gap between public dramas (such as feigning trips to the theatre) and the solitary task of writing one’s way into being this single individual. The Christian ideal cannot be obtained in solitude. Always polemical and, therefore, recognizable as the object of attack (PV, 67 / SV1 XIII, 553), the religious author needs a mob to hurl himself against. The public representation of the ‘mad author’ became as crucial as Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous vanishing had been earlier, subjecting himself daily to the “drenchings of rabble-barbarism” in the streets – incited by his bouts with Goldschmidt and the Corsair – where he had formerly been accustomed to wandering freely amidst the merchants. It was all part of a shrewd means of dissuading potential adherents of the Kierkegaardian cause. “[I]nstead of the incognito of the esthetic” he now had “the danger of laughter and grins,” “a kind of insanity” growing in the

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mass of Copenhageners incited by the image of the stooped author with the uneven pant-legs. The author was now poised amidst a hail of stones from the mob to properly communicate a Christian message. While Kierkegaard did expose himself to the crowd, removing the ironic masks of the pseudonyms, the mad comedy he (claims to have) staged in Copenhagen’s streets was in fact an even more effective method of ironic distancing than the pseudonymity of the aesthetic (PV, 67 / SV1 XIII, 553). What the “highly cultured public regarded as madness” (PV, 70 / SV1 XIII, 556) became an elevated form of Christian irony essential to the times and the turn his writings had taken. Ironizing an ironically detached age demanded the standpoint of the madman as the object of it’s venom. The madness belonged essentially not to Kierkegaard but rather the laughter and grins of the mob, which arose compulsively and en masse in a kind of automated response to the jibes of ‘the Press.’ Kierkegaard mirrored the insanity of the crowd’s “blather” and “brutish grinning” (PV, 67 / SV1 XIII, 553) artistically with a madness of his own, forcing them to reflect upon and possibly negate their collective hallucination – that Christianity was thriving in Copenhagen – in the consciousness that the madness they opposed in the single individual was actually theirs and that their putative sanity had been a bad reflection of his own. It was a Christian Socratism, substituting an ironic madness for an ironic ignorance. When the maieutics concluded Kierkegaard’s opponents would appear as mad as Socrates’ were ignorant. Kierkegaard would appear as sane as Socrates was wise, that is, sane enough to know what he does not know, or, what he is not yet, namely, a Christian. The Point of View, however, spends an entire section – Governance’s Part In My Authorship – calling into question Kierkegaard’s artistic mastery over this image of himself as a mad-man who, once ingested by the madness of the crowd, would cure it homeopathically. It describes the task of the authorship from its first stroke to its last in terms of divine possession. “When it was a matter of boldness, enthusiasm, zeal, almost to the border of madness, what was this pen not able to present” (PV, 72 / SV1 XIII, 558). The border of madness at this stage has only been glimpsed, not crossed. Still, a psychological border does not divide the country of the sane from that of the mad one-dimensionally in the neatly managed geography of a child’s map. It has colors and depths and ambiguous territories to either side. It is hard if not impossible to conceive of a reconnaissance which does not to some degree stray into this border-territory. The Point of View’s records of the anticipation of writing read increasingly like entries in a log from such a trip. Prepar-

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ing to write, Kierkegaard describes, “a poet impatience awakens in my soul” and “it seems that if I had a winged pen, indeed, ten of them, I still would be unable to keep up with the abundance offered to me” (PV, 73 / SV1 XIII, 558). This preliminary to madness and devotional writing “has been continually experienced,” he confesses, “during all my work as an author” (PV, 73 / SV1 XIII, 559). The symptoms magnify until “the poet passion” or “the thinker passion” translates into “divine worship” (PV, 73 / SV1 XIII, 559). Are we really justified in describing Kierkegaard’s writing in terms of divine possession, or is this all a bit medieval and melodramatic? On his account, yes, we are justified. There is a part of Kierkegaard that is not Kierkegaard, through which the invisible eye of God interrogates both author and reader alike – a providential god with his spyglass on each and every soul, employing spies like Kiekegaard himself – “hidden in a deception” – in “higher service” to the Idea of Christianity (PV, 87 / SV1 XIII, 571). His writings can be read as transcripts of this interrogation in a hand that is not his own, composed on the other side of a dark glass behind which God – the spy of all spies – silently observes all who read, Kierkegaard included. While the author has a double understanding – the Christian he is and the poet he is not – the poet he reluctantly plays at and the Christian he is not yet – so does God have an understanding encompassing the author’s. Kierkegaard may have “dialectically maintained supervision over the whole” but from a divine perspective this mastery was a fake (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII, 97). The second level of double understanding pairs a blindness or gap in the human author’s craft-knowledge with the total mastery of a divine author: Kierkegaard “could not attribute [the authorship] to any human being, even less would he attribute it to himself,” the third person voice of a poet informs – another one of Kierkegaard’s Godsanctioned spies, enlisted, this time, to report on the author himself (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII, 97). Kierkegaard further distinguishes the madness of this possession by drawing it into contrast with the inspirations of the romantic genius (the enlightenment’s translation of an archaic madness visiting the poet as well as the initiate into Greece’s mystery religions).17 The talent of the genius, like the work it fosters, belongs to the genius alone. 17

Socrates may have inverted the tradition of the Greek daimķn by transforming it into an instinctively prophylactic intelligence, but the New Testament returns to the more archaic concept of “psychic possession,” to use Dodds’ term. It is the Greek of Mathew’s gospel, not that of Socrates, that Kierkegaard retrieves with the word.

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It is a gift of nature.18 Nothing resembles Kierkegaard’s conduct less since he has “basically lived like a scribe in his office. The possession was not temporary and did not originate in an individual’s exceptional character – like the genius’ “outburst” with its “tumultuous breaking off.” It was total (PV, 74 / SV1 XIII, 559) and came from without. From the very beginning I have been as if under arrest and at every moment sensed that it was not I who played the master, sensed it with fear and trembling when he let me perceive his omnipotence and my nothingness, sensed it with indescribable bliss when I related myself to him and the work in unconditional obedience. (PV, 74 / SV1 XIII, 559)

The fertile influence of divinity upon the author volatilized him in such a way that dependence upon this God was magnified. “I have frequently experienced and at all times have been horribly aware of a terrible torment that is akin to starving to death in the midst of abundance, to being overwhelmed by wealth –” (PV, 75 / SV1 XIII, 560). Kierkegaard’s abilities would “crush” him, he believed, were he to release them with a poet’s impulsiveness “all at once” in lieu of the steady work-plan God administered. To stave off this death he wrote with a measure to match his measureless diligence: the unbroken evenness of the scribe who, echoing thoughts and passions not his own, each day copies a specific part of an already printed book (PV, 76 / SV1 XIII, 561). It was a restraint made possible only by the intervention of a divine author. The banner – “without authority” –which Kierkegaard hangs above the authorship as a whole denotes more than the ironic stance of a Christian Socrates, veiling himself in maieutic self-restraint. Without authority suggests, more deeply, that the authorship was paradoxically out of the author’s hands. Writing is a process which Kierkegaard constantly describes in terms of madness and possession. When God visits Kierkegaard qua author, it sets not only the world (i. e., Copenhagen) against this scribe, but his own imagination, its “most dreadful possibilities” – even human language itself (PV, 75 / SV1 XIII, 560). Captive to a thought that was not his own there were times when he “could not even make myself understandable to myself” (PV, 75 / SV1 XIII, 560). But the goal, after all, is not madness per se, but authorship and worship. The act of writing, however, does not call off the madness. Rather, cathartically, in a purging and transformation, it consummates it. 18

See Immanuel Kant The Critique of Judgment, par. 46. When Kierkegaard writes of genius directly, however, he identifies the notion with Schelling. See CA, 114 / SKS 4, 417.

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The possession began with the authorship itself and Kierkegaard’s passion for the poetic. He would have preferred to forego the aesthetic authorship but the only way to shake off this daimķn was to do its bidding (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). Kierkegaard used the pseudonyms in connection with the aesthetic production as a religious distancing from thoughts and feelings that were not “my own” (PV, 86n / SV1 XIII, 570). The approximately 600 pages of Either/Or he fills inside of a year he diagnoses as a “poetic emptying” or purgation imposed on him by an “alien” force against which “he could not do otherwise” (PV, 35 / SV1 XIII, 526). These thoughts and passions that inspired the veils of poetry were alien to the Christian Kierkegaard, but in a deeper sense were so much a part of him that he had no choice but to yield to them. So when does the “emptying out” of the esthete in him conclude? It is a question Kierkegaard has already answered. It concludes with the authorship itself. “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress” plays counterpoint to the Christian Discourses. These two notes, these two voices and personae – poetic and religious – either sound together in Kierkegaard’s work or not at all. It wasn’t just poetry that possessed Kierkegaard, of which he’d be forced to empty himself according to strictly ritualistic parameters – write according to a god-given measure – lest his enthusiasms overtake him. He describes the religious authorship similarly in terms of possession, by the God of Christians, now, rather than pagan poets and philosophers. “[I]t was not my intention to become a religious author.” He had planned upon his release from the daimķn of poetry to break suddenly into a new role: country pastor (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). But that role like the others was bound strictly to the imaginary. When the image of Kierkegaard the pastor faded from his mind the writer set to work on the religious authorship, his way of “satisfying the religious” (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). His need to write was so overpowering that he “could not do otherwise” (PV, 86 / SV1 XIII, 570). Three months after Either/Or came Two Edifying Discourses. Powerless again, to yet another daimķn, the authorship to no one’s surprise but his own continues – unto death. Satisfying the religious in Kierkegaard was no less an emptying than the poet-production, purgations he failed over the course of a decade to complete.19

19

Beginning with From the Papers of One Still Living (1838) and ending with the date of The Point of View’s composition (1848). Kierkegaard did not include this work or The Concept of Irony (1841) in The Point of View’s account of the authorship.

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Parousiac Madness and the Making of a Martyr “[I]n relation to God I offer this my entire work more shamefacedly and bashfully than a child who gives its parents a gift the parents have given the child” (PV, 89n / SV1 XIII, 573) – First to last Kierkegaard considered himself an instrument of divine self-satisfaction, suggesting a parallel with the autoerķmenon of the God of philosophy, though in a poetic and therefore embodied register, rather than a purely rational one.20 Religious writing for Kierkegaard always shares in the poetic because passionate thought is the province of the poet, whose language is irrevocably that of a body moved by its passions. Without a man’s body to speak through, the God of Luther haunting Kierkegaard’s thought would have been as immanently solitary and rational as the Prime Mover, while Kierkegaard’s God is a personal God, a maker of covenants, a source and object of love. Speaking poetically is the Christian author’s means of insisting on the mortality of the author – his fragility and ignorance, a tragic conception expressed Christianly in the concept of inherited sin – and the transcendence of the divine.21 To see the god, as the Jews knew, both the Judge and Climacus remind us, meant death (SL, 122 / SKS 6, 116; CUP1, 484 / SKS 7, 439), as it was the “torment of death” that threatened Kierkegaard constantly with a divine abundance of thought and the devil’s bargain of ten winged pens. Kierkegaard draws the author’s mad consciousness of mortality together with the appearance of God. “[I]t was religiously my duty that my existing and my existing as an author express the truth, which I had daily perceived and ascertained – that there is a God” (PV, 72n / SV1 XIII, 557). Becoming the single individual and becoming an author were for Kierkegaard part of a single movement through which a God appeared, not as in the old days, conjured by some Dionysian throng, but rather inwardly and in a solitude no less passionate. Every more earnest person who knows what upbuilding is, everyone, whatever else he or she is, high or low, wise or simple, male or female, anyone who has ever felt built up and felt God as very present, will certainly agree with me unconditionally that it is impossible to build up or to be built up en masse, even more impossible than to “fall in love en quatre [in fours]” or en masse – upbuilding, even more decisively than erotic love, pertains to the single individual. (PV, 117 / SV1 XIII, 603) 20 21

See Aristotle Met., xii.7. See Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy, 1st essay, sec. 23. Nietzsche identifies Luther with the renewal of Europe’s tragic spirit.

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Kierkegaard’s literary compulsion belongs to that particular genre which the Attic Greeks practiced in Dionysus’ theatre in which through catastrophe and offense the limits of human order and intelligibility are broached and a god appears among men: “If you could not go out into the street – and see that the god is right there in that appalling spectacle, and that this is what would happen to you if you were to fall to your knees and worship him – then you are not essentially a Christian.”22 Paralleling Sophocles’ ancient plots, Kierkegaard’s theory of authorship turns on the catastrophic development of divine knowledge in the author, who, in a modern twist, self-consciously pursues this disaster under the heading of the Idea of the martyr: “A true martyr has never used power but has contended by means of powerlessness. He contended people to become aware” and “understood that the momentum of his work began precisely with his death,” the elevation of the author’s “self-denial in relation to [his] cause” and the “ideaimpression” he means to make (PV, 51 / SV1 XIII, 538). The physical violence of martyrdom is the last note The Point of View sounds, blunt punctuation to the images of mental violence characterizing the authorship up until that point. “[T]o make sacrifices, to be sacrificed – which must indeed become the consequence of not seeking to become a power in the external world – [.]” The single individual is the category of sacrifice, essentially opposed to politics and the established order (PV, 121 / SV1 XIII, 607), for which sacrifice no longer has any meaning. There is only bargaining and self-promotion, more or less shrewd, more or less successful, at which, if we fail, our failures are justified according to our own power and merit. The unrecognized sacrifice is the final anonymity of the single individual, the anonymity of the sacrifice that goes unrecognized because the world now lacks the vocabulary. The human race’s “rebellion of reflection” has subjected God to the criterion of human reason and what as an abstract body of reflection it could stomach (PV, 121-122 / SV1 XIII, 607-608). There is no longer sacrifice. Only murder.

22

PC, 65 / SV1 XII, 62. As trans. by Kirmmse in Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 659. Cf. Pap. X 5 A 89 (no SKS): In this journal entry subtitled “My Task. And About Myself” Kierkegaard testifies personally to the individual experience of this parousia dividing him against the categories of human thought and culture: “What is absolutely the decisive factor is that Christianity is a heterogeneity, an incommensurablity with the world, that it is irrational with respect to the world and with respect to being a human being in a straightforward sense.”

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Christianity, for Kierkegaard, is an inhuman Idea. It demands the inhuman of us. An Idea demanding to be thought, it compasses a world from which the human mind naturally shrinks and by which it is at the same time compelled. Education in this Idea begins with the recognition of a more preliminary (im)possibility, another Idea(l) which in principle resists conceptualization and to which we are never quite adequate: ‘the single individual.’ Yet, ‘the single individual’ is not an idea or a concept in the traditional sense. Human thinking cannot compass it and so it “cannot be taught directly” (PV, 123 / SV1 XIII, 609). It is an “ethical task” and an “art” – a “practice” which tends to make sacrifices of its practitioners. The logic of the authorship’s progressions seems to lead to bloodshed: “If the age is waiting for a hero, it surely waits in vain; instead there will more likely come one who in divine weakness will teach people obedience – by means of their slaying him in impious rebellion, him, the one obedient to God, who would still use this category on an even much greater scale, but also with authority” (PV, 124 / SV1 XIII, 610). Sacrificial victims, however, are not authors such as Kierkegaard. The victim of this collective violence is not the author – he is the missionary. Although, these two characters do share a common goal. It is ‘the missionary’ who introduces Christianity dialectically into Christendom by drawing Christendom into opposition to the single individual. He makes a sacrifice of himself through which Christendom reflects both on its failure and his ability to present the Christian Ideal, opening once again to the possibility of Christianity’s return. The missionary after all is the only true author – the only author “with authority.” It has been Kierkegaard’s task as an author to “present the picture of a Christianity in all its ideal, that is, true form,” but also to submit himself above all to the judgment of this ideal – “that I do not resemble this picture” (AN, 129 / SV1 X5 B107, 288). As an author, admittedly, the resemblance is slight, given the aesthetic detachment inherent in the writer’s stance. But the author does not complete his work with one last dip of the quill. Instead, he replaces his pen on the desk and strolls head-first into the mob. Only when the writing has ceased and the authorship concluded has the writer become an author. The captivating “idea” and “task” (PV, 125 / SV1 XIII, 611) of Christianity and the pagan passions it incites in the poet-writer conclude in the missionary’s sacrifice. Across the pages of Armed Neutrality resolves the phantasied image of Kierkegaard the missionary / martyr. A few pages after decrying the theatricality of modern Christianity he con-

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cocts an imaginary scene with as much drama as any at the Royal Theatre he might, in his younger days, have strategically feigned attending: In other words, I am not afraid of dying, but I do fear to say too much about myself. I do not cowardly flee from a martyrdom, but I must be aware of and be of one mind about how I can defend falling as a martyr. (AN, 135 / Pap. X 5 B 107, 294) I pray to God, whatever danger comes in the form of bloody persecution or in the form of mockery, laughter, and ridicule, whether the suffering is physical pains or spiritual pains, that he will give me the strength not to deviate a hair’s breadth from the understood truth. 23 (AN, 139-140 / Pap. X 5 B 107, 299-300)

The dialectic familiar from Fear and Trembling returns, between the lyrical observations of the tragic poet and the actions of his hero – if no longer the hero that the age is waiting for, then the martyr it requires. In the last years of his life Kierkegaard seemed to relocate the madness, catastrophe and sacrifices of tragedy to this possibility impregnating his own life. It was as if he was preparing for the role of “modern tragic hero” towards which a decade of writing had gestured.24 “He wanted to actualize writings whose basic theme was deeply, sometimes obscurely, connected to the idea of sacrifice.”25 Kierkegaard connects this sacrifice to the themes of irrationality and a tragically ambiguous guilt.26 “The misfortune and fundamental defect of the times was – reasonableness,” he writes. “What was needed was indeed – the ecstatic.” 27 The spiritualized ecstasies of the mystic would not suffice. Kierkegaard hopes rather for the animal passion released in the kill: “In order to receive eternity once again, blood will be required[.]”28 Like Stages’ Quidam, he imagines real bloodshed. This time, it is his own. One 1854 journal entry attests that the mad23

24

25 26 27

28

He needs to die without declaring his Christianity definitively, without making it a matter of his own knowledge or that of the crowd. All he can do is trust that God will accept him. See Joakim Garff “ ‘You Await a Tyrant whereas I Await a Martyr’: One Aporia and its Biographical Implications in A Literary Review” in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, p. 143. Garff makes Kierkegaard “a modern tragic hero” in the will to catastophe he finally embodied with his deeply humiliating entanglement with the local media. Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 633. Pap. XI 2 A 58-63 (no SKS). Cf. JP 1:1067. Pap. X 2 A 286 / SKS NB14:108. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym H. H., author of Two Ethical Religious Essays (1849), indulges the same speculations on human sacrifice. The age requires a martyr to imbue it with the necessary passion … to put him to death. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 629. Pap. IX B 20, pp. 317 (no SKS).

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ness and catastrophe needed to set his pathologically reflective age in motion includes his execution.29 Five years earlier, a series of entries similarly phantasies his violent death at the hands of a mob. This he decides would be “the maximal result of my life.” 30 The root of all this violence is a tragically ambiguous crime: “I came into existence through a crime. I came into existence against god’s will. The crime – which in a sense is not my crime, even though it makes me guilty in god’s eyes – is to give life.”31 Imitating this image of the martyr required the end of literary imitations, of poetic or philosophical imaginations corresponding to concepts or pictures of ‘objects’ that stand before the writer and outside of his text. Writing about the martyr does not conclude in the reader’s understanding or an enhanced reserve of imaginations. The act of writing for Kierkegaard was one element in a performance – with clear ritual elements – that with the potential martyrdom and selfsacrifice of the author finally blurred the distinction between writing and praxis. The last word in The Point of View belongs not to Kierkegaard but his poet. The “direct report” promised on the title page has hardly been direct at all, interrupted frequently by this alien voice, allowing Kierkegaard to report on himself (as one of these heavenly spies) from the distance a poet’s detachment affords. The poet does have certain qualifications for keeping company with Christian authors. Like Kierkegaard he has “suffered for an idea” (PV, 95 / SV1 XIII, 580) – albeit the wrong one. But unlike Kierkegaard – at least the phantasied image of Kierkegaard this anonymous informer provides – his poet survives. Magister Kierkegaard seems to have died on his feet – bolt upright at his writing desk, pen dripping ink, hand rotating across the page – the ghost of the poet against whom he struggled lifelong still animating his corpse. It is a dead man writing the concluding words of The Point of View, Kierkegaard eulogizing himself in the guise of the poet: “the author, who historically died of a mortal disease but poetically died of 29 30

31

Pap. XI 2 A 265 (no SKS). Pap. X 1 A 280, pp. 188-189 / SKS NB10:199. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, pp. 632 f. Pap. XI 2 A 439 (no SKS). Cf. JP 6:6969. See Joakim Garff Søren Kierkegaard, p. 792. This was Kierkegaard’s last journal entry, the last thing he ever wrote. Having willed himself through this merciless campaign into a position of almost universal ridicule in the village of Copenhagen he died with “double facial pareses that forced him into a stiff, straight-ahead smile, like a petrified ironist.” Kierkegaard tragically suffered the starring role in a comedy penned in his own hand.

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a longing for eternity in order unceasingly to do nothing else than to thank God” (PV, 97 / SV1 XIII, 582). No accident, then, that The Point of View was left in the journals to be published posthumously. It was written posthumously – that essentially tragic feature of all human communication (EO1, 151-153 / SKS 2, 150-152). 32 The reader, for Kierkegaard, has no monopoly on anonymity. The writer, too, communicates anonymously, as if dead, as if all books were merely epitaphs extended. 33

32

33

In his essay on tragedy ‘A’ defines “the More” as the essential element of tragic writing – a conclusion or coherence which is always delayed – and human reality by analogy as essentially fragmentary, posthumously interpreted according to things left behind, broken artifacts, incomplete texts, and therefore perpetually in need of a supplement. See EO1, 219 / SKS 2, 213. ‘A’ enjoys reading epitaphs, and draws the analogy between the richest grave inscriptions and book titles so interesting, so pregnant with meaning, that for the reader they replace the contents of the books themselves. The emptiness of the grave, he writes – and, if we follow the analogy, the death of the author – becomes the condition for this signifying. For a similar analysis of all meaning as posthumous, erected like a monument, a pyramid, upon a constitutive loss or death, a “past that was never present,” see Jacques Derrida “Différance” in Margins of Philosophy, p. 24.

Bibliography Works by Søren Kierkegaard in Danish, abbreviations SKS SV Pap.

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al., 4th ed., Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1997-. Samlede Værker, ed. A. B. Drachmann et al., 1st ed., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1901-1906. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. Thulstrup and Cappelørn, 2nd ed., Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968-1978.

Works by Søren Kierkegaard in English, abbreviations AN

Armed Neutrality in Point of View, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1998). ASKB Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Libray of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by H. P. Rohde, (Copenhagen: 1967). CA The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Thomte and Anderson (Princeton: 1980). CD Christian Discourses (Princeton: 1997). CI The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1989). CUP1/2 Concluding Unscientific PostScript to the Philosophical Fragments, 2 vols. (Princeton: 1992). E/O1/2 Either/Or, 2 vols., trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1987). FT Fear and Trembling, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1983). JP Journals and Papers, ed. and trans., Hong and Hong, 7 vols. (Bloomington: 1967-78). OW On My Work as an Author in The Point of View, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1998). PC Practice in Christianity, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1991). PF Philosophical Fragments, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1985). PV The Point of View for My Work as an Author in The Point of View, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1998). R Repetition, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1983). SL Stages on Life’s Way, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton 1988). SUD Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1980).

318 TA UD

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Two Ages: A Literary Review, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1978). Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1993).

Works by Aristotle, commentaries, abbreviations APo. DA DC EE EN GA HA MP OB OS Phy. Po. Pol. Rhet. WA

Posterior Analytics, text and trans. Treddenick (Cambridge: 1960). De Anima, text and trans. Hett (Cambridge: 1957). On the Heavens, text and trans. Guthrie (Cambridge: 1939). Eudemian Ethics, trans. Ross (Clarendon: 1908). Nicomachean Ethics, text and trans. Rackham (Cambridge: 1926). The Generation of Animals, text and trans. Peck (Cambridge: 1942). History of Animals, text Peck and trans. Peck and Balme (Cambridge: 1965-91) Metaphysics, text and trans. Tredennick (Cambridge: 1938). On Breath, text and trans. Hett (Cambridge: 1957). Sense and Sensibilia in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 of 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Pronceton: 1971). Physics, text and trans. Wicksteed and Cornford (Cambridge: 1957). Poetics, trans. Halliwell (Cambridge: 1996). Politics, text and trans. Rackham (Cambridge: 1950). Rhetoric, text and trans. Freese (Cambridge: 1926). Without Authority, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: 1997).

Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, text, trans., and commentary Bywater (Oxford: 1909). Die Schule des Aristoteles, texte und kommentare, ed. Wehrli (Basel: 196769). Fragmenta, ed. V. Rose. (Stuttgart: 1967). L’Ethique a Nicomaque, introduction, traduction et commentaire, trans. Gauthier and Jaulif (Louvain: 2003). Nicomachean Ethics, text and commentary J. Burnet (Methuen: 1900). Nicomachean Ethics, commentary H. H. Joachim, ed. Rees (Clarendon: 1951).

Works by Sophocles Ajax, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994). Antigone, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994). Elektra, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994). Oedipus at Colonus, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).

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Oedipus Tyrranus, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994). Philoctetes, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994). The Trojan Women, text and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1994).

Other Classical Texts and Collections IG SIG EI GL LG

Inscriptiones Graecae, ed. D. M. Lewis, 3rd ed. (Berlin: 1981). Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, ed. W. Dittenberger, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: 1915-24) Greek Elegy and Iambus, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Edmonds (Cambridge: 1931). Greek Lyric, vol. 1: Sappho and Alcaeus, 4 vols., ed. and trans. Edmonds (Cambridge 1928-1959). Lyra Graeca, vol. 2, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Edmonds (London: 1931).

Aeschines, The Speeches of Aeschines, trans. Charles Darwin Adams (Cambridge: 1988). Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Eumenides, Libation Bearers, Fragments, trans. Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: 1957). – Suppliant Maidens, Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, trans. Weir-Smith (Cambridge: 1988). Apollodorus, The Library, 2 vols., trans. Frazer (Cambridge: 1976). Aristophanes, Clouds, Wasps, Peace, trans. Henderson (Cambridge: 2000). Clement of Alexandria, Works (Cambridge: 1960). Diels, Hermann, Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: 1953).* Diodorus, Siculus Bibliotheca Historica (Cambridge: 1933-1967). Eudemus, Eudemi Rhodii Peripatetici fragmenta quae supersunt, ed. Spengel (Berlin: 1871). Euripides, The Bacchae, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Rhesus, trans, Kovacs (Cambridge: 2003). – Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, trans. Kovacs (Cambridge: 1994). – Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, trans. Kovacs (Cambridge: 1995). – Suppliant Women, Elektra, Heracles, trans. Kovacs (Cambridge: 1998). Herodotus, Works, 4 vols., trans. Godley (Cambridge: 1981-82). Hesiod, Theogony, trans. and intro. Norman O. Brown (New York: 1953). Hippocrates, Ancient Medicine, vol. 1 of 7, trans. Jones (Cambridge: 1923). – Regimen I-III, vol. 4 of 7, trans. Jones (Cambridge: 1931). Horace, vol. 2 of 2, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry., trans. Fairclough (Cambridge: 1926). Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The PreSocratic Philsophers (Cambridge: 1983). Pausanias, Descriptions of Greece, 6 vols., trans. Jones (London: 1918). Pindar, The Odes of Pindar – including the Principal Fragments, trans. Sandys (London: 1919). *

Unless otherwise stated, all fragments are from this edition

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Index of Names Abraham 5, 151, 158, 169, 170, 174, 179, 191, 193-209, 228, 263, 295 Achilles 29, 50, 58, 85, 232 Acquinas, Thomas 4, 207 Adam 157, 170, 208, 214-220, 225, 230, 244 Aeschylus 12, 24, 61, 82, 101, 115, 164, 197, 203, 289 Agamemnon 57, 154, 196-198, 201-202, 204, 223 Ahab 163 Alcibiades 272 Alcmaeon 31, 84, 100 Anacreon 60, 62 Anaximenes 11, 29, 55, 97 Antigone 10, 11, 28, 42, 46, 63, 66, 68, 87-88, 147-148, 150-157, 171, 177-178, 188, 214, 227 Antiphon 48, 83, 106 Aphrodite 60, 227 Apollo 19-23, 27, 35, 36, 45, 54, 77, 158, 241 Apollodorus 54, 77, 158 Archilocus 59 Arendt, Hannah 26, 153, 155-156, 303 Ares 21, 33 Aristophanes 62, 67, 70-71, 140, 155 Artemis 21, 64, 179, 284 Asclepius 100 Athena 21, 58, 77 Athens 11-13, 16, 19, 33, 62, 70, 96, 102, 104, 140, 158, 180, 193, 198, 269 Bacchus and related words 21, 39, 43, 76, 164, 204, 216, 236 Becker, Ernest 216 Bentham, Jeremy 228 Bloom, Harold 293 Boethius 188 Brandes, Georg 3

Breuer, Josef 75 Christ 8, 149, 156-157, 203 Chryssipus 107, 191 Cleisthenes 16 Cybele (see, Kybele) Davenport, John 6 Deleuze, Gilles Delphi 18, 22, 33, 77, 137, 204, 282 Demeter 166 Derrida, Jacques 1, 24, 35, 159, 170, 174, 205-206, 208, 211, 214, 228, 230, 300, 316 Diodorus 77 Dionysus 9, 17-18, 21, 28, 33, 38, 44, 68, 70-72, 76-77, 79, 93-95, 97-98, 100-117, 138, 164-165, 178, 180, 185-186, 203-204, 284, 311-312 Don Giovanni/Don Juan 167, 178 Don Quixote 163, 183 Eleusis 79, 166, 193 Empedocles 30, 95, 97, 98-101, 125, 136, 162, 232 Euripides 12, 43, 48-49, 61-62, 64, 70-71, 84-85, 87, 96, 102, 115, 154, 164, 186, 197-198, 257 Faust 194, 262 Fellini 178 Foucault 2, 5, 8, 67, 96, 146 Freud 24, 28-29, 37, 42, 75, 174, 216, 288, 300 Furtak, Rick 5 Gass, William 279 Goethe 74-75, 194, 217 Gorgias 83, 172, 185 Hades 43, 50, 55, 62, 164 HAL 177 Hamann 235 Hamlet 186-188, 193, 202, 207-208, 231, 235 Hecataeus 103-104

328

Index of Names

Hegel 10-11, 115, 141, 143-145, 147-148, 151, 156, 161, 163, 174, 178, 188, 200, 205-206, 209-211, 213, 215, 217-220, 222-223, 226, 228, 266, 270, 274, 279, 287, 295-296 Heiberg, J. L. 142, 210, 296 Heidegger, Martin 146, 159, 220, 233, 285, 303 Heraclitus 14, 29, 31, 46, 57, 95-96, 99, 103, 113, 164 Herodotus 82, 93, 103-104 Hesiod 12-14, 162 Hippocrates 17, 100, 127-128 Homer 3, 11, 13-14, 25, 28, 34, 36, 45-47, 49-65, 67-69, 72, 79, 82, 85-87, 93-95, 97, 100-102, 105, 110, 113, 118-120, 148, 165, 170, 269 Horace 72 Husserl, Edmund 123, 179, 220 Iago 190 Ionia 11, 13-14, 17, 19-20, 29, 31, 42, 55, 57, 62, 68-69, 97, 99, 101, 265 Ishmael 163 Job 237, 241 Kafka 299 Kant, Immanuel 123, 156, 188, 191, 207, 213, 228, 259, 268, 277, 284, 299, 309 King David 176, 181 Kubrick 177 Kybele 76-77, 100-101, 193, 204 Lessing, Gotthold 74-75, 144-145, 205 Levinas, Immanuel 168 Luther 56, 206-207 Macedonia 96 Macintyre, Alisdair 4, 6, 96, 189, 248, 275 Manson, Charles 196 Martensen, H. L. 296 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 304 Mitchell, Joni 238 Mozart 167 Napoleon 174, 222-225 Nietzsche 18, 50, 107, 175, 180, 218, 238, 305, 311 Nussbaum, Martha 3, 78, 91, 107, 109, 117, 119, 128, 131-132, 134-135, 137, 154, 232, 240, 248-249, 324-325 Odysseus 50, 58, 67

Oedipus 2, 9-46, 53, 62-71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83-87, 89, 90-93, 101, 103, 106-115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 130-131, 133, 135-137, 142, 144-145, 147-148, 150-153, 165, 171, 174, 176-177, 179-180, 182-186, 188, 193, 199-200, 202-204, 208, 214-215, 223-225, 227-229, 269, 272, 274, 288 Onomacritus 101-102, 104 Othello 175, 190 Parmenides 31, 95, 99, 103, 217 Pausanias 102, 164 Philoctetes 67, 154, 241 Phrygia 76, 79, 100, 204 Pilate, Pontius 185 Pindar 12, 13, 25, 28, 45 Plato 2-3, 19-20, 23, 29-30, 33, 39, 47-50, 52, 58, 62-64, 67-69, 71-72, 77, 82-84, 92, 96, 100, 102, 104-105, 108, 120-121, 136-137, 155, 158-159, 162, 169-170, 180, 184, 188, 191, 204, 211, 219, 230, 234, 237, 245-251, 254-256, 258, 263, 265266, 270, 274, 276-277, 287-289, 300 Plutarch 164, 172, 259, 276 Polynieces 171, 178, 214 Prime Mover 112, 161, 280, 311 Prodicus 83 Raskolnikov 148 Rilke, Rainer Maria 139, 148 Rousseau 160, 180 Sappho 58, 60, 101 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4 Schelling, Friedrich 115, 144, 309 Semonides 62 Socrates 3-4, 14, 30, 33, 48-50, 54-55, 57, 62, 64, 67, 70-71, 98, 105, 117, 126, 155, 158, 162, 180, 182-184, 195-196, 200, 202, 204, 219-221, 240, 245, 250, 252-255, 258, 265-270, 272, 274-289, 297, 304, 307-309. Solon 11, 13, 25, 34, 61, 103, 188 Sophocles 2, 3, 10-51, 53. 55, 57, 59, 61-69, 71, 73, 82, 85-92, 96, 99, 103, 106, 108, 110, 114-115, 130, 151, 154, 157, 170-171, 185, 193, 203, 208, 228, 312 St. Augustine 155-156, 162, 173-174, 186, 208, 226, 231 St. Paul 156, 179, 198, 206-207, 209210, 221, 228, 233-234, 244

Index of Names

St. Peter 8 St. Vitus 236 T. S. Eliot 186 The Corsair 302, 306 Theognis 13, 34, 60 Thrace 17, 49, 58, 88, 95, 98, 102 Thucydides 12, 82, 96

329

Updike, John 167 Wittgenstein 220-221 Xenocrates 102 Xenophanes 25, 90, 100, 103 Zalmoxis 99 Zeus 20, 21, 27, 32, 33, 36, 52, 86-87, 100, 102, 186, 203, 269

Index of Subjects absurdity; the absurd 111, 135, 150, 171, 173, 198, 206-207, 224, 242, 251, 258, 273, 290 actuality 117, 177, 179, 181-182, 194-185, 188-189, 192, 210-213, 226, 234, 239, 241, 243-244, 245, 252, 256, 259, 263-264, 266, 280-281, 283, 286, 289, 296, 299 adultery 181 aisthùsis 117, 127, 132 agoraphobia 227 agos 16, 20, 89, 105, 199 aitia/aitios 18-20 akrasia 84, 88, 108-111, 117, 123-126, 128, 130, 255, 257 anagnķrisis 73, 199 anamnùsis 104 animal; animality 2-3, 17, 43, 54-55, 68, 77, 98, 104-105, 116-117, 119, 122, 126, 128-129, 131-132, 165, 171, 177-179, 204, 218-220, 222, 227, 230, 232, 235, 248, 284, 314 anonymity 96, 106, 172, 298, 301-305, 312, 315-316 anxiety 36, 40, 57, 62, 100, 104, 140, 150-151, 167, 171, 174, 203, 209, 211, 213, 215-217, 219-221. 223-235, 241-243, 246-247, 250-252, 254, 258, 270, 273, 283, 299 aporia 114, 193, 206, 212, 269, 287, 314 arab 263 archù 20, 88, 113, 131, 230, 283 art or care of the self (or soul) 12, 48-49, 67, 100, 126, 137, 235, 237, 240, 253, 270 askùsis 28, 92, 101, 110, 256, 261 astrology 223 atù 36, 45, 86-89 atopos tis 182 author; authorship 1, 3, 4-9, 11, 14-15, 17-18, 24, 36, 39, 46, 56, 77, 100, 102,

105, 108, 110, 113, 115, 118, 124, 126, 128, 131, 133, 140, 144-145, 158-159, 182, 189, 191, 195, 209-211, 214, 220, 230-231, 234, 237, 242, 245, 252, 253, 260-261, 266-267, 274, 276, 280, 286, 291, 293-317 bastard 80, 234 biology 37, 141, 145, 204, 217 bios 104, 136, 242, 276 birth 11-12, 22-23, 31-32, 28-39, 44, 66, 68, 99, 101-105, 116, 134, 139-140, 143-144, 152, 155, 159, 162, 167, 188, 192, 208, 215, 217-218, 221, 227, 238, 262, 274, 298, 311 blood 17, 19, 21, 29, 40, 52, 57, 63, 95, 97, 100, 104, 120, 124, 157, 164-165, 176, 178-181, 194, 197, 206, 109, 218, 253, 258, 268, 300, 313-314 body 1-2, 50-56, 62, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 108, 122, 125, 129, 135-137, 146, 171, 174, 178, 182, 184, 206, 216, 221, 230, 238, 247-249, 253, 263, 274-275, 289, 300, 311 boulùsis 51, 52, 118, 122-123, 131 chance 18-19, 38, 41, 73, 110-111, 116, 135, 176, 186, 188 character 3-4, 6-6, 12, 37, 39, 46, 48-51, 58-59, 62-68, 76, 78-80, 85, 89, 91-92, 96, 105, 107, 111-112, 123, 129-130, 133-134, 137-138, 141-143, 145, 158, 160, 162, 172-174, 182, 187, 193, 208-209, 211, 224, 243, 246, 250, 253, 262-263, 265-266, 270, 272, 275-276, 282, 300, 302, 304-305, 309, 312-313 child; children; childhood 1, 5, 8, 12, 15, 17, 31, 38, 41, 43, 55, 61, 77, 102, 117, 126, 152, 160, 175, 178, 185, 190, 212, 216, 227, 233, 246, 250, 258, 274, 282, 307, 311

Index of Subjects

Christianity 8, 150, 153, 155-157, 166, 170, 179, 210, 222, 224, 228-229, 231, 234, 255-258, 270, 281-282, 290, 292, 296-297, 300, 308, 312-314 cocktail waitress 118 continence; incontinence 88, 109, 117118, 120, 124, 126, 257 corybant 76-77, 93, 100-101, 193, 272 courage 13, 52, 62, 100, 120-121, 132133, 138, 189, 193, 198, 235, 240, 246, 303 crime; criminal 17, 20-21, 23-24, 31-32, 38, 41, 44, 49, 82, 86, 103-104, 114-115, 121, 130-131, 133, 147, 150-151, 159, 175182, 184, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 202, 214-217, 223, 227, 233, 284, 297, 315 crucifixion 207, 231, 278, 282 cuckhold 175 cult 17, 18, 36, 55, 68, 71, 75-77, 79, 93, 95, 98, 100-101, 162, 164-165, 169, 178, 204, 263, 284 cure (see also, remedy) 12, 17-21, 27, 37, 44, 76, 78, 82, 97-100, 162, 168-169, 187, 192, 216, 243, 257-258, 286, 293, 307, 314 curse 8, 22-24, 36, 168, 203, 223 daimķn 2, 33-36, 41, 46, 55-57, 61, 79, 94, 98-101, 96, 111-114, 116, 136, 137, 165, 167, 171-172, 184, 194, 200-203, 224, 229, 235, 248, 263, 308, 310 death 1, 10, 16, 21-22, 31, 33, 40-41, 44-45, 50, 54-55, 66, 68, 70, 97-98, 100, 102, 104-105, 113, 150, 154-155, 158-159, 163-165, 167, 173, 175, 180, 184, 194-196, 211, 216, 221, 228, 233, 235, 252-253, 272-273, 276, 284-285, 288-289, 294, 296, 309-312, 314-316 deception 172, 185, 188-189, 232, 291, 298, 300, 302, 306, 308 depression 19, 167, 170-171, 181, 185, 304-305 desire 2, 48, 3, 7, 32, 41, 45, 47-48, 51, 55, 59-60, 90, 94, 101, 107-112, 116-133, 137, 155, 157, 173-174, 178, 180, 187, 216-217, 223, 232-234, 239-240, 244, 248-249, 252-254, 262, 266-267, 269, 276-278, 281, 289 despair 36, 65, 141, 182, 226, 238, 253254, 266, 287, 289, 293

331

dialectic 10, 15, 20, 47, 56, 68, 105, 142-144, 148, 150-152, 157-158, 160, 162-163, 171-172, 177, 179, 182-183, 185, 187-188, 196, 203, 205, 208, 210, 212, 221-222, 224, 226-228, 230, 240, 251, 256-258, 263, 270, 275, 279, 284-285, 290, 292, 297, 303-305, 308, 313-314 dikù 13-14, 19, 24, 26, 35, 38, 40, 56, 63, 82, 88, 115 discovery 73, 91, 182, 185, 190, 199-200, 243 doctor 12, 69, 77, 126-127, 232, 245 drama 7-8, 10-11, 14, 17-18, 23, 35, 40, 43, 61, 70, 72-74, 78-79, 84, 89, 91, 135, 138, 140-143, 145-147, 149, 151-153, 155, 157, 182, 187, 189-191, 200, 202, 205, 210, 213, 225, 234, 255, 260, 289, 296, 300-302, 305-306, 308, 314-316 drinking 59, 84, 101, 119, 124-125, 158, 161, 165, 173, 231, 238, 247, 274, 300 dunamis 117 ecstasy 5, 57, 68, 71, 77, 79, 93-94, 101, 103, 106, 108, 164, 193, 204, 236, 249, 251, 269, 284, 288, 292, 314 education (see also, learning) 7, 28-29, 45, 63, 78-79, 91-92, 103, 120, 125, 129, 134, 189, 235, 242, 246, 247-248, 250252, 260, 266, 271, 287, 293-294, 313 eiresiķne 16 emotion 1-3, 5-7, 47, 49, 54, 57-58, 60, 62, 67, 69, 71, 73-80, 84, 90, 92, 107, 108, 113-114, 119-122, 128, 131, 146, 171, 189, 190, 193, 198, 232, 238, 240, 241, 246, 248, 250, 256, 258, 263 enkrateia 106, 258, 261 enthusiasm 38-40, 76, 79, 106, 111, 158, 164, 168, 185, 204, 220, 259, 285, 290, 296, 307, 310 epistùmù 3, 122, 240 epithumia 63, 110-112, 114, 118-121, 123, 131, 254 Erinye 33, 36, 56, 164-165, 167, 202-203, 288 eros 60, 110, 153-154, 158, 162-166, 169, 171, 173, 223, 241, 248-249, 269, 288 eternal; eternity 14, 59, 104, 122, 125126, 143, 156, 167, 185, 188, 198, 204, 222, 225, 230-231, 233-235, 245-246,

332

Index of Subjects

262, 264-267, 269, 270-271, 273-275, 277, 279-285, 287, 289-293, 314, 316 ùthos 2, 46, 92, 113, 141 eudaimonia 2, 6-7, 44-46, 48, 79-80, 92, 110, 131, 133-137, 234, 265, 283, 294, 303 faith 14, 38, 96, 171, 173-174, 185, 195197, 199-200, 202-203, 205-207, 209210, 212, 227, 230-231, 235, 241-242, 249, 254, 258-259, 264, 269-270, 274275, 283, 285, 290, 295, 303 fate 10-12, 24-25, 31, 36, 39, 44-46, 56, 73, 80, 103, 137, 142, 144-146, 148, 151, 158, 165, 178, 185-186, 188, 190, 195, 199, 200, 203, 208, 209, 211, 214, 217, 219, 222-227, 229, 231, 238, 258, 273, 286, 323, 324 fear 1, 5, 25, 35-36, 41, 57, 66, 69, 73-74, 76, 78, 81, 120, 133, 140, 148, 151, 154, 166-167, 179-181, 183, 185, 189-195, 197-199, 201-203, 205, 207-208, 220, 224, 245, 250-251, 254, 269, 309, 314 feeling 51, 53, 56, 58-61, 64, 65, 73-74, 76, 78, 97, 98, 100, 121, 160, 180, 238, 248, 249, 254, 256, 259, 263, 277 fiction 85, 93, 148, 158, 172, 182, 189, 209, 246, 261, 291-292, 300, 302-303 fortune-telling 223 freedom 63, 96, 103, 116, 144-148, 153, 156, 162-163, 165, 177, 211, 214-215, 225-227, 229-230, 232, 242-243, 246-247, 259, 290 furies (see also, Erinyes) 195, 288-289 genius 32, 48, 161, 219, 222, 225-227, 229, 231, 303, 308-309 ghost; phantom; bogey 56, 67, 154, 161, 165, 167, 169, 171, 176, 181, 184, 187, 202, 208, 211, 224 grace 7, 103, 149-150, 157, 192, 226, 273, 287, 290 grammar 42, 230, 260 grief 1, 10, 20-21, 36, 44, 148 hallucination 171, 307 hamartia 2, 10, 13, 19, 28, 34-35, 41, 46, 61, 71-73, 80-92, 111, 114-115, 143-147, 149, 158-159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189-193, 211, 228, 255, 260 happiness 2, 7, 9, 13, 44-46, 48, 90, 95, 129, 134-137, 139, 163, 168, 240, 265,

267, 269, 271, 273, 275-277, 279-281, 283-285, 287, 289, 291-292 healing 2, 19-21, 22, 41, 76-77, 98, 101, 149, 190-193, 232, 241-242, 245, 250, 273, 284, 287, 288, 293 hermaphrodite 227 hero; heroism 10-12, 15, 17, 21, 25, 28, 38, 45, 50, 71, 82, 93, 103-104, 135, 142145, 147-148, 154, 156, 163, 184, 187188, 190, 193-202, 204, 210, 219, 222, 225, 228-229, 231, 235, 265, 313-314 hķmophagos; homophagy 43, 105, 132, 164 hubris 46, 66, 68 hypochondria 188, 235, 247 illusion 18, 93, 185, 219, 267, 271, 280, 291-292, 300, 302 imagination 18, 56-57, 62-63, 100, 115, 117, 119, 132, 137, 152, 169, 179, 183, 192, 209, 227, 242, 255, 258, 263, 270, 277, 289, 291, 296, 299, 315 immanence 2, 30, 36, 68, 104-105, 107, 153, 155, 161-162, 182, 210, 213, 219, 226, 228, 260, 267, 281-283, 287, 290, 311 immediacy 133, 150, 159-162, 166, 170, 173, 192, 200-201, 213, 218-219, 221-222, 230, 248, 298 immortality 15, 49, 55, 64, 95, 99, 104, 166-167, 204, 231, 266, 268 incest 23, 32, 40, 84, 125, 152, 153, 179, 180, 181, 227 inclosing reserve 170, 187, 227, 229-230 innocence 21, 38, 61, 82, 103-104, 115, 145, 147-150, 155, 157-158, 160, 181-182, 187, 190, 199, 206-208, 210, 218-219, 221-222, 224, 226-227 inspiration 18, 22, 27, 34, 39, 43, 56, 72-73, 79, 95, 103, 110-115, 120, 124, 158, 162-163, 166, 168-169, 182, 185, 204, 265, 304, 308, 310 intemperance; temperance 6, 117, 126, 132-133, 137, 257, 280 intention; intentional 83, 87, 109, 111, 174, 186, 250, 284, 310 interior; interiority 65, 87, 151, 153, 161162, 177, 179-181, 185-187, 192-193, 200, 214 jokes 156, 175, 177, 183, 196, 295

Index of Subjects

Judaism 166, 169, 170, 178, 196-198, 209-210, 221, 228, 284, 311 justice 1, 13-14, 19, 24, 27-28, 34, 40-41, 46, 61, 67, 81, 83, 88, 102-103, 125, 128, 133-134, 175, 178, 189, 202, 276, 281 karate 267 katharsis 2, 19, 31, 40, 42, 48, 70-81, 89-93, 100-102, 103, 141, 144-150, 189-194, 198-199, 205, 228, 231, 284 khora 35, 211, 300 kinùsis 20, 34, 117, 212, 280, 289, 299 kiss 174 laughter 21, 163, 167-168, 175, 177, 183, 211, 219, 223, 286, 306-307, 314 law 10, 12-14, 17, 23, 26, 35, 46, 52, 57, 72, 75, 77, 80, 82, 87, 101-102, 126-127, 144, 147-148, 155-156, 174, 180, 92, 197, 199, 229 learning (see also, education) 28-31, 33, 38, 128, 132, 134, 219-220, 233, 272 leprosy 171, 177-178 logos 2, 10, 11, 13-14, 26-27, 30-31, 35, 42, 47-49, 69, 71, 85, 88-90, 100-101, 103, 106-107, 111, 115, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127134, 142, 146, 159, 169-170, 172, 174, 177, 203-204, 208-211, 213, 219, 226, 228-235, 242, 247, 259, 262, 278, 283, 287, 293 luck 32, 39, 44-45, 89-90, 111-112, 134135 madness 2, 8, 34, 36, 38-42, 45, 56, 72, 75, 77, 85-86, 93, 101, 105, 113-114, 124, 163-164, 166-169, 171-173, 179, 181, 185, 197, 199, 203-204, 207, 227, 234-235, 249, 258, 270, 283-285, 287, 289, 292, 305, 307-309, 311, 314 maenad 21, 38, 43, 164 maieutics 262, 300, 306-307, 309 mania 22, 29, 32, 24-35, 37, 39, 42, 77, 115, 125, 204, 260 marriage 24, 32, 66, 152-154, 161, 166, 168, 172, 174-176, 182, 193, 203, 218, 227, 261 martyr 168, 193, 311-315 meat 104, 124, 128, 235 medicine (see also, doctor) 12, 48, 69, 80, 99-100, 110, 117, 124, 126-128, 132, 240, 244-245, 250, 252-253, 284 melancholy 19, 112, 181, 203, 211, 223, 237, 239, 250, 254, 289

333

memory 60, 95, 101, 112, 143, 159-162, 166, 171, 230, 234, 239, 270 mercy 36, 149, 287 metaphysics 48, 90, 112, 134, 149-150, 155, 157, 170-171, 184, 190-192, 210, 212-213, 215, 217, 219-220, 225, 228, 246, 252, 265-266, 270, 278, 280, 284, 289, 296, 299-300 miasma 19, 77, 101 monsters 37, 171, 179, 189, 204, 267, 304 mood 89, 93, 150-152, 169, 175, 211, 215, 237-240, 245-246, 248, 250-251, 256, 261, 263, 276, 290 moral psychology 2, 5-7, 9, 47, 49, 67, 74, 114, 108, 116, 120, 126, 135, 237, 241, 246, 261, 291 murder 15, 19-20, 23, 32, 34, 38, 44, 58, 84-85, 97, 148, 150, 175-176, 178, 180-182, 187-188, 196, 199, 203, 227, 238, 312 music 76-79, 84, 93, 98, 101, 138, 167, 235 mynah 233 mystery 1-2, 8, 14, 38, 48, 56-57, 64, 71, 76-77, 79-80, 92, 99-101, 106, 138, 157, 162, 165-166, 185-187, 193, 199-200, 204, 206, 208, 223, 225-227, 244, 254, 265, 276, 292, 308 mystic; mysticism 39, 47, 159, 231, 249, 187, 300 mythos 12, 47 narrative 4, 6, 10, 37, 73, 103, 134, 140, 143, 158-159 navigation 127 nobility; the noble 11, 66, 70, 92, 118, 120, 130, 134-135, 188, 251, 262 nomos 26, 35 nous 2-23, 26, 36, 38, 63, 102, 17, 19, 122-123, 128-132, 136-137, 171, 216, 225, 238, 246, 274 nymph 39, 110 opium 247 oracle 18-20, 22, 23, 32, 33, 37, 72, 151, 176, 185-188, 203, 208, 222-224, 231 orexis 118, 122-123 Orphism 47-48, 52, 55, 74, 79, 92, 97105, 110, 113, 150, 164-166, 167, 276 ousia 76, 79, 111-112, 157, 173, 199, 249, 271-272, 283, 311-312

334

Index of Subjects

paradox 87, 14, 18, 21-22, 28, 38, 43-45, 60, 87, 91, 104, 107, 108, 111, 115, 128, 135, 149, 151-152, 157, 161, 164-165, 169-170, 178, 183-184, 187, 189, 191, 197-201, 203, 205-208, 213-215, 217, 218-221, 224, 228, 230-231, 243-244, 251, 256-258, 267-271, 273-274, 278-279, 281, 283, 285, 291, 298, 309 parousia 157, 199, 271-272, 311-312 parricide 23, 32, 84, 125, 142 passion 1, 5-7, 34-36, 49, 51, 53, 62, 67, 76, 81, 105-107, 110, 113-114, 118, 120, 122, 124, 129-130, 134, 136-137, 140, 149, 157-158, 160-161, 163, 168-169, 171, 173-174, 177, 180, 182-185, 189-192, 195196, 202, 204, 206-207, 222, 230. 237242, 246-251, 253-256, 258-264, 266, 268-270, 274-281, 284-285, 289-290, 205, 297-299, 305, 308-311, 313, 314 pathos 3, 73, 84, 92, 107, 109-111, 113114, 121, 142, 153, 169, 173-174, 183185, 195-198, 237, 254, 274, 279, 287 perception 33, 53, 58, 119-121, 123, 125, 129-130, 132-133, 171, 198, 218, 257, 262, 274-275, 277, 304 peripateia 73, 199 pharmakos 15-17 philia 153 photography 160 phronùsis 11, 14, 21, 26, 33, 46, 63, 74, 88, 91, 108, 111, 117, 119, 122-123, 126133, 135, 137, 248, 274, 278, 283-284, 288 physics 230 physis 14, 48, 66-69, 72, 80, 102, 110 pity 62, 69, 73-74, 76, 78, 81, 92, 146-148, 189, 190-191, 193-194, 198 pleasure 37, 73-79, 89-91, 108, 119-121, 124, 127, 130-131, 133, 175, 230, 247, 281, 291, 303 plot 5, 24, 73, 75, 81, 89, 102, 190, 200-201, 232, 312 pornography 222 possession 22, 34, 36, 55, 77, 98, 100, 106, 110, 163, 167, 174, 184, 204, 231, 233, 236, 251, 284, 305, 307-310 possibility 2, 13, 20, 29, 71, 91, 93, 96, 105-106, 111, 114, 126, 130, 141, 149, 153-154, 167-159, 161, 171, 175-176,

181, 185, 189, 196, 208, 213, 217, 219, 222, 224, 226-227, 232-233, 240, 243244, 246-247, 251-254, 258, 262, 264, 268, 272-273, 279-281, 285, 289, 295, 299, 302, 305, 313 praxis 11, 130-131, 140, 207, 315 pregnancy 89, 152, 163, 289, 316 prime mover 112, 161, 280, 311 providence 186, 185-187, 222, 225-227, 229, 258 pseudonym 2, 5, 7-8, 140, 158, 163, 167, 189, 209, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 247, 249, 251, 253, 257, 259, 261, 263-264, 270, 286, 293-297, 300-302, 304-307, 310, 314 psuchù 34-35, 47-55, 57, 59, 62-64, 67, 93-103, 105-106, 126, 128-129, 132, 136, 217, 221, 247 psychology 2-3, 5-9, 47-53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63-65, 67, 69, 71, 74, 78, 80, 82-82, 93-97, 99, 101, 103-108, 112, 116, 135, 145, 209, 212, 217-218, 237, 239-241, 243-251, 253, 255, 257, 259-261, 263, 265, 268, 271, 291, 300 purification 16, 19, 20, 23, 40, 41, 44, 74-77, 79, 92-93, 98, 101-102, 105, 149, 168, 191-192, 194, 204, 235 Pythagoreanism 48, 52, 55, 79, 92-93, 96, 99-100, 105, 110, 193, 264, 275-276, 321 recollection 99, 158-162, 166-167, 170, 213, 220, 222, 234, 235, 239, 261, 266, 270-271, 287-288, 302 remedy 18, 288 repetition 160, 162, 178, 199, 206, 213, 217, 220-222, 237, 240, 251, 256, 288, 305, 317, 321, 326 representation 13, 18-19, 44, 56, 84, 160, 181-182, 192, 200, 230, 233, 249, 279, 283, 289, 292, 299, 306 repression 2, 47, 62, 143, 161, 224, 288 reversal 18-19, 29, 71, 73, 91, 130, 135, 169, 182, 185, 201 rite; ritual 15-18, 23-24, 28, 44, 71, 7677, 79, 99, 100-102, 104, 142, 164-165, 179, 197, 202, 213, 223, 235, 315 romanticism 114, 160-162, 165-166, 168-169, 172-173, 178, 180, 219, 222, 238, 242, 263-264, 280, 308

Index of Subjects

sacrifice 16-18, 21, 38-40, 154, 157, 163164, 167, 172, 176, 178-179, 182, 188, 193-194, 196-199, 202, 206, 223, 228, 258, 284, 294, 312-315 salighed 7, 44, 265, 292 secrecy 8, 53, 112, 150-154, 161, 169, 188, 197-198, 201, 206, 226, 235, 256, 266, 286, 294-295 self-deception 185 sex 66-68, 96, 104, 119, 164, 174-175, 178, 181, 215-218, 221-222, 230, 246, 284-285 shaman; shamanism 92, 97-101, 105-106, 113, 138, 265 sick; sickness 2, 12-13, 15-17, 19-22, 27, 38-39, 41, 77, 115, 117, 124, 126, 148, 167, 172, 189, 197, 232, 236, 241, 251-254, 256, 265, 294, 296 sin 80, 149-150, 157, 166, 202, 211-214, 216-218, 221-22, 226-227, 229, 243-244, 246-247, 255-256, 258, 260, 268, 272, 274, 279, 281, 283, 288, 290, 311 sophia 27, 122, 128, 136, 213 sophism 37, 48, 65, 70-71, 83, 106, 110, 119, 184, 219, 226, 249, 261, 265, 220 sophrosynù 68 soul 3, 6-8, 14, 17, 20, 31, 34, 35, 47-80, 91-133, 136, 137, 177, 184, 202, 216, 220, 221, 230-232, 234, 237-239, 241-243, 245-251, 253-268, 270, 274-278, 281, 290, 308, 321 sparagmos 105 stoicism 5, 74, 107, 237, 276 style 134, 177, 226, 261, 278-279, 301, 306 subjectivity 141, 143, 148-150, 152-155, 170, 177, 187, 192, 196, 214, 225, 227, 256, 264, 275, 278-279, 283, 285-287, 289 talios 178 technù 3, 48, 72, 80, 122, 126, 128, 240, 246, 255, 277 teleology 25, 67, 74, 77, 93, 112, 118, 156, 188, 199, 205, 252, 266, 283, 289, 291 telos 6-7, 38, 118, 131, 141, 153, 165, 184, 197, 199, 201, 230, 248, 259, 265, 276, 281-284, 286 temporality 116, 132-133, 225, 232-234, 274, 286, 293

335

terror 1, 7, 19, 22, 24, 36-37, 56-57, 89-90, 165-169, 172-173, 177-179, 181, 188, 199, 204, 227, 234, 263, 289, 305 Thargelia 15-16 the comic; comedy 18-19, 98, 140-141, 143, 146, 155-156, 163, 167-168, 171-178, 180, 182-186, 189, 195-197, 207, 210212, 220-221, 225, 232, 242, 245, 255, 270, 285-287, 289, 296, 307, 315 the moment 222, 232-235, 238-239, 253, 262, 269, 271, 279, 283, 285, 290, 309 the press 303, 307 the public 303 the unconscious 29, 37, 62, 85, 97, 102, 105, 125, 151, 153, 165, 174, 188, 218, 292 the will; willing 226, 254-258, 263, 274 theatre 13, 18, 65, 70, 76, 79, 91, 93, 107, 138, 180, 185, 187, 191-193, 212-214, 238-239, 286, 289, 292, 295-296, 305-206, 312, 314 theogony 14, 52, 97, 99, 102-103, 162 theoria 20 therapy 5, 48, 75, 77, 79, 100, 105, 119, 126, 127, 205, 232, 245, 250 thumos 35, 39, 51, 53, 55, 58, 62-63, 67, 97-98, 110, 117-118, 120-121, 123, 133, 254 Titans 52, 97, 102, 104, 295 to kalon 120, 131 transcendence 2-3, 37, 48, 106, 110, 134, 137, 153, 162, 213, 218, 260, 267, 273, 283, 290, 299, 311 trauma 177, 216, 271, 288 truth 14, 22-23, 26-31, 37-38, 40-43, 45, 71, 97, 115, 116, 122-123, 130, 151-152, 164, 173, 183, 185, 204, 206, 208, 222, 233, 238, 267, 270, 277, 280, 282, 285, 291, 295, 301, 303, 311, 314 tuchù 19, 38, 79, 88, 90, 111-112, 116, 134, 137 universal 14-15, 29, 44, 68-69, 74, 84, 97-98, 104, 117, 124-126, 133, 143-145, 149, 152-153, 155-157, 162, 168, 182, 191, 197, 199-201, 206, 214-215, 220, 223, 225, 228, 267, 286, 293 violence 2, 14, 21, 38, 52, 64, 68, 78, 80, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 113-114, 147, 154-155, 167, 170-172, 180, 196-197, 207, 284, 300, 312-313, 315

336

Index of Subjects

virginity 152, 174, 223, 299 virtue 4,-7, 28-30, 66, 74, 79, 91, 93, 96, 105, 107-108, 111-112, 120-122, 127, 129-134, 136-137, 145, 148, 156, 168, 184, 189, 213, 225, 234-235, 244, 246, 248, 251-252, 257-260, 265-275, 277-279, 281-283, 285, 287, 289-291, 303 voluntary; involuntary 23, 83-86, 8889, 109-111, 113-115, 117, 125, 130, 174, 178, 200, 257, 274 war 57, 223, 288

woman 22, 31, 43, 59, 64, 66, 77, 117, 161, 164, 175-176, 178, 183, 216, 220221, 227, 241-242, 46-247, 289 wonder 7, 56-57, 73, 89-90, 165-166, 169-170, 172-173, 181, 185, 188, 227, 247-248, 250-251, 267-268, 273 worship 55, 98, 162, 164-166, 169, 172, 213, 220, 239, 258, 285, 308-309, 312 writing 2-3, 8, 62, 66, 109, 148, 191, 214, 218, 260, 293-300, 302, 305-309, 311, 313-316 zoù 33, 104