Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Philosophy)

Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses

‘Pattison makes a compelling case for giving close attention to these much neglected texts. In so doing he makes a case for finding a unity in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. His deep learning and lucid writing combine to give us a text as delightful as it is challenging.’ Merol Westphal, Fordham University ‘The “upbuilding discourses” have long been the Cinderella texts of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Yet in his original and impressive new study, George Pattison controversially argues that these relatively little read and discussed “talks” provide the optimal perspective in which the meaning and contemporary significance of Kierkegaard’s authorship can be assessed. Pattison makes some intriguing suggestions about the ways in which the discourses illuminate Kierkegaard’s much better-known pseudonymous works, as well as his explicitly Christian writings. This is thus a book that opens up numerous issues requiring further debate and discussion. It should be read by all with an interest in Kierkegaard.’ John Lippit, University of Hertfordshire

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy 1 The Scotch Metaphysics A century of Enlightenment George E. Davie 2 Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses Philosophy theology, literature George Pattison

Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses Philosophy, theology, literature

George Pattison

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2002 George Pattison All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-21657-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27278-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–28370–1 (Print Edition)

For Hilary, again ‘always the same about the same’

Contents

Acknowledgements Conventions

ix xi

Introduction

1

1 Kierkegaard’s right hand

12

2 The human condition

35

3 Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime

65

4 Before God

93

5 The language of upbuilding

118

6 The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses

141

7 Building up love’s ruins

169

8 Love’s witness

193

Bibliography Index

220 224

Acknowledgements

Many of the ideas and interpretations of texts presented here have been worked out through a number of conferences, seminars, discussions with students and in articles and contributions to collections. The discussion of the sublime in Chapter 3 reflects my contribution ‘Sublimity and the Experience of Freedom in Kierkegaard’ to Giles, J. (ed.) Kierkegaard and Freedom, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000. The treatment of the personification of the discourse in Chapter 6 is developed from the article ‘ “Who is the Discourse?” A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature’ Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993) pp. 28–45, while the exploration of the relationship between the subjunctive and the imperative in the same chapter largely follows the article ‘The Theory and Practice of Language and Communication in Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses’ Kierkegaardiana 19 (1998) pp. 81–94. Chapter 7, ‘Building on Love’s Ruins’, substantially reproduces the article ‘A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses’ in the Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte (Journal for the History of Modern Theology) 3 (1996) pp. 185–202. The closing section of the final chapter similarly reproduces a significant part of the article ‘Representing Love: From Poetry to Martyrdom’ Kierkegaardiana 22 (2002). I am grateful to the editors of these volumes and journals and to C. A. Reitzel (publishers of Kierkegaardiana) and to Walter de Gruyter (publishers of the Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte) for permission to reproduce these materials. I am singularly indebted to the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen for giving me time and space to work this material into a book and to King’s College, Cambridge, for giving me leave to take the opportunity provided by the Research Centre. Naming individuals would be invidious: I have learned a lot not only from established scholars but also from students of every level of achievement. In any existential enquiry, such as (I hope) this is, one uses and develops insights and arguments drawn from a still wider circle of experience and acquaintance. Writing them down is one way of returning the grace and favour of all that has been garnered in such ways and of building up the community of scholars and of friends. I should, however, record my thanks to Jamie Ferreira and Ed Mooney, who have read through and commented on parts of the manuscript of the book.

x

Acknowledgements

Thanks of a different kind go to the Revd Ole Askov Olsen and the Church Council of Eliaskirken in Copenhagen for permission to use Maria Thymann’s painting ‘Indgangsbøn I Eliaskirken’ (Opening prayer in Elias Church) as a cover illustration, and to Thomas Østergaard, whose photograph of this work was made available for this purpose. The painting serves as an eloquent epitome of Kierkegaard’s claim that his authorship came to rest at the foot of the altar and I am entirely confident that he would have approved the very mixed company that Maria Thymann depicts also finding their rest on the altar steps. George Pattison Department of Theology University of Århus

Conventions

Citing references to Kierkegaard has been a perennial problem. I have chosen, where possible, to follow the latest edition of his works, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, represented in the text as SKS followed by volume and page number. I have added in square brackets the corresponding page number in the (now complete) translation overseen by Howard and Edna Hong of Kierkegaard’s Writings. Where a work by Kierkegaard has not yet appeared in SKS I have referred to the third edition, SV (Samlede Værker) 3, again followed by volume and page number and, in square brackets, by a reference to the corresponding Hong volume. I have followed the Hongs’ use of English titles and am hopeful that the volume to which reference is being made is readily identifiable. In the case of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers I have used the standard reference system for the Heiberg, Kuhr and Torsting edition. Occasionally, where a passage from an exceptionally long entry is being cited, I have also given the page number. The index volume to the Hongs’ six-volume selection from the journals and papers gives the corresponding references to their numeration of entries. In the, as yet, relatively few cases where this is available I have also added the reference to journal entries printed in SKS, introduced by double capitalised letters (e.g. AA, BB, etc.). In each case the translations of these and of other foreign language titles are my own. Full details of these sources are given in the bibliography.

Introduction

The general aim of this book is to give an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding (or edifying1) writings as providing the optimal perspective within which to consider the meaning of his authorship as a whole and therewith a basis for assessing his significance for our own time.2 Those who are familiar with scholarly debates concerning the internal coherence of Kierkegaard’s authorship will instantly recognise this as a controversial position that will need to be defended on a number of fronts. For a start, the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses are undoubtedly the poor relations of Kierkegaard scholarship and have been consistently under studied. In Being and Time Heidegger wrote that: In the nineteenth century Søren Kierkegaard explicitly seized upon the problem of existence as an existentiell problem and thought it through in a penetrating fashion. But the existential problematic was so alien to him that, as regards his ontology, he remained completely dominated by Hegel and by ancient philosophy as he saw it. Thus there is more to be learned philosophically from his “edifying” writings, than from his theoretical ones – with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety.3 However, not even the authority of Heidegger has prompted philosophers to pay much attention to these works, and those who write about Kierkegaard from a theological point of view have tended to pass the early upbuilding works by in favour of his later explicitly Christian works (this distinction between what is ‘merely’ upbuilding and what is decisively Christian will become clearer as we proceed).4 Of course, there are reasons for this neglect. Compared with the ‘poetic’ character of many of the pseudonymous works and, for that matter, with the later ‘Christian’ discourses for the Friday communion or with the lilies and the birds, the earlier ‘upbuilding’ discourses are decidedly prosaic and often rambling. Collections of nineteenth-century sermons are probably among the least-read works held in library stacks, and it would appear that these sermonlike discourses belong with them and for the same reasons. So why choose these particular texts as the focus of our study, these ‘dull’, edifying works that

2

Introduction

even lovers of Kierkegaard so often pass by in silence? Surely this is not what excited our own first interest in Kierkegaard? Were we not rather seduced as adolescents by Either/Or or the journals and papers, in which Kierkegaard demonstrates his virtuosity in the many moods and tropes of boredom, irony, intoxication, eroticism and aesthetic enthusiasm? Or, if we are philosophers, was it not perhaps the acuteness of his analysis of the epistemological weakness of Hegelian idealism in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that first gripped us, or else the hyperbolic accentuation of the basic dilemmas of ethics in such works as Fear and Trembling? And if we are Christians, will it not have been the radical Christianity of the later Kierkegaard that aroused us against the halfmeasures of bourgeois Christianity, as it also inspired so many who suffered under the totalitarian tyrannies of the twentieth century? Surely, then, whether or not we believe that the authorship was successful in battling through to a religious conclusion (as Kierkegaard seems to have wanted it to), it is in the great pseudonymous works or in the confessional privacy of the journals or in the polemical ‘attack on “Christendom” ’ that ‘Kierkegaard’ – the name of the matter to be thought, as Heidegger might have put it – is to be found. Putting it very crudely, if Kierkegaard’s religious writings had been somehow lost to posterity and we had only the pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard would still rank as one of the great modern writers. Quite possibly, many commentators would rank him higher than they do, for there would be no embarrassment over his Christian hang-ups. On the other hand, if we had only his religious writings, there might be some researchers in theology faculties who would write the occasional scholarly article or monograph on them, just as there are those who write about any number of obscure religious thinkers, but Kierkegaard would never have become ‘Kierkegaard’. Despite this unpromising beginning, there are nevertheless good reasons for spending time with the discourses. After all, in addition to Heidegger, we have the word of Kierkegaard himself, who in his retrospective ‘report to history’ entitled The Point of View for my Work as an Author refers to them as the works of his right hand – in contrast to the pseudonyms, which are called the works of his left (although, as he adds, the world took with its right hand what he offered with his left, and with its left what he offered in his right). These, in other words, are the works that constitute his direct communication, as opposed to the indirect communication of the pseudonyms. But perhaps that itself has discouraged potential readers. Isn’t it part of the fun of reading Kierkegaard that we relish being teased by his irony and humour and never know quite how seriously to take him – so why allow ourselves to get bogged down in texts that boringly mean what they say? And perhaps, remembering the pseudonym Johannes Climacus’ advocacy of Lessing’s view that we should prefer what God offers with His left hand (the infinite pursuit of truth) rather than what He gives with His right (the possession of truth), we should read these remarks in The Point of View as being themselves a little bit ironic. However, I shall claim, the discourses are not quite as direct as Kierkegaard makes them sound, and there is an important sense in which they too are indirect communication.

Introduction 3 This, of course, has the corollary that the idea of there being such a thing as direct communication anywhere in Kierkegaard’s authorship virtually vanishes, a point that not only has important implications for how we read Kierkegaard at a literary level but also for Kierkegaard’s understanding of the intellectual, ethical and communicative dimensions of the God-relationship.5 I shall address the question as to the place of the upbuilding works in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole in Chapter 1, and the nature of the communicative act that they collectively constitute will, in effect, be the matter of this book as a whole. More urgently, I wish to draw attention to two working assumptions that are decisive not only for the overall shape of my approach to Kierkegaard but also for my view of his place in the history of ideas. The first is that despite the explicitly religious nature of his ultimate concerns Kierkegaard can consistently be read within the general horizons of a philosophical or humanistic approach. The second is that despite its extraordinary internal variety Kierkegaard’s authorship does constitute an essential unity. Even a limited acquaintance with Kierkegaard might suggest that the claim that he can be read philosophically is rather odd. Even if there are philosophically interesting arguments or assertions to be found scattered here and there throughout Kierkegaard’s works, isn’t his very distinctiveness as a religious writer to do with the way in which he dismisses the claim of the human – and especially of human reason – to play any role in determining the things of faith, which, for their part, are inscribed under such rubrics as the paradoxical, the absurd or the incomprehensible, and are described as essentially offensive to human thought, values and sentiments? And isn’t his principal ‘philosophical’ achievement to have derided the attempts of philosophers to play any part at all in debates about religious (and even, for that matter, moral) truth? And why – despite Heidegger’s teasing comment – should we look specifically to these sermon-like discourses for philosophical instruction? We shall, of course, not be surprised to discover that it is much too simplistic to talk about a crude opposition to all forms of philosophy on Kierkegaard’s part. He himself frequently invoked a sharp distinction between two very different ways of philosophising. On the one hand there is the modern, speculative, ‘German’ style of philosophy, usually represented by the eponymous figure of Hegel. Philosophy of this kind is academic, doctrinal and humourless, and, Kierkegaard believes, utterly excludes any genuine concern for ethics, personal involvement and transcendence. But against this there is also what he calls the Greek style of philosophising, supremely (though not exclusively) embodied in the person of Socrates. This is a deeply human form of philosophy that keeps the existing individual in view and never succumbs to selfforgetfulness; it is always ethically concerned, not in a ponderous, doctrinal way, but playfully, ironically and humorously. Where speculative philosophy believes itself to be capable of arriving at knowledge of the absolute, Greekstyle philosophising remains constantly aware of its own boundaries and ultimate ignorance. Where speculative philosophy finds expression in the lecture and the encyclopaedia, Greek-style philosophising engages in dialogue and

4

Introduction

conversation. In this respect Kierkegaard says of Socrates that ‘… Socrates does not begin most of his investigations at the centre but on the periphery, in life’s infinitely interconnected and variegated motley …’ It is precisely this procedure, Kierkegaard adds, that demands the characteristically ‘Socratic art of questioning or, recalling the necessity of dialogue for Platonic philosophy, the art of conversing’ (SKS 1, p. 94 [32–3]). This may seem a long way removed from the world of the upbuilding discourses, but is it? Leaving aside the question of content, we may note that the discourses contain stylistic elements that echo what Kierkegaard says about the Greek style. As we shall see at greater length in the body of this study, they are not ‘doctrinal’ (in the sense that they do not expound the theoretical meaning of religious teachings); they are resolutely focused on individual situations and appeal to the reader on the basis of his or her own life experience and understanding; they therefore start within the ‘variegated motley’ of lived experience, considering now this side and now that of the point at issue, and they seek quite explicitly to engage the reader in dialogue. In the preface to the three discourses of 1844, Kierkegaard writes of the reader who will ‘give consideration to what is said and bring the cold thoughts to burn once more, and to transform the talk (Tale) into a conversation (Samtale) …’ (SKS 5, p. 231 [231]), and throughout the discourses we can see examples of how Kierkegaard deploys a variety of literary means in order to inject such a dialogical element. These means include the use of question and answer, the juxtaposition of contrary views, and peopling the discourses with personified figures and fictional characters. Of course, these are written texts and do not pretend, in the manner of the Platonic dialogue, to imitate any actual conversation. Kierkegaard was, clearly, aware that Socrates did not write, but is no less conscious of the fact that he himself is operating within a book culture and that his task is not simply or naively to copy the Socratic example but to produce an analogue to Socrates’ activity that is appropriate to the social, intellectual and cultural context of his time. The claim that Kierkegaard’s work has an essential unity may, at first, seem no less odd than the assertion that the upbuilding discourses can be read as (in some sense at least) philosophical texts. There are many, especially among those who come to the texts with a literary orientation, who would simply deny such a claim. In this vein, Roger Poole has asserted that Kierkegaard’s multiple pseudonyms are fundamentally distinct voices whose various points of view cannot be harmonised but, following Kierkegaard’s own stated ‘wish’ and ‘prayer’, must be kept forever apart.6 To impose any kind of philosophical or theological unity on the authorship is, therefore, to become guilty of what Poole terms a ‘blunt’ reading that utterly destroys the delicate complexity of Kierkegaard’s many-faceted writerly achievement. Woe to those commentators who unite what Kierkegaard himself has so determinedly put asunder! In a different vein, Joakim Garff has – brilliantly – taken apart the unitary reading of the authorship proposed by Kierkegaard himself in his retrospective selfinterpretation The Point of View for my Work as an Author, suggesting that this

Introduction 5 work too, for all its apparent directness (Kierkegaard called it a ‘report to history’) is a kind of fiction that smoothes over the actual discontinuities and masks the fissures and crevices of the texts themselves. Garff’s reading is part of a larger project of interpreting Kierkegaard’s writings as a kind of selfinvention by Kierkegaard, understanding the authorship as bio-graphy in the sense of the writing of a life or the creation of a life in writing.7 A not dissimilar claim was made a generation ago by another Danish scholar, Henning Fenger. Fenger’s approach was more narrowly philological than that of Garff, and took as its motif the Cartesian motto (used by Kierkegaard as the subtitle for an uncompleted biography of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus) de omnibus dubitandum est – ‘everything is to be doubted’. Fenger’s study was entitled Kierkegaard, The Myths and their Origins, and he showed in some detail how a number of widely held assumptions about Kierkegaard’s life and work could not stand up to a careful scrutiny of the texts themselves.8 Fenger’s method is probably too specialist and too microscopic to justify making The Myths and their Origins mandatory reading for anyone coming to Kierkegaard for the first time, but he serves an important warning to those who would overlook the problematic nature of the Kierkegaardian source material. The issue of The Point of View (which Poole simply rejects and Garff radically reinterprets) is especially relevant in the context of the present study, since this contains some of Kierkegaard’s own clearest comments on the centrality of the upbuilding works (including, as we have seen, the claim that these are the works of his right hand). So, is the pursuit of a unitary reading inevitably going to be blunt? Is any unity we may find in Kierkegaard going to turn out to be no more than a fiction, whether it is a fiction originating with Kierkegaard or ourselves? Much depends, of course, on what is meant here by unity. If this means that Kierkegaard’s writing is dominated by or culminates in a single, propositionally determinable teaching, whether philosophical or theological, or is the expression of a single overriding existential passion such as melancholy, then we might well be in the domain of blunt, reductive readings. If, for example, the ‘meaning’ of Kierkegaard could be condensed into a single formula (like, perhaps, the ‘algebraic’ definition of the self in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death or the assertion of the infinite qualitative difference between God and man found in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and taken over by Karl Barth as the epitome of his own ‘system’), then it would seem, somehow, as if the richly textured diversity of the Kierkegaardian corpus had turned out to be worth less than might have been thought, as if it were all no more than a teachingaid, a ladder that we could throw away once we had arrived at the truth thus defined. All that Kierkegaard says about indirect communication, and all that he produced in the way of indirect communication, would be radically devalued, and would emerge as no more than a tactical concession to his local circumstances rather than as something necessitated by the very nature of what it was he was seeking to communicate. Such a formulaic approach is – one would like to say self-evidently – not

6

Introduction

going to serve us well in really coming to terms with any major figure of the philosophical, theological or literary tradition. Although it is an approach that may, arguably, be necessitated by the requirements of teaching (particularly in an age of quantifiable ‘quality assessment’), it cannot prove satisfying in the case of a thinker, such as Kierkegaard, who operates simultaneously on so many different levels. Confusingly, however, it is once more Kierkegaard himself who gives a lead to those who like such things, having been extremely fertile in coming up with one-liners that, supposedly, captured the whole meaning of the authorship. These can be found in both his published and his unpublished works. ‘What I really am …’ ‘What has really been my life’s work …’ are the kinds of phrases that recur constantly in the journals, especially from the late 1840s onwards. To add to the confusion, however, these programmatic selfassessments are not always consistent with each other. They open the way both to those who would see the authorship as being fundamentally ‘about’ what it is to become a self, and to those who would see it as, for example, humbling one’s self in fear and trembling under the inscrutable will of God. And, to confuse matters further, Kierkegaard also wrote in the journals that no one would ever find anywhere in his papers the ‘secret note’ that would explain it all (see Pap. IV A 85/DD 95). But perhaps it is simply a mistake to look for a unity of this kind, and perhaps Kierkegaard himself did less than justice to his actual achievement on those occasions when, for whatever reasons, he attempted to come up with such programmatic statements. Fortunately, however, this by no means exhausts the possibilities of establishing a unitary reading of a given body of literature. Maybe you have had the experience of going into an unfamiliar art gallery and, as you wander from room to room you suddenly chance upon a work you instantly recognise as a Rembrandt, a Watteau or a Cézanne. You have never seen this particular work before, neither ‘in the flesh’ nor in reproduction, and yet you have no doubt as to its identity. The style is unmistakable. Irrespective of its subject, whether it is a portrait, an action scene or a landscape, it bears the stamp of this particular master (indeed, it might be argued that this is precisely the characteristic of a genuine master that each of their works, no matter how great or how small, bears their distinctive signature). Now, of course, the attribution is not unmistakable in an absolute sense. Mistakes are often made. The ‘Rembrandt’ turns out to be ‘school of Rembrandt’, the Cézanne turns out to be a forgery. But these mistakes are corrigible – and they are corrigible in terms of the criteria that we, perhaps intuitively, called upon in assigning this work to this artist in the first place, although refined and extended. In other words, the possibility of error does not mean that there is no such thing as a distinctive signature or style, since it is precisely in the light of a more adequate view of what exactly constitutes that signature or style that the error is discovered. So too in the case of Kierkegaard. I suggest that, for all the differences between the pseudonyms or between the pseudonymous and the signed works, each piece of Kierkegaard’s writing has its distinctive watermark, whether we look for this in his use of grammar, vocabulary, manner of expression,

Introduction 7 thematic continuity, or whatever. As in the case of our imaginary Rembrandts and Cézannes, it will always be possible to debate just what it is that constitutes this watermark, but the possibility of such an argument is already an argument for the reality of what is at issue. This sentence, we say, just could not have been written by Hegel, despite the prevalence of Hegelian terminology, nor could that sentence have been written by Bishop Mynster, despite a certain analogy to Mynster’s spiritual outlook. No, these sentences could only, and unmistakably, have been written by Kierkegaard. Even if this point is taken, however, we may seem merely to have established a kind of writerly unity for Kierkegaard’s authorship. It does not of itself do much to secure anything that might count for its conceptual or philosophical unity. After all, it may well be that, say, Agatha Christie’s work also has a unity of the kind we have been discussing, but that does not make her interesting philosophically. However, as we shall explore in more detail later, Kierkegaard is a writer for whom the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ are, to a considerable extent, inseparable and, as I have already claimed, it is precisely the stylistics of the upbuilding discourses that will provide some of the most important clues to their philosophical significance. Something still seems to be missing, however, and we may approach this by means of Heidegger’s assertion that every genuine thinker thinks only a single thought.9 In making this typically provocative assertion, Heidegger is, in the first instance, seeking to distinguish those he calls thinkers in an eminent sense from those who are ‘mere’ researchers, labourers in the positivistically conceptualised fields of the natural and humanistic sciences, whose efforts are directed towards the production of ever new ‘results’ or ‘applications’. A particular research project will, naturally, have its own proper unity, but this is a unity of a narrow and artificial kind, deriving from having set up the project in such-and-such a way according to such-and-such a determinate aim and with such-and-such determinate methodological procedures decided upon in advance. The project having been brought to completion, the ‘good’ researcher will then be ready to move on to the next, where the pattern repeats itself. Such research, no matter how brilliant the discoveries and inventions to which it leads, will never, in Heidegger’s judgement, accomplish more than a very one-sided take on our being-in-the-world. Neither will it be able to give the researcher’s own life any decisive orientation, still less yield a coherent understanding of our common condition. All essential thinking, according to Heidegger, moves us towards an essential decision concerning what must be most momentous for us. Now, if there is a certain romantic (or just pedagogic) hyperbole in play here, Heidegger’s point helps us to see why a unitary reading of Kierkegaard is something to be desired. Here, as elsewhere, there is a basic requirement of coherence, in terms both of structure and of development. That is to say, the significance of a thinker will be closely correlated with the maximum achievement of diachronic and synchronic unity-in-diversity. This, however, by no means excludes but, on the contrary, demands genuine diversity and development.

8

Introduction

Unity, then, does not at all mean the same as uniformity or monotony. On the contrary, it is precisely the diversity of matter and the scale of development that makes the achievement of unity interesting and important. In the context of his reading of Nietzsche (a pre-eminent example for Heidegger of a thinker in the strong sense), Heidegger says that, precisely by virtue of the power with which Nietzsche thinks his single thought, his thinking is, for us, ‘a feast’. Its unity is not proved by the fact that we can summarise it or define it, but by the experience of its inexhaustibility each time we return to it.10 To claim that Kierkegaard’s thought is essentially and decisively unitary is not to reduce it to a paragraph in the system. The kind of systematic unity that is simply imposed on its material in an extrinsic way – for which Kierkegaard, rightly or wrongly, criticises the Hegelians – is a caricature of the kind of unity that can be thought of as ‘a feast’, that gives us something really to think about. It is, of course, still possible to reproach Heidegger with using the principle of unity in a reductive way. Derrida challenged the application of this requirement to a thinker such as Nietzsche, who was so given to masks and to a plurality of intellectual identities, and, interestingly for us, noted in passing that Kierkegaard stands alongside Nietzsche as one who cannot be brought into the range of any such strategy of unification.11 But how would it be if we accepted that Nietzsche’s thought, or Kierkegaard’s, was a simple chaos, a mass of disconnected words without any kind of significant unity? Surely we not only would not, we could not read them. If, like all texts (as some might claim), they continually deconstruct their own conscious intentions, they nevertheless do so in a determinate way, not in an arbitrary way. Deconstruction does not mean that anything can happen or be said at any time. An essentially similar point can be made with regard to another influential source of contemporary literary theory: Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s principle of polyphony is, I believe, extremely fruitful for the interpretation of Kierkegaard, as Bakhtin himself seems to have recognised.12 What is perhaps most interesting and relevant about applying this principle in the present context is that, although it is clearly anti-reductive and anti-monological, it is not the simple privileging of disorder. Polyphony is not sheer noise. Listening to Byrd or Tallis is very different from listening to classical composers such as Bach or Mahler, and it is clear that in some periods and for some listeners they have been heard as merely primitive and lacking in what is most proper to musical form. But we can now hear their music as music and as having a genuinely musical form, albeit one of a very different kind from the form that derives from the laws of harmonic progression. Similarly Bakhtin’s categories of dialogue and double-voiced discourse call precisely for a closer specification of the internal structuring of the text, not for the repudiation of structure. In taking the upbuilding discourses as the focus of this study, then, I am not simply attempting to write a research monograph but to establish a perspective that enables us to make maximum sense of Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and to show why and how this perspective can be understood as ‘philosophical’ in at least one well-accredited meaning of the word. That perspective is, as I

Introduction 9 have made clear, derived from a reading of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and Kierkegaard’s other upbuilding writings. This does not mean that if we have the upbuilding discourses to hand then the rest of the authorship is superfluous. My point is not that these texts contain all that is interesting and important in Kierkegaard, as if the quintessence of his thought were distilled into these relatively few pages. It is rather that these texts provide a standpoint from which best to see the unity that holds together the whole, including, necessarily and pre-eminently, the extraordinary achievement of the pseudonymous works. Or, to put it another way, as we read our way into the discourses, we find ourselves on a trajectory along which, if we track its course with an appropriate attentiveness, we may attain the best available view of the largest possible range of Kierkegaard’s writings and so arrive at the optimal view of ‘Kierkegaard’ himself, the matter that his writings give us to think on. Although a complete mapping of the network of interrelationships between the discourses and the rest of the authorship would, in the nature of the case, require nothing less than a complete and close reading of the authorship in its entirety, I shall conclude this study by attempting to trace some of the lines leading from the discourses to other parts of the authorship in order to show something of what such an approach might yield. This, finally, will put us in a position to assess the strong claim motivating my undertaking this study, that Kierkegaard is a paradigmatic thinker for the regeneration of moral discourse in a situation determined by the collapse or problematisation of the grand narratives of religion and social progress and the inability of science to move beyond an essentially reductionist approach to religion and ethics. Before reaching this point, however, we need to have a clearer idea about the nature of the discourses themselves. In Chapter 1 I examine more closely what Kierkegaard means by his claim that these are the works of his right hand and, as such, deserve a privileged place in the overall mapping of his authorship. Readers who are less interested in the internal workings of Kierkegaard’s authorial strategy may, however, wish to go straight to Chapter 2, where I attempt a relatively naïve reading of the discourses as offering a depiction of the human condition. This also involves considering the question whether his view of the human condition is such as to require a religious or mystical experience as an essential part of being ‘upbuilt’. Chapter 3 contains a critical discussion of three ways of reading the discourses philosophically: as an exercise in dialectics, as phenomenology and as a reworking of the (Kantian) idea of the sublime. Chapter 4 offers an alternative approach that understands the central religious ideas of the discourses as functioning in a manner analogous to Kant’s regulative ideals of reason: as moral and religious principles that serve to give measure and direction to living but that do not presuppose any general ontology or any particular world-view. Chapter 5 examines how Kierkegaard’s understanding of language serves the communicative strategy of the discourses, a discussion that is further developed in Chapter 6, focused on Kierkegaard’s rhetoric. As pieces of writing that aim to persuade the reader to accept the ideals embodied in them, the discourses are essentially rhetorical

10

Introduction

works, and the actuality of the situation of moral persuasion and appeal is where we best see both the force and the justification of the position they advance. The specific moral and religious content of the discourses, however, is developed in the context of the recollection of mortality and the experience of love. In this respect the discourses not only offer Kierkegaard’s ‘religion of ethics’ but show that ethics are embedded in what might, loosely, be called a ‘spirituality’, a type of sensibility in which moral decisions and concrete religious commitments are informed by a larger sense of the contours of human life in time. Although Kierkegaard famously argues strongly against attaching any moral worth to preferential love or love based on inclination, Chapter 7 shows how situations of ordinary human love provide the context that best makes sense of this critique. This suggests that Kierkegaard is not calling on us to abandon all affectionate human relationships but, assuming that his readers will necessarily be involved in such relationships, is showing how eros needs the support of a higher and different kind of love. Finally, in Chapter 8 I illustrate how the world of the discourses connects to other parts of Kierkegaard’s authorship: to the pseudonymous works (where I initiate a comparison between Fear and Trembling and the Three Upbuilding Discourses published on the same day), to the later Christian writings (especially some of the later communion discourses and The Sickness unto Death) and to the ideal of radical discipleship, where faith is no longer a matter of hidden inwardness but of public suffering witnessed before the world. This returns us to Socrates, portrayed by Kierkegaard as a witness to truth in a world of cave-dwellers reluctant to exchange their illusions for truth. Socrates thus emerges as a prototype of the Christian witness to love whose testimony is sealed by rejection, persecution and suffering. At some remove from questions of epistemology, ontology and proof, the philosopher and the Christian meet again in their readiness to expose both their arguments and themselves to misrepresentation, abuse and violence at the hands of those they seek to persuade. Notes 1 The term ‘upbuilding’, favoured by Kierkegaard’s most recent translators, has had a controversial reception, and some have accused it of being over-literal and inelegant. Compared with the older ‘edifying’ it does have the advantage of reflecting the sense of the Danish op-byggelige – the literal sense of which becomes an important focus for some of Kierkegaard’s own reflections on what it means to be ‘built up’ – as well as avoiding what many find to be the somewhat prim connotations of ‘edifying’. Interestingly, Mynster also comments in his ‘Remarks on the Art of Preaching’ that divine service should, above all, serve the edification of the congregation and also that ‘We can scarcely find a more suitable term with which to express what we chiefly require of a preacher than “Talks” (Taler) …’ See J. P. Mynster (1852) Blandede Skrifter, Vol. 1, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, p. 88. 2 Although the category of the upbuilding is represented in many phases and aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship, I am taking it here as primarily defined by the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, written within the same period as the early pseudonymous works, together with such additional texts as Upbuilding Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and, to a certain extent, Works of Love. I am, largely, excluding the later Christian Discourses and the various sets of discourses Kierkegaard wrote for, and sometimes

Introduction

3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

11

delivered at, the penitential communion service held on Friday mornings in Copenhagen’s Church of Our Lady (although I will be including a discussion of the relationship between the earlier upbuilding discourses and these later writings). The reasons for this particular selection will, I hope, become apparent as I proceed. M. Heidegger (1962) Being and Time, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, p. 494. In his study Kierkegaard and Christendom, John Elrod equates Kierkegaard’s ‘religious writings’ with what he calls the ‘second literature’ that Elrod defines as the post-1846, post-Postscript works. He says of these that they are ‘opposed to the more philosophically oriented pseudonymous works published between 1840 [sic.] and 1846’. J. W. Elrod (1980) Kierkegaard and Christendom, Princeton, Princeton University Press, p. xi. Jeremy Walker, in a generally excellent study of Kierkegaard’s religious authorship, distinguishes ‘the early edifying discourses’ from ‘the edifying literature proper’. J. Walker (1985) Kierkegaard: The Descent into God, Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, p. 127. David Gouwens, again addressing the issue of Kierkegaard as a religious author, refers twice as often to the pseudonymous works as to the eighteen upbuilding discourses themselves in a chapter specifically devoted to ‘Becoming Religious: Upbuilding’. See D. J. Gouwens (1996) Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. This debit in the secondary literature is partially offset by N.-J. Cappelørn, H. Deuser and J. Stewart (eds) (2000) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2000, Berlin, de Gruyter, which includes surveys of what has been written on the discourses in English, French, German, Japanese and Danish. However, in the nature of the case, most of the critical essays in the volume are devoted to tightly focused studies of particular aspects of the discourses, rather than using them for an overall interpretation of Kierkegaard. A fine study (though I dissent from the theological framework of Polk’s discussion) of two of the discourses – perhaps the most detailed in the English language – is found in T. H. Polk (1997) The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith, Macon, GA, Mercer University Press.Two very recent studies focusing on the discourses suggest a possible increase in interest in this part of Kierkegaard’s authorship: T. Hagemann (2001) Reden und Existieren: Kierkegaards Antipersuasive Rhetorik, Berlin, Philo; M. W. Sinnett (2000) Restoring the Conversation: Socratic Dialectic in the Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard, St Andrew’s, Theology in Scotland. This point is close to, but is developed differently from, Michael Strawser’s argument that every sentence in Kierkegaard is equally well read as either irony or edification. See M. Strawser (1997) Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification, New York, Fordham University Press. See especially R. Poole (1993) Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press. See J. Garff (1995) ‘Den Søvnløse’: Kierkegaard laest Aestetisk/biografisk, Copenhagen, Reitzel, and idem. (2000) SAK. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard: En Biografi, Copenhagen, Gad [translations of both works in preparation]. See H. Fenger (1980) Kierkegaard, the Myths and their Origins, Newhaven, CT, Yale University Press. M. Heidegger (1991) Nietzsche, Vol. III, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, San Francisco, Harper and Row, p. 4. M. Heidegger (1991) Nietzsche, Vol. I, The Will to Power as Art, San Francisco, Harper and Row, p. 5. J. Derrida (1995) ‘Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions’ in Peter R. Sedgwick, Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, p. 63. For the relationship between Bakhtin and Kierkegaard see, for example, A. Fryszman (1993) ‘ “Teoria kommiunikatsii” Seriona K’erkegora I dialogichkoe mishlenie Bakhtina’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 31: 33–55. See also Chapter 6 below.

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I Kierkegaard’s ‘upbuilding discourses’ were initially published in small sets of two, three and four in 1843 and 1844 and the remainders were subsequently collected and sold as Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses.1 Thereafter Kierkegaard continued to deploy the genre, although often incorporating it into works published as books (e.g. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and Works of Love) and increasingly accentuating the specifically Christian element in them. This already raises the important interpretative question of whether there is a qualitative distinction within the discourse literature between what might be called the more humanistic ‘upbuilding’ works and the more doctrinal ‘Christian’ works, and, if such a distinction is worth making, where exactly the line is to be drawn. Which works are ‘merely’ upbuilding, which exclusively Christian? And within the Christian works themselves, can we identify the continuing presence of upbuilding elements, or are these quite extirpated? It will already be clear from the Introduction that the interpretation offered here is one that refuses to make a final division between the upbuilding and the Christian and that regards even the most radical Christian works as readable in the light of the category of the upbuilding. This, of course, is not to say that there is no development of content, style or method, but simply that this development follows a path whose trajectory is already laid down within the purely upbuilding works. In a later chapter I shall show by a comparative reading of discourses from the earlier and the later periods how the distance between the upbuilding and the radically Christian writings is actually less than it might appear. Here, however, I shall look at the issue primarily in the light of Kierkegaard’s own programmatic comments about the place of the discourses in the authorship, comments that, as we shall see, come from different strata of his work and, since they can by no means easily be harmonised, provoke important interpretative questions. The discourses are akin to sermons in form, but although Kierkegaard does on occasion refer to them in his own drafts as sermons he repeatedly draws attention in the published Forewords to each set of discourses that they are not sermons, giving as a reason that they are written by one who, because he is not

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ordained, does not have legal authority to preach. Paradoxically, Bishop J. P. Mynster, Kierkegaard’s Bishop and Primate of Denmark, brushed Kierkegaard’s disclaimer aside and stated that they were sermons, and, as far as the Danish Church was concerned, no one had greater authority in such matters than Mynster!2 For reasons that will become clearer in the course of this study, Kierkegaard’s insistence on this point has its justification – and not so much as a matter of legal niceties as a pointer to some of his most far-reaching assumptions about the nature of Christian communication. If not exactly sermons however, it is hard to find any precise genre definition that does justice to them: ‘Discourses’ is a term now hallowed by several generations of translations and will probably remain, if only for familiarity’s sake. But – just to get a sense for what we are dealing with here – meditations, addresses or just ‘talks’ (the English term closest to the Danish Taler) might also be possible titles.3 Formally, each of them – following the conventions of contemporary Danish sermons – has an extended prelude leading up to and introducing the text or topic of the discourse and then proceeds to develop this through the remainder, although some repeat the text or its key words, offering a series of variations on it. Many are expositions of texts prescribed for preaching in the liturgical calendar of the Danish Church. Some, but not all, begin or end with prayer. That it is just these particular texts that constitute the unifying thread in Kierkegaard’s authorship and that they are his ‘direct’ communication to the world is a claim we encounter in Kierkegaard’s own writings and, if only for that reason, a claim we should take very seriously. It is one of the characteristics of Kierkegaard’s modernity that he not only wrote but also wrote about his writing. At several points in his authorship, in the published and perhaps even more in the unpublished works, his almost obsessive interest in his own writing, its meaning for himself, for his contemporaries and for posterity, threatens to swamp what might be regarded as his more substantive concerns (though whether this is a genuine dichotomy is, of course, open to question). Thus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus (who, as we shall see, certainly does not know everything about Kierkegaard), he presents a reprise of the whole previous pseudonymous authorship up to that point, together with a commentary on the accompanying upbuilding discourses, that, Climacus guesses, have a certain affinity to the pseudonymous works. Later, in 1848, Kierkegaard also wrote what purports to be a defining account of his literary productivity entitled The Point of View for my Work as an Author, which, however, he did not publish in his lifetime (it was first published in 1859, four years after Søren’s death, by his brother Peter), but in 1851 he did publish two short essays closely related to The Point of View under the title On My Work as an Author. In addition to these sources there are the Forewords to his various works, including the discourses, which provide important pointers to how they should be read, and extensive notes in the journals and papers, including the outlines and drafts for the previously mentioned Lectures on Communication, which he never, in fact, completed or gave.

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Naively, we might assume that a study of such sources would enable us to deliver a decisive verdict on the status and role of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings within the overall economy of his authorship and even to draw some conclusions about the ultimate tendency of that authorship. Who should know better than the author himself what his works are about? But we have grown suspicious of authors. Maybe we no longer even believe in them at all, although a certain memory of their vanished presence still haunts the more genteel districts of the literary universe. Even if we were better disposed to such mythical creatures, however, we might want to make an exception in the case of Kierkegaard. As noted in the Introduction, there is good reason to apply the Cartesian motto de omnibus dubitandum est (‘everything is to be doubted’) to Kierkegaard’s pronouncements about himself and his authorship. In this spirit we may notice some quite significant inconsistencies between the various selfaccountings, as well as between what Kierkegaard says about his writing and that writing itself. Although many commentators have sensed not a little creative misreading at work in these sources, this does not necessarily require us to see him as having deliberately falsified or misrepresented his authorial intentions. More interesting, if less entertaining, would be the view that Kierkegaard was not so much a proto-postmodern self-inventor as a thinker engaged in an ongoing quest to gain clarity and understanding about the meaning of his own words and works, a quest that involved him in experimenting with a variety of self-representations and points of view, and testing these out in relation to such issues as time and eternity, self and world, the individual and God, Christianity and modernity, issues that recur throughout the authorship. In this light Kierkegaard’s various self-explanations may be read not so much as definitive ‘reports to history’ (his own subtitle for The Point of View) as questions, hypotheses, experiments in interpretation – remembering that even in that most ‘direct’ of all Kierkegaardian texts, The Point of View, he acknowledged that it was only as a reader of his own works that he really came to understand what they meant. Not only is this an experience familiar to many authors, but the process is one that lies at the heart of philosophy itself, namely the neverending attempt to reach clarity about what it is we really are saying, an attempt that must involve the philosopher too in an open-ended sequence of clarifications, revisions, even retractions and, in the midst of all this, the acknowledgement of alternative possibilities of understanding. Bearing the motto de omnibus dubitandum est in mind, then, let us see how Kierkegaard himself ‘explained’ the meaning of the upbuilding works. In The Point of View he wrote: [W]hat I truthfully am as a writer is that I am and I was a religious writer, that the whole of my activity as a writer relates to Christianity, to the problem: how to become a Christian, with a direct and indirect polemical take on the monstrous self-deception called Christendom, or [the belief that] in a country more or less all can be more or less Christian. (SV 3 18, p. 81 [23])

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He then describes how, in pursuit of this goal, he found himself forced to adopt two very different but complementary strategies. On the one hand he produced the various aesthetic works. These are what they are and as they are because of the need to meet people where they are, to engage their attention in a manner and on topics that belong to their experience of contemporary reality. In this approach Kierkegaard seemed to join hands with his then recent and universally acclaimed predecessor F. D. E. Schleiermacher, whose Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers of 1799 set out to persuade the cultured élite of Germany of the cogency and truth of Christianity but to do so without invoking what his audience would have regarded as the superstitious or priestly trappings of heteronomous religiosity. But the rhetorical strategy of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic works – aesthetic because he judges the contemporary world to be, in essence, aesthetic – is even more subtle than that of Schleiermacher’s speeches. So, in Either/Or Part I, he portrays the life-style and self-consciousness of post-romantic aestheticism from within, by means of a series of aphorisms, essays, reviews and the novella The Seducer’s Diary, juxtaposed with two letters from a married legal official and a sermon by a country pastor that collectively set out a critique of the position developed in Part I. As Kierkegaard noted, the first part was almost too successful, with people reading The Seducer’s Diary and nothing more. 4 These aesthetic works are also described by Kierkegaard as pseudonymous, indirect and maieutic, and, he says, the works of his left hand. Kierkegaard next suggests that if he had only written works like this between 1843 and 1846 (the period of their publication) and had then repudiated them in order to write exclusively religious works, it could very well seem as if he himself had changed from being nothing but an aesthetic personality and author to being religious, perhaps via some sort of conversion experience. And, in an aesthetic age, many would draw the conclusion that his religious conclusion was simply the result of the inevitable burn-out following upon his hyperactive beginning – a pattern familiar already among romantic poets and perpetuated in the lives of hell-raising rock stars and, Kierkegaard believed, one of modernity’s characteristic stereotypes of the religious life. C. G. Jung agreed, saying many times that religion was typically the problem that engaged people in the second half of life. To avoid such a misunderstanding, Kierkegaard claimed that it was necessary from the very beginning to complement the aesthetic, pseudonymous works with signed works of a directly religious nature, namely the upbuilding discourses we are considering here. These, he says, are the works of his right hand. So, he explains: [T]he duality is there right from the beginning. For from the same period as Either/or we have the two upbuilding discourses. The duality in a deeper sense, that is in the sense of the authorship as a whole, was by no means that which people talked about at the time – [the duality between] the first and second parts of Either/Or. No, the duality was Either/Or – and the two upbuilding discourses. (SV 3 18, p. 86 [30])

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Kierkegaard’s right hand

And, he adds, ‘religiously I was already in the monastery’ (SV 3 18, p. 90 [35]) when Either/Or was written: ‘When I began on Either/Or … I was potentialiter as deeply influenced by the religious as I have ever been.’ (SV 3 18, p. 89 [35]). The two discourses did not, of course, appear strictly simultaneously with Either/ Or, which had three months in which to work its aesthetic magic before being challenged by this little religious work. In fact, although Kierkegaard (and, for that matter, Johannes Climacus) emphasises that the publication of upbuilding works accompanied the pseudonymous works step-by-step, only the Three Upbuilding Discourses of 1843 were actually published on the same day (16 October 1843) as any of the aesthetic works, namely Fear and Trembling and Repetition.5 Nevertheless, in a loose sense, Kierkegaard is justified in claiming that between 1843 and 1846 there was a continuous dual production of, on the one hand, aesthetic works, and, on the other, upbuilding discourses. In 1845 all eighteen of the discourses published in small batches up until then were bound together in a single volume, all the aesthetic works except the Postscript being then already finished. However, ‘what is most decisive often appears as most insignificant’ (SV 3 18, p. 90 [36]) and, to use Kierkegaard’s own image, the world took with its right hand what he offered with his left, and with its left hand what he offered with his right. The distinction between direct and indirect communication as drawn in The Point of View seems, in its own terms, clear enough, and the reasons for defining the upbuilding discourses as direct communication also seem clear and, broadly speaking, reasonable enough. What we are looking at then is, it seems, a direct statement of the meaning indirectly hinted at in the pseudonymous works. But is it that straightforward? De omnibus dubitandum est! For, first, if we actually look at what Kierkegaard himself says elsewhere about indirect communication, and, second, if we look at what the Forewords to the discourses and other sources say about them, and, third, if we look at what is actually in the discourses themselves, a rather different and more complex picture emerges. II We turn first, then, to take a longer look at the question of indirect communication and, especially, at the abortive Lectures on Communication. These are drafts of lectures under the general title of The Dialectic of Ethical and Ethico-Religious Communication written 1847–8 (Kierkegaard himself noted in the journal that he could not remember whether they were written in 1847 or early 1848), that is to say, after the completion of the early pseudonymous authorship, after the Postscript and after Kierkegaard had been subjected to sustained character assassination in the satirical paper The Corsair. The error of the modern world, he says here, is, in a single word, that it lacks integrity. But, of course, a single word will never quite do for Kierkegaard, so he sets about making his point yet more precise. The problem is that in its pursuit of pure thought the world of knowledge has become fantastic, and that people have forgotten what it is to be human, creating a book-world that really exists only

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for the abstract phantom ‘the public’ and that has lost touch with essential primitivity. Consequently, we need to relearn the distinction between art and science, where art is not simply identified with aesthetics and fine art. It is in this larger, and older, sense of ‘art’ that ethics, or ethical life, is an art. It is, however, once more typical of the confusion of modern times that ethics is treated as a science. But the art of the ethical, i.e. the art of living ethically, is not at all the same as knowledge about the ethical: ‘The ethical,’ Kierkegaard says, ‘is indifferently related to knowledge; that is to say, it assumes that every human being knows it.’ (Pap. VIII 2B, 81.5, p. 144). He develops this point by the example of a corporal teaching a peasant boy how to drill. The corporal does not offer theoretical elucidations concerning what it is to drill but teaches the conscript how to do it, i.e. he teaches it as an art. The conscript does not have to learn about soldiering in order to be able to do it, but, it is assumed, the qualities needed for soldiering are already in him, kata dunamin, potentially, and the issue is how to bring them out, how to actualise them. Similarly, the ethical is or should be assumed to be already ‘in’ the individual – no human being should be regarded as devoid of moral sense – so the question is not ‘What is the ethical?’ but the demand that the ethical should be done. Normally, communication of an art requires either authority or competence. However, because the ethical involves the God-relationship neither of these apply, since God is solely competent, and solely authoritative. In relation to God, no human being is more than an apprentice. This means that ethical communication must be indirect, doubly reflected and maieutic. What does this mean? It must be indirect, Kierkegaard says, because God is the only teacher, because the recipient already has an implicit knowledge of the ethical (so the teacher does not need to teach it to him directly) and because the ethical task is that every individual comes to stand alone in the God-relationship. Obviously, not everyone would agree with Kierkegaard that the ethical involves the God-relationship. Many moral theorists would argue that it is possible to construct ethics on a purely humanistic basis, and Nietzsche and Sartre, at least, would regard atheism as a necessary presupposition of authentic morality. From the other side, and as we shall see at a number of points, Kierkegaard’s own work raises the question whether the kind of Godrelationship assumed in and by the ethical is identical with the God-relationship given in and by Christian faith. Without entering into the question as to the justification for Kierkegaard’s usage, we can say provisionally that, as far as this passage is concerned, his linking of the ethical with the God-relationship means that ethical principles have an unconditionality and ultimacy, that in acting ethically we are acting according to our freedom, and that in acting ethically we are actualising what is fundamentally and distinctively human. Here at least, he is not necessarily talking about a personal relation to God involving, for example, prayer, Bible study, worship, etc., although he will do so in other contexts. In other words, the ethical, as it is being used here, is understood within the general parameters of Kantian ethics.

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Ethical communication must be a matter of double-reflection, in that the communicator must himself practise what he teaches. Of course (though Kierkegaard does not consider such examples), a heavy smoker may tell his children or friends that the best way to stop is never to start, but, if this is not simply a device to move us to pity, its effectiveness as ethical teaching will be marred by the suspicion of hypocrisy (though, of course, if the smoker presents a sufficiently disgusting spectacle to his interlocutor he just may prove a very effective teacher). Ethical communication must be maieutic: although the teacher must himself be concerned to practise what he teaches and to live a moral life, the point of instruction is not the teacher and his needs but the pupil, and, specifically, bringing to birth the ethical possibilities latent in the pupil. This therefore requires a certain deflection of attention away from the teacher, and, Kierkegaard suggests (though one may suspect him of rushing things a bit here), therefore requires a deception on the part of the teacher, so that he does not appear to be authoritative or competent, thus leaving the pupil free to develop his own capacities.6 The character of such a teacher will be marked by earnestness, but this is masked by irony, his ataraxy is true humanity. In the further development of these notes, Kierkegaard makes a number of additional points. First, he distinguishes between the ethical in general and the ethical-religious. The former is, in the sense we have just seen, presupposed as a capacity of every human being. The second requires instruction in a knowledge that cannot be assumed to be implicit in human consciousness – such as, to take a pertinent example, the knowledge (or knowledge claim) that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, the third day he rose again, and by his death and resurrection our sins are forgiven: true or not, such claims involve matters of contingent historical fact of which no individual can possibly have a priori knowledge. Nevertheless, once this knowledge is given and received, then it must be appropriated ethically, and, therefore, taught as art not as science. This, Kierkegaard notes, has been forgotten in Christianity, but, he comments, ‘What I have contributed by means of the pseudonyms is this: within Christendom to have discovered the maieutic.’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 82.13, p. 157). Second, in accordance with his general remarks about teaching an art, Kierkegaard distinguishes between the communication of knowledge and the communication of capability. With regard to the latter he offers three subdivisions: the communication of aesthetic capability (dancing, singing, painting, etc.); the communication of ethical capability, i.e. the awakening of the unconditional moral sense, the ‘ought’; and the communication of religious capability, which, although it depends on the prior communication of what might be called saving knowledge, has, nevertheless, to be acquired ethically, as a duty, freely. Third, concerning the media of communication, Kierkegaard distinguishes between communication that occurs primarily by means of imagination or, as

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he also refers to it, possibility, and communication that occurs in actuality. All communication of knowledge, he states, is both direct and in the medium of imagination, whereas communication of capability is in the medium of actuality and is indirect. This further connects to the distinction between dialectical and pathos-filled transitions. In a dialectical approach to truth – which, for Kierkegaard, coincides with the communication of knowledge in the medium of imagination – there is no ‘situation’. One can teach the principles of swimming in a classroom, on a train or read about them in a book – but if one is to teach swimming there must be water to swim in and the lesson concludes (or, rather, begins) with the instruction: ‘Dive in!’ Such an ‘actual situation’ is ‘essential as the real conditio sine qua non of ethical communication.’ (Pap. VIII 2 B 85.16, p. 164). With these comments on communication in mind, let us go back to the upbuilding discourses and to the concept of the upbuilding discourse as such, looking especially at how the concept of ethical communication set out in the lectures is exemplified in the discourses. It soon becomes clear that the concept of the upbuilding is quite distinct from doctrinal exposition. For an upbuilding discourse does not aim to introduce any new knowledge but presupposes sufficient knowledge on the part of the reader. Kierkegaard makes this point by contrasting an upbuilding discourse with what he calls Overveielser (translated by the Hongs as ‘Reflections’).7 This point – at least concerning the upbuilding – is borne out by the discourses themselves, and their characteristic feature of appealing to what the reader already knows or is likely to think – ‘Is it not so, my listener …?’ The discourses are not about a ‘what’ but about ‘how’ we are to make our own what, it is assumed, we already know. In Works of Love Kierkegaard seems to separate the work of upbuilding still further from any kind of knowledge, arguing that, as with love itself, ‘there is no word in language that is in and for itself upbuilding, and there is no word in language that cannot be said to be upbuilding and have an upbuilding effect if love is present’ (SV 3 12, p. 206 [213]). The work of upbuilding ‘can give itself in all and be co-present in all’ (SV 3 12, p. 206 [212]). This nevertheless leaves a residual uncertainty whether this assumption (that the reader already knows what he needs to know in order to be upbuilt) applies only to those who are already members of the Christian community – as Bishop Mynster argued, the preacher is entitled to assume that his congregation already accept and share certain fundamental principles. The Church is neither a mission station nor an educational institution.8 But does the same hold for upbuilding works that, by virtue of publication, are not limited to the Church congregation? Next, and as is required of an ethical communicator, Kierkegaard, as author of the upbuilding discourses, makes deliberate and high-profile efforts to disavow his own authority and competence, a point that is fundamental to each of the Forewords published to the various sets of discourses. But his understanding of the self-effacement on the part of the author is perhaps most extensively elaborated in an often-quoted and extended simile in the discourse ‘On the

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Occasion of a Confession’ (best-known in English as Purity of Heart) from the collection Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. In this passage Kierkegaard sets out the relationship between the various participants in the upbuilding discourse: the speaker, the listener and God: In the theatre, as you know, things are so arranged that there is someone at hand to prompt [the actors] – he is hidden [because] he is not the one who matters, he is and should be overlooked. But there is another, the actor, who steps out and catches everyone’s attention. All eyes are on him, and this makes him the one to be renowned … [But] now forget the trivial [world] of art, for – ah! – in relation to what is godly, many are so foolish as to see the speaker in a worldly way, as if he were an actor, and the listeners were the audience who could sit in judgement on the artist. But it is not like that, not in the slightest. No, the speaker is the prompter, there are no actors, for every listener should look only at himself … In the theatre the play is performed for those who are present and who are called spectators, but God Himself is present at the godly address, [and] in all seriousness he is the critical spectator, who watches how the talk goes and how it is listened to, [and] for that reason there are no spectators. The speaker is the prompter, and the listener, if he is open before God, he is, if I may put it like this, the actor who in truth plays before God. (SV 3 11, pp. 115–6 [124–5]) This is a long and complex analogy, and we shall examine it in more detail in a later chapter, but it makes one point especially clear, namely the requirement to shift attention away from the speaker and to emphasise instead the appropriation of the message by the listener. Again the Forewords to the discourses, as well as disclaiming authority, repeatedly insist on the centrality of the role of the reader. The upbuilding discourses are moreover concerned with actuality, precisely in the sense of the Lectures on Communication. That is to say, they are not directed towards the dialectical definition of the topic, but towards the pathos-filled actualisation of the matter at issue by the reader. So, for example, in the discourse ‘Against Cowardice’, Kierkegaard begins by describing how a worldly discourse on courage might portray the heroism of a daredevil diver who plunges into a turbulent sea off high rocks – to which Kierkegaard comments ‘Let the theatre keep what belongs to the theatre … big words, daring gestures and the applause of a crowd of spectators.’ (SKS 5, p. 336 [348]). What is wrong with this? Is the diver not courageous? The problem, Kierkegaard says, is that representing danger in this way is actually a means of covering over awareness of the real and present danger that each of us always already faces as a fallible creature, thrown into a world of sin. A speech of this kind operates entirely in the medium of imagination, and it is all too easy to be courageous in imagination:

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What thoughtlessness to remain ignorant of the danger there really is, but what perversity to use big words and promises of a hero’s fame to stir people up to be daring enough to confront what is right in front of them … It is a proud thing to plunge into danger, it is a proud thing to struggle with unheard of terrors, but it is also wretched … to have an excess of resolve, [but] to be poor in action, to be rich in truth and poor in virtue. (SKS 5, p. 337 [349]) There is also, and still in keeping with the principles of the Lectures on Communication, a profound deception in the form of the discourses. We have seen that Kierkegaard will not allow these to be called sermons, as he is not authorised to preach. On the other hand, they do have the form of sermons, according to the pattern of such contemporary sermons as those of Schleiermacher, of Bishop Mynster and of Kierkegaard’s tutor and rival H. L. Martensen and, in many cases, they take what purports to be the text for the day as their starting-point. So, for example, the reader is constantly addressed as ‘My listener’ and there are references to a Church building as the site of the discourse. The Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions still more explicitly conjure up specific services – confession, marriage and burial – as imaginary contexts in which they are ‘spoken’. Despite the appearance of Kierkegaard’s name on the title page, then, and the disavowal of authority, the reader is clearly called upon to make a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and to be complicit in what is essentially a fictional transaction. This would, of course, seem to contradict the preceding point, that what is going on here is a provocation in the direction of actuality, and to go against the strictures placed on imagination in the lectures. We shall, however, see in a later chapter how Kierkegaard deliberately uses this fictional, imaginative element against itself, creating a situation in which the reader is led out into a space of imaginary possibilities in order to be all the more sharply confronted by the claims of actuality. Another point to be developed later, but which should be mentioned now in order to complete the application of the categories of the Lectures on Communication to the discourses, is that the discourses, both in a general and in a more particular sense (this last relating to Kierkegaard’s own life crises), are situational, i.e. concrete, local and contextual. The point of view they collectively constitute is not simply a theoretical representation of the world, but is offered as and seeks to elicit the word of an embodied voice, engaged, dialogically, with equally situated embodied voices. As such, the discourses do not contain Kierkegaard’s finished ‘answer’ to his own crises or to the common crisis of modernity or to the question posed by the pseudonyms, but they are engaged with all these in an open-ended way in order to clarify the matter at issue. The extent to which the upbuilding discourses correspond to the stipulations of ethical communication as set out in these lecture drafts and Kierkegaard’s insistence that ethical communication of this kind is necessarily indirect, would, in terms of the communicative scenario described in The Point of View, seem to mark them out as indirect communication after all. At the very least, reflection

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on the lectures must make us aware that if we insist on referring to the discourses as ‘direct’ communication we are not to construe that in the sense of a directly doctrinal or propositional resolution of the questions at issue in the pseudonyms. But the lectures may also lead us to suspect that the discourses – again despite the impression given by The Point of View – are not Kierkegaard’s last word, that precisely to the extent that they match the requirements of ethical communication they remain dependent on another level of communication, the communication of the ‘saving knowledge’ of Christian doctrine. How, then, do the discourses stand in this regard? To pursue this question further, we turn to the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who, in his book Concluding Unscientific Postscript, gives us a resumé of the authorship to date, including a commentary on the meaning of the upbuilding discourses. III In the course of this indirect self-review, Johannes/Kierkegaard makes the following comment: ‘For Christian truth as inwardness is also upbuilding, but it by no means follows from this that every upbuilding truth is Christian; the upbuilding is a larger category.’ (SV 3 9, p. 214 [256]). He goes on to make the further comment that Søren Kierkegaard was right not to call them sermons, because ‘the term “sermon” must be reserved for the religious-Christian existence’ (SV 3 9, p. 214 [256]). The upbuilding discourses, however, ‘only use ethical immanence-categories, not the doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox’ (SV 3 9, p. 214 [256]).9 He concludes the survey with his own Philosophical Fragments, in dealing with which he comes back to the question of the discourses and comments (specifically on the Four Upbuilding Discourses of 1844) that they ‘took on a carefully shaded tinge of the humorous. Thus concludes what it is possible to reach within immanence’ (SV 3 9, p. 226 [270]). And, he adds, ‘The paradoxical expression for existence (i.e. for what it is to exist) as sinful, the eternal truth as the paradox through having come into existence in time, in short, what is decisive for the Christian-religious is not to be found in the Upbuilding Discourses …’ (SV 3 9, pp. 226–7 [271]). Even more strongly, he states that: Humour, when it uses Christian terminology, is a false reflection of the Christian truth, since humour is not essentially different from irony, but it is essentially different from Christianity, and essentially not otherwise different from Christianity than is irony. It is only apparently different from irony through apparently having appropriated all that belongs to the Christian, yet it has not appropriated it in a decisive way (while the Christian position inheres in the decision and the decisiveness). (SV 3 9, p. 227 [217–2]) Neither irony nor humour, he says, is decisive, but each, in its distinctive way, opts for ‘recollection’s withdrawal from the temporal into the eternal’ (SV 3 9,

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p. 227 [272]). However, because humour has greater insight into existence than irony, although only in quantitative terms, ‘Humour therefore becomes the last terminus a quo in relation to determining what is Christian. Humour, when it uses Christian terminology (sin, the forgiveness of sins, atonement, God in time, etc.) is not Christianity, but a heathen speculation which has come to know all that belongs to the Christian.’ (SV 3 9, p. 228 [272]). These are fairly devastating remarks. Not only do they apply clearly to Climacus himself, who is consistently presented in his own works and by Kierkegaard as a humorist, they might also be taken to apply to the whole enterprise of Christian theology insofar as that seeks to offer a timeless, theoretically determined (i.e. in Climacus’ sense, speculative) presentation of Christian doctrine – an inference that certainly makes sense if we connect it to the rumbling attack on Christendom as a conflation of pagan and Christian categories that is already present in Climacus’ work, but only finally unleashed in its full force ten years later. It may also be taken as supporting Michael Strawser’s view that even in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding works we have always to be sensitive to the possibility that they are, in the end, ironic.10 Johannes Climacus does Søren Kierkegaard, the named author of the discourses, the honour of supposing that he has understood these points, and that it is because he too understands things this way that he has ‘abstained from using a Christian-dogmatic terminology, from mentioning the name of Christ, etc., as is otherwise done quite promiscuously in our day, although the categories, the thoughts, the dialectical factor in the exposition, are only those of immanence’ (SV 3 9, p. 228 [272]). Then, seemingly at odds with his identification of the humorous standpoint of the discourses with speculation, he argues that the upbuilding discourses, along with the pseudonyms, constitute a polemic against speculative philosophy. Why? Because, he says, ‘they are precisely speculative’ (SV 3 9, p. 228 [273]) and yet are deliberately not called sermons. How does this constitute a polemic against speculation? As if to acknowledge that this is a rather subtle point, even by Kierkegaardian standards, Climacus resorts to a footnote in which he explains that one of the confusions brought about by speculative philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the nature of the sermon. Nowadays, he says, people (he almost certainly means theologians such as H. L. Martensen) produce exercises in speculative philosophy that are then presented to and regarded by the world as sermons. Now, one could set about rectifying the situation by writing an article exposing it for what it is. More damning, though, would be to do as Kierkegaard has done, and write speculative addresses and then to insist on their not being sermons. The specific distinction of the sermon is that it is preached by one who has authority, through ordination, defined as ‘a teacher’s paradoxical transformation in time, by which he becomes, in time, something other than he would be through the immanent development of genius, talents, gifts, etc.’ (SV 3 9, p. 229 [273]. This paradoxical transformation, of course, corresponds to the paradoxical content of the decisively Christian content of preaching itself. The polemic constituted by the discourses shows that the speculative preachers

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have lost all sense for the meaning of their own authority as well as for the dogmatic content of Christianity. What are we to make of Climacus’ view of the discourses? Whatever else may be said about it, it scarcely fits either with the claim of The Point of View that they are the works of Kierkegaard’s right hand and, as such, ‘direct’ communication, or with the view of the Lectures on Communication, which suggests that the discourses are ethical, indirect communication, but in a more positive light than that cast by Climacus. Climacus sees them as belonging to immanence, as speculative, at best as humorous, and asserts that they do not involve decision or the radically Christian concepts of sin, atonement, etc. In order both to understand and to evaluate Climacus’ case, we need, as briefly as possible, to look at his overall schematisation of religious existence in his two works, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, works which have more than any others, perhaps, shaped the theological and philosophical profile of Kierkegaard himself in the history of ideas. Philosophical Fragments opens with the question ‘To what extent can truth be learned?’ (SKS 4, p. 218 [9]). Climacus then proceeds to give the Socratic answer to this question, that ‘the truth is thus not brought into [the learner], but was [already] within him’ (SKS 4, p. 218 [9]) and could, therefore, be recovered by a process of recollection. Consequently, Socrates could not regard himself as a teacher in the strong sense, but as a midwife, maieutikos, bringing to birth the truth that was already ‘within’ the pupil. This, for Socrates, is the highest human relationship, since ‘to give birth belongs to God’ (SKS 4, p. 220 [11]). On this view of things both the teacher and the moment in time at which the Truth is learned are accidental, since the Truth always has and always will be there, whether it is discovered or not. No matter how thrilling the moment of discovery in psychological or emotional terms, it does not change the pupil ontologically, since his relation to Truth already belongs to his being and the change is only one of consciousness. This is how it is with the Socratic. But what, asks Climacus, ‘if things are to be otherwise?’ Then, he suggests, each of the preceding features of the situation must be reversed. The pupil will not already ‘be’ ontologically in possession of the Truth, and coming to acquire it will not be a mere change of consciousness but an ontological transformation, a change from non-being to being, a rebirth. The teacher will be more than the occasion for the pupil to learn the Truth, he will give the pupil the Truth and therefore the moment of time in which the gift is given will become decisive, it will be the ‘fullness of time’. Moreover, he goes on, the preceding ignorance of the pupil will not be simple ignorance: for the moment in time and the encounter with the teacher to be ontologically decisive, it must be a radical ignorance such that the pupil is utterly devoid of the condition for learning the truth. For a creature defined ontologically by consciousness and will, however, this means that the loss of the condition must have come about through the pupil’s own fault, otherwise it will be merely an accidental or fortuitous lack that cannot concern him essentially. He is therefore hostile to truth and not merely lacking it. This state, says Climacus, is sin, and

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the Teacher, capitalised, is not merely a teacher but is a Saviour and Redeemer, an Atoner. Such a teacher can only be the God Himself, but, as Climacus goes on to argue the case, the logic of the situation demands that the God present Himself to the pupil as a concrete individual human being, the God in time, the paradoxically Incarnate One. Philosophical Fragments, then, presents – indeed, seemingly hinges on – a simple dichotomy between the Socratic and the Christian. The former presupposes a uniformly immanent ontology, a continuum of being in which there is no radical hiatus, whereas the latter presupposes a radical ontological difference between immanence and transcendence, and requires, in effect, a leap of faith. In these terms, and in the light of Climacus’ remarks in the Postscript concerning the discourses, it would seem possible to add that the speculative, immanent standpoint of the discourses (according to Climacus) is Socratic and, thereby, definitively excluded from the Christian position at every point ontologically, and not merely epistemologically. The Socratic is, however, a large and complex category in Kierkegaard’s thought as a whole, and the Socrates of the Fragments seems to be lacking (or, at least, not emphasising) an element that is elsewhere decisive for Kierkegaard’s portrayal of him, namely, a passionate concern for ethical truth. Since, as we have seen, the discourses fit well with the model of ethical communication developed in the Lectures on Communication, a model that is also there regarded as Socratic and maieutic precisely because of its essentially ethical nature, we may suspect that this points to an area where connections may be made that are excluded by the abrupt dualism of the Fragments. That the discourses are scarcely categorisable as ‘speculative’ is also illustrated (indirectly!) from another side by one of Kierkegaard’s wittiest texts: Prefaces, a book comprising a series of prefaces for books that his pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene had never got round to writing. One of these is an ironic preface to ‘An Upbuilding Work for the Cultured’. The title, of course, alludes back to Schleiermacher, but, as with the speculative sermons attacked by Climacus, also to such Danish contemporaries as Martensen (who was on record as saying that to speak to and to win the cultured classes was the best strategy for a Christian preacher in modern times) and H. P. Koefoed-Hansen, who had lamented the failure of the Church to win over the cultured in a review article of Kierkegaard’s own Either/Or. An upbuilding work of this kind, the author observes, will necessarily have a ‘systematic tendency’, ‘The individual sermon will not stand by itself or mean anything by itself’ but will point to the larger totality ‘wherein alone the cultured can find edification’ (SKS 4, p. 493 [31]). In this respect, he says, it is clearly different from Bishop Mynster’s sermons. These, published in a form that assigns one sermon to every Sunday in the Church’s year, invite the reader ‘to withdraw his thoughts from worldly distractions, reminding himself of the purpose for which a time of meditation is set aside, reading the appropriate sermon aloud to himself and perhaps to those who are his closest, being upbuilt by what he reads, not forgetting it

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entirely in the course of the week’ and not attempting to see how the sermon is situated vis-à-vis the whole. Such a ‘restricted reading’ may have its significance, he concedes, but only for the ‘less cultured’. Mynster’s collection seeks ‘to awaken and to nurture in the individual a serious self-examination, a deeper concern about himself and for himself, his well-being, his salvation, his blessedness’, and does so in such a way as to make it difficult for the reader to forget himself. Such a concern for the merely individual, however, once more suits only the less cultured. The cultured, on the other hand, are only upbuilt by forgetting about the petty, individual circumstances of life: The life of the community, the grandiose definitions of the system, pure humanity, none of which tempts the individual to think about himself or to want to achieve anything but only to be upbuilt insofar as he reflects on it – that is the object the present work seeks to contemplate. (SKS 4, p. 494 [32–3]) Moreover, he adds, the present work is, of course, Christian, ‘which is selfevident, since the cultured are patently Christian’ (SKS 4, p. 495 [33]). In this satire, Kierkegaard clearly aligns his own upbuilding works with those of Mynster, against the purely theoretical ‘upbuilding’ works deemed suitable for the cultured classes by the Hegelianising theologians. Like Mynster’s sermons, and like Socrates’ moral dialogues, his discourses seek to bring the reader into a situation of actual, concrete and intensely individualised moral and spiritual reflection. IV The Concluding Unscientific Postscript itself already proposes a significantly more complex mapping of religious existence than the apparently simplistic dichotomy proposed by the Fragments. The problem of the Fragments is now defined in the following terms: ‘How can an eternal blessedness be based upon historical knowledge?’, i.e. how can the concrete singularity of a once-off historical occurrence, the advent of the God-in-time, be decisive for the eternal happiness of the existing individual. Here, however, instead of beginning with the epistemological and ontological differentiation of the Socratic and the Christian positions, Climacus looks at the problem from the standpoint of the existing individual concerned about his eternal happiness. He defines the problem confronting such an individual as ‘pathetic-dialectic’. It is ‘pathetic’ in that it involves the pathos, the feeling, of the individual whose ultimate concern must be for his own final destiny, who asks himself such questions as ‘Were we made for the dust or for the stars? Is life nothing but vanity, a useless passion, and must our understanding of life therefore take its stand on the principle of despair or on the anticipation of death? May we hope for a future beyond death? Is death not perhaps the end, but the beginning?’ What questions, Climacus’ words suggest, are better able to arouse

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our passion, our feeling, our pathos? And if they do not, then the maximum that one human being can do for another is not to teach him the truth, but ‘to make him restless’ (SV 3 10, p. 82 [387]). The dialectic aspect has to do with the way in which this pathos is then determined by its being brought into relation to a historical fact. However, it is characteristic of Climacus’ own circuitous and extremely indirect approach that he only begins his argument (over 300 pages into the book!) by analysing the pathetic factor, i.e. what belongs to human subjectivity as such in face of the religious question concerning eternal happiness. He distinguishes three different forms or expressions of existential pathos, which he calls the initial, the essential and the decisive expression. The initial expression is defined in terms of an absolute relation towards the absolute telos, i.e. an absolute interest in, and an absolute commitment towards, attaining the ultimate goal of eternal life. We can see something of this in the value placed on the monastic life in the Middle Ages, and the utter dedication of the individual to the quest for salvation. However, Climacus suggests, this also confuses the issue, since, as the monastic movement historically developed, it identified the absolute with something worldly, albeit in a negative way, i.e. with physical separation from the world. To truly express an absolute relation to the absolute must be a matter of inwardness involving the renunciation of all outward distinctions, including those cultivated by ascetics. The monastery is in fact a failed mediation between the absolute telos and finite ends. But if the relationship between the individual and the absolute telos cannot be mediated in this way, what kind of relationship is it? It cannot be a simple, immediate relationship such that God is the ideal to which the individual is to conform himself, since ‘as between God and a human being … there is an absolute difference’ (SV 3 10, p. 104 [412]), and this absolute difference expresses itself in the non-mediated existential passion of inwardness as worship. This is ‘the maximum expression for a human being’s God-relationship’ (SV 3 10, p. 104 [413]). All of this, however, is still contained within the initial expression of existential pathos. The essential expression goes a step further. Here, the existential subject who has been aroused by a passionate concern for eternal happiness experiences that concern as suffering. Why? Because in the immediacy of actual life the individual is always to some extent caught up with and involved in a range of finite, relative goals, passions or relationships. These necessarily limit or obscure the purity of the relation to the absolute telos in such a way that the tension between the absolute desire and the necessary compromises of life in the world is experienced as suffering. Suffering, then, as it is being understood here, is not necessarily or even primarily about physical sufferings, whether they befall the subject from without (acts of violence, accident, disease or disability) or are self-imposed (as in asceticism and self-mortification). Suffering in this context is more a kind of self-consciousness, a feeling about how one’s life in the world is constituted, a form of inwardness. So, for the religious individual, suffering is simply a way of being in the world. Life itself is a suffering, a suffering of the

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separation from God. The religious endeavour of such an individual, then, will be to die to the world, to die away from immediacy, although as long as life lasts such a programme can never be brought to a conclusion. In order to emphasise that this is nothing to do with external suffering as that is normally understood, Johannes Climacus offers what he calls an ‘edifying divertissement’. This concerns a man who has heard in the sermon on Sunday that a man can do nothing of himself, since he is in all things utterly and totally dependent on God. But how should he apply such a principle in face of the prospect of an outing to the Deer Park with its summer funfair? This question absorbs Climacus for over thirty pages. Eventually the man gets to go to the funfair – and, we are told, enjoys himself – but he understands the whole thing as if it were a divine concession and, as such, a further example of his dependence on God. Yet, despite his enjoyment, this is for Climacus a lived example of religious suffering: suffering, passio, in the sense that the trip is not conceived by the man as something he chooses to do for himself and by himself, it is not an action on his part, but a passivity, it is what he receives – and can only enjoy insofar as he receives it – from God. In connection with this, Climacus tells us that although a religious address need not always talk about suffering: [I]n whatever else it says, however it roams about, along whatever path it goes to catch men, however it may testify in monologues to the speaker’s own existence, it must always have with it its total category as a measure, so that the experienced listener can straightaway see the total orientation of the address’s life-view. (SV 3 10, p. 123 [435]) This essentially involves suffering. Consequently ‘Essentially, the religious address has the task of uplifting through suffering.’ (SV 3 10, p. 123 [436]). Furthermore, in expressing this essential concern, the religious discourse assumes that all who hear it are already sufferers: ‘The invitation to [sic] a religious discourse is quite simply as follows: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden … ” ’ (SV 3 10, p. 125 [437]) – remembering, of course, that the suffering concerned is that of inwardness and that, although these are words of Christ, they are being applied to the religious discourse in general without regard to whether it is ‘merely’ upbuilding or decisively Christian. But although the contradictions between the absolute and the relative, between the infinite and the finite, between God and the world, may be present in the form of suffering in the consciousness of the individual concerned about his eternal happiness, it can also, by a slight shift of perspective, be seen as comical or humorous. How so? ‘[W]here there is a contradiction, there the comical is also present’, says Climacus. Humour, he says – and he is himself, remember, a humorist – is ‘the incognito of the religious’ (SV 3 10, pp. 177–8 [500]).11 What does this mean? At its simplest it means that the religious individual understands that there is no aspect of life in the finite, relative world that

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absolutely matters and that, therefore, life in the world cannot be taken entirely seriously. In the world there is not and can never be an absolute loss, and so there is nothing over which one should ever get absolutely agitated. From this point of view, the humorist is able to see and to smile at the ridiculousness of his own and others’ absorption in things that do not finally matter. But Climacus defines what he means by humour still more closely. There are, he says, three existence spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Correspondingly, there are within these two boundary lines, between the aesthetic and the ethical and between the ethical and the religious. The former is the position of irony, the latter that of humour. Nevertheless, and in accordance with its status as a boundary position, humour still falls short of the third expression of existential pathos, the decisive expression. The key term of this most fully developed form of the religion of hidden inwardness is guilt. Guilt in this context does not mean either forensic or pathological guilt, which always relates to this or that particular fault or transgression: ‘That it is eternally recollected is the decisive expression of guiltconsciousness’ (SV 3 10, p. 207 [535]), i.e. the totalising recollection on the part of the self of its own responsibility for itself and therefore of its own responsibility for its separation from, its difference from, the absolute, the infinite, the eternal. This difference is not simply a ‘given’ of the human condition, but is a matter of responsibility: in its guilt-consciousness, the self comes to understand itself (and itself alone) as responsible for being unable to do anything without God. Again Climacus comments on how this might be dealt with in a religious address. Instead of ‘thundering’, he suggests the speaker ‘humble before God, submissive to the royal majesty of the ethical’, in fear and trembling on his own behalf, puts guilt together with the idea of an eternal blessedness, so that the hearer is not worked into a lather, but is affected indirectly, when it appears to him as if the priest were talking only about himself. (SV 3 10, pp. 203–4 [530–1]) Nevertheless, far as we might seem to have come from the naïveté of immediate consciousness and from everyday worldliness, the position we have now reached – guilt as the ultimate existential pathos – is still said to be merely an ‘immanent’ consciousness. It is not, and, for Climacus, is quite distinct from the consciousness of sin. It does not presuppose an ontological discontinuity within the subject, but is a consciousness arrived at through recollection – albeit in this case (as opposed to the form of recollection discussed in the Fragments) a negative recollection, the recollection of oneself as in a condition of not being what one ought to be, the realisation that ‘I am not what I am’. Such guilt is not to be expiated by external penances but by self-concentration in hidden inwardness, beneath the incognito of humour. As a consequence of this it is, of course, impossible for any third party to tell whether a humorist – Johannes Climacus

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himself included – is ‘merely’ ironic or whether, behind his mask, he is gripped by the passion of hidden inwardness. In the course of this summary of the initial, essential and decisive expressions of existential pathos we have encountered many of the characteristic features of the upbuilding discourses – as we would expect, given Climacus’ designation of them as corresponding to the religion of immanence. Such features include the question of eternal happiness itself (to which three of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses are specifically directed), the need for inwardness (see, for example, ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’), worship (see ‘One Who Prays Aright’), suffering (see, for example, ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’) and the acknowledgement of one’s nothingness in guilt (see ‘To Need God’). We should also remember that all of the stages of existential pathos are, for Climacus, qualified by their ethical character, which, for him, is coterminous with the category of the existential, and, again, we have seen from the comparison with the Lectures on Communication that (despite Climacus’ view of them) the discourses too may count as essentially ethical communication. We may also, if Climacus is to be believed, attribute a humorous tone to at least some of the discourses, an attribution strengthened by Kierkegaard’s own comment in the later Christian Discourses that the discourse does not forget, where appropriate, to wear a smile (SV 3 13, pp. 18–9 [12]). What Climacus describes as the upbuilding element in ‘Religiousness A’ corresponds closely to what we shall see emerging as the definitive position of the upbuilding discourses themselves: [I]t is the annihilation in which the individual puts himself to one side in order to find God, since the individual has himself become a hindrance … it is quite correctly recognisable by the negative, by the self-annihilation, that finds the God-relationship in itself, that, permeated by suffering sinks down into the God-relationship and finds its basis therein, because God is at its basis, if only everything that is in the way is rooted out … in the ethical-religious sphere the individual is himself the place [of ‘the upbuilding’s holy tranquillity’], when the individual has annihilated himself. (SV 3 10, p. 229 [560]) But does it follow that Climacus is right in saying that humour, immanence and recollection mark the limit of the discourses? Climacus himself switches at this point from the pathetic to the dialectical aspect of the concern for an eternal happiness, a switch that brings into view the Christian claim that the question is decided by the individual’s relation in faith to the God in time, involving acknowledgement of his own status as sinner and of God as redeemer. Here faith must embrace the paradox of the incarnation, and allow this 2,000-year-old event to become a contemporary reality. Climacus designates these two forms of religiousness, the immanent and the transcendent, as ‘A’ and ‘B’. However, he emphasises that ‘B’ does not simply replace ‘A’. Rather it incorporates and internalises ‘A’ within the new

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perspective opened up by Christian faith. Everything that belongs to existential pathos thus belongs also to ‘Religiousness B’, where it becomes a ‘sharpened pathos’. Nevertheless, the content of ‘B’ cannot be thought, and adherence to this position is ultimately isolating (SV 3 10, pp. 248–9 [582]). Whereas the standpoint of the upbuilding finds the point of contact between God and the self within the self itself, ‘Religiousness B’ finds it ‘outside’ the self (SV 3 10, p. 229 [561]). However, if this is where the theology of Johannes Climacus ends, it is not where Kierkegaard himself finishes up. In his later authorship, Kierkegaard seems to move beyond this position of inward faith in the saving power of the incarnation, to emphasise instead the need for actively confessing Christ before a hostile world, an act of witness that will lead to conflict and persecution, a position that might be called ‘Religiousness C’.12 Nor does he stop here. Acknowledging the extreme strenuousness of such a life of witness, and the danger of conceiving such a life as, in Lutheran terms, works-righteousness, Kierkegaard returns to the thought that we are unable of ourselves to help ourselves, that the repeated failures of our attempts to live out a Christian commitment in the world drive us back to a deeper and yet more inward reliance on grace. It is important, then, for our overall understanding of Kierkegaard’s view of the religious life, that the apparently rigid schematisation of ‘Religiousness A’ and ‘Religiousness B’ and their various subdivisions conceals a far more dynamic picture. Religion, for Kierkegaard, is not something to be divided up between a series of hermetically sealed compartments, but is a process, something lived. With this comment, let us return once more to the question of whether Climacus is right in categorising the discourses as limited to the world of ‘Religiousness A’. It is my view that such a categorisation cannot, finally, stand. Although there is an undeniable shift in emphasis, vocabulary, style and thematisation between Kierkegaard’s earliest and last religious writings, I do not believe that it is possible to sustain an absolute distinction here. Indeed, there is even a clear sense in which Climacus’ claim that the discourses ‘abstained from the use of a dogmatic Christian terminology, from mentioning the name of Christ’ or from broaching the concept of sin, or the paradoxical element of authority, is simply wrong. Although the first discourse, presented as a sermon for New Year’s Day, involves no specific Christian reference, and ‘The Expectation of Faith’ of the title might justifiably be read as relating only to a general attitude towards time, the second already focuses on the biblical text, from the Letter of James (said by Kierkegaard himself to be his ‘most loved’ biblical text), and the discourse emphasises the apostolic authority of the writer. In a second discourse on the same text Kierkegaard specifically discusses the sinfulness of human nature, contrasting human and divine giving. In the two discourses on 1 Peter 4: 7–12, ‘Love will cover a multitude of sins’ (from the three discourses of October 1843) there are explicit references not only to apostolic authority and sin but also to judgement, and each ends with an exegesis of a gospel text involving, as it were, a direct personal appearance by Christ.

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Later we shall examine these texts in more detail, and with particular reference to whether they should be read ‘immanently’ or ‘transcendently’. The point here is simply to emphasise that the classification of the discourses is not as open and shut as Climacus presents it and that, at the very least, there is a case to be made for the essential continuity of Kierkegaard’s religious writings. Such a case has, indeed, been made by several commentators. Emanuel Hirsch, in his monumental (though tendentious) Kierkegaard Studien emphasises especially the religious decisiveness of the Three Upbuilding Discourses of October 1843 (with regard to which he remarks that Kierkegaard ‘was scarcely going to be able to say anything religious that did not find its point of departure in these three discourses’13), but generally he sees the seeds of Kierkegaard’s entire later religious development within the early discourses, and, in contrast to Climacus, finds in them an appeal to apostolic authority, the distinction between sin and grace, a break with immanence, a concept of distinctively Christian faith, with hints as to the category of the exceptional individual (as opposed to the universal) and, even, the attack on Christendom: ‘They are,’ Hirsch says, ‘genuine Christian sermons’14 – although he too acknowledges that this is the beginning, not the end, of Kierkegaard’s religious development. The postulate of essential continuity is also the cornerstone of Anders Kingo’s more recent account of Kierkegaard’s authorship, in his major study The Theology of Analogy and other works.15 The first of the three theses of The Theology of Analogy runs ‘The entirety of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding and Christian discourses from the “Ultimatum” in 1843 to “The Unchangeableness of God” in 1855 are a function of the Christian paradox.’16 In keeping with this, Kingo insists that ‘… Christianity is Kierkegaard’s authoritative presupposition’ and that consequently ‘the issue does not turn on man in himself but on what is presupposed concerning man. Therefore,’ he adds, ‘he is not to be regarded as a writer belonging to modernity.’17 But the fact of continuity does not of itself decide how that continuity is to be understood. Kingo’s mission is to rescue Kierkegaard from the cause of an anthropocentric modernity and to claim him for a dogmatic theological position that, in Kantian terms, cannot but appear as essentially heteronomous. But this is not the only way of looking at it. Indeed, perhaps the very opposite could be argued: that such continuity argues all the more for the possibility of reading Kierkegaard’s entire authorship within a humanistic, philosophical perspective. That is the case I hope to put in this study. My thesis, to put it at its simplest, is that what the Fragments calls the Socratic can be taken as the basis for the entire conceptualisation of Christianity in Kierkegaard’s writing. This does not, of course, mean that Socrates (for example) could have predicted the ministry, death and resurrection of Christ or the Reformation doctrine of faith. It does mean that these events (and their theological interpretations), events that arise in history and offer themselves for interpretation on the basis of history and that are therefore necessarily marked by the constant singularity and unrepeatability of all historical occurrence, are understandable, interpretable and, if we are so moved, capable of being appropriated existentially within the

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horizons of general human understanding and experience. If there is to be a question of presuppositions here, then these are not ‘outside man’,18 but presuppositions that are generated by the needs and exigencies of the human condition. Seen in this way, Kierkegaard’s religious writings become open in their own terms and in their entirety to human enquiry and philosophical investigation (though whether they will prove to be philosophically interesting is another matter again).19 Simply stating the position in this somewhat programmatic way is neither to have made good the claim regarding the essential continuity of Kierkegaard’s thought nor to have justified why I believe that that continuity points to the need for a humanistic reading. The justification of these claims is, in large part, the matter of this book as a whole, and will depend on the particular readings and applications of the texts themselves, the texts that, for us, are Kierkegaard. Climacus is, however, if not right absolutely, then right in this – that overtly Christian concepts and vocabulary are relatively less marked in the majority of the early upbuilding discourses, and that these give greater scope to the exploration of the common human condition than the later works, with their greater emphasis on the application of specifically Christian insights. In theological parlance, the earlier discourses appear to argue ‘from below’, whereas the later may seem more to argue ‘from above’. It follows from my basic position that this, to some extent, is deceptive. Certainly, the earlier discourses start from below, but their achievement is precisely to create a context in which the ‘above’, the perspective of transcendence, first becomes meaningful. There is, then, no finally independent ‘above’ or transcendence. However, even if the strong thesis on the essential humanism of Kierkegaard’s thought is not accepted, there is still a good case for taking our orientation from the early upbuilding works: as with any thinker, Kierkegaard’s thought is, in the first instance, to be interpreted from within itself and therefore in the light of its own internal development – beginning, therefore, with the beginning. Also, the relative emphasis given to the generality of human experience in the earlier discourses makes them an easier starting-point for an enquiry that seeks to avoid the presuppositions of any specific doctrinal position. Even if the position finally arrived at by Kierkegaard is a ‘transcendent’ position that repudiates the claims of human reason and experience, the context for the words spoken ‘from above’ in the later discourses is precisely the context developed in the earlier discourses, constructed ‘from below’. What, then, do the discourses say of the human condition and of the way in which this condition generates the religious needs that faith is to meet? Notes 1 Except for a small number of sets of Sixteen Upbuilding Discourses, from which the first two were omitted, having had better initial sales than the subsequent sets. However, there were never more than eighty-three of these ‘Sixteen’ .

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2 See the article ‘Kirkelig Polemik’ published under the pseudonym ‘Kts’ (1844) Intelligensblade 1, 1: 111. 3 See Chapter 1, Note 1. 4 Since Kierkegaard’s time The Diary has often been printed and translated or adapted for the stage on its own, without reference to the rest of Either/Or. 5 Although the Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions appeared just one day before Stages on Life’s Way. 6 Kierkegaard might seem to be contradicting himself here, in that, as he has just argued, no human being actually is ethically competent or authoritative in relation to any other, since, in relation to God, all are apprentices. It is therefore no deception on the part of the teacher to undermine his own authority, since he is not actually authoritative. 7 See Pap. VIII I A 293. 8 Mynster (1852) pp. 87–8. 9 Note, however, that this seems to be a different idea of double-reflection from the one employed in the Lectures on Communication (it is typical of Kierkegaard that he uses technicalsounding terms rather loosely). 10 See M. Strawser (1997) Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification, New York, Fordham University Press. 11 On the role of humour in the Postscript, see John Lippitt (2000) Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Basingstoke, Macmillan. 12 See M. Westphal (1996) Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press, esp. pp. 194ff. 13 E. Hirsch (1933) Kierkegaard-Studien, Vol. 1, Gütersloh, Bertelsmann, p. 271. 14 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 649. 15 A. Kingo (1995) Analogiens Teologi: En Dogmatisk Studie over Dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards Opbyggelige og Pseudonyme Forfatterskab, Copenhagen, Gad. See also idem. (1987) Den Opbyggelige Tale: En Systematisk-teologisk Studie over Soren Kierkegaards Opbyggelige Forfatterskab, Copenhagen, Gad. 16 Kingo (1995) p. 20. 17 Ibid., p. 87. Harvie Ferguson, although holding with Kingo that the upbuilding discourses presuppose the paradox, also manages to read Kierkegaard as a profoundly and characteristically modern writer. See H. Ferguson (1995) Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology, London, Routledge. 18 Kingo (1995) p. 87. 19 Of course, even if we understood Kierkegaard himself as committed to an anti-humanistic transcendent position of the kind represented by Kingo, this would not mean that the philosopher had to walk away and leave his work untouched. The issue is not whether philosophy has the right to question Kierkegaard – it has the right, or at least should have the nerve, to question any human text – but whether its manner of questioning is going to go with or against the grain of the text.

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I In challenging the view of Johannes Climacus that the discourses are no more than speculative sermons, we have preferred the possibility of reading them as the works of Kierkegaard’s right hand, the works in which we can best hear Kierkegaard’s own distinctive voice. However, that by no means answers the question of how the discourses should be read or what we are to hear in them. In this chapter, I shall attempt to give a relatively naïve reading of the discourses, finding in them a descriptive account of the human condition and of the religious ‘solution’ to its internal contradictions. Under this aspect, the discourses offer the outlines of a broadly coherent anthropology or psychology, a picture of the self in the throes of what Heidegger was to call the ‘ontic’ or ‘existentiell’ confrontation with the question of existence. Those who are familiar with the pseudonymous works but not the discourses will find a great deal here that resonates with what they already know of Kierkegaard. This is unsurprising, since my claim that the discourses offer a privileged viewpoint on the authorship as a whole requires there to be a necessary and integral connection between the various parts of that authorship. It would therefore be very odd indeed if the anthropology of the discourses had no points of contact with that of the pseudonyms. I would, however, also claim that although this ‘anthropology’ is not presented here in as ‘systematic’ a way as it seems to be in several of the pseudonymous works, it is in fact presented more accessibly, if only because it is not formulated as a polemical reversal of the language of contemporary philosophy and theology. Those who do not know Kierkegaard but have some acquaintance with the literature of existentialism will (as my allusion to Heidegger hints) also have a sense of déja vu. Again, this is scarcely surprising since Kierkegaard was to be one of the main historical resources for the existential analysis of the human condition. The familiarity of the story Kierkegaard tells is not only due to his subsequent influence on the history of ideas, however. For he was himself inevitably influenced by a long tradition of Western Christian anthropology. Particularly important were such historic moments of Christian belief and practice as pietism and, working backwards, the Lutheran depiction of the crisis of sin and

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forgiveness, Augustine (although Kierkegaard does not seem to have engaged directly with Augustine to any significant degree, the indirect presence of Augustine was inescapable for someone in the Lutheran tradition), Paul, and behind Paul the gospels and the whole biblical tradition. Much of this Kierkegaard shared with other Christian writers, and it is easy to see parallels with several major figures of the Christian tradition, such as Pascal (a parallel that Kierkegaard himself recognised). Some of the most relevant points of the understanding of the human condition dominating this tradition would include the following: ‘the chief end of man’ is to enter into and, as far as is possible under earthly conditions, to fulfil a believing and worshipping relation to God; however, because of the corruption of thought and will through the fall (a corruption that is universal, yet for which each individual is decisively accountable), such a relationship can only come about through radical repentance, through faith in the forgiveness of sins, and through a sanctified life in which the meaning of that forgiveness is lived out in real time, as the converted soul learns to trust itself to divine providence, to humble itself under God’s will in all things, and to thank God in and for all that it experiences, in sickness and in health, in sorrow and in joy, in life and in death. For the Christian all this is possible only on the basis of God’s prevenient grace, initiating and providing the conditions for repentance and conversion, especially by means of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, believed to be the incarnation of God. Life after conversion (sanctification) subsequently becomes a matter of following in the footsteps of Christ and imitating his example in the concrete circumstances of life. These specifically religious sources, however, represent only one element in Kierkegaard’s understanding of human life in the world (if, in the final accounting, the most significant, as regards its specific content). His writing also resonates with the kind of emphasis on passion, feeling and the heart found already in the Sturm und Drang movement, and several figures from that period play a direct role in his development, notably Hamann and Jacobi. Either/Or took as its motto a line from the English poet Edward Young (an important influence on Sturm und Drang) that effectively sums up this aspect of Kierkegaardian thought: ‘Are passions, then, the pagans of the soul, reason alone baptiz’d?’ Kierkegaard also absorbed himself in the literature of both German and Danish romanticism in his formative years, and his mature writings reflect that he had found in this literature a many-faceted resource for quotation, illustration and anthropological reflection. Not the least important aspect of this influence was simply the concern with and exploration of the subjective self – its moods, yearnings and longings – as the site of humanity’s deepest traffic with the divine. The theology and philosophy of romanticism also had their significance for Kierkegaard. In this connection F. D. E. Schleiermacher was a major, and largely positive, influence even though there are clear theoretical differences. Indeed, Kierkegaard took private tutorials with his later opponent H. L. Martensen to work through Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre.

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Schleiermacher’s earlier Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers had emphasised that the source and centre of the religious life was in the immediate feeling of unity between self and world, a unity that Schleiermacher insisted was inexplicable, and that, as a lived experience, was real only in being lived. The supreme form of this experience was to be found in love, in the spontaneous mutual recognition and union of man and woman. In the Glaubenslehre, Schleiermacher’s fundamental formulation was more recognisably doctrinal. The basis of Christian doctrine, he stated, was not external revelation or rational proofs of God’s existence, but the experienced feeling of absolute dependence. This was not intended as a prescription for simple heteronomy (as Hegel suggested in his sarcastic comment that if Schleiermacher was right then a dog was the best Christian), but as pointing to the fundamental and inescapable experience of our lives as somehow given, i.e. that we did not invent or create ourselves. God is not so much a heteronomous autocrat, as the mysterious ‘Whence’ of our being. Anything we may say of Him over and above this is simply by way of the analysis and interpretation of this fundamental idea. We shall at several points see how such Schleiermacherian themes found their way (reworked, of course) into the body of the discourses. Kierkegaard’s relation to the philosophers of romanticism, especially Fichte and Schelling, is complex. If he was critical of Fichte as having provided the philosophical justification for the illegitimate extension of the romantic concern for the self to an ideology of self-creation, he nevertheless admired what he regarded as Fichte’s ethical passion. His relation to Schelling is similarly ambiguous. He did after all attend Schelling’s lectures of 1841, which seem to have vividly impressed on him the importance of the concept of actuality, but (like many other auditors) he soon tired of them. Yet there is much, especially, in Schelling’s later philosophy, that seems to resonate with Kierkegaard: the necessity of inner anxiety and suffering as conditions of the self’s journey to itself, and the struggle between good and evil as the site of freedom’s sudden, unconditioned and rationally inexplicable emergence. Yet Schelling himself painted the story of the self on a vast cosmic and metaphysical canvas that was essentially alien to Kierkegaard’s more psychological orientation. As in the case of his relation to romanticism, Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel was double-sided. His polemics are well known. On the other hand, there is some analogy between the broadly threefold modelling of the self that we find in the discourses and the general pattern of Hegelian thought, a modelling that is related to but not identical with that other famous Kierkegaardian triad of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Basically, as we shall shortly see in greater detail, the self that is the focus of attention in the discourses is typically shown as actualised in one of three modes or stages. The first is that of immediacy, the simple absorption in the life of nature that is typical of the life of the child. The second is that of the reflective consciousness that, remaining within the horizons of nature and experience, is able to reflect on that experience, to understand itself as separate from its world, and to treat that world as the object of its thought and action. The third is that of the person who has awoken

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to a deeper sense of self than that of the merely reflective person. Such a one does not simply reflect on the world, but on himself, and, in that self-reflection, comes to an anxious awareness of the failure of his life to live up to all that he could be. Followed through to its conclusion, this anxious concern will lead him to a new understanding of himself as dependent on God. The analogy with Hegelianism is striking, but far from exact. For, if there is a seamless progression from the first to the second stages, the third represents a kind of breakthrough – even a leap – into freedom that cannot therefore be regarded as necessary in any sense and that cannot be grasped by the kind of thought characteristic of philosophy in the Hegelian sense (as Kierkegaard, at least, understood it). In terms of Kierkegaard’s own attack on Hegel, the third stage, even if it can be referred to as a new or second immediacy, cannot therefore be mediated. It emerges only on the basis of the annihilation of the previous stages as a free act of self-choice (or, it may be, divine grace). Moreover, unless this third step is taken, the second phase, reflection, will itself collapse back into immediacy and even show itself, in many respects, to fall below immediacy in moral terms. Immediacy always has the defence of naivety, but reflection that does not follow through to faith may turn into mere cynicism. Reflection is not automatically ‘higher’ than immediacy in a progressive or hierarchical sense. Yet immediacy itself is no longer an option once we have left infancy behind us, and we typically experience it as a state that we have always already transcended. The second discourse on the text ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift is from Above’ opens with a description of what such a lost paradise would be like, a world in which the divine prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had never been broken: ‘Then man would have awoken from that deep sleep in which Eve came forth only to sink back once more in peace and glory, then would God’s image have been impressed upon everything in a glorious radiance that lulled everything to rest in the enchantment of perfection, which, itself unmoved, moved all.’ (SKS 5 130 [126]). But, as Kierkegaard goes on to stress, such a world simply is not our world, and, for us, some level of knowledge, some level of awareness of difference, is unavoidable. The world of difference is where we start. But that is to run on too far ahead. As yet, we have scarcely begun with the discourses themselves. For the kind of contextualisation of Kierkegaard’s anthropology that has been given here does not of itself decide anything about the actual content of his view of the human condition. Even if we were to develop the connections between the discourses and their historical background in far greater detail, it would still not tell us what Kierkegaard himself says, or what his understanding of the human condition amounts to. If we see Kierkegaard merely as the point of convergence of the Christian, Romantic and Hegelian currents of early nineteenth-century thought, then he has been reduced to a merely historical figure. At the same time, we make Kierkegaard himself incredible if we do not bear in mind that the specific colouring of his distinctive and unique thought is what it is by virtue of its specific and concrete differentiation from its context. Since this is not a historical study, however, we

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note only that Kierkegaard’s originality, and therefore what Kierkegaard is saying in his discourses, is not to be found in any mere novelty but in the way in which he transforms the materials he has absorbed from his intellectual and cultural milieu. II Bearing in mind the caution against reading these terms in a strictly Hegelian sense, I shall refer to the first two forms of human existence that Kierkegaard presents in the discourses as the immediate and the reflective, beginning with the immediate person, the natural man in the most elementary sense. In the first of the discourses on the text ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift is from Above’ (one of the first two discourses from May 1843) Kierkegaard gives a paradigmatic account of those whose lives are lived solely on this primitive level: Without knowing how, they are carried along by life, one link in the chain that joins past and future; [they are] unconcerned as to how it happens, they are carried along on the wave of the present. Reposing in that law of nature that permits a man to develop himself in the world in the same way that it spreads a carpet of flowers over the earth, they live happily and contentedly amidst the changes of life, not for one moment do they wish to tear themselves loose, they give credit where credit is due, thanks to the one to whom they ascribe the good gifts [they have received], help to the one they think needs it, according as to what they believe will be most helpful for him. That there are good and perfect gifts they know well, and they know from whence they come; for the earth gives its increase and the heavens give the former and the latter rains and their families and friends are concerned as to what is best for them, and, naturally enough, their plans, wise and reasonable as they are, succeed, since they are [indeed] wise and reasonable. For them, life contains no riddles, and yet their life is a riddle, a dream … (SKS 5, pp. 42–3 [33]) What is wrong with this? Isn’t it part of the neurosis of so-called ‘modern man’ that he has forgotten how to live life like this, how to take each day – how to take life – as it comes, that he has forgotten how to act naturally, absorbed in ‘having’ instead of just being? Wouldn’t it be better for us if we could all be just like the person described by Kierkegaard? Although we might envy such a one, he will not at all envy our knotted brows and troubled minds: ‘Relax, take it easy’, he’ll say, ‘don’t get so wound up’ – and, of course, at one level he is right.1 But not at every level. So what is wrong with this way of living, with allowing ourselves to be contentedly absorbed in the flow of life? Apart from the observation that this simply is not life as we know it, Kierkegaard’s most direct answer to this question comes in the discourse

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‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’. He introduces his answer by re-examining the person to whom he now refers as ‘the fortunate man’: Regard the fortunate man, whom fortune delights to indulge in all things. He does not need to work and yet he lives in splendour such as Solomon’s; his life is a dance, his thoughts intoxicated by [his] wishes’ dreams – and every dream is fulfilled, his eye is satisfied more quickly than it is aroused to desire, his heart hides no secret wish, his longing has learnt to know no limit. But [didn’t we just sense the ‘but’ coming? – GP] if you were to ask him where it all comes from, he would lightly answer that he didn’t know. (SKS 5, p. 94 [89]) The fortunate man’s answer betrays the essential limitations of his life. Happy as he is, he is profoundly ignorant of his own why and wherefore. As Kierkegaard goes on to argue in ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’, such a way of having the world at one’s disposal is a kind of illegal possession: When a man is met with whose abundant fortune and wealth create general astonishment, he will need to explain the source of it all. If he cannot explain it, then he becomes the object of suspicion, [the suspicion] that he has not come by it by honest means, that he is not in lawful possession of it, but is perhaps a thief. (SKS 5, pp. 95–6 [89]) This example, Kierkegaard immediately acknowledges, is only an ‘imperfect likeness’ of how it is with divine justice, which keeps a watchful eye on every single person. When a person has no other answer to the question as to whence it all comes than that he does not know, then it judges him, and accompanies him as a suspicion against him that he is not in lawful possession of it. (SKS 5, p. 96 [90])2 This thought is further refined in the discourse ‘To Acquire one’s Soul in Patience’, where the point is not so much that this is an illegal possession as that it is, really, no possession at all. Such a man does not possess the world but is possessed by it. One who ‘has’ no soul has no centred self and therefore cannot possess anything at all: What a person thus seeks to own, the world, is what he was nearest to having in the first moment [of his life] when his soul was lost in it, and owned the world in itself, as the wave owns the sea’s unrest and deeps within itself, and knows no other heartbeat than the infinite heartbeat of the sea itself. People indeed claim that the way of possessing the world they are speaking about is something quite different. But that is a deception.

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For the world can only be possessed, insofar as it possesses me … if one … owns the world in such a way that losing it can diminish one’s possession, then that person is possessed by the world. (SKS 5, p. 164 [164–5]) In the discourse ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’3 the same idea is reiterated when Kierkegaard rhetorically asks whether a human being ‘is no more than an ornament in the successive unfolding of creation’ and can be content to be a weapon in the service of obscure drives, that is, in the service of the world, since the world that he desires is what awakens these drives … a stringed instrument played by the hand of obscure moods, or, better, by the hand of the world, because what stirs his moods is [only] the way in which the world strikes his strings … a mirror, that reflects the world, or better, in which the world reflects itself. (SKS 5, p. 301 [308]) Such a life, then, falls far short of what we generally take to be a humanly adequate life characterised by thought, decision and action. And, of course, in the world as we encounter it, we very rarely come across the person who genuinely lives so completely absorbed in the world, living life for the moment, without experiencing anything other than the fulfilment of all their wishes. It is a purely notional limiting case, conjured up to mark one particular limit of human possibility. More usual are those who would like to be like that, who would be happy (or who think they would be happy) to move through life like a wave in the sea, but who are denied that kind of satisfaction. Such are those whose experiences of adversity Kierkegaard describes in ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’ as a counter-position to that of the fortunate one: Observe him [the one familiar with adversity]! He had learnt that there is neediness in life, and a heavy fate had forced him to admit how weak and powerless a person’s own strength is. Yet he did not lose heart; he did not give up; he continued to work. Whether he gained anything thereby, whether he went backwards or forwards, whether he was making progress or standing still, he didn’t know, for a shadow had spread all around him like an endless night. Yet he strained with all his might – and see! Once more fortune’s sun came out and made it all bright again, explained [it all] and assured him that he had come far enough, that he had won what he had been working for. Then he broke out in joy: ‘So it had to be! For a person’s best efforts are not fruitless and meaningless toil.’ (SKS 5, p. 98 [92])

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Such a one looks to be an advance on the purely immediate person, but is this so? Although the content of his life may be richer than that of the person who only lives for the day, the one familiar with adversity still understands himself as dependent on the world and can only justify his efforts in relation to their outcome, the happy ending that makes everything all right. If final gratification had been denied, he would have despaired. His happiness is not, in any significant sense, in his own gift, and the fact that he is happy in the end is only a more or less accidental outcome. It could have been otherwise. It is otherwise for the person Kierkegaard calls the unfortunate one: And who knew how to understand [good fortune] better than precisely the unfortunate one? For who understood better how to talk of the joys of wealth, better than the one who lives on crumbs, who portrays power and might more glowingly than the one who sighs in thraldom, who depicts the beauty of the common life more alluringly than the one who was alone in life? (SKS 5, p. 99 [93]) But neither does such an unfortunate one necessarily understand the true meaning of all this. For ‘he who knew how to portray [this so well], nevertheless did not perhaps always understand himself, but how should one who does not understand himself understand in a deeper sense what is outside him?’ (SKS 5, p. 99 [93]). Simply standing outside the enchanted circle of naive happiness is not enough. Nor is seeing through it, as Kierkegaard goes on to argue with reference to the figure of ‘the concerned one’. This is one whose life had an auspicious beginning, who stepped out into the world with high hopes, but who was denied the expected fulfilment: Then everything became confused for him. [As he saw it] there was no longer any ruler in heaven, the whole wide world was a mere playground for life’s wild cacophony, and no ear could hear a harmony in all this confusion, no hand could get a grip on it and give it direction. Whatever means a person might have with which to comfort themselves, he believed, hope had gone, and would remain gone. So his soul became concerned. And the more he stared into the anarchy into which everything seemed to have been dissolved, the more power [this vision of things] gained over him, until he was rendered as if senseless by it all; his thoughts became dizzy, and he himself plunged down into [the abyss] and lost himself in despair. Even if his concern did not get such a seductive power over him, his soul nevertheless became devoid of sympathy and estranged from others. He saw what others saw, but his eye would always read an invisible inscription running through it all, that everything was emptiness and illusion. Or he withdrew from human society, and exhausted his soul in murderous cares, in dark thoughts and in the fruitless service of a restless moodiness. (SKS 5, p. 100 [94–5])

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Such a one is, of course, not far from the popular picture of Kierkegaard himself, the so-called ‘melancholy Dane’. But although Kierkegaard portrays this position with an insider’s sympathy, it is clearly not being recommended as exemplary. For the concerned one is also dependent on the world he rejects, and his negative stance towards it is powered by resentment. It is, to borrow an expression from the Philosophical Fragments, an ‘acoustic illusion’. This is not someone who has overcome the world, but someone who has been deeply wounded by it. Kierkegaard goes on to drive the point home by further analyses of ‘the person who was wronged’ and the ‘person who was tried and tempted’. In each case, the essentially simple point is that taking a negative stance towards existence, despising the simple naivety of those who are seen as merely absorbed in life’s immediacy, is not, of itself, a sign that one has really arrived at a better understanding of life, even if such a one believes himself to be in some way superior to the herd. The issue is not whether we are to be cheerful or depressive in a trivial sense, but concerns the basis from which life is to be understood. Neither of these first two ‘stages’ of life, however, can count as being correctly situated in this respect. We shall shortly return to what does count as a proper basis for understanding life, but first we should note that the two modes of immediacy and reflection are articulated in a variety of ways throughout the discourses, of which the division between the fortunate and the various types of life’s insulted and injured victims is only one. Another reworking of this duality is in the contrast Kierkegaard frequently draws between youth and age. In the discourse ‘Remember Now thy Creator in the Days of thy Youth’,4 Kierkegaard suggests that the thought of God as Creator is in fact something that the young understand almost naturally. This comment may seem rather odd to us, since we assume that religion comes more naturally to the old. But this is an idea with which Kierkegaard was already familiar. As we have seen, part of the motivation for his insistence on the claim that the religious was present in his writing from the very beginning was to ward off the charge that he only had recourse to religion as he got older, as his poetic genius burned out. But the discussion here is not so much about the statistical probability of young people being religious or not. Rather it is a matter of how they are religious, if they are. Kierkegaard is not making sociological or psychological comments about actual cases, but offering ideal types, almost exaggeratedly drawn figures that thereby illustrate particular possibilities or tendencies. The way in which the thought of God as Creator comes to the youth, then, is naturally. The young person simply accepts the fact that there is a God because, after all, there is the local Church, and the young person goes there with his family, neighbours and friends and they all sing hymns and hear words that speak of God’s existence as Creator. Therefore the young person assumes it too, just as he generally assumes the legitimacy of the various forms of life into which he is in the process of being socialised. When one grows older, however:

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The human condition [T]hen the way to Church is often so long, for the weather is bad in winter, and it’s so cold in Church, and when the bird song echoes through the woods in summertime, then the way doesn’t lead to Church at all. (SKS 5, p. 241 [242])

If young people believe in God at all, their belief is intuitive and spontaneous, because they do not have the experience to see all the complexities and difficulties that belief in God brings in its train. The young person can think of God creating heaven and earth and all that is therein without pausing to think just how unimaginably vast a reality that brief phrase covers. Therefore, the young person’s belief is immediate, and, in a sense, the best kind of belief there is, for it is pure and unsullied. Youth, Kierkegaard says, has only one thought, or, it thinks its thoughts with the entire passion of its being. In contrast to youth, adults may find many things to intervene between themselves and such a simple expression of belief as going to Church – the cold, the distance, and many other needs and concerns. Nor are the hindrances that put themselves in the way of the older person merely physical, and the contrast between youth and age involves some of the same points that Johannes Climacus makes in his criticisms of Hegelian philosophy. Several times in this discourse Kierkegaard touches on the issue of proving God’s existence – something that seems pointless to youth, but that easily lures the adult mind down a false trail. So, alluding to Spinoza, he states that ‘a thinker, whose memory is revered, supposed that the category of the miraculous was characteristic of the Jewish people, who in an idiosyncratic manner, leapt over the realm of intervening causes to reach God’ (SKS 5, p. 242 [243]). But this, Kierkegaard suggests, is not only a characteristic of the Jewish people, it is also a characteristic of youth. The adult, however, gets taken up with all the intervening causes, ‘and if anyone does reach God along the lengthy path of intervening causes, he may well say that has come a great distance, if he reaches God, for many perish underway’ (SKS 5, p. 242 [243]). Kierkegaard reinforces the point by invoking another unnamed thinker (Lucilio Vanini) who claimed ‘that by means of a straw he could prove God’s existence’ (SKS 5, p. 242 [243]). But, Kierkegaard retorts: Let the thinker keep his proof, give the straw to the youth: it cannot prove anything from this, but why should it, since it has the straw – and God! When one grows older, then comes the proof, and the proof is an elegant traveller that everyone regards with admiration. (SKS 5, p. 242 [243]) But what can the proof add, if we already have God? The many thoughts and extensive knowledge enjoyed by the adult often serve only to obscure and dissipate what is most essential. Nor is this just in relation to religion. It applies no less to our essential knowledge of what it is to be human, a point Kierkegaard makes by calling upon one more thinker, this time ‘a wise man’, Diogenes of

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Sinope. Mocked by the crowd, Diogenes lit a lamp and wandered among them by day, saying that he sought a human being: ‘One should not laugh at him,’ Kierkegaard remarks, ‘for the person who has not found humanity in their youth may well need a lamp to guide them.’ Although the young do not perhaps know many people and have little extensive experience of the world, they give themselves with all their heart to those they do know, and thus find humanity. But: When one grows older, one sees many people, many partings and many meetings, but if one has not known what being human is about from one’s youth up, what will one ever find [in all these meetings], and if one finds anything at all, what is it but the parson and schoolmaster, i.e., the ordinary and everyday that he has been familiar with from home; and what does he ever find that can make recompense for the best in life, that bit by bit he lost …? (SKS 5, p. 244 [245]) As with humanity, so with God: if we do not have the kind of immediate and spontaneous belief in humanity or in God that youth has, then no amount of reasoning or deliberation will make up for it, and the fact that youth’s view of things lacks experience and judgement does not mean that we can in any way mock what youth supremely has. Kierkegaard writes: As the first book in the Old Testament is called the Birth (Genesis), and the second the Departure (Exodus), so we might say that there is a third book in human life which is called the Retreat. Hence there appears to be a need to return to what was once so beautiful, but which later came to be despised, forgotten, overlooked, [and] polluted, and yet to which everyone with a certain degree of shamefacedness resorts for refuge. And the shame is certainly a cheap price to pay, for whatever the error of his way has been, he experimented with everything before he resolved to return. But then was it not a blessing that he had something to which he could return? Was it not fortunate that the blind man had a child who could lead him? … Thus the youth helped him when there was no other help, thus does it help him. It dissolves the spell of brooding earnestness, so there is again joy in heaven and on earth … it saves the despairing soul from seeing the despair through the frankness which understands nothing, which does not understand the specious assertion of self-accusation, but understands only God’s mercy. (SKS 5, p. 246 [248]) Reflection there must be, but its task is to build on, to protect, to carry forward what is given in immediacy, not to extirpate it. If there is to be talk of that, then it can only be in the name of and in the strength of a quite different principle.

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The mapping of the relationship between immediacy and reflection onto the transition from youth to adulthood also points to the importance of time for the view of life put forward in the discourses. Here again there are fundamentally two modalities, whose mutual contradiction points to the need for a resolution at a different level. The first mode of experiencing time, corresponding to immediacy and youth, is the wish. Kierkegaard asks rhetorically: Who has forgotten the priceless delight that children take in wishing, and no less pleasurable for rich children than for poor. Who has forgotten those beautiful tales from a vanished age, in which it was as in childhood, when the wish summed up the meaning of life … (SKS 5, p. 251[253]) Remembering that for the person who was absorbed in the present ‘every wish was fulfilled’, the mode of wishing presents an experience of time as a continuum in which there is no radical break between present and future, so that the anticipation of a future gratification fills the present without any sense of residual lack. As in the case of youth, it is easy to draw attention to the naivety of such a ‘childish’ position, but, Kierkegaard insists, it also has its worth. In ‘To Strive in Prayer’ he emphasises the way in which a cherished wish can unify the soul, since one who is convinced that his wish will be granted if only he prays rightly, is ready to let go his secondary wants and wishes and to concentrate his prayer on the one thing he really, really wants: ‘Then his soul gathers itself before God on the issue of a single wish, and this is already in itself ennobling, for it means the readiness to give everything up, for he alone can renounce everything who has only one single wish.’ (SKS 5, p. 375 [394]). In wishing we reveal who we really are: Tell someone who your friends are, and they will know you; entrust them your wishes, and they will understand you, for not only is the soul revealed by what it wishes, but also, in a quite different manner, it renders you transparent, insofar as the wish subtly betrays how you are inwardly. For when you give utterance to your wish, the other person can see whether this is something that should be wished. (SKS 5, p. 250 [254]) The wish discloses the underlying moral orientation of the person who entertains it, even if he is not himself conscious of the disclosure. But wishing is one thing, life is another. In the very first discourse, ‘The Expectation of Faith’ (set on the occasion of New Year’s Day), Kierkegaard begins by reflecting on the custom of wishing each other well for the coming year. But what if there is someone you care about particularly, he asks, will you be satisfied with just a general expression

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of benevolence, won’t you want to personalise the wish, to make it specific? As the argument develops, however, it becomes clear that the best thing we could wish for another person would be faith. But faith is something that cannot be given as the result of a wish, since the person who finds faith must find it for and by themselves, through their own spiritual act. Faith cannot happen to you as a piece of good luck, like winning a lottery. There are some things, then, that cannot properly be wished. Yet the one who wishes will not always be able to recognise this and wishing does not easily or voluntarily recognise its own limits. In ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’, Kierkegaard comments sympathetically on the pleasant eloquence with which youth knows how to express its wishes, but then draws attention to these limits. He says; The individual who wishes cannot understand another, let alone be of benefit to him, because the wish acknowledges no limits. He to whom much is given wants more, and he to whom little is given wants just a little more, the one is amazed at the other’s moderation or at his greed, although such complaining is not justified since both are wishing. (SKS 5, p. 192 [189]) In any case, as we have seen, the fortunate one whose every wish is fulfilled is an exception. Experience makes it virtually impossible to continue in the naive bliss of the wish. Mostly in life our wishes are denied. Sometimes this denial is purely and simply external in the sense that we cannot get what we want. In this case, the person who is vehemently attached to their wish is likely to grow impatient, a topic to which the discourses return again and again, and that corresponds closely to what we have already heard of the ambiguous voice of experience. In ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’ Kierkegaard allows impatience itself to speak: So what, then, is this life, in which the only certainty is the one thing that one knows nothing for certain about, namely, death! What is hope? An importunate nuisance, one cannot get rid of, a cunning deceiver, who keeps going longer than honour, a tiresome friend, who is always in the right, even if that should mean putting the Emperor in the wrong. What is recollection? A tiresome comforter, a cheat who wounds from behind, a shadow, one can not get rid of, even if someone wanted to buy it. What is happiness? A wish one gives away to whoever will have it. What is friendship? An illusion, a superfluity, one more irritation! What is it all, what is it all … (SKS 5, p. 198 [195–6]) The impatient person demands instant gratification and if this is denied mocks the wish, rather than re-examining it to see if it was something that should have been wished for in the first place. In this way, although it assumes

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the aura of experience, impatience is no less abstract in relation to time than the wish. Essentially it is a refusal of time. This is brought out forcefully in the discourse ‘Against Cowardice’, in which Kierkegaard imagines how the standpoint of impatience will conceive of courage and resolution. It is, he suggests, likely to see these in terms of a sudden momentary decision or action, like that of a courageous diver who climbs up on a high rock in order to plunge down into the foaming waves below. But this, he asserts, is merely theatrical. The really challenging dangers are not external but internal, the moral challenge within. Therefore, instead of producing imaginary instances of courage, we should turn and confront the danger that, because of sin, we are always already faced with. Resolve must begin with small things that are real rather than big things that are merely imaginary, and it proves itself to be resolve by its persistence in self-renewal, over and over again. Life’s big issues are never decided at a stroke. Our big decisions are the ones we have to live with, day after day, year after year. In short ‘one must learn to crawl before one can walk, and to want to fly is always suspicious.’ (SKS 5, p. 337 [349]). But it is just this that impatience cannot accept. In the discourses on the ‘Lilies and the Birds’ (the reference is to the Sermon on the Mount) in the middle section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard portrays the character of impatience by means of fairy tales. In the first of these, he pictures a flower that grew on one side of a hill. For a while it lived its flower-life happily enough. But from time to time it was visited by a bird, who told it all about the different places it flew to and painted these in such glorious colours that the flower grew miserable and depressed. Being literally rooted to the spot, it could never see these places for itself. So the flower pleaded with the bird to pluck it up and take it away with it, which, eventually, the bird did. The outcome, of course, is that the flower’s root withered and it died. The same message is repeated in the second story, which concerns a wood pigeon. Like the flower, the pigeon too lived happily enough, each day finding enough food and never taking any thought for the next day. However, it noticed that in the woods there was a woodman’s cottage with a dovecote. The tame doves were fed by the woodman, and, unlike their wild cousin, never needed to search for their daily bread. They were sleek and plump, and the pigeon grew envious. For the first time in his life he began to worry about where the next day’s food would come from. Eventually, he had had enough, and decided to join the tame doves in the dovecote. The woodman, however, noticing an interloper, seized him and had him for dinner. Grim tales – but with a clear moral: impatience destroys the foundations of life itself. Within the limits of the discourses themselves, it might seem as if the criticism of impatience is purely a moral issue, a matter of individual orientation. In Kierkegaard’s historical context, however, I would suggest that it also carries a distinct political and cultural charge. Impatience, as epitomising an attitude that is unable to accept the given limitations and boundaries that circumscribe human life, is, for Kierkegaard the key to the spirit of the age, a spirit that

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could also be seen as a cult of the new. In this connection it is striking that the two works that, as it were, ‘frame’ the pseudonymous authorship, From the Papers of One Still Living and Two Ages: A Literary Review (both of them basically literary reviews expanded to book length), each begins with an attack on what Kierkegaard sees as the impatience of the younger generation and, in each case, an affirmation of the kind of continuity through time, the kind of acceptance of life’s circumstances, that he sees exemplified in the novels of Madame Gyllembourg. It is therefore striking that the first of the eighteen upbuilding discourses accompanying the pseudonymous authorship likewise begins with a reflection on time, and recommends ‘The Expectation of Faith’, an expectation that looks beyond the frustrations and obscurities of the present to the constancy of the eternal and finding there a cure for impatience. In each case, in the two reviews and in the discourses, Kierkegaard’s own name is placed over a critical discussion of a response to temporal existence that he sees as symptomatic of the condition of modernity. But a very different kind of response to the absence or the frustration of gratification is possible: that of patience. The importance that Kierkegaard gives to patience is exemplified in the fact that it appears in three of the titles of the discourses, ‘To Acquire One’s Soul in Patience’, ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’ and ‘Patience in Expectation’. The virtue of patience is, moreover, closely connected with the that of expectation, which, again, features in several of the discourse titles: ‘Patience in Expectation’ (again), ‘The Expectation of Faith’ and ‘The Expectation of an Eternal Happiness’. Both patience and expectation, separately and together, point to a relation to time that accepts time’s essentially extended, open, unfinished character, and, consequently, the inevitable deferral of gratification that belongs to a life lived in time. Kierkegaard concedes that worldly life itself demands a certain level of patience. The walker has to moderate his pace if he is not to wear himself out before he reaches his destination, the person with a heavy load will rest from time to time to renew their strength, the trader waits at his stall, the fowler and the fisherman must wait patiently for their catch, the mother patiently endures sleepless nights and all the worries of a growing child. (SKS 5, pp. 160–1 [160–1]). In these cases, however, patience is being construed in an external way, as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. Such a person does not end up by acquiring patience itself, but uses patience as a means to achieve an external goal. With regard to the inner life, i.e. the matter of gaining a soul, of wresting our self free from absorption in the world, patience is intrinsic to what is to be achieved. For the soul, Kierkegaard says, is ‘the contradiction of the temporal and the eternal’ (SKS 5, p. 163 [163]). If this definition is accepted, it means that the gratification of temporal wishes cannot of itself be finally determinative for the soul’s well-being. By virtue of its orientation to the eternal, the soul is, in one sense, already what it is; it has a certain determinate identity given to it from its very inception. Whereas Kierkegaard had previously argued that in the relationship between self and world the self could not possess the world without being possessed by it, he now claims that in terms of the

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relationship between the temporal and the eternal it is possible both for the soul to possess and not to possess itself: He who comes naked into the world owns nothing, but he who comes into the world in his soul’s nakedness does nevertheless own his soul, it is, as it were, that which he is to acquire and it is not like something external to him, like something new that needs to be taken possession of. (SKS 5, p. 163 [163–4]) Gaining or preserving one’s soul, then, is bringing together and holding together the two temporal dimensions of the soul or self, and patience is precisely the form that this process of unification takes in relation to time. At the same time, because the soul is not some kind of atom of eternity, dropped into time and being required to maintain its self-identity through time, but is what it is in and by the temporal process of being acquired, i.e. as a lived, repeated, resolute self-choice, it is never finally completed in time. For this reason, patience is also qualified by and as expectation. Like the wish, expectation is oriented towards the future, but, whereas the wish is characteristically focused on a single, distinct object or aim, expectation is, as it were, pure and, in worldly or temporal terms, object-less: it is the anticipation of eternity: The one who expects some particular thing can be disappointed, but it is not thus for the person of faith. When the world begins to test him sharply, when life’s storms crush youth’s joyous expectations, when existence, which seemed so tender and mild, turned itself into a heartless master who demanded everything he had given back, having given it only on such terms as made it possible to take it backagain – then the person of faith may well regard himself and his life with sorrow and pain, but he will nevertheless say: there is one expectation that not even the whole world can take from me, the expectation of faith, and this is victory. I am not disappointed, for I never really believed that the world contained what it seemed to promise. My expectation did not concern the world, but God. (SKS 5, p. 32 [23–4]) What expectation expects, then, is not this or that finite good: it is the self’s expectation that in any and every finite situation it will be able to renew its relation to the eternal, to God, and in that relation, but under the conditions of temporality, acquire, preserve and be what it is, to become itself. We shall return to further aspects of the concept of expectation in Chapter 5. Now, however, the argument has already overtaken itself. Whereas previously we saw the self’s immediate and reflective polarities as locked in a mutually destructive cycle of inadequacy, we have now seen something of how, in relation to its extension through time, the self may nevertheless break through the opposition of these modes, concretised in wishing and impatience, to a third

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position. However, to see just what is involved in this breakthrough in more detail, let us now turn back to the self/world scenario, and see how Kierkegaard characterises the self’s becoming aware of and accepting its own essential being and task. One important passage is where, in ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’, Kierkegaard speaks of the awakening of concern. We have seen how, in his depiction in this discourse of the unfortunate one, the concerned one and the one who was tried and tested – as in many other places throughout the discourses – Kierkegaard shows us that life is likely to present us with a multiplicity of cares and concerns. These frustrate our wishes, and draw us away from what is essential towards absorption in worldly finitude. But there is another kind of concern. This is the concern that awakens when the self is no longer satisfied simply with taking the world as the confusing and frustrating object of his attention and desire, but asks ‘what the world means to him and he to the world, what all that within him by which he himself belongs to the world means to him, and, on this basis, what his life means for the world …’ and it is ‘first then that the inner being announces itself in this concern.’ (SKS 5, p. 93 [86]). This kind of self-reflection and self-questioning, however, cannot be satisfied with mere knowledge, ‘it requires another kind of knowledge, a knowledge which does not maintain itself as knowledge for a single instant but transforms itself in the moment of possession to action.’ (SKS 5, p. 93 [86]). In such concern: [T]he inner self announces itself and requires an explanation, a testimony, which will explain the meaning of all things to him, and which will explain the meaning of his own life, in that it explains/transfigures5 him in the light of the God who holds all things together in his eternal wisdom … in that concern the inner self announces itself, which does not care about the whole world, but only about God and about himself, and about the explanation which will make his relation to God intelligible, and about the testimony which will strengthen him in the relationship. (SKS 5, p. 94 [87]) In such concern the self’s time-relation is also transformed, as it becomes ‘older than the moment’ (SKS 5, p. 93 [86]) and, in so doing, finds a perspective that first makes possible the God-relationship. III The crisis generated by the inner duality of the self can, it seems, only be resolved by and in the context of the God-relationship. The self, having lived through and internalised to the uttermost the defining dualities of self and world, time and eternity, etc., is brought to an impasse. The subject is annihilated, but ‘in this annihilation is his truth’ (SKS 5, p. 302 [309]) – the truth, namely, that in this annihilation, in the measure that it is accepted by a

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person as his subjective truth, a new possibility of being is opened up, the possibility of the God-relationship, a relationship that restores him to himself but on a new and unshakeable basis. The shipwreck of human will and understanding clears a space for a foundational dependence on God that encompasses and permeates every aspect of the subject’s life in the world. This new possibility is figured and expounded in a variety of ways in the discourses: in ‘The Expectation of Faith’ it is in the image of the seafarer on the endlessly changing ocean of time who, unable to orient himself by anything he sees about him, looks up to the stars, whose unchanging laws provide a guidance that earth cannot; in the first of the discourses on Kierkegaard’s beloved Letter of James,6 ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift’, it is the transformation that occurs when we realise that God is the giver of every good and perfect gift in such a way that whether our life flows smoothly and uninterruptedly forward, or whether we are wronged, tried or tested in adversities and temptations, all that we have and all that we are is a gift from God and therefore to be received with thankfulness and repentance; such an understanding is further exemplified in Job, presented in the discourses as a ‘correction’ to the defiant portrait of Job found in Repetition, who, in the face of utter loss, does not lose his mind in troubling himself over the various secondary causes that brought about this loss – the Sabaean robbers, the lightning and the storm (the empirical causes of Job’s losses according to the biblical text) – but relates everything back to God in his saying ‘The Lord gave, the Lord takes away, Blessed be the Name of the Lord’; in the case of John the Baptist it is the acceptance that, with the coming of the Expected One, John’s own ministry must decrease and he must accept that even the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he – but for what else has the bridegroom’s friend been waiting if not the advent of the bridegroom himself? In the last group of discourses, the Four Upbuilding Discourses of 1844, special emphasis is laid on the necessity for the self to become as nothing as a precondition of a right relation to God (a feature connected with Climacus’ characterisation of them as ‘humorous’). In the discourse ‘To Need God’ we follow the course of the self’s inner conflicts to and beyond the point at which, in relation to the external world, it becomes incapable of ensuring the fulfilment of its most earnest wishes; but even if we are able to accept our limitations and to live with whatever the outcome of our actions may be, success or failure, Kierkegaard draws attention to the fact that there is still the question of how the self should relate to itself, whether and how it is to confront and to overcome the temptations of vainglory, fear, disappointment, pride, defiance or pleasure. It seems to be true by definition, Kierkegaard suggests, that we cannot in fact overcome the temptations that come from within, from ourselves: no one, he says, is stronger than himself. One can conquer oneself only in respect of what is external. The point is, of course, not merely a play on words, but reflects a long Christian tradition, passing from Paul through Augustine to Luther and beyond, that emphasises the ultimate powerlessness of the self vis-à-vis its religious destiny, ‘the bondage of the will’ as Luther famously put it.

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If we once accept this situation of powerlessness, then, Kierkegaard suggests (again following Christian tradition), we are in a position to experience a sudden reversal, for this is precisely how we come to know God: ‘He who is himself altogether capable of nothing, cannot undertake even the smallest thing without God’s help, that is to say, without being aware that there is a God.’ (SKS 5, p. 313 [322]). The attempt to know God ‘from the history of times past’, e.g. by immersing oneself in the lives of the saints or in the history of the Church (perhaps, Kierkegaard is implying, even by the study of scripture), is overlengthy and the result is, in any case, ambiguous, being dependent on knowledge that is itself contingent, approximate and always contestable. But ‘he who, on the contrary, knows from himself [his own experience] that he can do nothing at all, has every day and in very moment the wished-for and incontrovertible opportunity of experiencing that God lives.’ (SKS 5, p. 313 [322]). To know that he is nothing is his truth, it is ‘truth’s secret’, entrusted to him by God: in the acceptance of his nothingness he comes to know God. In the final discourse, ‘The One who Prays Rightly Strives in Prayer and Triumphs – in this: that God Triumphs’, 7 the conclusion is that one ‘triumphs’ in prayer only by allowing God to triumph, that is (once more) by becoming nothing. In the course of this discourse, Kierkegaard has spoken of the struggle of prayer as being a struggle on the part of the one who prays not simply to get something from God but to understand the meaning of what he is experiencing in life: what he wants above all is an ‘explanation’ or ‘clarification’ (Forklaring) from God. But the final outcome is not an explanation or a clarification in a theoretical sense but a transfiguration (Forklarelse) of his situation,8 in and as he consents to being nothing: The outer world, and every demand he ever made on life, was taken from him, so now he struggles to find an explanation, but he cannot fight his way through. At last it seems to him that he has become an utter nothing. Now the moment has come. Who should the one who thus struggles wish to be like if not God? But if he himself is anything [in his own eyes] or wants to be anything, then this something is enough to prevent the likeness [from appearing]. Only when he himself becomes utterly nothing, only then can God shine through him, so that he becomes like God. Whatever he may otherwise amount to, he cannot express God’s likeness but God can only impress his likeness in him when he has become nothing. When the sea exerts all its might, then it is precisely impossible for it to reflect the image of the heavens, and even the smallest movement means that the reflection is not quite pure; but when it becomes still and deep, then heaven’s image sinks down into its nothingness. (SKS 5, p. 380 [399]) Kierkegaard returns to this same image at the conclusion of the first part of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits:

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There are several points in this passage that should be noted for future reference: that it is explicitly stated that it is ‘sin’ from which the heart must be purified if it is to be at peace with itself and capable of reflecting the image of Heaven; that the analogy is more cautious than that of ‘To Strive in Prayer’, since it is no longer God Himself but the ‘heavenly sublimity of the Good’ that is to be reflected in the pure heart that has become as nothing; and the use of the phrase ‘figurative expression’, which, as we shall see, plays a vital role in Kierkegaard’s understanding of religious language. The theme of reflecting the image of God/Heaven recurs in the second of the three discourses on ‘The Lilies and the Birds’ that make up the central part of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. Here again the idea of human nothingness is in play, and there is an important, but somewhat different, reference to the sea as a reflecting surface. The issue is what it means for human beings to be created in God’s image and, therefore, what it is that makes human beings distinctive from creation as a whole. Whereas the lilies and the birds bear witness to God, and assist us, if we are willing to learn from them, in calling God to mind, they do not bear the likeness of God, they are not Godlike. Kierkegaard continues: When a person sees his image in the mirror of the sea, then he indeed sees his image but the sea itself is not that person’s image and when he goes

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away the image goes too: the sea is not the image and cannot retain the image. (SV 3 11, p. 176 [192]). The point that Kierkegaard is making here is that, in the realm of externalities, no one thing can actually be the image of another. In the world of Spirit, however, where we are dealing with what is invisible, it is different: But God is Spirit, [He] is invisible and the image of the Invisible is also Invisible: thus does the invisible Creator reflect himself in that invisibility that is an attribute of Spirit, and God’s image is precisely the invisible glory. If God were visible, then there could be nothing that could be like him or be His image; for there can be no image of anything that is visible and in the whole realm of visible things there is nothing, not a single blade of grass, that is the likeness of any other or is its image: if that were to happen then the image would be the object itself. (SV 3 11, pp. 176–7 [192]) In the realm of visible things, then, in the world of space and time, existence is possible only on the basis of concrete particularisation. Even if two entities share a common essence – two blades of grass are indeed both blades of grass – they exist only as separate and inexchangeable instances, each is a unique ‘this’. Consequently, nothing visible can be like God in this strong sense of ‘like’. But what is distinctive about humanity is that humanity too, like God, is defined as and by Spirit: ‘To be Spirit: this is humanity’s invisible glory’. (SV 3 11, p. 177 [193 ]). But this also means that humanity’s God-likeness is not to be found in its external distinction from the rest of creation: its upright carriage, its commanding gaze, its dominion over other creatures. All such distinctions remain in the dimension of what is visible: [I]t is glorious to stand erect and have dominion, but most glorious of all is to be nothing in the act of adoration. To adore is not to exercise dominion, and yet adoration is precisely that wherein humanity is like God, and, in truth, to be able to adore [God] is what gives the invisible glory preeminence over the rest of creation … Humanity and God are not to be likened in any direct way, but inversely: it is only when God has infinitely become the eternally omnipresent object of adoration, and humanity remains forever the one who adores that they are ‘alike’. If humanity would seek to be like God by exercising dominion, then it has forgotten God, God has departed and humanity is playing at being Lord in His absence. (SV 3 11, p. 177 [193]) This last point reiterates Kierkegaard’s earlier observation regarding the sea’s inability to retain the images reflected in it: if humanity defines itself in terms of its external powers it will necessarily make itself incapable of being

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(rather than merely reflecting) the image of anything else, including, preeminently, God. The external appearance of human beings (the upright carriage, etc.) may bear witness, obliquely and obscurely, to God (if we know how to interpret it), but that is not where we are to look for the image of God in the strong sense. For that, we must be capable of inwardness, but even here it is especially important to note that the identity of God and humanity in the union of being Spirit occurs only on the basis of an inverse relationship, namely, the relationship of worship and adoration. To become as nothing, to become, simply, nothing, then, is to have arrived at the end of the spiritual struggle to know and to become who we are. It is also, as such, to return to our original created being as bearers of the image of God, and to become capable of fulfilling our primary creaturely vocation: to worship and to adore God our maker. IV But what does all this mean? What is it to become as nothing? To accept the annihilation of the self and to be transfigured in God? The language recalls that of mysticism, but could this be what Kierkegaard intends, either on the basis of his own experience or as he understood such a thing from literary sources? Although the question of mysticism and religious experience has been occasionally alluded to in the secondary literature, it has rarely been discussed to any significant extent, an omission that may be explicable in terms of the history of Kierkegaard’s reception, but that seems surprising in view of the language of the texts themselves.9 Let us then proceed, first, to ask whether Kierkegaard could have been using some personal religious experience as the basis for the kind of passages from the discourses we have been considering and then, second, to consider what such an experience could have meant for him, culturally and intellectually. Was Kierkegaard himself, then, the first-person subject of one or more religious experiences that came, subsequently, to define his understanding and articulation of the religious life? The journal entry that, in the judgement of a number of commentators, provides the most likely evidence for such an experience is dated to 19 May 1838, and timed as 10.30 in the morning, a practice (as Kierkegaard’s most recent Danish biographer, Joakim Garff, points out) that was customary among pietists when recording their conversion experiences. The entry reads: There is an indescribable joy that burns through us as inexplicably as the apostle’s exclamation bursts spontaneously forth: Rejoice, and again I say: Rejoice. – Not a joy over this or that, but the soul’s full-bodied declaration ‘with tongue and mouth from the depths of the heart’ by this my joy I rejoice, for, in, with, at, about, by and with my joy, – a heavenly chorus, that, as it were, suddenly cuts out our customary song; a joy, that, as it

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were a breath of wind cools and refreshes, a gust of the trade wind that blows from the grove of Mamre unto the eternal dwellings. (Pap. II A 228/DD 113) What are we to make of this? For Eduard Geismar, whatever its more precise content or occasion, this is the record of Kierkegaard’s ‘decisive religious breakthrough’, a ‘supra-temporal experience’ or ‘purely mystical, ecstatic experience’ and, as such, similar to Paul’s indirect confession of a mystical experience in 2 Corinthians 12 or Pascal’s testament.10 It is precisely the power of this experience that makes it impossible for Kierkegaard to discuss it subsequently other than obliquely, and even his own later claim not to have had any immediate God-relationship is seen by Geismar as registering his inability to maintain himself at this level of religious immediacy. Other early biographically oriented interpreters such as Emanuel Hirsch and Walter Lowrie also saw this entry as having a singular importance. Both, however, maintained a certain reserve compared with Geismar’s explanation of it. For Lowrie (who also cites 2 Corinthians 12) ‘this was a profound and genuine religious conversion’. Nevertheless, he goes on, ‘to the mere “experience” connected with it, the fringe of feeling which accompanied it and which he attempted to register in his Journal, he attached no more importance than the wiser mystics have commonly done.’11 Evidence that Kierkegaard sat lightly to the actual contingencies of the experience itself is the mock-mystical experience described in Repetition when the pseudonymous author, Constantin Constantius, refers to his own experience of religious ecstasy. In words echoing those of the discourses Constantin describes how he experienced the ‘dizzy maximum’ on the ‘scale of well-being’: ‘My very being was pure transparency like the deep ground of the ocean, like the self-satisfied silence of the night, like the monological stillness of noon.’ (SKS 4, pp. 46–7 [173]). But then, at precisely one o’clock (note once more the precise reference to the time of day), just as he felt himself on the verge of intuiting the ‘All-highest’, a hair or a speck of dust got into his eye and he was brought back to earth with a despairing abruptness. Lowrie also takes Kierkegaard’s subsequent disclaimers concerning his own God-relationship at face value. Thus, although allowing that some kind of experience inspired the original entry, Lowrie allows it no systematic significance. In Hirsch’s view, what is important is the religious content that is separable from the experiential occasion itself. For Hirsch – displaying a characteristic Lutheran reticence in face of the mystical – Geismar’s talk of a ‘purely mystical, ecstatic experience’ is misleading. What we have is testimony to a properly evangelical experience of the grace of God in Christ, the discovery that concealed within Kierkegaard’s previous awareness of the claim of Christ as a demand to live righteously was also the possibility of joy: the joy that springs from the conviction that the God whose demands seems to weigh so heavily is also the God of love. The correct analogy for this, according to Hirsch,

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is not Paul’s ecstatic transportation to the seventh heaven but the conversion on the Damascus road, or the joy that was experienced by Luther on realising that the righteousness of God is not simply the righteousness that God demands of us but the righteousness that He bestows upon us in Christ.12 Despite differences in nuance, then, both Lowrie and Hirsch see the ‘experience’character of what Kierkegaard is attempting to describe as an epiphenomenon, the reflex of an act of understanding rather than a simple and direct intuition. Joakim Garff has hinted that the whole entry may not even be the record of any kind of experience. Perhaps, he muses, it is no more than a ‘poetic Entwurf [sketch]’ and not autobiography at all.13 Garff’s comment alerts us to the problematic status of the journal notes that constitute the primary source material for Kierkegaard’s own religious life. These are often fragmentary, and by no means easily connected to the adjacent entries. Their status and function are therefore necessarily conjectural – as opposed, for example, to the person who says, ‘On such and such a day I had a religious experience and this is what happened …’ Perhaps, therefore, the better question is not whether Kierkegaard ‘had’ a religious experience but what such an experience could have meant to him in his intellectual context. On the one hand, this returns us to the published texts themselves, for these now become our best evidence for what Kierkegaard did in fact make of the experiential element of the religious life. On the other hand, we are led back to Kierkegaard’s own sources, to see what – if anything – could have led him to understand religion as necessarily involving a mystical, experiential moment and how that might have contributed to shaping his own religious thought. Let us begin with this latter question. The Protestant bias that contributed to the eclipse of the question concerning the mystical in the secondary Kierkegaard literature was, of course, already an element in Kierkegaard’s own religious context. Here as elsewhere, however, Kierkegaard did not allow himself to be confined within the relatively narrow limits of orthodox Protestant theology,14 and in his own reading he ranged far and wide through Christian literature. In the course of this reading he encountered mystical writings directly and indirectly. Having family roots in the culture of pietism, he would have absorbed many motifs from mystical literature as a part of his religious environment. M. M. Thulstrup has shown how the pietists mediated a number of Catholic mystical writers such as Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, the quietist Madame Guyon and Miguel de Molinos. This is particularly true of Johann Arndt, whose True Christianity was said by Kierkegaard himself to be one of his main sources for devotional reading (and who is quoted in the course of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses). Mystical themes are also found in other pietist writers read by Kierkegaard, including Johann Gerhard and G. Tersteegen. Pietist circles also especially valued Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi – said by Kierkegaard’s fiancée, Regine Olsen, to have been her favourite devotional text.15 In Kierkegaard’s student time, romantic philosophers, including Schelling and Franz von Baader, assisted the rediscovery of mystical writers such as Meister Eckhart (to whom H. L.

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Martensen dedicated a short monograph published in 1840) and Jacob Boehme, about whom Hegel too wrote in exceptionally positive terms. Kierkegaard himself not only read the sermons of Johannes Tauler, a Rhineland mystic who influenced Luther, but also read both primary and secondary sources relating to medieval mysticism (e.g. St Bernard) and its classical and patristic roots.16 It is perhaps also important that, in addition to the focus on experience in Schleiermacher’s theology, Poul Martin Møller, the university teacher to whom Kierkegaard had perhaps the closest and most amicable relation, insisted on the need for ‘an ‘experience of a higher kind’ as the moment in which empirical experience and ideal truth would be synthesised in an individual life and thereby lay the foundation for the individual appropriation of the inner meaning of the Christian tradition. In formulating this requirement Møller was, of course, giving a particular form to a widespread tendency in romantic philosophy to appeal to some kind of intuitive experience as the one sure basis for philosophical construction, a tendency that, in its turn, reflects romanticism’s deep affiliation to Platonism and to the Neo-Platonic notion of a philosophical ecstasy. Clearly, we cannot simply conflate all these diverse sources into one amalgam labelled ‘mysticism’. In any case, if such sources enable us to say that the idea of some sort of mystical experience would not have been totally alien to Kierkegaard’s religious horizons, the question still remains of what it could mean to interpret the climax of the anthropology of the discourses in such terms. The first thing to emphasise is that it is, of course, characteristic of mystical literature that in speaking of mystical experience the term ‘experience’ is necessarily and avowedly twisted out of its everyday usage. Kierkegaard’s own talk of the annihilation of the self calls into question the kind of subject–object relationship that is typically in play in post-Kantian models of experience. A subject that has been annihilated in itself cannot easily be construed as the subject of any kind of experience in a normal epistemological sense. Although Kierkegaard nevertheless speaks about such a self as entering into a relation to God in the inverse and inward relation of adoration and worship, the basis on which he does so is established precisely by differentiating this from the kinds of relationships that hold among objects in the world that make them capable of knowing each other. The relationship of spiritual union, in which the self is or becomes the image of God, is precisely a relationship that excludes and is excluded by the sort of relationship in which one can perceive the other as the object of representation. As Kierkegaard put it in a previously quoted passage from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits: But God is Spirit, [He] is invisible and the image of the Invisible is also Invisible: thus does the invisible Creator reflect himself in that invisibility that is an attribute of Spirit, and God’s image is precisely the invisible glory. If God were visible, then there could be nothing that could be like him or be His image; for there can be no image of anything that is visible and in the whole realm of visible things there is nothing, not a single blade

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The very possibility of our being made in and restored to being the image and likeness of God depends upon the suspension of the structure of subject– object relationships that holds in all intra-worldly relationships. Moreover, if there was an experience that could be appealed to as demonstrating the reality of God or determining the content of the God-relationship, then this would seem to make a mockery of Kierkegaard’s whole strategy of indirect communication. Why go through all this, if there is a simple and direct experience out there, waiting to be had, something to which one can point and say: there it is, there’s my evidence? But, as Kierkegaard says, if the miracle of new birth was a kind of experience, then it would be a legitimate object of doubt and incapable of providing a secure foundation for the religious life (SKS 5, p. 138 [135]). In other words, the reality, status and meaning of the new beginning would be on a level with all other inner-worldly relativities. Any concept of experience deployed in this connection would also need to be capable of allowing for the kind of temporalisation of the self that is central to the discourses’ account of human existence and that is brought to the fore in connection with such terms as expectation and patience. If the task is to grow older than the moment, i.e. to achieve a deep understanding of one’s own existence and to make a commitment that overarches and embraces the whole of life, then that cannot be served simply by abstracting and singling out a privileged moment from within it. For Kierkegaard there can be no unique moment of conversion, and no corresponding unique revelatory experience that would allow us to bypass the temporal extension in which we are to work out whatever our salvation demands of us. In this regard, Kierkegaard shares with both dogmatist and rationalist strands of Protestantism a reserve in the face of religious enthusiasm, especially regarding the kind of claims made by the so-called ‘awakened ones’ to have had a special and direct experience of the Holy Spirit. This reserve is reflected in his Protestant commentators’ unease at the thought of finding any ‘experiential’ element in his own writings. Whether understood in a more narrowly religious sense or in more Kantian, moralistic terms, the meaning of any putative religious experience must be worked out in the long-drawn-out struggle of an entire life. As Kierkegaard puts it at the end of ‘To need God’: ‘[God] does not want human beings to immerse themselves passively in the contemplation of His glory: what He wants is that as human beings come to know Him they are made by Him into a new creation.’ (SKS 5, p. 316 [325]). None of these cautions require us to rule out every possibility of a more direct religious experience playing some role in Kierkegaard’s text or thought, if such a thing is at all conceivable. Whatever restrictions Kierkegaard may place upon such an experience are paralleled in the mystical literature itself. For precisely by emphasising the mystical we are not only emphasising (shall we say ‘under erasure?’) the heightened immediacy of the experiential moment

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but are indicating the problematic and paradoxical character of what is involved. Even if there are ways of working such ‘mystical moments’ into a larger interpretative framework, these cannot resolve the inherent paradox of the appeal to the mystical without depriving this appeal of its specific force. Could we imagine such a thing as a phenomenology of the mystical, for example? William James’s (1902) study of The Varieties of Religious Experience had made clear that such an approach will be methodologically bound to leave undecided the key theological question of whether such an experience (whatever its human meaning and value) is an experience of God. Perhaps it is telling that in using Kierkegaard’s psychology as the material of phenomenological investigation, Heidegger felt himself obliged to bracket out the religious element. Conversely, the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro, who perhaps comes closest to articulating a phenomenology of the mystical that takes seriously the dimension of nothingness (and, in doing so, appealed specifically to Kierkegaard), delivers an outcome that makes clear its own problematic status vis-à-vis the problems of epistemology and ontology as those have been formulated in Western philosophy.17 The question of mysticism does not, of course, have a monopoly on the theme of experience and there are other senses of ‘experience’ that might be deemed relevant to the discourses. In a passage from ‘To Need God’, for example, Kierkegaard speaks of the daily ‘opportunity of experiencing that God lives’. Here Kierkegaard seems to be using a somewhat loose sense of the word that suggests the idea of reflecting on a succession of life experiences, as when we say ‘Experience teaches that …’ or ‘My experience of life has shown me that …’. Here ‘experience’ carries no specific epistemological investments, and such phrases could easily be restated in quite different terms, e.g. ‘My understanding of life is that …’ or ‘Thinking about things makes you realise that …’. Perhaps the choice of ‘experience’ here seems to imply that what I am about to say is not just something I have invented or my arbitrary opinion but is somehow well grounded in the way things are, but its force need be no more than rhetorical. ‘Experience’ in this sense occurs frequently in the discourses, usually negatively. It is in the light of experience or probability that the mediocre, middle-aged man of the world justifies his refusal to commit himself to anything unusual or extraordinary, since experience has taught him that nothing comes of it, or it does not make any difference or it will only turn out badly. In this way experience is used to relativise the value of any particular experience or commitment. However, the connotations do not have to be negative, and the religiously committed person too can appeal to experience in support of his position – as, I am suggesting, is the case in the passage at issue. Note that Kierkegaard does not say in this passage that the believer has ‘the opportunity of experiencing the living God’, which would indeed suggest that he was invoking experience as the direct ground, the spectral evidence that justifies religious belief. Instead, he says that the believer has the opportunity ‘to experience that God lives’, a distinction all the more forceful in Kierkegaard’s Danish, where there is a comma between ‘to experience’ and ‘that God lives’. Again, it is possible to think of experience as important for the discourses if

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we think of it less as focused on a specific ‘experience of God’ and more on what Calvin Schrag has called the ‘dynamic field’ that underlies and encompasses all particular ‘experiences’.18 In this sense it is clear that Kierkegaard is strongly committed to the view that ‘life’ in some sense precedes interpretation and that he is not engaged in some purely a priori deduction of existential categories, as he accuses the Hegelians of doing. If ‘becoming as nothing’ is the climax of the religious path of the discourses, it is not the conclusion of that path. In a sense it is only the beginning, a base line from which to start reconstructing ourselves. As such it already hints at what this will involve – i.e. thinking of ourselves (and acting) in the light of such values as humility, meekness, modesty and self-effacement that are represented in the discourses by a sequence of types, largely though not exclusively drawn from biblical sources: Paul, Job, Anna, John the Baptist, the Woman who was a Sinner, and others. These show us something at least of what it would be like to live with a kind of self-abnegation that might correspond to thinking of oneself as nothing. As models to be emulated they give concrete form to what, otherwise, would be merely abstract formulae. An important characteristic of those who can live like this is that, paradoxically, they achieve the maximum level of unity and coherence in their lives. To find our meaning outside ourselves, in God, is to find a possible focus of continuity and constancy in the midst of all the fluctuations of fortune, the changes of life and the flow of time that otherwise carry us away from ourselves in a process of endless self-dissolution. As the first discourse put it already, it is like the sailor who, far out on an ocean of endless change and chance, can still navigate by the unchanging light of the stars above. Paradoxically, then, becoming as nothing is a way of giving consistency, cohesion and shape to a life in time. This theme of unity, implicit throughout the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, becomes central to the first discourse of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, generally known in English as ‘Purity of Heart’, where, through the definition ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’, the theme of the self’s unity becomes the guiding thread of the whole discourse, itself the longest in the whole authorship (130 pages in the third edition). But the fruits of being ‘built up’ are not simply of benefit in terms of the individual’s pursuit of personal integrity. They also concern the relation to others. Kierkegaard has been notoriously suspected of having been so absorbed in the individual’s project of inward self-unification that he came to forget the communal or interpersonal dimensions of selfhood. However, a growing secondary literature on the subject is shifting the general perception of Kierkegaard as having been so extreme in his individualism as to verge on the solipsistic.19 Here, where we are concerned primarily with the upbuilding works, there are a number of points where the transformative role played by the Godrelationship in the self’s relation to others is emphasised. In the first discourse, ‘the Expectation of Faith’, the point would seem to be directed towards the solitary individual finding in the inward movement of faith a resource for

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achieving ‘victory’ in the face of time’s changes and chances. However, it is important to note that the discussion of what faith can do for the individual is introduced by the question of what might be the best gift that each of us can wish for one another. Two of the three discourses of 1843 address the text ‘Love covers a multitude of sins’. The prophetess Anna is praised in the discourse ‘Patience in Expectation’ for her faithfulness not only to God but also to the memory of her dead husband. The ‘Expectation of an Eternal Happiness’ is said to work on earth as well as in heaven and to enhance human beings’ sense of community. The God-relationship is clearly given a certain priority, but this does not exclude the relation to (human) others. As Kierkegaard puts it in ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’, ‘the one who loved human beings and only learned to love God through this love would be only imperfectly educated, but the one who loved God and in this love learned to love human beings, such a one was strengthened in the inner being.’ (SKS 5, p. 102 [97]). If, as I claim, it is possible to extend the scope of the upbuilding writings to include Works of Love, the role of interpersonal love in the overall economy of a God-centred life becomes even more prominent. At the anthropological or psychological level, however, it has to be acknowledged that the theme of human love is not the chief focus of the main body of upbuilding works. On the other hand, as I shall argue below, it is not in the anthropology of the discourses that we find what they have to say about human relationships but in their communicative form and strategy. That this element is under-argued in the discourses’ anthropology therefore contributes, albeit indirectly, to leaving open a different kind of discourse about the Other and, I shall be suggesting, it is precisely in this different kind of discourse that Kierkegaard’s real originality is to be sought. Where, then, has this survey of ‘Kierkegaard’s anthropology’ left us? If we have learned something of the shape of Kierkegaard’s view of the self and its problematic God-relationship we might still find ourselves asking about the status of this whole account. What sort of description is this, and what would count for or against accepting it? With these questions we turn to consider Kierkegaard’s methodology and to look more closely at how we might be persuaded not merely to accept the third-person account of the human condition offered by the discourses but also to take seriously the recommendations they contain about how we ourselves might choose to live our lives. Notes 1 An example of how this kind of outlook might be elevated to the status of a religious and philosophical world-view is provided by the many writings of Alan Watts – see, for example, A. Watts (1951) The Wisdom of Insecurity, New York, Pantheon. 2 Like much else in the discourses, the example would, of course, arouse the attention of any psychoanalytical reader, suggesting some kind of apologia for the ever-watchful SuperEgo’s repression of the instinctive life of the Id or ‘Es’. 3 Hereafter ‘To Need God’. 4 Hereafter ‘Remember now thy Creator’. 5 At various places in the discourses Kierkegaard makes much of the verbal association

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6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

The human condition between Forklaring (explanation) and Forklarelse (transfiguration), suggesting how the intellectualistic idea of ‘explanation’ needs to be experientially deepened until it becomes a ‘transfiguration’ that permeates the totality of the individual’s existence. On Kierkegaard as a reader of the Letter of St James see Richard Bauckham (1999) James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage, London, Routledge, pp. 158–174. Hereafter ‘The One Who Prays Rightly’. See Note 5 above. The secular orientation of existentialism meant that commentators in that tradition had little interest in such questions, whereas the theological milieu in which Kierkegaard was most extensively received, Neo-Orthodoxy, was hostile to the idea of religious experience as betraying a ‘man-centred’ approach to religion. Typically, Friedrich Heiler categorised Kierkegaard as representative of a ‘prophetic’ rather than a ‘mystical’ type of religious personality. (See the references to Kierkegaard in F. Heiler (1937) Prayer, Oxford, Oxford University Press) There have been exceptions – see Jean Wahl’s comment that Kierkegaard manifested a ‘negative mysticism, close to quietism and to a sort of religious nihilism’. J. Wahl (1967) Études Kierkegaardiennes, 3rd edition, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, p. 409. E. Geismar (1926) Søren Kierkegaard: Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed, Vol. 1, Copenhagen, Gad, pp. 66–7. W. Lowrie (1938) Kierkegaard, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 174. Hirsch (1933) pp. 42–3. J. Garff (2000) SAK. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard: En Biografi, Copenhagen, Gad, p. 115. Although it would be untrue to say that mystical elements were entirely lacking in mainstream Lutheranism, given Luther’s own appropriation of elements of the medieval mystical tradition. See M. M. Thulstrup (1967) Kierkegaard og Pietismen, Copenhagen, Munksgaard; idem. (1959) ‘Lidelsernes Problematik hos Kierkegaard og Mystikerne’, Kierkegaardiana 3; and idem. (1981) ‘Pietism’, in N. Thulstrup and M. M. Thulstrup (eds) Kierkegaard and Great Traditions: Biblioteca Kierkegaardiana 6, Copenhagen, Reitzel. However, Mme Thulstrup is particularly interested in making connections between pietism and the development of Kierkegaard’s polemic against established Christendom rather than exploring possible links to his own spiritual writing. Many of the relevant references are given in D. Law (1993) Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 24–34, under ‘Kierkegaard’s Knowledge of Negative Theology’. See K. Nishida (1986) ‘The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview’, The Eastern Buddhist, 19, 2 and 3: 1–29, 81–119. See C. O. Schrag (1969) Experience and Being: Prolegomena to a Future Ontology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press. Mark Dooley, Jamie Ferreira, Bruce Kirmmse, Martin Matustik, Ed Mooney, Robert L. Perkins, Pia Søltoft, Sylvia Walsh and Merold Westphal are some of the leading contemporary scholars who have done much to bring this ‘social’ or interpersonal dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought to the fore. See also the collection G. Pattison and S. Shakespeare (eds) (1998) Kiekegaard: The Self in Society, Basingstoke, Macmillan. A note of caution remains in place, however, and we should be chary of assimilating Kierkegaard too easily to contemporary models of the liberal-democratic self.

3

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime

I Considering the possibility that the discourses could be read as climaxing in the call to experience a mystical illumination, we arrived at a somewhat indeterminate conclusion. Although the texts seem hospitable to a mystical reading, this does not really explain what is actually being said in them. The displacement of conventional subject–object structures in accounts of mystical experience and the mystics’ characteristic recourse to negation and denial may seem to resonate with Kierkegaard’s talk of ‘becoming as nothing’ but, in so doing, also make it hard to see how appealing to this kind of experience can in any way help determine the noetic content of the discourses. Instead of offering a vantage-point to interpretation, such an experience would itself be crying out for interpretation. If we wish seriously to understand what is being said in the discourses, then, we must resort to other means. I have already proposed reading the discourses within the general horizons of human understanding and experience, without appeal to any special dogmatic beliefs and therefore, in a loose sense at least, reading them philosophically. Such an approach, however, presupposes a hermeneutic sensitivity to the time and place of the text’s origin. I shall therefore begin by looking at three lines of philosophical interpretation that seem to be appropriate to Kierkegaard’s own philosophical horizons: dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime. In each case this will involve a wider consideration of the philosophical status of Kierkegaard’s authorship before coming to focus specifically on the discourses. Let us start with dialectics. Perhaps the most influential attempt to see Kierkegaard’s thought in terms of a dialectical conception of truth is that of Gregor Malantschuk. The ‘dialectical’ orientation of Malantschuk’s approach is already signalled by the original Danish title of the work translated as Kierkegaard’s Thought, literally, Dialectic and Existence in Kierkegaard. Malantschuk’s approach seems especially suited to the present enquiry since he identifies the controlling impetus of Kierkegaard’s thought as ‘authentic anthropological contemplation’, an expression he takes from Kierkegaard’s own early journals.1 Such a definition appears well suited to the anthropological or psychological content of the upbuilding discourses as set out in Chapter 2.

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Malantschuk argues for the essential unity of Kierkegaard’s thought, seeing a unified project taking shape in the very earliest strata of the journals, long before Kierkegaard’s first published work. Indeed, Malantschuk regards unity or, using his expression, ‘consistency’, as a central principle of Kierkegaard’s philosophical procedure. With regard to the crystallisation of this notion of consistency into a guiding principle, Malantschuk ascribes considerable weight to the influence of F. C. Sibbern, one of Kierkegaard’s philosophy professors. Kierkegaard could also have found (and, Malantschuk believes, did find) in Sibbern a model for dialectical thought that was avowedly distinct from that of Hegel. The objection to Hegel was not his use of dialectic but the abstraction of the dialectic from the fullness of life. This insistence on the need for philosophy to take into account the richness of actual life is a constant theme in Sibbern’s thought. At the same time this does not mean the simple surrender of philosophy in the face of lived experience but is rather to be understood as a demand placed upon philosophy to take into account what Sibbern calls the ‘collateral’ reality of existence. For Sibbern the aim is to arrive at a conception of the object of investigation as an organic whole, self-consistent, but understood in the light of the maximum knowledge of its multi-levelled collateral selfdevelopments. Life is not – against Hegel (as read by Sibbern) – a simple linear progression but moves forward on a number of interconnected fronts simultaneously. As Malantschuk summarises Sibbern’s position, ‘by the concept of the collateral he meant to express the fullness and exuberance of existence.’2 This fullness was to be attained and expounded through a sequence of binary oppositions (of which the collateral opposition between thought and existence is perhaps the most general) that give to this whole its determinate content. Within the larger organisation of the whole these oppositions find their synthetic unity but, like his pupil Kierkegaard, Sibbern sees this as something very different from the imposition of an arbitrary triadic dialectical logic on any given phenomenon without regard to its own distinctive existence. Malantschuk acknowledges that Kierkegaard soon moved beyond Sibbern. Nevertheless, this affiliation demonstrates the possibility of Kierkegaard’s having very early on developed a conception of dialectical thought as serving the understanding of subjective actuality, a dialectic of existence in fact. Kierkegaard’s thought thus acquires its distinctive shape by virtue of his manner of deploying a sequence of interdependent or binary concepts, the most important of which are said by Malantschuk to be the temporal–the eternal, necessity–freedom, the finite–the infinite, body–mind–spirit, being–essence, quantity–quality,3 cognition–feeling–will. These – together with other, related dialectical concepts – are used by Kierkegaard for a very specific purpose, namely the exposition of Christianity as the answer to the question concerning authentic anthropological contemplation. As Malantschuk puts it, ‘Christianity is the orienting principle in the longitudinal structuring of the dialectical method. From now on the method consists of delineating human existence, with all its given presuppositions and its variety of existential factors, as it moves steadily forward to higher and higher levels and finally to a confrontation by

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 67 Christianity.’4 We should not, however, see in this a simple reversion to a Hegelian ‘linear’ progression, nor be misled by the adverb ‘steadily’. Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic is one that is open to qualitative determinants and that is therefore able to take into account the various ‘leaps’ and discontinuities that mark this ascent towards truth in a way that Hegel’s dialectic cannot, according to both Kierkegaard and Malantschuk. This basic pattern, Malantschuk argues, provides a unitary frame of reference for the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s whole authorship, from the early journals through to the radically Christian works of the ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Malantschuk’s approach must (and does) therefore include the upbuilding writings.5 He regards these as being situated on a relatively low level of the dialectical ladder and summarises their teaching in these terms, ‘The eighteen upbuilding discourses deal with a person’s first confrontation with the eternal and are addressed to the person who as yet is on the aesthetic level and point to the eternal as the fixed point in all the changes and vicissitudes of temporal life.’6 Even if the discourses remain within the general ambit of the aesthetic, however, they do provide the occasion for the first formulation by Kierkegaard of ‘the idea of man as a synthesis of two opposite qualities’.7 We are not immediately concerned here with Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole but, quite specifically, with the interpretation of the upbuilding discourses. Even in its own terms Malantschuk’s argument gives a somewhat sparse summary of the discourses, which, it might be thought, provide more plentiful material for a dialectically determined exegesis than is covered by the brief comments just quoted. Indeed, the discourses seem potentially to offer substantial support to a dialectical approach. In Chapter 2 it was easy to allow the exposition given to be guided by the dialectic of immediacy and reflection, a dialectic worked out in such polarities as the naively ignorant and the concerned person, the fortunate and the unfortunate person, the child and the adult, wishing and willing, the temporal and the eternal. Passing through the ‘stormy’ conflict of these polarities the self seems to arrive at last at a state of calmness in which it finds reconciliation with God and itself. But is this dialectical ordering of the anthropological material offered as an answer to the theoretical question concerning the nature of human being? And if it is, is the dialectical modelling of the person exhaustive? Or is there a part or moment of the human condition that dialectics cannot reach? If so, then what are the implications of the breakdown or shortcomings of dialectics for our assessment of its role in the anthropological understanding of the discourses as a whole? These questions come to focus on how we read the culminating moment of the discourses, the moment when the self becomes as nothing and, in a state of transparency to God, is paradoxically granted the possibility of its own existence as a free and individual personality. Is this paradox something that can be dialectically mapped? Or does this mark the point of breakdown of dialectical construction? It has often been noticed that Kierkegaard’s dialectic is severely truncated,

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that is to say, it is dualistic and negative. The binary opposites that Kierkegaard puts in play characteristically do not serve to bring about a harmony or synthesis (as in both Hegel’s and Sibbern’s type of dialectic), but end in a moment of breakdown that apparently resists reconciliation or reintegration. Hegel did, of course, claim to offer a path of thinking that embraced even the utter dismemberment and death of consciousness in the speculative Good Friday, but whether he made good this claim is another matter. In Bataille’s terms, what most post-Kierkegaardian and post-Marxian readers have found in Hegel is a restricted economy, a carefully calculated admission of negativity that stretches but does not break a fundamental presupposition in favour of a positive resolution. Whether or not this is a fair reading of Hegel is not an issue for this present study, but the question can readily be re-applied to Kierkegaard. Even if we note Kierkegaard’s own constant objection (and, again, it is not here an issue whether the objection is fairly made) that the system smoothly glides over the real fissures, disjunctions and breaks that characterise existential actuality, this does not insure Kierkegaard himself against having to face an analogous objection – an objection formulated in this instance as the construction of a dialectical model that guarantees in advance the necessity of a new, higher stage of consciousness emerging out of the mutual annihilation of the terms of what has gone before. When, in the journals and elsewhere, Kierkegaard speaks of faith as a new or higher immediacy supervening upon the vacuum left after reflection has emptied the first immediacy of its given contents, is this the sign of a dialectical model delivering a predetermined result, or is it more a matter of using a familiar philosophical terminology to try to make approximate sense of an experienced occurrence that, in itself, is not determined by these terms? With specific regard to the discourses, then, is the moment of becoming transparent to God a predictable outcome of the breakdown of the two poles of the self (the inner and the outer person)? Is what we see happening here the outworking of some divine mechanism? Is the transfiguration of the self in God written into the script from the beginning – or might it happen that, having committed ourselves to the struggle between the outer and the inner person, we could find ourselves stranded in the wilderness, annihilated but not reborn? Perhaps these are questions that cannot ever be answered once and for all, since they involve judgements about the Kierkegaard texts that are of a qualitative rather than a merely factual nature. These judgements will depend on how seriously we take such terms as ‘annihilation’ and ‘nothing’ with regard to what happens to the self in the decisive moment of the God-relationship. And here we face a knotty interpretative conundrum. For how could such expressions be read literally? But if they are not read in that way, what exactly do they mean? Even if these questions resist ready answers, I take it as a matter of good reading practice that we should allow the difficult talk of ‘annihilation’ and ‘becoming as nothing’ as much weight as is consistent with possible meaning. Minimally this would seem to involve taking them seriously as indicative of a

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 69 limit to the role of knowledge or theoretical enquiry with regard to the religious crisis of the self. In considering their possible role as signifying some kind of mystical state, we previously saw that even such a state would offer precious little to any knowledge-oriented enquiry. Here, reading the comments about the annihilation of the self more as ‘grammatical remarks’, we might say that quite apart from any possible experiential reference they put down a marker about the use or value of theoretical enquiry. There is nothing for knowledge to know here, Kierkegaard would seem to be saying. Kierkegaard did, of course, have a notable model for a dialectic that ended in simple defeat: the dialectic of Socrates, which, as Kierkegaard himself interpreted it in his doctoral thesis, was governed by an irony defined as ‘infinite absolute negativity’. In opposition to Plato, Socrates’ own practice of dialectic was determined by his genuine conviction that he knew nothing at all. It is therefore no accident that some dialogues end without a positive conclusion. On the contrary, it is just this that signals the presence of the truly Socratic element within Platonic texts that are composed from a quite different standpoint, one that, like that of Hegel, is committed to the speculative principle of the ultimate identity of thought and Being. Socrates’ dialectic does not lead to illumination, but, like Samson in the house of the Philistines, brings the whole edifice of thought crashing down – not only on his interlocutors’ heads, but also on his own (SKS 1, p. 102 [40]). If, then, there is a dialectical element at work in the discourses, an element that allowed us to use the pattern of immediacy/reflection to guide the presentation of their anthropological teaching, there has to be a question mark over the view that this guides us to what is truly determinative for the discourses as a whole, namely the religious resolution of the crisis of the divided self. This does not, of course, mean that the dialectical element is simply ‘useless’, but only that its usefulness is limited to ordering and presenting the anthropology of the discourses, to a sharper posing of the question of existence, and to the demarcation of the near-side limits of reason in getting to grips with existence. This is not only important for our reading of the discourses: it is also crucial to how we understand his authorship and his view of the human situation as a whole. According to Malantschuk, the discourses are situated on a relatively low rung of Kierkegaard’s dialectical thought. But if the culminating phase of the discourses already frustrates a dialectical construction of the human condition, it becomes hard to see how dialectics (and, certainly, how dialectics alone) could adequately elucidate Kierkegaard’s central religious teaching, especially if this is regarded as in some sense ‘higher’ than the teaching of the discourses themselves. II If a dialectical interpretation of Kierkegaard’s work takes us only to the moment of breakdown when the most decisive aspects of his thoughts first come into view, are there other philosophical means of clarifying its essential content?

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One candidate would seem to be phenomenology. The most ambitious claims for Kierkegaard in this area have him providing us with the materials for carrying through a thorough-going phenomenology of the ontological structures of human existence. Heidegger, in the famous footnote referred to in the Introduction, clearly believed that Kierkegaard himself was ‘merely’ a Christian psychologist. Nevertheless, he no less clearly regarded Kierkegaard’s ‘penetrating’ writings as providing a kind of preliminary study for the work of a more fundamental ontological description, i.e. the work he himself was undertaking in Being and Time. Heidegger’s own ontology, at least in that period, was, of course, resolutely based on the premise of human mortality and finitude, and therefore on the assumption that, consequently, any view towards God was simply and in principle closed. The Being that was to be disclosed through the work of fundamental ontology was not the Being that could be defined within the scholastic tradition as the best name for God. It was and could only be Being that had, as it were, internalised the human experience of utter temporalisation. Kierkegaard, then, is to be affirmed qua psychologist, but the Christian framework of his psychology is to be dropped and, instead, his psychology is to be deepened in the direction of a Godless ontology. Others have offered a more fulsome view of Kierkegaard’s possible contribution towards a phenomenological ontology. Calvin Schrag acknowledges that ‘an ontology of existence is only implicitly present in the writings of Kierkegaard, for he was primarily an ethico-religious thinker searching for an answer to his all-absorbing question: “How can one become a Christian in Christendom?” ’8 At the same time Schrag claims that such an ontology is nevertheless implicit in Kierkegaard’s writings. His conviction, he says, is that an existentialist ontology ‘is possible and that its possibility was already suggested in the reflections of Kierkegaard.’9 However, while not excluding the possibility of religious existentialism, Schrag argues that the outcome of any such existentialist ontology would have to be neutral with regard to the decision for or against faith. Paul Tillich (a contemporary of Heidegger’s and, briefly, a colleague) could by way of contrast read Kierkegaardian psychology as one source text for a new and distinctively modern religious ontology. For Tillich (as opposed to Heidegger), God could indeed be spoken of as Being-Itself. The one nonsymbolic thing we can say about God, he insisted, is that God is Being-Itself. However, in opposition to scholasticism, Tillich did not seek to ground this in an analysis of the cosmological structures of the universe but in the existential analysis of subjective experience, primarily in terms of anxiety and the confrontation with death (‘the shock of non-Being’, as he put it): ‘The Eternal’, the ‘God’ of the discourses is, for Tillich, congruent with God as Being-Itself.10 Phenomenology does not of itself deliver God into the grasp of human cognition, but it does make plain the unanswerability apart from God of the question of human existence, a question brought to consciousness by the radical experience of nothingness. There are, therefore, two questions. First, is it possible to understand Kierkegaard as offering a phenomenology of the religious life? And, second,

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 71 how far could a Kierkegaardian phenomenology take us in making sense of the claim that it is in the God-relationship that we first attain to the only possible foundation for an authentic existence? Could an existential, Kierkegaardian phenomenology deliver the ultimate prize of a religiously articulated ontology? These questions are, of course, formulated with specific reference to Kierkegaard and, still more specifically, with regard to the upbuilding discourses. However, beyond this narrow concern with the interpretation of Kierkegaard there is also, inevitably, the larger question whether any such project of using phenomenology to uncover the deep ontological structures shaping human life and/or the human God-relationship is at all conceivable or possible. A specialised study such as this cannot hope to answer the question in global terms. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the narrowly textual considerations that lead us to reject the view of Kierkegaard-as-phenomenologist cannot entirely be kept separate from larger considerations as to the meaning of the phenomenological project as such in its bearing on questions of religious existence. In addressing the question of phenomenology and its possible role in relation to a religious ontology we are asking about both method and content. PostHeideggerian phenomenology is inseparable from the ambition of ontology, and ontology cannot come into question unless there is some notion of how Being might show itself. By focusing on the question of Kierkegaard’s method, his manner of proceeding in the discourses, we may therefore most expeditiously determine whether or to what extent he can be read ‘ontologically’. Leaving Heidegger and Tillich, then, let us return to Kierkegaard and to the question whether we can speak of his methodology as a kind of phenomenology. My answer to these questions will, essentially, be negative. Nevertheless, both the promise and (I would claim) the failure of a phenomenological reading do bring into focus some of the decisive issues. The question of Kierkegaardian phenomenology is, moreover, importantly and critically refined by Michael Theunissen’s ‘negativistic’ approach, which, although in some sense phenomenological, also contributes to undermining some of the presuppositions of the more common ways of reading Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist. What, then, would a phenomenological reading of the discourses involve, and why am I rejecting it? The possibility of applying the category of phenomenology to Kierkegaard’s work, or to aspects of it, has been widely broached in the secondary literature, although often only in passing.11 Moreover, it should at once be said that there is some textual basis for it. There are many places where Kierkegaard seems to speak the language of phenomenology. It pervades his master’s dissertation On the Concept of Irony, where the opening paragraph already introduces the issue of the relationship between concept and phenomenon that is then taken up at many places throughout the dissertation. In the mature authorship it is found in the discussion of the demonic in the Concept of Anxiety, where he repeatedly adverts to the ‘phenomena’ of this particular form of anxiety (see SKS 4, p. 426 [125]). In The Sickness unto Death, there seems to be a clear analogy to the structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology12 – though what this signifies is another

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matter, and the possibility that the analogy is intended very deliberately and precisely to serve a critical strategy (e.g. by means of parody) cannot be ruled out in advance. With regard to the discourses, a phenomenological approach seems plausible and even fruitful insofar as it allows for the unfolding of their actual content, and, indeed, the kind of naive exposition given in the previous chapter may itself appear to tend towards a loosely phenomenological approach. The correlation of the structural contrasts between, for example, youth and age, fortune and adversity, with the seemingly Hegelian dialectical polarities of immediacy and reflection may also strengthen this impression, suggesting that here too we have something like a phenomenology of the religious life. Nevertheless, important and attractive as it is, a phenomenological reading does not and cannot provide the most adequate way of reading the discourses. The reasons for this are connected with the religious nature of the discourses and the limits of phenomenology in relation to the ultimate concerns of the religious life. In this connection, the difficulty of carrying through a phenomenological reading of the discourses (and of Kierkegaard’s authorship in general) suggests some more general reflections about the limits of phenomenology as such. Let us, then, look at some of the main versions of Kierkegaard-as-phenomenologist. Mark C. Taylor’s influential Journeys to Selfhood: Kierkegaard and Hegel, although devoting relatively little space to setting out just what phenomenology means, is based on what he himself calls his ‘central thesis’ that: Hegel and Kierkegaard develop alternative phenomenologies of spirit that are designed to lead the reader from inauthentic to authentic or fully developed selfhood. While Hegel undertakes this task explicitly in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard unfolds his analysis indirectly in a series of pseudonymous writings … [Both] present detailed interpretations of various figures of spirit, shapes of consciousness, forms of existence, or types of selfhood. In both cases the contrasting spiritual configurations are elaborated in a dialectical progression that advances from less complete to more complete forms of life.13 A further dimension of this that is especially important to Taylor is that it brings to the fore the ‘narrative quality of experience’ a term that, as he acknowledges, he owes to Stephen Crites.14 Jörg Disse’s study Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of the Experience of Freedom also draws an explicit parallel with Hegel’s phenomenology. Moreover, Disse offers a somewhat more formal statement of how he understands phenomenology, and spells out what he regards as the three decisive factors: Firstly, this term is taken to characterise the descriptive direction of my exposition. I am not attempting a transcendental philosophical grounding of freedom. Rather, my point of departure is the concrete person in their

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 73 immediate actuality, the concrete being-in-the-world of the human person – a point of departure that also in large part determines Kierkegaard’s thought … Secondly, drawing on Hegel’s concept of phenomenology I shall show the various stages of the experience of freedom and their relations to each other. Thirdly, I intend the term phenomenology, in the sense of a doctrine of the phainomenon, to mean the explication of the subjective appearance of freedom. The object of the investigation is not freedom ‘in itself’, but how the individual person understands for himself what has pre-theoretically been always already experienced as freedom, and the conditions under which the experience of freedom is brought to its fullest expression.15 Although Disse sees philosophies of modernity as having characteristically emphasised autonomy, the freedom to choose who and how I want to be, this is not how any of us actually experience that freedom in a pure state: our experience of freedom is tied to all manner of contingencies and counter-forces that give to that experience its specific and concrete form and, as it were, colour. Moreover, in a remark that is especially pertinent to the reading of the discourses being attempted here, Disse claims that since the confrontation with our impending death is integral to the actual experience of freedom, since that confrontation of itself engenders the hope that we might become free of or from death, and, since, further, this hope makes no sense without the further postulation of God (as the only possible guarantor of an eternal happiness), the experience of freedom itself reveals the concrete and actual meaning for us of the God-relationship. Consequently, Disse argues that ‘[i]t can be shown on the basis of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of the experience of freedom that freedom cannot be separated from a God-relationship, that the experience of freedom and the God-relationship are indissolubly bound up together, and that there is no concrete freedom where this God-relationship is not sustained by a mood of trust.’16 Further dimensions of what might be involved in a phenomenological reading of Kierkegaard are offered by Arnold B. Come in his article ‘Kierkegaard’s Method: Does He Have One?’17 Come regards Kierkegaard as ‘primarily’ a theologian, if also a theologian of ‘a peculiar kind’.18 Kierkegaard’s thought, then, is methodically phenomenological, but this, in Come’s view, does not confine Kierkegaard to the inflexible grid of a predetermined method, since his ‘phenomenological commitment’ is precisely what makes it possible for ‘[n]othing in the thinking and writing of Kierkegaard [to be] ever finished or closed, but everything [to be] always open and running out to unseen horizons …’19 Moreover, Come also disclaims the wish to ascribe to Kierkegaard a programme of phenomenological research of the kind that has grown up under the influence of Husserl (although, as we shall see, he does argue for quite a close analogy between Kierkegaardian and Husserlian phenomenology). What phenomenology does in Kierkegaard’s hands, Come argues, is to ensure the constant bonding of, on the one side, ‘the metaphysical and the eternal’

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and, on the other, ‘the accidental or fortuitous’ – or, rather, what would be accidental or fortuitous if deprived of its metaphysical or eternal connection. But, equally, the metaphysical and eternal is never to be separated ‘from the phenomenon within the phenomenon’.20 What appears in and as my life, then, is not a ‘mere’ phenomenon, but ‘[t]he phenomenological is an integral dimension of reality’. 21 At its simplest, then, what Come means by ‘phenomenological’ is that Kierkegaard begins his every exploration of human existence with an analysis of his own self, his own experience … And his goal, his ending is not a system of ideas or even understanding, but is to turn his “subjective reflexion” towards the task of transformation of his concrete existence as a self.22 However, this focus on himself does not lock Kierkegaard into a solipsistic cage. As with Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology, Kierkegaard confronts the question of whether ‘my experience, my self-consciousness in all its complexity [can] serve as a clue to the nature of consciousness as experienced by every other human being?’23 Come believes that Kierkegaard answers this question in the affirmative. Although starting with himself, Kierkegaard delivers nothing less than ‘a phenomenology of human nature in general’. Quoting Ricoeur (interestingly not his two short essays on Kierkegaard, but his study Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology), Come claims that, as opposed to Hegel, the categories yielded by a Kierkegaardian phenomenology are not, finally, logical, but are the ‘ “actual ‘categories’ of the individual” ’.24 Like Disse, Come also stresses the point that Kierkegaardian phenomenology discloses the human situation as inseparable from God as giver of life, encountered concretely in our experiences of freedom, failure and guilt, within the facticity and temporality of history, and that this encounter, despite its negative aspect, contains the prospect of self-fulfilment. One the most forceful proponents of the view that Kierkegaard is best read as a kind of phenomenologist is Arne Grøn, most notably in his book Subjectivity and Negativity: Kierkegaard, but also in a number of articles. Grøn’s understanding of phenomenology lays particular emphasis on the visual metaphor – and, perhaps, more than metaphor – that inhabits the word phenomenon itself, something that, Grøn suggests, is also highlighted by Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety. As Grøn defines ‘phenomenon’ it means ‘that which shows itself through the individual’s manner of presenting himself. It [the phenomenon] is not available for direct observation, but requires a particular kind of attention.’25 A ‘phenomenon’, understood in these terms, is not simply an object, since it is ‘a sign, that is to be interpreted’.26 Moreover, the pre-eminent phenomenon is, as far as Kierkegaard is concerned, ‘not merely a problem or theme, but a figure, a form of consciousness’.27 As a figured sign of a conscious content, the phenomenon reveals itself to us in and as an expression of what is to be interpreted, and, characteristically does so dynamically, as movement, including

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 75 such ‘elementary movements as turning one’s back on something, looking out over something or down on it. It is [constituted by] bodily movements that are metaphorical in the sense that they, in movement, give shape to a certain meaning.’ But the phenomenon is not ‘out there’ like something we look at from afar. If we are to interpret it aright, we have to do so in the light of the appropriate categories. As a form of consciousness it is not something alien to us, but requires the engagement of our own self-consciousness. Even if the phenomenon is, in the first instance, given as something external (a form of behaviour I observe in others, for example) it is only in the degree that I bring to bear an understanding of existence that, ultimately, I derive from my self, from my own self-knowledge, that the phenomenon becomes meaningful. Conversely, the phenomenon itself is what makes it possible for my self-knowledge to appear, to acquire shape and concrete form, and not merely to be something locked away in abstract interiority. With regard to the activity of the interpreter, Grøn writes: In order to read it is necessary to have a certain fantasy, such that the reader’s own experiences and observations are set in motion. Like the observer, the reader should be supple and in motion. The reader must be able to imitate in himself the movements that are described. The movement thus turns back onto the reader who must be attentive to himself as he reads. This sets the stage for an ethic of reading, which is often implied by Kierkegaard and most directly stated in the way in which the Forewords to the upbuilding discourses point to the role of the reader.28 Grøn offers an extended quotation from The Concept of Anxiety that provides something like a proof-text for his argument. Since this same passage not only illuminates what Grøn is aiming at, but also, as I understand it, provides important evidence against a phenomenological reading, strictly understood, it is worth quoting the most relevant section here: He who has used a regular measure in the field of psychology and psychological observation, has acquired for himself an ability to insinuate himself into everything human, an ability that makes him able to summon the example he needs in an instant, which, even if it does not have the authority of a fact, has another kind of authority. As the psychological observer needs to be more supple than a tightrope walker in order to insinuate himself in amongst people and imitate the positions they represent … so ought he to have a poetic originality in his soul that enables him in an instant to make a whole, a regular whole, out of what is only ever present in the individual in a partial and irregular manner. When he has perfected himself in [this capacity] then he will not need to fetch examples from the literary repertoire or poetise half-dead reminiscences, but brings his observations out fresh from the water, still jumping and playing in all their colourful brightness. Nor does he need to run himself to death in

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Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime order to find something to notice. On the contrary, he sits quite quietly in his room like a police agent who nevertheless knows everything that is going on. What he needs, he can give shape to instantly, what he needs he has instantly to hand thanks to his general praxis, just as in a well-ordered house one does not need to go down to the street to fetch water but has it on tap in one’s apartment. If he should grow dubious, he is nevertheless so oriented in human life and his gaze so sharp, sharp as an inquisitor’s, that he knows just where to look and easily discovers the kind of individual [example] he needs for his experiment. (SKS 4, pp. 359–60 [54–5])

Finally, Grøn distinguishes two senses of phenomenology. With regard to the first, he says that ‘both in the pseudonymous and in the upbuilding works, phenomenological descriptions play a role that is no less decisive than it is overlooked. This concerns phenomena such as mistrust, courage, patience, gentleness, envy, vainglory, hope, forgiveness, pride and humility.’29 The second sense is more specific, namely that Kierkegaard approaches something like a phenomenology in the Hegelian sense ‘where we encounter examples of a descriptive and analytic presentation of forms of consciousness’.30 Clearly there are differences between the various accounts of Kierkegaardian phenomenology we have been examining, though, equally, there are significant convergences. All seem to agree that to speak of Kierkegaard’s method as ‘phenomenological’ is to draw attention to the inseparability of selfunderstanding from the concrete, contingent, temporal, narrative, embodied nature of human existence, and the conviction that, despite this ‘disadvantage’ (as it might seem from a rationalistic viewpoint), Kierkegaard’s view of life is not that it is a merely chaotic flux but rather contains the possibility of a structured and generalisable self-understanding. Furthermore, although all are anxious to keep a certain distance between Kierkegaardian and Hegelian phenomenology, emphasising the individual orientation of the former and the logical orientation of the latter, they nevertheless see a significant convergence, particularly in terms of the way in which the subject manifests itself in the mode of experience. None are eager to enter into a more detailed reckoning of the relationship between Kierkegaardian and Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology. Several specifically claim that Kierkegaard’s phenomenology not only provides him with a way of explicating the self-understanding of the human subject, but also opens a way – perhaps the only way there is – to an appropriate grasp of the God-relationship: in other words, that Kierkegaardian phenomenology can be understood as an existential and theological ontology. This, as I see it, raises both exegetical and systematic questions. III As an understanding of Kierkegaard’s texts and of Kierkegaard’s own explicit methodological reflections, the ‘phenomenologists’ are perhaps on their

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 77 strongest ground when their argument is applied in detail to specific texts. The evidence that, especially, The Sickness unto Death structurally and methodologically reflects Hegelian practice is, in one respect, persuasive. Nevertheless, even a strong formal analogy must be severely qualified by a number of observations. One does not need to take the extreme view (such as Poole’s) that Kierkegaard never engaged in serious philosophy or theology to take seriously the need to contextualise such philosophical and theological arguments as Kierkegaard does produce in relation to his whole communicative strategy, and to recognise that one element in this strategy is the deliberate twisting of external form in order to distort the substantive content, even to the point of parody or lampoon. But if we nevertheless maintain that serious philosophy is going on in at least some parts of the texts, the question remains whether phenomenology is the right word for it. It is curious that Heidegger is rarely discussed in the context of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology, since it is precisely Heidegger who, in Being and Time, not only undertakes to offer a phenomenological interpretation of human Dasein but does so precisely, if partially, on the ground mapped out by Kierkegaard’s descriptive analysis of the human situation. Heidegger himself does not, as we have seen, accept that Kierkegaard can count as a phenomenologist in the strong sense. That this is Heidegger’s view does not of course mean that the issue is settled once and for all. What is more interesting is what Heidegger himself, at least in the early period of his thought, takes over from Husserl as one of the fundamental presuppositions of phenomenological enquiry: that phenomenology orients itself by and towards the light of that which shows itself from itself as what it is. Putting it another way: that phenomenological investigation rests upon a founding intuition that, in an important sense, is self-legitimating and self-interpreting, an intuition that, in his lectures on phenomenological method, Heidegger calls ‘fulfilled categorial intuition’, i.e. seeing the phenomenon as the phenomenon that it is.31 Now although Heidegger no less emphatically underlines his view that the subject itself is interpretatively active in this situation (a cognitive scenario that, as he sees it, pre-empts and undermines the subject–object duality of classical epistemology), what his account brings to the fore is the interdependence of phenomenological interpretation and what is given to it concretely and in a quite determinate way in intuition: this particular thing revealing itself as this particular thing that it is. To take one of Heidegger’s own examples: we see unity as the unity of this flock of birds in that we see it precisely as a flock and not an amorphous conglomerate. We do not impose unity as a mental form given a priori onto an indifferent sense impression: we see the unity of the phenomenon itself. Nor is this insistence on the more than subjective nature of the founding intuition of phenomenological enquiry a quirk on Heidegger’s part. Something similar may be said of Hegel: that what is disclosed in the course of the phenomenological approach to consciousness is a history that had to be as and how it showed itself to be, that reason had to go this way and no other. For all their differences, it is this that gives the phenomenologies of Hegel, Husserl and (early) Heidegger

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their claim to be forms of science rather than imaginative evocations of particular ways of viewing the world. To look at the world rightly is to see it as it is. Let us return to Kierkegaard’s observer, sitting in his study like a detective who, nevertheless (somehow), knows everything that is going on in the mean streets below. The end of the passage quoted from The Concept of Anxiety brings into the discussion a term Kierkegaard himself several times uses for his method: ‘experiment’ or ‘experimentation’.32 Kierkegaard does not mean by this anything much like experimentation in the natural sciences, but, rather, something that the passage itself brings to the fore: the active production by the observer of an exemplification of that which is to be understood, whether that is the movement of resignation, the demonic or faith. Now undeniably Grøn is correct in drawing attention to the plastic, mobile and representative character of Kierkegaard’s ‘phenomena’: but are they anything like phenomena in the sense we have just been considering, i.e. are they intrinsically, uniquely and irreplaceably what gives expression to just this determinate content? I suggest that the whole tenor of Vigilius Haufniensis’ description of the observer implies not. In any case, the actual course of his exposition further undermines the claim. The phenomena through which the concept of anxiety is revealed are as diverse and as disconnected as one could wish, and the same applies to The Sickness unto Death and the phenomena that are taken as disclosing despair. As opposed to the sense of phenomena in phenomenological enquiry, Kierkegaard’s examples and illustrations – his ‘experiments’ – are literary, parabolic, oblique, and suggestive rather than binding. Already in On the Concept of Irony Kierkegaard seems to be concerned by the limitations of phenomenological method. Even in the Introduction, despite speaking in suitably balanced terms of the need to give both the phenomenon and the concept their respective rights, he draws attention to a number of problems. Very much in passing he alludes to difficulties with regard to both nature and history, difficulties that centre on the singularity of each entity or event and the corresponding impossibility of bringing about a complete mutual transparency between concept and phenomenon. How much more problematic is the case of one, like Socrates, in whose life silence played such a key role, in the sense that he himself gave no clear or final expression as to the essential content of his life or message. There is thus, necessarily, an inherent limit with regard to Socrates counting as a historical phenomenon at all. But things are even worse, since, if ‘the substantial factor in his existence’ is identified as irony, then we are faced with what is in itself a negative concept, i.e. a concept that does not simply withdraw from phenomenalisation, but actually works against it. Dealing with such a concept, Kierkegaard says, is like trying to picture a nixie wearing the hat that makes it invisible (SKS 1, p. 74 [12]). In the context of The Concept of Anxiety itself Kierkegaard gives a yet harder case. For, as he makes quite explicit, he sets out in this text to develop a psychological study of the concept of anxiety in relation to the concept of sin (with which, he suggests, anxiety has an intrinsic connection). However, not only does the concept of sin belong to a domain outside the reach of psychology, it is also said to resist

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 79 being grasped as a concept at all. For the point is not to know what sin is, but to resist it: ‘Essentially sin does not belong to any science. It is the subject of preaching, in which the individual is spoken to as an individual by an individual.’ (SKS 4, p. 323 [16]). Even ethics is undermined by sin, although, in a sense, sin is also a presupposition of ethics, since if we all knew and did what was right there would be no need for ethics at all. Only dogmatics could appropriately deal with sin, or, more precisely, a ‘second ethics’ that, incorporating a dogmatic understanding of sin, approached it as a matter of concrete resolve. But dogmatics and, consequently, ‘second ethics’ is not a ‘science’ in the general sense of the word but a matter of concrete judgement concerning good and evil. A psychological study of anxiety, then, can never finally clarify its own ultimate sources or tendencies. The result is a kind of destabilisation, such that the concept of anxiety itself only ever appears in a kind of half-light, a chiaroscuro that never comes to rest in a distinct form or complex of forms. Although Kierkegaard may avail himself of a quasi-Hegelian structure to organise the outline of his exposition, moving as it does through a sequence of ever more radically reflected historical stages, the texture of his account is woven out of a curious mixture of conceptual deduction and disconnected illustrations. What, for example, is the precise role of the Genesis narrative in this work? Does the story of Adam’s and Eve’s fall manifest anxiety, is it itself a phenomenalisation of anxiety or does it merely provide an occasional scenario within which Kierkegaard then works out his own understanding of anxiety? The force of this question is, it may be added, considerably sharpened by his free treatment of the biblical text.33 As we go through the text, there is indeed little enough that could really count as a phenomenon in the strict sense. The much-cited image of subjective anxiety as a kind of dizziness or vertigo is not offered as a manifestation of anxiety but as an analogy or likeness of it. The moment of vision in which the self grasps itself as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is said to be necessarily ambiguous (SKS 4, p. 392 [89]) and, moreover, ‘a figurative expression’ that Kierkegaard expounds by means of the poetic heroine Frithiof, looking out across the sea at her departing lover (SKS 4, p. 390 [87]). The ballet dancer Bournonville’s leap, when he makes his entrance in the role of Mephistopheles, shows forth the essential discontinuity of the demonic, but is not itself a ‘phenomenon’ of the demonic since it is merely an artistic representation thereof. It is this variety in his material and in his manner of dealing with it that gives to this and other Kierkegaard texts their distinctive, irregular and, as it were, ‘lumpy’ feel. But this is as it must be since, on the one hand, Kierkegaard insists that ‘There is only one proof of Spirit, and that is Spirit’s proof within oneself …’ (SKS 4, p. 398 [95]), whereas, on the other hand (as he says with specific reference to the forms of the demonic), the phenomena are so various that the only thing that unites them is that they are manifestations of this particular concept. Anxiety is not given to us in the concrete form of a determinate phenomenon that we apprehend in a prereflective manner, like Heidegger seeing the unity of a flock of birds. It is everywhere and nowhere: it all depends on how we look. In this connection it

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is relevant to note the distinction that is made – albeit very much in passing – in the discussion of seriousness that concludes the section on the demonic, namely the distinction between phenomenology and pneumatology. Kierkegaard’s point here is precisely to reprimand the Hegelian Rosenkrantz for an inadequate understanding of the latter, i.e. for treating phenomenologically what can only finally be grasped pneumatologically, i.e. from the standpoint of Spirit, as a matter of and for freedom. In many instances, therefore, the phenomena of anxiety are more in the way of what Heidegger called an ‘ontic warrant’ for his ontological conclusions (as in his use of the myth of Care in Being and Time). Much the same could be said of Kierkegaard’s procedure in The Sickness unto Death. There too, despair is said to be everywhere, and the question is whether we bring to the phenomena the right conceptual understanding for deciphering its presence, a presence that, of itself, because of its transcendent nature, is always ambiguous, indirect, concealed. However, it is precisely this emphasis on the active, interpretative role of the observer, who can carry out his experimental ‘observations’ alone in his apartment without the aid of any phenomena actually present, that separates Kierkegaard from what we might think of as the more ‘classical’ forms of phenomenology, where recourse to just this method is urged as a way of undercutting the kind of separation between subject and object that has dogged post-Cartesian philosophy, a way, that is, of opening up the primordial intertwining of subject and object in a single, unitary phenomenalisation of Being. But perhaps the requirement that the only legitimate use of the term phenomenology is that associated with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger is far too stringent. Couldn’t the proponents of a Kierkegaardian phenomenology remind me that such a phenomenology was never intended to be taken in an abstract or impersonal sense, but was precisely existential in orientation, a matter – as Grøn indeed emphasises – of self-knowledge? The point of this kind of phenomenology, then, is not to solve problems in philosophy, but to enable us to come to a better understanding for ourselves of who we ourselves are, or, rather, since the question can only be asked in the singular, of who I really am. Relevant here would be not only the conceptual distinction between interested and disinterested knowledge made in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but also a distinction that Kierkegaard draws in the discourse ‘Remember now your Creator’ between ‘indifferent’ and ‘concerned’ knowledge. Kierkegaard writes: There is a truth whose greatness, whose loftiness is customarily praised by admiringly saying of it that it is indifferent, equally valid if anyone accepts it or not, indifferent towards the individual’s special circumstances, whether he is young or old, happy or downcast, indifferent towards its relation to him, whether it is of benefit to him or damages him, whether it holds him back from something else or helps him to it … indifferent towards what concerned him or any other human being qua human being or, especially, qua human being. (SKS 5, p. 233 [233])

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 81 On the other hand, Kierkegaard continues, ‘there is another kind of truth that one might call concerned’. Such concerned truths have nothing lofty about them, since they know of themselves that they do not apply universally in all circumstances, but only in the special circumstances of the individual. They are not indifferent to the individual’s special circumstances, whether he is young or old, happy or downcast, since it is this that decides whether they are to become truths for him. They do not immediately detach themselves from the individual and abandon him, but continue to be concerned for him … Such a truth is not indifferent towards how it is received by the individual, whether he appropriates it with all his heart or merely with his lips, for precisely this difference shows that it is jealous of itself; it is not indifferent towards whether the truth is a blessing for him or brings about his downfall … Such a concerned truth is not indifferent to who it was that had propounded it, but, on the contrary, he [the original propounder] remains continuously present in it, in order that, he may repeatedly concern himself with what is individual. (SKS 5, pp. 233–4 [233–4]) Certainly, self-knowledge is a key issue in Kierkegaard’s authorship in general and in the discourses in particular. The arousal of self-concern, of what I mean to the world and the world to me, is, in various formulations, pinpointed in several of the discourses as the inaugural moment of the movement from our being immersed in the world to becoming transparent in nothingness to God. In this context, our experiences would no longer be experiences of the world but of our selves. This is, indeed, how we may understand Hegelian phenomenology: as the history of Spirit’s (the subject’s) experiences of itself. For all its claims to objectivity, Hegelian phenomenology is not just a means of understanding the world, but of understanding ourselves. So too for Heidegger (for early Heidegger, at least): the way to the question of Being is necessarily a journey through our own ‘existentiell’ anxiety and the resolution that delivers us from it. But the question remains whether phenomenology is the best term to describe Kierkegaard’s way of mapping the route taken by this movement. It is not simply that Kierkegaard defines himself out of consideration as a phenomenologist on account of his acceptance of the limitations of subjectivity, since, in a sense, phenomenology in general accepts the unavoidability of a certain subjectivity. It is not that Kierkegaard does not draw his ‘phenomena’ from experience in an external (perceptual or historical) sense that finally counts against seeing him as a phenomenologist, but that the nature and the kind of connections between those phenomena that are the object of Kierkegaard’s interest are too ambiguous, oblique and ‘lumpy’ to serve the purposes of anything significantly analogous to a philosophically or scientifically oriented phenomenology. They are riddles to be guessed, enigmas whose interpretation must always remain a matter of debate, rather than phenomena that illuminate

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the matter at issue from themselves. Rather than resolving the question of selfknowledge, they deepen it to the point where it becomes questionable whether knowledge is something that is at all possible in relation to ourselves. If, of course, we are simply using the term phenomenology in a looser sense that seeks simply to emphasise that Kierkegaard’s way of writing has a narrative and plastic quality that much philosophical writing lacks, that may seem fair enough. But, then, we are beginning to stretch the sense of ‘phenomenology’ very far – as, for example, when Mark C. Taylor draws attention to the analogy between Hegel’s Phenomenology and the genre of the Bildungsroman. In this sense any philosophy that makes extensive use of illustrative material is ‘phenomenological’, and perhaps it is not coincidental that some philosophers writing under the influence of phenomenology have resorted to drama and the novel as a means of extending philosophical enquiry – Sartre, Marcel and Iris Murdoch might be relevant examples here. But, at this point, the term ‘phenomenology’ has become so attenuated that it is doubtful whether it really helps us much. Martha Nussbaum, for example, has used Henry James as an example of how literature can be used to exemplify and to draw us deeper into understanding some of the fundamental issues addressed by Aristotelian moral philosophy.34 Does this make James a phenomenologist? In many ways, he answers really rather well to the kind of definitions invoked by Grøn, yet this is scarcely a label he would have applied to himself, unless with a more delicate touch than any philosophical definition would allow. Applied to Kierkegaard, then, ‘phenomenology’ in this attenuated sense simply draws attention to his difference from a more abstract kind of philosophising, and his gift for introducing vivid and forceful illustrative material into the discussion. Perhaps the best case for seeing Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist would be in relation to such texts as Either/Or Part I, where Don Juan and Johannes the Seducer are proposed as two plastically realised representative figures of, respectively, the immediate and the reflective forms of seduction. This, however, precisely highlights the problem of applying the same model to the more directly religious texts, since it is of the essence of the aesthetic sphere – as Kierkegaard understood it – that there should be an essential congruence between its forms of manifestation and the idea at work in it. In the case of the religious texts, however, this congruence is not given and is, at the very least, put in question. The idea of seduction is one thing, the ideas of sin, repentance and faith another. And if we wish to move beyond these human dimensions of religion to God as the fulfilling ground of those dimensions, the problems are compounded. For what kind of experience, what kind of phenomenalisation could adequately and of itself stand as a grounding intuition of a transcendent God? In considering the possibility that the discourses might be read as testifying to some kind of mystical experience as the defining moment of the religious life, it became clear that any sort of experience that would meet the conditions of ‘becoming as nothing’ would be one that thereby excluded itself from providing a resource for determining any sort of noetic content. Of course, theological phenomenologists such as Tillich and Rahner have attempted to articulate such

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 83 grounding intuitions, but it remains questionable whether either succeeded, on philosophical grounds alone, in doing more than suggesting how God might be understood in terms of a generalised doctrine of Being. Isn’t Heidegger on surer ground here in resisting an over-hasty identification of the meaning of Being with God? The further specification of this Being in terms of actual doctrine, however, seems to presuppose the hermeneutical situatedness of the interpreter in a concrete religious tradition. In a crucially amended version of the phenomenological reading of Kierkegaard, Michael Theunissen has insisted on the negativity of Kierkegaard’s method. As for Grøn, The Sickness unto Death stands at the centre of Theunissen’s exposition, although much that he says is applicable more widely in Kierkegaard’s work. Kierkegaard, Theunissen suggests, does not so much orient himself towards the self as that which is to be interpreted, and from which the concept of despair (that is at the centre of The Sickness unto Death) can be wrested as one of the phenomenal manifestations of the self. Rather, despair is assumed from the outset as the matter under consideration. Despair, as ‘the sickness or material negativity possesses a gnoseological preponderance’, i.e. whatever Kierkegaard says about the healthy self is inferred from the sick self, not vice versa. That The Sickness unto Death opens (or is generally assumed to open) with an ‘algebraic’ definition of the self is, in Theunissen’s view, merely a presentational prioritisation of the self, in which the ‘results’ of the ontological investigation carried out in the text are brought forward and made to appear as if they constitute its beginning. When Kierkegaard then goes on to describe how the self succumbs to the sickness of despair, he is, says Theunissen, merely ‘concretising, since the examination nowhere breaks through the bounds set it by the preliminary concept of despair as sickness in the self’.35 But that the self is to be viewed in this way, in the light of its sickness, as sick (which, in Kierkegaard’s account is taken to mean as sinful) is, however, as Theunissen makes clear in a subsequent article, not something that could ever be established on the basis of an autonomous anthropology. On the contrary ‘… everything that Kierkegaard says about despair, is motivated by theological assumptions already decided upon in advance [of the investigation]’.36 Kierkegaard’s ‘negativity’, then, is the methodological reflex of a theological view of the human subject as fallen. This has two consequences that are immediately relevant to the present enquiry. The first is that it underlines the problematic nature of moving phenomenologically towards a concept of divine transcendence when the human subject is conceived as separated from God by the kind of infinite qualitative difference that requires the subject to be annihilated in itself if it is to enter into a right relation to God, a separation that, in the discourses, as well as in The Sickness unto Death, is described as sin and expounded in terms of an inner duality in the self and that leads to its defining inability to sustain itself in being. There is a distinctive kind of difference here that sets a question mark against any kind of general ontology that might nurse an ambition to embrace

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both divine and human. The second consequence is that the theological content is something that, if we follow Theunissen, is determined in advance. It is a presupposition, a fore-conception that guides, rather than results from, the investigation itself. Although it may retrospectively be justified by the outcome of its application to the anthropological phenomena, a reading of those phenomena is not the way the idea has been arrived at. I take it that, logically, this remark would apply not only to the concept of God but also, as Disse implied, to the concept of an eternal happiness, understood as a fulfilment of which we have in fact no direct experience in this life. But – quite apart from the question from where we might derive such a conception – what would motivate us to want to apply it in the interpretation of our experience of the world? And, if we are to say of it not only that it is not derived from experience but is also and in principle outside the scope of any possible knowledge (two factors that have, of course, a certain interdependence), what can it possibly mean? Is there any way we can secure it against merely capricious application? However, before proceeding to address these questions constructively, a couple of concluding remarks on the issue of phenomenology are required. I have argued that it is inappropriate to describe Kierkegaard’s ‘method’ as phenomenological, and, in at least some of the ways in which the term is used, close to vacuous. But if the possibility of what might be called a global application of phenomenological concepts to Kierkegaard is excluded, this does not rule out a more limited, as it were ‘regional’, phenomenology, such that within certain localised areas within the authorship something like phenomenology was going on, a point that has already been conceded with regard to, for example, the concept of seduction. Nor is it necessarily being claimed that treating elements in the authorship in this way is never going to be either interpretatively or pedagogically fruitful. However, all such regional phenomenologies are necessarily going to be undermined in terms of their final import by their localisation. For, whether in its Hegelian, Husserlian or Heideggerian form, it has been one of the historical characteristics of phenomenology to be seeking precisely a unification of the whole domain of experience and knowledge. Even within the narrower bounds of Kierkegaard’s authorship, the existence of a phenomenology of seduction is not, of itself, going to help us to determine Kierkegaard’s final philosophical or religious intentions. Perhaps it is not even going to tell us all that Kierkegaard wants to tell us about seduction. These remarks are, of course, critically formulated vis-à-vis the claim that phenomenology provides an appropriate method by which to read the upbuilding discourses. However, what has been said implies a more general reflection about the scope of phenomenology as such. It has just been claimed that in its historically most significant forms, phenomenology has always nurtured what might be termed global ambitions. Its aim has been to provide a unifying basis for natural and human science. In Hegel and Heidegger, at least (and these are, perhaps, the two most relevant examples in relation to

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 85 Kierkegaard), this has also been directed towards the production of an ontology. ‘Phenomenology’ in this usage is not simply a means of overcoming certain epistemological problems, such as how we come to know the world, but is a way of showing us how things really are. The point of such phenomenology is that the phenomena are not ‘mere appearances’ or manifestations of an unknown and unknowable underlying reality, but that the phenomena, rightly viewed, are themselves revelatory of how things are, the way it is, beings in Being. Now, nothing that has been said here can count decisively for or against this or any other particular version of phenomenology, but my objections to reading Kierkegaard phenomenologically do suggest a fundamental difficulty confronting any attempt to develop phenomenology in the direction of theology, i.e. as a means of elucidating the groundedness of human existence in God. For to the extent that God is thought in His/Its radical distinctiveness from created beings, it would seem that no phenomenology, and, for that matter, no general ontology, is going to be in a position to provide a unitary account of God and creature. But this point does not only apply in the context of those, chiefly Christian, theologies that maximise the specific difference engendered by sin to the point where all epistemological and ontological continuity between human and divine falls down. For the problem is that once this possibility has been put in play, even if we do not ourselves accept its dogmatic basis, it becomes clear that the degree and the manner of the divine difference– however it is conceived – is a matter that is always a matter of presupposition. Perhaps, in this sense, one could have a Christian phenomenology that allowed for the most radical conceivable difference between divine and human – but it would precisely be a phenomenology constructed on the basis of dogmatic presuppositions and open, therefore, only to those who shared those presuppositions. From the point of view of the believers, what they experienced in the world would indeed show the universality of sin and the consoling evidences of divine favour – but not to anyone else. Equally, one could have a religious phenomenology in which, through the process of analysing the generality of phenomenal experience it was shown that God was the proper name for the ground of our common Being. But then the status of such a philosophical religiousness vis-à-vis any particular religious tradition or practice would remain wide open. Whether such a God could be the God of Abraham, of Isaac or of Jacob, or for that matter of Paul or Muhammed would be entirely undecided. Phenomenology, however, was by no means the only philosophical tool in Kierkegaard’s bag, nor is it in ours. But if not phenomenology, then what? IV Central to the naïve reading of the discourses presented in the preceding chapter and echoed in several of the philosophical approaches to Kierkegaard discussed in this chapter was the idea that one thing the discourses are about is telling a story of the self. This story not only tells us what it is for a self truly to be what it is, it also tells us what is involved in the process whereby the self is awoken

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from its immersion in a state of undifferentiated nature and, traversing a range of possibilities marked by anxious concern, finally reaches the point at which – annihilated in itself – it becomes transparent to God and receives the divine imprint of Spirit by which it is truly human. This story is easily told – but what does it mean, what sense can we make of it? The very stress placed by Kierkegaard on the moment of annihilation, the moment in which the self becomes ‘nothing’ seems to set a barrier against any philosophical approach (such as dialectics or phenomenology) that seeks to bring the teaching of the discourses within the shared horizons of common human experience and understanding. But it would be previous to suppose that philosophy has never had anything to say about what happens in those boundary situations where knowledge becomes problematic. On the contrary – and especially when what we are talking about is the self – such situations and the problematising of knowledge associated with them have been of intense interest to philosophy from its beginnings. If Kierkegaard was concerned to resist the levelling kind of universality he saw in Hegel, he was also heir to other traditions of philosophy that seemed to allow for the radical incommensurability of the self and its world. Such incommensurability had come to expression in the Kantian doctrine of the sublime, in which the tension between concepts of nature and concepts of freedom was brought to the fore and made central to the overall architectonic of Kantian anthropology. Here, as in Kierkegaard’s discourses, the emergence of freedom/the self is hedged with negation, as the incapacity of the concepts of the understanding in the face of the sublime is interpreted as the obverse of freedom’s discovery of its own transcendence. Here there would seem to be the possibility of a paradoxical experience of freedom, a moment in which the self’s self-discovery is indissociable from its experience of its own powerlessness and limitations at the level of nature and conceptual objectifiability. Let us then, as briefly as possible, see whether or to what extent the Kantian treatment of the sublime can contribute to the philosophical approach to the religion of the discourses.37 I shall begin by summarising the most relevant points of the Kantian doctrine. Kant’s (1952) ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ belongs to the Critique of Judgement, ‘judgement’ being the function by which the spheres of nature and freedom, the theoretical understanding and the practical reason, are held together within the overall economy of mental life. The sublime plays a particularly important role in developing the concept of judgement, because it marks the moment when the mind, stimulated by experience, first enacts a form of judgement that goes beyond experience. The sublime judgement comes into play at the very point at which it is no longer possible for us to form an adequate mental representation of objects. In the case of the mathematical sublime, for example, this is because of sheer size or number, whereas in the case of the dynamic sublime it is because of the chaotic, overwhelming or unstable nature of the object: the storm at sea, the Alpine scene or the fury of battle. The characteristic pleasure of the sublime is that, despite the object being unrepresentable in terms of the understanding (thereby frustrating the

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 87 subject’s desire to understand its world), the mind forms a conception of the object out of its own resources, thereby enjoying the ‘thrill’ of its own freedom and its elevation above the mere play of representations. The intertwining of the incapacity of sensuous representation and the power of rational idealisation is thus the source of the peculiar pleasure of the sublime. Notwithstanding this pleasurable element, however, the negative moment in the sublime judgement, the moment in which the mind feels its incapacity and has to surrender its attempt to grasp the object theoretically, means that there is also a kind of suffering inherent within sublimity that is never entirely expunged. Beauty may be predicated of objects, but the sublime is not in any real sense ‘in’ the object. Instead it is in what we bring to it. When we respond to a situation by declaring it to be ‘sublime!’ we are affirming the sovereignty of our intellectual freedom in relation to the external world, although not in such a way as to annihilate the world. With regard to the sublime, Kant says, we are stirred or touched (rührt), i.e. sublime moments are not created out of our own inner resources but they arise from the interplay of subject and object and therefore have the differentiated characteristics of experience and freedom, united in judgement. The paradox of such an aesthetic is that although it comes closer than any aesthetic of ‘mere’ beauty to representing the arousal of freedom and thereby representing that which is most distinctively human in us, the images in which that representation is rendered are likely to be of chaos, disorder, violence and destruction – precisely the things that set up the greatest affront to freedom and therefore also precisely the things best suited to challenge freedom forth. Such images become a negative figuration of freedom – the freedom of God in creation or the freedom that we ourselves are. We have long since become familiar with an aesthetic that merely relishes in negative and provocative imagery in the name of artistic freedom, but such self-indulgence does not prevent the way of authentic freedom from continuing to be marked by the occurrence of sublime experiences, experiences that deepen and strengthen the subject’s understanding of freedom’s own dignity, value and elevation (as, perhaps most famously, in Kant’s own appeal to the conjunction of the starry heavens above and the moral law within as the quintessential summary of his philosophical project). In turning to Kierkegaard we can see many possibilities of tracing analogies to the Kantian sublime. The concept of anxiety itself, both in the treatise of that title and in the discourses (where it is often linked with ‘concern’) clearly occupies the same logical space as the concept of the sublime, situated at the very point of balance between nature and freedom, between unconscious absorption in the world and the free self-affirmation of the self that, in concern, has become responsible to and for itself. The negative moment of the sublime, the experience of the world as threatening and overwhelming, is mooted by several of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. A striking example is in Either/Or Part I. In the essay ‘Shadowgraphs’ in Either/Or the speaker calls upon ‘the vortex that is the world’s innermost principle’ to

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Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime break loose and display its inner wrath, shaking the mountains from their places along with nations and all that has been produced by culture and all the cunning inventions of mankind, let it break loose with that final terrible shriek that, more surely than the last trump, declares the downfall of everything, let it stir itself and sweep away this exposed cliff on which we stand, like a speck of dust blown away on its breath … (SKS 1, p. 166 [168])

The aesthetes of Either/Or are not, however, able to realise their own freedom over against this sublime chaos other than in the mode of aesthetic escape, losing themselves in the production of a painted veil of aesthetic illusion that can mask but scarcely exorcise the all-consuming vortex. But the chaos against which they seek to defend themselves is represented by them as something ‘out there’ in some sense, something opposing my sense of self-conscious freedom, something from which I need to rescue myself or above which I need to elevate myself. What is beyond their grasp is the realisation that the most decisive form of the struggle against chaos is when that struggle is internal to self-consciousness in such a way that self-consciousness itself becomes the medium in which I experience the raging of the powers of chaos that threaten the inner annihilation of the self and my prospective triumph over them. If, following Kant, the sublime is conceived as the action of creative conceptualisation struggling against the incapacity of the theoretical understanding in the face of an object given to it from without, it will first manifest itself in the form of experience, as something I undergo or endure or suffer, not as something I do. Now, however, we are not thinking of the overwhelming object as being ‘out there’ but ‘in here’: it is the inconceivability of my own existence that assails me from within the very heart of that existence itself. In my struggle to exist, I repeatedly discover that I cannot be what I am: ‘I am not that I am’ (Iago). Such an interiorisation of sublimity does not, however, simply prevent its aestheticisation. Even when I am no longer projecting an image of my inner moral chaos out into some fantastic cosmology, it is still possible for me to try to represent that turmoil aesthetically. Indeed, if we stay with Kant, we have in some sense and to some degree to do just that, since such representation is a moment in the inner dynamic of freedom elevating itself above the incapacity of the understanding. What I ‘represent’ in the mode of the sublime is, first and foremost, my own freedom, my transcendence over nature (in the sense of mere externality). This, then, brings us close to Kierkegaard’s talk of ‘becoming as nothing’. But, to pursue the link with the conventional philosophical discourse on the sublime, I shall move away from the more technical epistemological language of Kant’s account, and turn instead to Kierkegaard’s use of the imagery of sea and storm in the discourses. The sea, whether with regard to its sheer expanse suggestive of infinity, its vast, empty horizons or the awesome tumult of storm weather, was a major

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 89 theme in the art and literature of the sublime. It has also served as a perennial image of the abyssal quality of freedom, as in Baudelaire’s ‘Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer’. It is therefore striking to see Kierkegaard making significant use of such imagery, not least (statistically, in fact, above all) in his edifying works. There are a variety of references, but the overall effect is of a coherent body of imagery that is carefully dovetailed into some of the fundamental concepts and categories of the discourses. In the very first of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses we are told how the sailor journeying across the ocean and surrounded by the ever-changing sea needs to take his orientation from the one thing that does not change: the stars above. In the same way the power of an eternal expectation overcomes the changeableness of this world. Like the sea, the storm is also an image of changeableness (SKS 4, p. 28 [19]). The person who is not awakened to selfconcern is said to relate to the world as a wave to the sea, immersed in its endless and aimless surge (SKS 4, p. 164 [164]). But the sea and the storm not only provide images of the world as a power that threatens the self or prevents it from achieving concretion and definition: they are also images of the way in which the world threatens to overwhelm or to destroy what we believe to be an achieved self. Nature’s destructive power can, of course, be seen as an occasion for heroism (SKS 4, pp. 335ff. [347ff.]), like the unleashing of the vortex of destruction in war (SKS 4, p. 160 [160]), but typically storm and shipwreck are images of a supreme testing of the spirit (SKS 4, p. 75 [65–6]; 124 [119]; SV3 11, p. 250 [269]). But Kierkegaard’s aim in drawing upon such imagery is not simply to invoke a sublime aesthetic – although I would argue that it is central to his method that he exploits the sublime resonances stirred by his imagery. For sea, storm and tempest are only symbols of what is really dangerous: the inner dissolution of the self into the changeableness of life in time or its destruction at the hands of its own raging impatience. The real conflict is within. (SKS 4, pp. 337–8 [349–50]; SV3 11, pp. 187f. [205]). And the judgement required of us is not simply a judgement of taste but a judgement in which we choose ourselves in our concrete singular unrepresentable freedom. To see what is involved here let us turn again to the beginning of the discourse ‘Against Cowardice’, where Kierkegaard mimics the rhetoric of worldly heroism: It is all only the matter of a moment; just be resolute, dare to be like the bold swimmer to plunge into the sea, dare to believe that a man is lighter than all suffering, and that the swimmer’s will reach his goal despite every [contrary] current, despite the foaming waves. Behold the undaunted swimmer: he climbs up to a high point, his eye delights in the danger, his figure trembles with terror’s joy – then he plunges confidently into the waves, he disappears as if swallowed by the sea, but quickly bobs up and has triumphed, triumphed in a single moment. Thus does resolution take its stand on the mountain of transfiguration, delighting in danger, plunging into the sea and in the same moment bobbing up victoriously! (SKS 4, p. 336 [348])

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The image of the swimmer braving the turbulent seas fits well into the conventions of sublime discourse. But Kierkegaard is of course holding the whole thing up as an example of how not to approach the kind of challenges and dangers that the self must confront in its religiously oriented quest of selfdiscovery and self-appropriation. Such a way of representing the task is, he says, merely theatrical, merely imagined, a way of grasping at finitude (SKS 4 p. 336 [348]). This, we may say, is a caution against confusing an aesthetic sublimity that resolves the dangerous or overwhelming object into an ideal generated by imagination with the religious sublimity of self-conquest and faith. For – and here we come to what perhaps marks the most significant point of divergence between Kierkegaard and Kant – the error of idealisation is to be too hasty in asserting the freedom of the self in response to its experienced incapacity. That moment of incapacity is not simply to be overcome: it is to be endured and suffered to and beyond the breaking-point of the self. The task is not great deeds (SKS 4, p. 159 [159]) but a reorientation that is the self’s learning to become as nothing before God. The hero springs forward to mount the high point from which to leap towards danger, imagining himself to be an object of admiration, but the self that is underway to faith realises that it is accused rather than admired, and even ‘if no earthly court accuses you, you are accused in heaven, where there is judgement’ (SKS 4, p. 338 [350]). The pride of the hero is undone by the totalising memory of the eternal judgement seat, from which no secret thoughts or desires can ever be concealed. The religiously oriented self does not seek to test itself against the storm, but, realising its incapacity, submits to the measure that God applies. It cannot find security in its own action but, like Peter walking on the water, must trust solely in God (SKS 4, p. 267 [272]). The verbs and adjectives that describe the passions of the impatient heart are those of storm and tumult, but the heart that becomes still and deep is the heart that is transparent to God, just as the sea will never reflect the overarching sky when it is stirred into a foaming tumult by the storm but only when it is perfectly still and unruffled (SKS 5 380 [399], SV3 11, p. 112 [121]). But even in the state of stillness both sea and sky in their mutual mirroring are sublimely devoid of all boundaries or limits, the purest image of two infinities, the infinite freedom of God and the infinite freedom of humanity, negatively conjoined in the moment of the self’s annihilation that is also the moment of its self-realisation as and for freedom. If, however, we are justified in speaking of freedom here, this is still only in the most abstract sense. The stilling of the storm, ‘becoming as nothing’, offers a negative figuration of freedom, but it does not tell us what the exercise of freedom in the manner of a life that is being patiently built up will be like. How can the impulse that is given in this inconceivable moment of annihilation be the measure of a whole life, extended through time and existing in a world shared with others? To use the idea of sublimity to establish a philosophical foothold in the world of the upbuilding discourses, then, is still to have said essentially nothing

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime 91 concerning the actual meaning of that world. Negatively it is valuable in helping us see how the discourses contribute to Kierkegaard’s critique of ‘the aesthetic’ if, as I have suggested here, the Kierkegaardian aesthete characteristically takes refuge in an aesthetic of beauty (albeit a somewhat dark and bitter beauty) as a remedy against the terror of the sublime. At the same time it signals that, whatever else it is, the task of upbuilding or of being upbuilt requires the exercise of a freedom that has an ambiguous relation to the world of knowledge and representation. It is not something that can be immediately shown or known. But even in terms of the discourses themselves, to call the moment of annihilation ‘sublime’ gives us little or no idea what it would be like to live with an understanding of ourselves as ‘nothing’ – or why we would want to. If the comparison with Kantian sublimity confirms our caution against using the discourses for the construction of some kind of ontology of the self, it still leaves us asking what the discourses could mean to someone who wanted to take them seriously as a guide to living. But the Kantian analogy does also suggest that it is just here, in relation to the actual living of the moral or ethical life that the real thrust of the discourses comes into play. Notes 1 G. Malantschuk (1971) Kierkegaard’s Thought, tr. H. V. and E. H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 12. 2 Malantschuk (1971) p. 128. 3 With respect to which it is precisely Kierkegaard’s complaint against Hegelian dialectic that it only develops a quantitative dialectic and does not take account of the qualitative dialectic that actually determines the relationship between, for example, thought and existence, possibility and actuality. 4 Malantschuk (1971) p. 131. 5 Other studies that emphasise the dialectically determined consistency of Kierkegaard’s thought – like so many works in the secondary literature – typically overlook the upbuilding writings. See, for example, Hermann Diem (1959) Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence, tr. H. Knight, Edinburgh and London, Oliver and Boyd; Paul Sponheim (1968) Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence, London, SCM; Stephen N. Dunning (1985) Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages, Princeton, Princeton University Press. 6 Malantschuk (1971) p. 310. 7 Malantschuk (1971) p. 314. 8 C. O. Schrag (1961) Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, p. xvi. 9 Schrag (1961) p. xvi. 10 See P. Tillich (1968) Systematic Theology, Welwyn, Nisbet. Of course, Tillich’s ontological approach to Christianity goes against those theologies that would deny any direct route from the human to God. In this regard, theologies in the line of Karl Barth would agree with Heidegger that Kierkegaard’s anthropology is framed from the ground up by its Christian presuppositions and cannot be taken as a purely philosophical description that nevertheless finds its conclusion in a theological ontology. Or, since such a thing is, in the Barthian perspective, simply impossible, so much the worse for Kierkegaard if that is what he himself thought he was doing! 11 See, for example, Schrag, op. cit., Malantschuck, op. cit., pp. 144–5; George J. Stack (1977) Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, p. ix; Merold

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34 35 36 37

Dialectics, phenomenology and the sublime Westphal (1996) Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, pp. 44–5. See J. Stewart (1997) ‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness unto Death’ in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1997, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter,. M. C. Taylor (1980) Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley, University of California Press, p. 13. Taylor (1980) p. 5. J. Disse (1991) Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of the Experience of Freedom, Freiburg, Karl Alber, p. 9. Disse (1991) p. 15. A. B. Come (1988) ‘Kierkegaard’s Method: Does He Have One?’, Kierkegaardiana XIV: 14–28. Idem. (1997) Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self, Montreal and Kingston, McGillQueen’s University Press, pp. 3–10. Come (1997) pp. 20–1. Kierkegaard, quoted by Come on p. 21. Come (1997) p. 21. Come (1997) p. 22. Come (1997) p. 23. Come (1997) p. 24. A. Grøn (1997) Subjektivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen, Gyldendal, p. 37. Grøn (1997) p. 37. Grøn (1997) p. 43. Grøn (1997) p. 48. A. Grøn (1996) ‘Kierkegaards Phänomenologie’ in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1996, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, p. 91. Grøn (1996) p. 92. See M. Heidegger (1985) History of the Concept of Time, tr. T. Kisiel, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, pp. 47ff. Note, for example, the subtitle of Repetition – A Venture in Experimental Psychology. In this respect the analogy between Kierkegaard’s treatment of the story and Milton’s retelling of it in Paradise Lost is revealing precisely on account of the dissimilarity. In this connection we could say that it is precisely Milton who goes to work phenomenologically, by showing us how anxiety and, subsequently, the fall into sin manifest themselves in Adam and Eve. See John S. Tanner (1992) Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost, Oxford, Oxford University Press. See M. C. Nussbaum (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press. M. Theunissen (1981) ‘Kierkegaard’s negativistic Method’ in Joseph H. Smith (ed.) Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, Newhaven CT, Yale University Press, pp. 397–8. M. Theunissen (1996) ‘Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay’ in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1996, Berlin, de Gruyter, p. 64. For a more extended discussion of the connection between Kantian sublimity and such Kierkegaardian themes as anxiety see G. Pattison (2002) Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Chapter 1. See also G. Pattison (2000) ‘Sublimity and the Experience of Freedom in Kierkegaard’ in J. Giles (ed.) Kierkegaard and Freedom, Basingstoke, Palgrave.

4

Before God

I I have argued that Kierkegaard’s discourses are not to be read as if they were an exercise in dialectics or phenomenology and, consequently, not as contributing to the development of a fundamental ontology, religious or otherwise. The difficulty of using them in such ways further underlined the implications of examining the discourses as testimony to some sort of religious experience. Insofar as it is at all possible to read them this way, the experience concerned proved to be of such a cognitively indeterminate kind that it could not provide the basis for any significant ontological claims. But if we are, nevertheless, aiming at reading them as philosophically interesting texts, over and above whatever religious or psychological materials they may make available to us, how should we be reading them? And how should we be making sense of such phrases as ‘becoming as nothing’ or ‘becoming transparent to God’? In order to address these questions I should like to turn to an image briefly touched on earlier. This is the image of life being lived ‘before’ or ‘in the face of’ God. This, as I understand it, supplements and deepens the talk of nothingness and transparency and helps us see more clearly why such talk should not be understood in primarily experiential terms or, if we do accept the possibility of an experience of nothingness, how such an epistemologically and ontologically ‘useless’ experience can be made fruitful for philosophy. Let us begin with the theatrical simile that Kierkegaard develops in the discourse ‘On the Occasion of Confession’ in order to explain the various roles of the listener, the speaker and God in relation to a religious discourse. Let us read it through again, this time in full: In the theatre, as you know, things are so arranged that there is someone at hand to prompt [the actors] – he is hidden [because] he is not the one who matters, he is and should be overlooked. But there is another, the actor, who steps out and catches everyone’s attention. All eyes are on him, and this makes him the one to be renowned. He portrays a quite particular character, and, in the beautiful sense of the illusory art, he makes every single word come true – and yet he gets to know everything he has to say

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Before God from the one who is hidden, who sits and whispers to him. No one would be so stupid as to regard the prompter as more important than the actor. [But] now forget the trivial [world] of art, for – ah! – in relation to what is godly, many are so foolish as to see the speaker in a worldly way, as if he were an actor, and the listeners were the audience who could sit in judgement on the artist. But it is not like that, not in the slightest. No, the speaker is the prompter, there are no actors, for every listener should look only at himself; the stage is eternity, and the listener, if he is genuine (and if he isn’t, then he is guilty), he is before God by means of the address. The prompter whispers to the actor what he is to say, but the actor’s repetition of it is the chief thing, the seriousness in art’s jest. [So] the speaker whispers the word to the listener, but the chief thing, the serious thing, is that the listener speaks to himself, by himself, with himself, in silence, before God. The address is not given for the sake of the speaker, so one should not praise or blame him, but the repetition [of the message] by the listener is what is aimed at. If the speaker has a responsibility concerning what he whispers, the listener has just as great a responsibility not to misconceive his task. In the theatre the play is performed for those who are present and who are called spectators, but God Himself is present at the godly address, [and] in all seriousness he is the critical spectator, who watches how the talk goes and how it is listened to, [and] for that reason there are no spectators. The speaker is the prompter, and the listener, if he is open before God, he is, if I may put it like this, the actor who in truth plays before God. (SV 3 11, pp. 115–6 [124–5])

One of the interesting features of this analogy is the way in which it subtly changes as it develops. In the beginning the listener is in his seat, concerned with himself, while the stage is eternity, i.e. the site on which he himself – his life, his values, his actions – is presented to him as it would appear in the eyes of God. In this image the listener has learned not to understand himself as the absolute measure of his own experience and life but to submit himself to the standard and the scrutiny of God. Perhaps, in the light of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on becoming as nothing, it is also significant that we most easily image this stage as empty: from the standpoint of what most of us conceive of as the plenitude of everyday life, the readiest figure of eternity is sheer negation or emptiness. Then, however, a second picture supervenes upon the first. This time the listener is no longer in his seat. He is on stage. He is himself the actor, and God has become the spectator (‘if I may put it like this’, says Kierkegaard, and it is important that we note this hint as to the highly reflective and selfconscious nature of the analogy). If Kierkegaard had been writing today, he would of course have had to submit his work to the critical oversight of a publisher’s reader, and might well have been required to do some tidying up at this point, clarifying just what the reader should take to be the final form of the analogy. Undoubtedly the second version is neater, and has a sharper, firmer

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outline. Nevertheless, it is precisely the juxtaposition of these two images that brings to expression the interdependence of the annihilation of the self vis-à-vis any predetermined ontological framework and its concurrent and paradoxical responsibility in this ontological vacuum for choosing who it is to be. The image before us, then, is that of the reader, not as the judge, for whom the work is the object and focus of attention, but as the one who, in and as he reads the work, has himself become the object. This does not mean that he is simply to be regarded as the object of God’s action as in those Protestant views of justification that see the human subject as altogether impotent, since here it is, first, the reader’s own choice to see himself in this way (it is a matter of a certain kind of critical self-reflection) and, second, it is precisely as the object of God’s gaze that his responsibility for all that he is and says and does is immeasurably intensified. Such a reversal of perspective is already hinted at in an earlier discourse ‘Against Cowardice’. Here Kierkegaard contrasts the ‘worldly’ understanding of heroism with the understanding of courage implicit in the religious life. The worldly understanding looks to glorious and splendid deeds, achievements that can become the object of public attention and acclaim. The point here, as Kierkegaard develops it, is that the hero becomes what he is (i.e. ‘the hero’) through what he achieves externally. It is by climbing the cliff and plunging down into the wild sea below that he becomes both noticeable and admirable. But such actions are applauded entirely in abstraction from the hero’s moral character. The heroes of sport (and politics and many other spheres of public life) are by no means exemplary in the moral or religious spheres. In religion and morality the issue is not that of external dangers or external achievements, but of inner motivation and orientation, of who we are in ourselves. It is, Kierkegaard says, essentially deceptive to hold up the goal of overcoming external dangers as the supreme challenge to human courage, for this simply masks the fact that each of us already is qua human being in peril of death, and prone to sin. It is a greater heroism to confront the reality of our mortality and the irreplaceable loss of personal truth through wrong action, a reality that accompanies our every step, than, forgetting that, to become (or to aim at becoming) a ‘personality’ through what we achieve externally. (As an example of this distinction, we might think of the protracted death of Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh when one of the bystanders remarks how courageously Lord Marchmain is fighting for his life against the cancer that is gradually consuming him, to which the priest says that it is not the hope for life that is driving the patient, but fear of death – something that may look very similar from the outside but that expresses a very different inner experience.) So, Kierkegaard says, the real danger that should concern us is the danger threatening the soul: But this is what is dangerous for the soul: that the world should become empty and everything become indifferent to you, life itself devoid of salt or savour, and truth itself too wearisome to seek, and death a vague thought

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Before God that neither troubles you nor seeks your notice. It is the danger of sin: that you should forget your duty, or rather forget that you should do your duty with joy, that you should bear your sufferings, or rather forget that you should bear them willingly, that you should fall into sin and lose your freedom of spirit, going through life without courage, and so despairing in the face of death that not even repentance can support you. It is the peril of death, who has his spies out everywhere, even though he knows that no one shall escape him. If the danger is not there, or if you do not know of it, even though you might be willing enough to climb the highest cliff and then to leap down from it; if you do not know that you are an accused man, then, though no earthly court accuses you, yet you are accused in heaven where there is judgement; if you do not know that you are in bonds, though their bounds may be as wide as the whole world – but, try it, go to the world’s uttermost limits, hide yourself in the abyss, and see if the justice that held you captive does not know how to fetch you back; if you do not know that there are witnesses who, even though they are far from wanting to witness against you, are those you trust the most, for these witnesses are your own thoughts, this witness is you yourself, when you are forced on the day of reckoning to inform against yourself, so that you will not be able to conceal your most hidden opinion, or forget your most casual thought or keep back to yourself a single thought, so hidden that conscience would not know how to twist open the inner chamber [of your soul] and, by informing on yourself tear it from you against your will. (SKS 5, p. 338 [350–1])

This, then, is what it might mean to live before the gaze of God, to be the actor who has God as his critical audience. Here too, though, we again encounter the further theme that – for this life at least – this is not so much a matter of direct experience (as if we might, one day, feel the eyes of God boring through us), but of a critical self-relation in which we actively adopt and take upon ourselves a certain understanding of life, a matter of actively and deliberately sustaining a certain kind of awareness, of learning to take note of how our own thoughts might be bearing witness against us. In his study Kierkegaard: The Descent into God, Jeremy Walker makes the suggestion that for Kierkegaard, as earlier for Socrates, self-knowledge is not so much a matter of knowing a large number of facts about oneself, as if one might have access to a total video recording of one’s life, but being able to produce … an account of the kind we can call a ‘deposition’ (Forklaring). And what is this? What is it that the individual cannot become confused about or forget, once he has become clearly aware of it? In a nutshell, his moral principles and aims … the kind of account of his activity and existence that [Socrates] gives in the Assembly and in prison.1 For Walker this is particularly connected with the Kierkegaardian themes of

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transparency and self-revelation in such a way that, as he asks rhetorically, ‘How can my life and activities not be revealed to myself assuming that I am conscious? How can I not know what I am doing, what I am trying to do, what I have been trying to do?’2 It is to be able to answer ‘the serious question’ as to ‘what kind of life you live’. Maybe, we might object, we often do not know entirely clearly what we are trying to do. But perhaps Walker’s point is met if only we accept the obligation to try to give some kind of account of why we do what we do. As he further refines the point, the issue is not being able to give the answer but being able to put the question: ‘Transparency, self-revelation, is not the knowing of the question’s answer; it is the question’s arising for one.’3 This I take to be both a helpful and an important comment. I would (in, I think, essential agreement with Walker) add that insofar as this ‘Socratic deposition’ is not based either on experience or on any other kind of knowledge, it is fruitful to see it as analogous to Kant’s ideals of pure reason, and, like these, not as something that could ever be taken as constitutive of the objective truth of what is contained in it, but as serving to regulate, in this case, the actual living of the moral and religious life. But such Kierkegaardian ‘regulative ideals’ are not confined to talk of transparency or becoming as nothing. We can, I suggest, extend this idea to the whole complex of essential religious ideals as found in the discourses – expectation, patience, thanksgiving, repentance, etc. – and to their embodiments in the various exemplary figures of faith who people the discourses. It is therefore not so much a matter of being moved by the discourse in such a way as to allow the feeling of, for example, thanksgiving to well up inside us, but rather, of adopting thanksgiving as a religious strategy for encountering each new situation in our lives, so that we ask ourselves ‘What is it in this situation for which I am to give thanks?’ In the case of an exemplary figure of faith such as the prophetess Anna, she is not held up as an example we might actually imitate in an external sense, but as a model for our relationship to time such that, having Anna in mind, we might remember to ask ourselves: ‘How would it be if I were to hold to this possibility opening up before me now with the persistence and devotion of an Anna?’ That something like this is how Kierkegaard himself is understanding these ideals and ideal figures is perhaps most strongly suggested by the discourse ‘The Expectation of an Eternal Happiness’. One of the key terms in this discourse is the term ‘measure’, which, as I hope to show, is particularly relevant to understanding Kierkegaard’s fundamental religious ideals ‘regulatively’, and, as we shall see, it is a term that also plays a central role in Kierkegaard’s statements concerning the expression ‘before God’ as it is deployed in The Sickness unto Death: ‘Measure’, here, is to be taken in the sense of the criterion that enables us to evaluate situations we encounter in the world, a criterion that is not the result of any particular experience but, rather, is independent of and prior to all particular experiences and precisely for that reason able to help make sense of experience. In the discourse Kierkegaard especially emphasises that having an expectation of an eternal happiness is not only important in relation to what awaits us in

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eternity but is also fruitful for life in time. It works, he says, both in heaven and on earth. Indeed, if this is not so, then what we are really talking about is ‘a sick soul’s cunning, that would trick its way out of life, not a healthy soul’s righteous presence in the temporal, then it is not an expectation of the eternal but superstition concerning the future’ (SKS 5, p. 255 [259]). It is, therefore, with the consequences for this life of having an expectation of an eternal happiness that the discourse is chiefly concerned. Once he begins on his main theme, Kierkegaard starts by discussing the advantages of ‘experience’s tried and tested view of things’ compared with the views of youth. Experience knows how to break problems and issues up into manageable parts and is therefore well suited to guiding us through a life that unfolds gradually, bit by bit, in and through time, whereas youth wants it all at once. Someone with experience approaches life with a goal or purpose (Maal) towards which he strives and which enables him to bring order into his affairs. He has a measure (Maalestok: also, literally, a ‘measuring-stick’) by means of which he reckons his own strength and powers of endurance in relation to the dangers and difficulties he is likely to encounter. However, in relation to the question of an eternal happiness, and how we might best fit ourselves for such a destiny, the measure of experience alone is too limited. Its gradations are only adapted to the relativities of earthly life. In fact even in this life the measure provided by experience can let us down, as when we are confronted by situations that exceed all our previous experience. Even the most experienced among us can find himself in situations where he just does not know what to do, think or feel. The measure of experience, then, is only relatively valid. The measure of eternity, however, is, Kierkegaard says, valid ‘in itself’ (a comment that, as we are reading the text here, invites comparison with the ideas of pure reason, the ideas of things-in-themselves) and therefore applicable in all conceivable situations. This brings Kierkegaard to his text, 2 Corinthians 4: 17–18: For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. Paul himself, Kierkegaard reminds us, could not have spoken such words lightly, since he had profound experience of affliction – rejected by his people, mocked by the gentiles, familiar with hunger, hardship, violence, shipwreck and, finally, executed as a criminal. ‘Experience’ cannot rightly take the measure of this, and from the standpoint of exclusively temporal experience such a life will seem no more than unendurable and pointless affliction. But for Paul himself, who had eternity as his goal and its blessedness as his measure, the suffering was ‘light’. Kierkegaard imagines Paul taking his measuring-stick out as he experiences a succession of testing situations, and measuring them against it, as if it were a ruler, and finding, each time, that, after all, they do not amount to much.

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But the application of the measure of eternity is not only relevant to making sense of suffering. Kierkegaard also claims that it helps to create a sense of community among human beings. There are those, he remarks (almost certainly thinking of certain sorts of pietists) who believe that there are recognisable ‘signs’ whereby it can be seen if a person is destined for salvation or damnation. However, he insists, since grace is the only condition of eternal happiness, and since each of us has more than enough to do in living up to what would befit would-be recipients of an eternal happiness, we cannot possible imagine ourselves to be in a position from which we could judge others. How in any case, he asks, could the admission of anyone else, even one of our ‘enemies’, take away from the joy we find in our own hope of salvation. On the contrary, a proper understanding of this hope should reinforce our sense of common humanity, as we realise that we are all mortal, finite beings, all dependent on divine grace. Such is the worth of this expectation in ordering our lives in this world, Kierkegaard says, that we can adapt Lessing’s saying (used in the critique of absolute idealism by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript) that if God held all truth in his right hand and the endless pursuit of it in his left we should choose the left. Here Kierkegaard reformulates the saying thus: that if God held eternal happiness in his right hand and the concern for it in his left, we should choose the left. The use of right-hand/left-hand imagery here can, of course, scarcely be passed over without comment. This idea of Lessing’s was to play a crucial role in the critique of speculative philosophy in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but the situation is complicated by the fact that, as we have noticed, Kierkegaard was to deploy the same image to explain the relationship between his pseudonymous and upbuilding works – only there, in The Point of View, it would seem that it is what is held in the right hand, the religious works, that is being privileged: it is precisely the error of the world that it takes with its right hand what Kierkegaard was offering with his left, the aesthetic and intellectual pleasures of the pseudonyms. Let us allow these three texts to talk among themselves for a moment. In this conversation, we might hear the Postscript as subverting The Point of View in advance: what is offered with the right hand, it might seem to say, is, despite appearances, not the best of gifts; the best of gifts is not the endowment of a perfect reality but the possibility of a relationship. But let the discourses themselves (the works of the right hand, according to The Point of View) speak. What they are holding out, according to the discourse we are considering, is by no means a perfect reality (doctrinal truth, salvation signed, sealed and delivered), but is itself just the invitation to an open-ended dialogical relationship. What the right hand of the author of the discourses offers to the world, then, is not at all the plenitude of truth that God deceptively holds out to would-be speculative philosophers, but precisely the pursuit of truth of the subjective thinker, reformulated as the moral and religious concern for an eternal happiness, for transparency concerning one’s self, and one’s deepest values and motivations, for allowing the question of moral accountability to arise for one. 4

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Eternal happiness, then, is not something we know, not something we can grasp securely in our right hand. Its validity is not derived from us, but it is valid ‘in itself’ and, for precisely that reason, is a fitting measure by which to regulate our lives in this world. Its validity in itself and its usefulness for living are presented as interdependent: its validity in itself is what makes it useful for living, and its usefulness for living depends on its independence from experience. Yet, although it might be relatively straightforward to see how ideas like ‘an expectation of an eternal happiness’ might work in this way, it is perhaps not so easy to see what would become of such paradoxical ideas as ‘becoming as nothing’ or ‘becoming transparent to God’ on this interpretation, ideas which, as we have seen, play a crucial role in shaping Kierkegaard’s overall view of the religious life. Essentially, I believe, their application to the way in which we actually live our lives is, in fact, congruent with the kind of application that comes from applying the measure of an eternal happiness. But to see what this involves more fully, let us go back to Kierkegaard’s metaphorics of reflection and transparency that are at the heart of these ideas. If this involves a digression from the texts of the discourses themselves, it will, I believe, help us finally to understand them the better. II ‘Transparency’ and ‘reflection’ might seem at first to fit most easily into the framework of epistemology, as if we might be speaking of a subject that is transparent to or that reflects a determinate object outside itself. But talk of transparency is importantly qualified in Kierkegaard’s writings not only by the fact that it coincides with the subject becoming as nothing, but also by the presupposition that the self that is to reflect the divine image is not merely a reflecting surface but reflects itself to itself and that this structure of selfreflection determines the whole range of conscious life. It is not just a matter of a reflected reflection but of a reflecting reflection. Consciousness is more than the mere reflection or impress in a receptor organ of an external stimulus: it is also the mind’s taking cognizance of this reflection, i.e. it is the reflection of the reflection, or that the reflection is re-reflected, that determines consciousness as consciousness. Thus, for conscious beings, the structure of self-reflection takes priority over the mere reflection of external objects and mediates all such reflection. This understanding of internal reflection is perhaps most succinctly and famously – if also notoriously – summarised in Section A of The Sickness unto Death, where Kierkegaard describes the structure of the self in what he himself refers to as an algebraic formula: Man is Spirit. But what is Spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relationship, that relates itself to itself, or, is that [element] in the relationship that [brings it about] that the relationship relates itself to itself; the self is not the relationship, but that the relationship relates itself to itself. (SV 3 15, p. 73 [13])

Before God 101 Whatever else this means, it means that active reflection, self-relating and selfreflecting, is integral to what it is to being a self: one does not become a self just by growing to be one, according to a predetermined essence or nature, one becomes a self by an act of self-relation that is itself only possible in the light of an active self-reflection. But, as Kierkegaard argues the case, such a self could not be its own ground, it could not – in opposition to the opinion of, for example, Fichte and the Romantics – posit itself. That it can be a self at all is possible only insofar as ‘in willing to be itself the self finds its ground in being transparent to the power that posits it’ (SV 3 15, p. 16 [14]). Although The Sickness unto Death is generally treated in the secondary literature as one of the most radically Christian of Kierkegaard’s texts, he does not seem to be saying anything here that could not already have been said from the standpoint of the upbuilding discourses. We have, for example, seen how concern arises in the moment of active reflection in which the self moves from seeking to know or to understand the world about and turns to asking what the world means to it and it to the world, and, more intensively still, how it is to orient itself in the light of its own inner dualities. The outcome, in the crisis whereby the self comes to be as nothing, is that these dualities can only find unity in and with itself by becoming transparent to God. There is clearly a tension here that constitutes one of the central axes of Kierkegaard’s religious interpretation of the crisis of his time. On the one hand, the ambition of the self to be its own ground, to be personally and ontologically as well as morally autonomous, leads to ruin, and merely deepens the self’s alienation from its actual ground: God. On the other hand, the process of becoming as nothing, of becoming still and transparent and allowing the storms of doubt and rebellion to subside into a smooth reflecting surface, is not a simple reversion to a first immediacy: it is not a ‘natural’ or spontaneous process, but one that requires us to choose. Consequently the structure of self-reflection remains active even in the process of becoming appropriately reflective or transparent to our true ground. But how can the self choose its nothingness in the light of an active self-reflecting reflection, without thereby excluding itself from the kind of receptivity for which the religious requirement of dependence on God calls? At its simplest, isn’t there a fundamental confusion in Kierkegaard’s central images: a reflecting surface is not a transparent surface, and vice versa. A mirror is not a lens. Either we are reflective beings and therefore, following the dialectic of reflection, ultimately self-reflecting, or else we are transparent beings, beings whose centre, in some sense, lies outside ourselves, in that to which we are transparent.5 Kierkegaard’s dilemma here is formulated in terms of the specific history of philosophy deriving from Descartes and culminating in German idealism. For Fichte, the postulation of an intellectual intuition in which the self-reflecting self has an immediate intuition of its own being in the very act of self-reflection by which it posits itself as consciousness means that the self is both subject and object of the intellectual intuition and, therefore, capable of being the spectator of its own act of self-creation. And, as Kierkegaard at least believed, Hegel said essentially the same, despite his stated opposition to the doctrine of

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intellectual intuition. For although Hegelian reason did not seek to glimpse itself in an immediate intuition but, like the Owl of Minerva that flies at dusk, only sought to know itself in the retrospective reflection of its own history, that history is, for Hegel also, our common, universal history. The philosopher who performs an intellectual apokastasis (recollection) of history also believes that he has come thereby to be the spectator of his own being.6 The struggle to break the mould of such a self-reflecting consciousness, to open it up to its founding ground, permeates many Kierkegaardian texts. A striking example is Stages on Life’s Way, where it leaves its mark on the words of two of the pseudonyms who appear in that work, in Assessor Vilhelm’s ‘Observations on Marriage’ and in Frater Taciturnus’ ‘Letter to the Reader’. In arguing that a religious understanding of life emerges as the outcome of a process of infinite reflection Frater Taciturnus says that ‘the infinite reflection is not something heterogeneous but is immediacy’s transparency to itself ”, adding that in the infinite reflection ‘immediacy relates itself to itself in the idea. But this phrase “in the idea”, denotes a God-relationship …’ (SV 3 8, p. 213 [414]). The dilemma is clear. On the one hand, the process of infinite reflection is such that it cannot allow for anything heterogeneous – and yet, it is claimed, it is by this very process that we come to establish ourselves in a God-relationship. The key would seem to be in the phrase ‘in the idea’, but what does this mean and how should it legitimate the transition from reflection to a Godrelationship? The point would seem to be that an exhaustive ‘infinite reflection’ [my emphasis – GP] ‘in the idea’ is a reflection that, by totalising itself and so coming to know itself as a whole, is able to grasp itself for what it is. At the individual and subjective level it functions analogously to the operation of Hegelian reason at the objective level of history. One who can perform such an act of reflection becomes internally transparent to himself in every aspect of his being, and this, Assessor Vilhelm claims, means that it is ‘a new immediacy’, and, he adds, it takes the form of faith or resolution: ‘Resolution,’ he says, ‘is the ideality brought by a pure ideal reflection … (SV 3 7, p. 144 [160]). And again: ‘… reflection is exhaustively subsumed into faith, which is precisely the ideal infinity anticipated in the form of resolution. Thus resolution is a new immediacy, attained through the ideally exhausted reflection …’ (SV 3 7, p. 145 [162]). This, he adds, is ‘the immediacy of religion … a new immediacy having reflection between it and the first immediacy …’ (SV 3 7, p. 146 [162]). In the self-reflection by which it attains the transparency of full selfconsciousness, then, the self establishes itself as a self, as a unitary entity capable of determining itself in action (resolution). The Assessor polemically defines his own position against what he perceives as the Fichtean/Romantic understanding of the self as some kind of actus purus by contextualising the act of self-choice in the givenness of the self’s factical concretion. Nevertheless, he coincides with the Fichtean position in an important respect: that it is both as a condition of and as a result of its self-determining action that the self becomes transparent to itself and gains assurance concerning its ontological

Before God 103 groundedness. It knows that it is and what it is by means of its own inner action. We seem to be very close to the position of the upbuilding discourses, but there is an important difference that Kierkegaard’s prolific but not always precise use of the vocabulary of reflection, transparency and resolution perhaps obscures. For it is an implication of the Assessor’s understanding of the relationship between reflection, self-transparency and resolution that the self is capable of becoming the spectator of its own being. Here too the idealist model of selfreflection continues, more or less explicitly, to be determinative. And, curiously enough, Assessor Vilhelm also made use of a theatrical image, and recommended that we should look upon our lives as if we were actors in a play written by God. But this is rather different from Kierkegaard’s intertwined images of imagining ourselves sub specie aeternitatis (on the stage of eternity) ‘before God’ or, simply, as acting ‘before God’ by the way in which we appropriate what is whispered to us by the upbuilding address. For, although his presentation is also set in the context of a critique of irony, the implication of the Assessor’s picture of our acting out the roles scripted for us by God is that we in some sense know the content of those roles prior to acting them out. We are like actors reading for a part who imaginatively anticipate how they might perform it. Integral to his simile is the implication that, in some sense, we are able to watch ourselves ‘in role’. And this is distinctively different from Kierkegaard’s image, which, in both versions, rules out the possibility of knowing in advance what we need to say or do, or knowing how God sees us. In a well-known passage in Either/Or the Assessor reminds A of an incident when A had boasted of embarrassing a young girl by catching her eye in a mirror, thus entrapping her in a visual space defined by his gaze. ‘Mr. Observer’, the Assessor calls him – but he himself is no less well rehearsed in the ‘observations’ on marriage that, as he says, are so largely drawn from his own marriage. But it is precisely this self-spectating that the rubric ‘before God’ prohibits. And maybe the ones who truly live their lives as if ‘before God’ do not even understand becoming as nothing in the sense of counting oneself ‘as nothing’, because that would also mean attempting to define oneself in terms of the view that one has of one’s self. For those who understand themselves as living before God on the other hand, becoming as nothing means no longer caring to count themselves as anything, i.e. no longer being the spectators of their own drama or, recalling ‘Against Cowardice’, to be the judges in their own cause. That I come to be who I am only in and through the reflection in which I am able to turn in on myself – even when the only content I can give to this choice is that of the reflecting reflection itself in its infinite vacuity – had, indeed, been the nub of Kierkegaard’s critique of romantic irony, when he wrote of the ironist that he is someone for whom life is a drama … [and h]e himself is a spectator, even when he himself is the one acting … He is inspired by self-sacrificing virtue just as a spectator is inspired by it in a theatre; he is a severe critic who well knows when this

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Something similar seems to be true for Frater Taciturnus and Assessor Vilhelm. As they see it, faith and the God-relationship seem to be virtually identical with the self becoming transparent to itself in the ideality of its ethical resolve. This is, however, precisely the issue that engages us here in the context of the discourses and their concern to persuade us of the value of a religious understanding of life, and it is precisely the point that the self that has become as nothing cannot be its own ground in the manner advocated by Fichte. It becomes and must be utterly dependent in its nothingness on God in a reversal of perspective that self-reflection cannot encompass. It is at this point, then, that the notion of measure comes into its own. For the measure we apply to our understanding of a situation (or of ourselves) is not itself generated by that understanding, nor is it its ‘content’. The measure that is applied to thought is a priori. On the other hand, that we choose to apply it and the way in which we apply it are inseparable from our thinking itself. That, having once applied it, we continue to do so is, moreover, determined by our experience of the usefulness and fruitfulness of so doing. Although our measure does not derive from experience (and to that extent marks a certain limit to autonomous self-reflection), it is tested and, it may be, vindicated in and by experience (and cannot, therefore, be taken as the imposition of heteronomous values). The impossibility of reflection generating its own measure, and the corresponding need to call on an ideal a priori measure in applying reflection to life, is suggested by Kierkegaard in the first chapter of the second part of The Sickness unto Death, i.e. precisely at the point at which his argument moves from what appears to be a purely immanent consideration of the forms of despair to a new, more theological account, in which despair is, as he put it, ‘potentiated’ by its being ‘before God’. As he expresses it: The gradations in the consciousness of self with which we have hitherto been concerned have been within the determination of the human self or the self whose measure is the human. But this self acquires a new quality and qualification by the fact of its being before God. This self is no longer the purely human self but what, hoping not to be misunderstood, I would call the theological self, the self before God. (SV3 15, p. 133 [79]) It is at this point that Kierkegaard introduces and explains the term ‘measure’: The child, which hitherto has simply had the measure given it by its parents, goes on as a man to take his measure from his civic duties, but what an

Before God 105 infinite emphasis falls on the self by getting to have God as its measure! The measure for the self is always: that over against which it is a self, but this is nevertheless precisely the definition of what a ‘measure’ is. As one can only add quantities of the same kind, so each thing is what it is by virtue of that by which it is measured … (SV3 15, p. 133 [79]) A further refinement of the concept of measure occurs when it is transposed into the ethical sphere, the sphere of freedom. Here the self is itself responsible for that which it takes as its measure. In the case of distances, weights, and even aptitudes (IQ perhaps) the issue of what measure to use is constrained by the objectivity of the matter at hand. We may argue whether it is better to measure distance in miles or kilometres, but both are, essentially, the same kind of measure. In the sphere of freedom, however, it is the self itself – at its own peril – that chooses what kind of measure it will think of itself by and, therefore, what kind of thing it will give itself out to be. But this means precisely that in coming to think of itself as ‘before God’ and taking God as its measure, the self is not responding to any perceived state of affairs (and still less to any necessary deduction from a priori principles): The mistake [in earlier dogmatics] lay in regarding God as something external, and, as it were, in supposing that one only sometimes sinned against God. But God is not something external like a police officer … That which essentially makes human guilt into sin is that the guilty one has a consciousness of existing before God … It is only when a self, as this determinate individual, is conscious of himself as being before God that it becomes an infinite self, and this self then sins before God … [But] the heathen and the natural human being have [only] the purely human self as measure. (SV 3 15, p. 134 [80]) The question concerning the measure against which we measure the value of human life, then, is precisely a question for freedom and a question of freedom. It is a question of deciding our moral priorities for ourselves, and, more strongly, it may be, our religious priorities: How high a price are we going to place on human existence, how high a price on the human individual? The answers, it seems, cannot be determined by reflection itself or by any knowledge we could have of ourselves gained by self-reflection. But although Kierkegaard has positioned himself in relation to the philosophy of German idealism and the distinctive role played in that by a highly specific concept of reflection, his case can readily be seen to have a certain independence from that immediate historical context. For his view as to the incapacity of reflection to arrive at the first principles of moral life of itself could easily be applied to the kind of knowledge about human values that, some would claim, could be derived from the knowledge we have of human beings as biologically or, for that matter,

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psychologically or historically determined beings. Each of these fails adequately to grasp the unique and exclusive role of freedom in choosing its measure. But, then, why formulate the measure in just these terms: before God? Why insist on the need to become as nothing, or to allow ourselves to become transparent to God as a part of what it means to take God as our measure? Why define God as the invisible, inscrutable spectator, rather than (say) God as the highest perfection towards which we must continually strive to approximate (a strategy that the combined talk of ‘before God’ and human nothingness would seem to subvert in advance)? Does this not condemn us to having to choose what we in any case are? And if it is objected that that would be to conflate Kierkegaard with Sartre does not that conflation itself have a certain plausibility in terms of Kierkegaard’s association with the origins of twentieth-century existentialism? And even if Kierkegaardian existentialism turns out, after all, to have a masochistic feel about it, is that not, finally, a matter of taste? Remember that, for Sartre no less than for Kierkegaard, we are finally incapable of creating ourselves in an absolute sense. Although responsible in freedom for every detail of our facticity (‘There are no accidents in life’, Sartre says), we do not ourselves create that facticity. One does not choose in advance to be a malcontented bourgeois philosopher in a country that loses a war and is occupied by an enemy power, but one can – one must – choose to be just that if that is the hand one has been dealt. We fail in attempting to become the ground of our own freedom, but we must freely assume the failed project that we are with unflinching honesty, transparent to ourselves in the nothingness that we repeatedly choose to be. III Teasing out the precise difference on this point between Kierkegaard and Sartre will, I think, prove fruitful for understanding something of what it might mean to understand the Kierkegaardian category of ‘before God’ as a kind of regulative ideal and, indeed, why this particular ‘measure’ is so important to his overall religious outlook. For Kierkegaard, as we have seen, it cannot be the case that God shining through our nothingness (or in another formulation: the power that posits us being disclosed as God) is something that lies within our own power. We cannot compel God to reveal himself as the foundation of our being by the practice of self-annihilation. If we could, then ‘God’ would simply become the cipher for the project of understanding ourselves in terms of the infinite transparency of self-reflection, as for Assessor Vilhelm and Frater Taciturnus. The ‘religiousness’ of Kierkegaardian existentialism would then be no more than a means of inflating the importance of our acts of self-choice and the difference between Kierkegaard and Sartrean existentialism would be merely a matter of vocabulary. But if the self-manifestation of God is altogether and entirely unrelated to our practice, then the distance between Christian and Sartrean existentialism is collapsed from another side because, as far as human practice is concerned,

Before God 107 Kierkegaard and Sartre would bring us to the same point, the point at which it becomes evident that the project of freedom must continually fail to reach its goal. What happens beyond this point is beyond our control and incapable of being determined in any precise way with regard to our consciousness. To grasp the point at issue here fully, let us look more closely at Sartre. A convenient starting-point is provided by a detail from his autobiographical work Words, in which he describes a kind of unconversion: One day I handed my teacher a French essay on the Passion; it had delighted my family, and my mother had copied it out herself. It won only the silver medal. This disappointment plunged me into impiety ... For several years longer, I kept up public relations with the Almighty; in private, I stopped associating with Him. Once only I had the feeling that He existed. I had been playing with matches and had burnt a mat; I was busy covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt his gaze inside my head and on my hands; I turned round in the bathroom, horribly visible, a living target. I was saved by indignation: I grew angry at such a crude lack of tact, and blasphemed, muttering like my grandfather: ‘Sacré nom de Dieu de Dieu de nom de Dieu.’ He never looked at me again.7 This anecdote helps us to identify a key element in the meaning that God has for Sartre and thus provides an important clue to the meaning of his atheism. God is the one who looks at him – and, moreover, the one who looks at him when he does not want to be looked at. Later, towards the end of Words Sartre tells the story of a further unconversion, one that occurred when he was waiting for ‘the Machado girls’ with whom he travelled to school. One day, he says, he suddenly realised quite simply that God did not exist. Whether the realisation was that simple or that empty of content, however, is another question, and it is striking that he reverts to the idea of God as an unwelcome and omniscient spectator in a passage leading up to the telling of the ‘Machado girl’ incident. Speaking of the time when he still believed (or, at least, did not bother to challenge the tacit assumption that he, like all the others, believed), Sartre writes, ‘a vast collective power had penetrated me; lodged in my heart, it was keeping watch, it was the faith of others.’8 This ‘vast collective power’ was not so easy to throw off as conscious belief in God, he acknowledges. Indeed, it continued to hold sway over his early attempts to be a writer: It is enough to debaptise and modify superficially its normal object: faith recognised it beneath the disguises which deceived me, threw itself on it and enclosed it in its tendrils. I thought I was giving myself to literature when I was, in fact, taking holy orders.9 After describing how God disappeared while he was waiting for the Machado girls he adds that although he had no wish to revive the God who had

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Before God vanished without explanation, … the Other, the Invisible, the Holy Ghost, he who guaranteed my mandate and dominated my life through great, anonymous and sacred forces, he remained … For a long time, writing was asking Death or Religion in disguise to tear my life away from chance. I was of the Church.10

By the time of writing Words (1964), however, even this persistent ‘Holy Ghost’ had been ‘caught … in the cellars and flung … out of them.’11 ‘Atheism,’ Sartre comments, ‘is a cruel, long-term business: I believe I have gone through it to the end.’12 Sartre’s reinterpretation of God as the admiring gaze of a public whose collective will is endowed with the power to confer a kind of immortality beyond chance upon the heroes of literature may be a piece of reductionism – and yet, as Sartre himself confesses, it was also a covert theology that still awaited the rigorous self-criticism of a more ruthless atheism. It also points once more to what is for Sartre most characteristic of God’s role: God is the great spectator, the one who watches over me. Against the background of these biographical reflections let us turn to a very specific section of Being and Nothingness: to Part IV, ‘Being-for-others’ and, more specifically, to the section entitled ‘The Look’. In addressing the problem of other minds philosophers have generally taken a wrong turn, according to Sartre. Typically, the problem has been seen as how, given the sensory perception of another body as an object in space, can I know that this other body is inhabited by a consciousness like that which I immediately intuit in myself? How do I know that the other is a person just like me? As Sartre sees it, this is putting the question the wrong way round. For I do not in fact ever have a perception of the other as a mere body from which I then, somehow, have to infer his subjectivity. On the contrary, the other is disclosed to me ‘directly’ and ‘in connection with me’ as a subject. Indeed as Sartre sets out to show, my being-for-myself – my own being-as-subject-as-the-projectof-freedom – is inseparable from this primordial relation to the other-assubjectivity. But this relation is negative, in that my attempt to become myself is always also an attempt to free myself from others and to define myself in my own being-for-myself against others – although it is crucial that we do not forget that this ‘against’ is, of course, still a very definite kind of relationship. Sartre thus insists that the subjectivity of the other is not disclosed in some sort of ‘mystic or ineffable experience. It is in the reality of everyday life that the Other appears to us, and his probability refers to everyday reality.’13 Let us take an example of what this might mean. Sartre writes: I am in a public park. Not far away there is a lawn and along the edge of that lawn there are benches. A man passes by those benches. I see this man; I apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man. What does this signify? What do I mean when I assert that this object is a man?14

Before God 109 Although at one level the man is always an object among objects, his presence as a human Other immediately and totally disorients my perception of the world. The lawn is no longer merely the lawn at which I am looking. It is also the lawn that is seen by the Other. It is not just ‘my’ lawn. It is also, potentially, ‘his’: [T]here is a regrouping in which I take part but which escapes me, a regrouping of all the objects which people my universe. This regrouping does not stop there. The grass is something qualified; it is this green grass which exists for the Other; in this sense the very quality of the object, its deep, raw green is in direct relation to this man. This green turns toward the Other a face which escapes me. I apprehend the relation of the green to the Other as an objective relation, but I can not apprehend the green as it appears to the Other. Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and fixed in the direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralisation of the world which undermines the centralisation which I am simultaneously effecting.15 But this decentralisation is not complete. I do not lose my world altogether despite its flight from me towards the other. After all, the world qua objectworld continues to exist. I continue to see the grass. I continue to see the other man: [T]he disintegration of my universe is contained within the limits of this same universe; we are not dealing here with a flight of the world toward nothingness or outside itself. Rather it appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole. The universe, the flow, and the drain hole are all once again recovered, reapprehended, and fixed as an object.16 I still have ‘my’ world, but now I can only have it by means of the resistance I offer to its disintegration,. It remains ‘mine’ only as a product of the will to resist its absorption by the gaze of the Other. But how is it possible for the Other to exercise such a disequilibriating power? Isn’t there something abnormal – pathological even – about Sartre’s whole account thus far? Before reaching such a conclusion we need to notice that what is at issue in this encounter is not simply that there are now two of us looking at the lawn. What really sharpens things is the further possibility that the Other might lift his eyes from the lawn and look at me: ‘[M]y fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject,’ Sartre writes, ‘must be able to be referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other…’17 On this basis Sartre is thus

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able to state that ‘the “Being-seen-by-the-Other” is the truth of “seeing-theother.” ’18 The question then follows: what does being seen mean for me? Imagine a situation in which, for whatever reason, I am peering through a keyhole. Whether I am titillated by what I see (or hope to see) or am racked by jealousy and fearful of what will meet my gaze, I am in each case entirely absorbed in what I am doing and without any reflective understanding of the being that I am. Indeed, in the manner of bad faith, my behaviour is itself a flight from my having to be as anguish and as freedom: ‘But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall.’19 This, Sartre claims, alters the situation entirely and at a stroke. I am now forced to see myself precisely because I have become aware of the possibility that someone else will see me. Yet this sudden selfawareness is not the self-awareness of authentic freedom choosing its own project. The (potential) presence of the Other in the first instance identifies me as a self but only as a self within the domain of unreflective consciousness. In this situation ‘I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other’20 – like, we might say, the aspiring writer and his ‘Church-like’ public. How then does this revelation of myself at the end of the Other’s look affect my being-for-myself? First, says Sartre, ‘there is a relation of being. I am this being.’ Yet the being that I am is a being that is seen by the Other and is therefore limited by the horizons projected by his freedom. The ‘me’. As the object of his gaze my freedom and my transcendence is not that of the self that I choose to be but of the ‘one’ he chooses to see in me or to see me as. My self is thus fixed by him in the realm of objects and of things that can be assigned to essences rather than in the realm of freedom, in which (as we know) existence precedes essence: ‘Thus for the Other I have stripped myself of my transcendence. This is because my transcendence … acquires a nature by the sole fact that the Other confers on it an outside.’21 ‘The Other as a look is only that – my transcendence transcended.’22 Or – and note the recourse to a theological motif at this point – ‘My original fall is the existence of the Other.’23 In this context Sartre appeals to Kafka and especially to the novels The Trial and The Castle as exemplifying the resultant situation. Because the actions of Kafka’s characters are in every case potentially see-able by the Other: [T]he truth of these acts constantly escapes them; the acts have on principle a meaning which is their true meaning and which neither K. nor the Surveyor will ever know. Without doubt Kafka is trying here to express the transcendence of the divine; it is for the divine that the human act is constituted in truth. But God here is only the concept of the Other pushed to the limit … That gloomy, evanescent atmosphere of The Trial, that ignorance which, however, is lived as ignorance, that total opacity which can only be felt as a presentiment across a total translucency – this is nothing but the description of our being-in-the-midst-of-the-world-forothers.24

Before God 111 My sense of self, then, my understanding of who I am in my own subjectivity, is never something I discover simply by reflecting on that subjectivity in itself. My freedom is never absolute, but always situated in relation to what Sartre calls ‘a strange freedom.’25 To become the freedom that I am I must contest the limit projected onto me by this ‘strange freedom’ of the Other: If in general there is an Other, it is necessary above all that I be the one who is not the Other, and it is in this very negation effected by me upon myself that I make myself be and that the Other arises as the Other … consciousness must freely disengage itself from the other and wrench itself away by chasing itself as a nothingness which is simply Other than the Other and thereby must be reunited in ‘itself’.26 Sartre acknowledges that this is reminiscent of Hegel’s dialectics of recognition, culminating in the ‘Master–Slave’ dialectic described in the Phenomenology. Like Hegel, Sartre sees being-for-itself as intrinsically agonistic: it exists in and as the struggle to be itself and to refuse the objectifying projection of the Other and its own consequent reduction to mere being in-itself or essence. Yet whereas for Hegel the goal of a community of mutually affirming free subjects is possible within history, Sartre cannot embrace such eschatological harmony. As he sees it the process must continue indefinitely as we oscillate between conflicting sadisms and masochisms, between denying the freedom of the Other or denying our own freedom. Both of these options are, moreover, inherently unstable, since even the sadist must ultimately fail in the task of achieving an immaculate perception of his freedom, because the other whom he reduces to a mere object thereby loses the quality of humanity that gives the act of recognition its worth. We are now close to the philosophical roots of why it is that, for Sartre, all that is necessary to establish a hell is to lock three people up for ever. The fundamental dynamics of such a situation predetermine their interrelationship as the perpetual mutual denial of freedom. Mutual recognition is never secure. In such a situation of radical and unpredictable instability the self can only be itself in the continuing refusal of the objectifying viewpoint of the Other. As existing before the face of the Other I can never entirely be or become myself. Hell is other people. Yet if a community of finite freedoms can never attain a reassuring equilibrium, as a member of such a community I at least have the possibility of making a bid for the freedom that I am. I may always have to pick up the cudgels anew, but at least I can do that much. Over against God, however, I could not even do that. For the human Other is as non-absolute and as insecure as I am myself. I have a good chance of being able to reclaim something of my world from such an Other (even though that ‘something’ is never enough to ground my freedom ontologically or in-itself), but over against God, whose viewpoint is absolute, who sees and ‘it is’, I have no such opportunity. As Sartre sees it, then, atheism is the one ground we have for a limited hope. The refusal

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of God means that although I can never attain an absolute freedom nor yet a perfectly transparent consciousness of myself in that freedom, I can do something, I can make some progress, there is something to lose and something to win. And it is in this light that we are to understand the ‘humanism’ of existentialism, because, by virtue of the finitude and limitations inherent in the human situation, the agonal processes of becoming human offer some possibility of creating meaning and value. It is this humble, humanistic optimism that Sartre explores in The Devil and the Good Lord, in which the main character, the warlord Goetz, switches from the pursuit of absolute evil to the pursuit of absolute obedience to God but in each case brings ruin upon all about him. Only at the end of the play, when he gives up both God and Devil, both the attempt to affirm God absolutely and the attempt to defy God absolutely, does he become capable of acting in a way that might (though, of course, no more than ‘might’) achieve some small, provisional good. No longer a monster nor an angel Goetz has the hope of becoming a man. Thus far at least Sartre shares Camus’ philosophy of the absurd, understanding this as the quest for a consistently non-absolutist understanding of the human situation. IV Kierkegaard’s view of the Other and, above all, of the relation to the divine Other might well be read as a thoroughgoing reversal of Sartre’s. In The Sickness unto Death, discussing what he calls the despair of defiance, Kierkegaard speaks of the self that ‘recognises no power over itself’. Such a self, he says, is: Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods [for it] is stealing from God the thought – which is earnestness – that God pays attention to one; instead, the self in despair is satisfied with paying attention to itself, which is supposed to bestow infinite interest and significance upon his enterprises, but it is precisely this that makes them imaginary constructions. (SV3 15, pp. 123–4 [68–9]) With these words Kierkegaard seems to be positioned diametrically opposite to Sartre, placing himself on the very ground that Sartre ascribed to Kafka. The category of ‘before God’ would, in this way, seem precisely to exclude the kind of attempt made by Sartre to affirm the self’s struggle to be itself in distinction from the Other. Indeed, it would seem not only to absolutise the impossibility of success in any such venture in self-assertion, but also explicitly to stigmatise such efforts as inherently sinful. However, this is not just a matter of Kierkegaardian masochism versus Sartrean egoism, since Kierkegaard immediately goes on to make clear that such defiance is equally capable of taking a passive form, fetishising its own need to suffer. The point is not whether the self is active or passive, but the kind of understanding the self has of itself in its activity and in its passivity alike. One of the implications of the imagery of ‘before God’ was, we noted, that

Before God 113 it rendered any kind of knowledge-relation to God impossible. The inverse perspective of understanding ourselves as being-before-God does not allow of God becoming the object of experience or knowledge. The question is rather that of the measure or criterion by which we evaluate our lives in the world. The difference between Sartre and Kierkegaard here, then, is that whereas for Sartre the only possible value our lives can have is that which we bestow upon them, Kierkegaard ascribes a value and meaning that in principle (though not necessarily temporally) precedes any act on our part. Human beings have, for Sartre, no value or worth other than the value and worth they give themselves: for Kierkegaard, however, that we exist ‘before God’ means that we each have a value that exceeds any possible estimation we may have of ourselves. Kierkegaard makes this point in his parable of the day-labourer who, having admired the princess from afar but without any realistic hope of gaining her hand, is nominated to be the emperor’s son-in-law. The moral of the story is ‘that this individual human being, no matter whether man, woman, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, or whatever’ is the object not only of God’s attention but is one for whose sake ‘God comes to the world, allows himself to be born, to suffer, to die’ and whom God ‘almost implores and beseeches … to accept the help that is offered to him’ (SV3 15, p. 138 [85]). In other words, to regard my existence or that of another as an existence ‘before God’ is to endow it with an almost unimaginable value in its quite unique individuality prior to and apart from any action by which the self is theoretically or practically determined as this or that, for the self is whoever God sees it as. In this perspective my annihilation as the centre of reflection does not lead to the devaluing of individual personality, but the reverse. I do not need to prove or to create the value of my life but, in Tillich’s phrase, ‘to accept acceptance’ and with that to find liberation not only from the guilt generated by authoritarian religion but also from the neuroses of success and achievement endemic in secular societies shaped by free-market economies. In this context it is important to remember that the measure ‘before God’ is itself further potentiated as ‘before Christ’, which, for Kierkegaard, means thinking of ourselves as existing before one who we can be sure regards us with love, forgivingly. To take ‘before God’ in a constitutive sense would be to claim to be able to define or to understand the kind of being that is determinative for the being of God: it would be to constrain in advance the possible scope of a God’s eye view and therefore, however abstractly, to make the human being privy to that view; it would be to ignore the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ and the nonconvertibility of the divine and human standpoints and to place God ‘out there’ as the object of the subject’s reflecting gaze when, having penetrated itself in the totality of its factual concretion and having achieved self-transparency, it goes on to look through and beyond itself to God. Understanding our lives as transparent to God, as lives lived ‘before God’, in a regulative sense, however, would mean surrendering the capacity (or, better, divesting ourselves of the illusion) that we are able to achieve an incorrigible view onto the meaning of

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our lives. It would be both a way of talking about ourselves, as in the application of the expectation of an eternal happiness to life in this world, but also a way of marking the limits of any purely humanistic dream of fulfilment. It would, with Sartre, accept the impossibility of reaching a final, objective view of ourselves, but reject Sartre’s refusal of any view of myself that is other than my own. Bearing in mind the ‘earthly’ or existential work that Kierkegaard expects his regulative ideals to do, this admission of an alternative point of view is not only significant with regard to my God-relationship, but also for my relations to other human beings, since the dethroning of my own view of myself clears the way for me to attend also to others’ views of me. In accepting my life as a life to be lived as if ‘before God’ I also, by that acceptance, indicate my willingness to listen to advice, to take a telling, or, in Calvin’s phrase, ‘to subdue my heart to teachableness’. Analogous applications of the image of becoming nothing and, thereby, transparent to, or transfigured in, the divine light that then shines through us are readily available. This is not an appeal to a privileged religious experience, which would make it the possession of a cognitive minority, but an idea that, irrespective of our ‘experiences’, we can each take and apply regulatively in the context of our actual moral and personal life in the world. To do so will nurture in us humility, patience, endurance, a sense of solidarity and a spirit of gratitude, and, perhaps most importantly, in doing so serve, paradoxically it might seem, to unify and harmonise the diversity of our strivings and commitments, bringing the sought-for unity to the self. Applying Kierkegaard’s fundamental religious ideals regulatively is not, of course, anything like applying a technical apparatus to a problem. The specific attitudinal responses called for and, still more, the specific conduct that would be appropriate to having embraced such ideals is not going to be obvious in every case. Kierkegaard is consistently sensitive towards the possibility of such misapplications and does what he can to point them out, within the limits of an author who can by no means foresee all the different challenges and demands that his readers will be facing. So, in the discourse ‘At a Graveside’ (from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions) the idea at issue is the remembrance of death, an idea with obvious connections to, for example, ‘becoming as nothing’. Here Kierkegaard sets out the differing ways in which essentially the same thoughts about death may either be adopted as a matter of mere mood (Stemning) or as something really serious. Thus, with regard to the idea of death as levelling all human differences, Kierkegaard offers a sequence of scenarios, in which he pictures how this might appeal to someone whose spirit has grown weary with considering the endless proliferation of differences and varieties and is frustrated at not being able to understand the whole and works himself into a ‘fever for annihilation’; or to a lonely sufferer who has been unable to find anyone who really understands him; or to the insulted and injured, powerless to avenge their humiliation; or to the defeated and to the sick, excluded from the dance of life, but consoled by the thought that, in the end, the others must also join him in the dance of death – but all of these, Kierkegaard says, represent ‘mood’,

Before God 115 a passive, reactive response, a kind of wounded powerlessness of the kind Nietzsche would call ‘ressentiment’. Seriousness, on the other hand (and this is a kind of refrain that recurs throughout the discourse), ‘has the same idea concerning death, but understands it differently’ (SKS 5, pp. 457–8 [89]). Seriousness understands that death is the great leveller; and it has long since understood what this means, since seriousness taught him to seek that equality before God in which all could be equal. In seeking this, however, the serious person discovered a difference, namely his own difference or distance from his goal that was set him, and he discovered that the furthest distance from this goal would be a condition such as that in which death makes all equal. (SKS 5, p. 458 [89]) The serious person does not use the thought of death as levelling the infinite variety of human differences as a means of revenging himself on the world, but as a motive to redouble his own moral striving, his own attempt to live at one with others because he is equal with all: ‘We’ve all got to die,’ we can imagine him reflecting, ‘and probably sooner than we’d think, so let’s do the best by each other while we still can.’ This expresses the fact that his basic attitude towards life is not one of resentment or hate but thankful obligation to the giver of life. Learning this kind of distinction and understanding better the most appropriate way in which to apply our fundamental principles – regulatively – will, necessarily, be a process of continual experimentation and, with that, of self-examination. The discourse ‘At a Graveside’ incidentally points to a further dimension of Kierkegaard’s fundamental religious principles that should be mentioned. If we were only talking of values like humility, teachableness, etc. we might conclude that Kierkegaard was simply about promoting a set of moral or social virtues of a certain kind. But his concern is not just with morality: it is also with our mortality. The question as to the value we place on human beings is not just a question about how we are to treat one another across a certain range of social interactions (though it is that): it is also a question of whether and how we can sustain our commitment to those values in the face of the utter annihilation with which we are constantly threatened by death. Kierkegaard’s proposal is that, fully acknowledging the utter exposure of all that we have and are to death, we should nevertheless live as if we might become worthy of an eternal happiness, committing ourselves to a process of unfinalisable striving for unity, meaning and purpose in our short time under the sun (choosing the pursuit of eternal happiness held in God’s left hand over the possession of it held in his right). This process not only gives us an inner consistency, it also provides the basis for building up the bonds of common life – of mutual respect, trust, and, ultimately, love. The philosophical interpretation of the discourses offered here puts Kierkegaard on a different course from that of existential phenomenology,

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bringing him back closer to Kant and seeing him as, essentially, a moralist, in the expanded sense indicated in the previous paragraph – that is a moralist whose morality is contextualised in a larger sensibility or, we might say, spirituality. This interpretation places the standpoint from which the self is to be understood outside the self in such a way that the circle of self-knowledge can never finally be closed: the best view there is on human life is a view from outside, not from within. Yet, at the same time, the idea of such a view from outside, looking at ourselves ‘as if’ the meaning of our lives was the meaning that God saw in them, is one that, in the regulative use proposed here, can give direction and measure to our practice and prove its worth at that level. With this we have found a way of making sense of both sides of a debate that has riven Kierkegaard studies for generations, the debate between theological and philosophical interpreters, the former seeing him as the apostle of a new heteronomy, the latter claiming him as an authentic thinker of existential anthropology. Against the latter it has to be said that the religious dimension of Kierkegaard’s thought and the specific force of such formulae as ‘before God’ or ‘becoming as nothing’ cannot be eliminated without doing violence to his central ideas. Autonomy reaches its limit in the breakdown of self-reflection. But the appeal to religious values does not depend on any putative knowledge that is not available to the generality of human beings, and the adoption of these values as principles of living is always and entirely a matter for freedom and the exercise of moral discernment. But if the issue is not one of knowledge, what might move us to accept and to apply such values for ourselves? The answer to this question is, as we shall see later, indissociable from Kierkegaard’s understanding of the whole issue of communication, for it is in and from a perspective determined by the dynamics of communication that the motivation for adopting the religious point of view as a regulative ideal for existence is best understood, and it is in and from that perspective that the justification for holding such a point of view can best be demonstrated. Notes 1 J. Walker (1985) Kierkegaard: The Descent into God, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, p. 130. 2 Walker (1985) p. 131. 3 Walker (1985) pp. 132–3. 4 And, we might add, to this open-ended and unfinishable pursuit corresponds the literary construction of the discourses as dialogical texts, texts that seek not to instruct their readers, but to open a conversation in which the reader, like the writer/speaker, remains necessarily and always essentially alone with God. 5 As noted in considering the question of religious experience, this ambiguity might echo Meister Eckhart’s image of the mirror placed in the bottom of a bucket of water. See Chapter 4 above. 6 It is in the light of this understanding of the implications of Hegel’s method that we can see how the critique of the doctrine of recollection in Philosophical Fragments, although relating explicitly to Socrates, is also an indirect critique of more recent idealism. 7 J.-P. Sartre (1967) Words, tr. I. Clephane, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 65. In what follows

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

I have chosen to elucidate Kierkegaard’s position by the negative comparison with Sartre. It would, however, have been possible to explore the no less interesting interconnections between Kierkegaard’s view of the self’s situation vis-à-vis the Other and that of Lévinas, a comparison that is being made with increasing frequency among scholars; see, for example, P. Sheil (2002) Kierkegaard, Levinas and the Subjunctive Mood, Aldershot, Ashgate. Sartre (1967) p. 155. Sartre (1967) p. 156. Sartre (1967) p. 156. Sartre (1967) p. 157. Sartre (1967) p. 157. J.-P. Sartre (1958) Being and Nothingness, London, Methuen, p. 253. Sartre (1958) p. 254. Sartre (1958) p. 255. Sartre (1958) p. 256. Sartre (1958) p. 256. Sartre (1958) p. 257. Sartre (1958) p. 260. Sartre (1958) p. 260. Sartre (1958) p. 262. Sartre (1958) p. 263. Sartre (1958) p. 263. Sartre (1958) p. 266. Sartre (1958) p. 275. Sartre (1958) p. 283.

5

The language of upbuilding

I In Chapter 2 we looked at how the upbuilding discourses culminate in the self’s becoming as nothing and so transparent to God, irradiated and transfigured by the illumination of the divine. The language recalled that of Christian mysticism, but, it was suggested, Kierkegaard is not basing himself on an appeal to experience. The absence of any cognitively significant experience undercuts the possibility of using the discourses as material for a phenomenological analysis, yet, at the same time, the insistence on the primacy of ‘reality’ or ‘actuality’ sets a limit to any purely dialectical construction of a religious world-view. So, I claim, what Kierkegaard says about the God-relation is to be used regulatively, in the specific context of the existential concern for a unified, coherent life lived out against the prospect of the self’s annihilation in death. This might still seem to confine Kierkegaard to a particular corner of philosophical discourse from which philosophy has mostly moved on. Don’t we know that the whole domain of philosophy has been flooded by language in such a way that the kind of opposition between ethics and ontology implicit in this account of Kierkegaard’s thought cries out to be recast with an eye to the kind of language games being played here, or, to put it in Heideggerian rather than Wittgensteinian terms, with an ear for what language is saying to us? Raising the issue of the so-called linguistic turn, however, brings us back once more to the question of whether, or in what sense, the discourses can be read theologically. For theology is by no means identical with rational theism, but, some have argued, operates with a quite different understanding of knowledge from anything found in post-Enlightenment philosophy. Indeed, theology finds itself especially at ease with the new domains opened up by philosophy’s linguistic turn, since the theologians claim that just the kind of oppositions between subject and object, ethics and ontology that characterise Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment discussions of religion have served to prevent the really interesting and important questions about religion from being properly asked. John Milbank, for example, has argued that in positioning itself in relation to the linguistic turn in philosophy, theology is not just hitching

The language of upbuilding 119 a ride on the coat-tails of an essentially secular development, but is returning to its own proper procedures, i.e. that theology itself embodies the original linguistic turn.1 That theology has developed sophisticated theories concerning representation and language in the course of its history is not surprising given the dominant role played in the Abrahamic traditions by scripture as a source of right doctrine. Traditions of apophatic, negative and mystical theology, and, associated with that, theories that acknowledge and exploit the figurative, analogical and metaphorical dimensions of religious language can readily be appealed to as evidence of theology’s own internally generated ‘linguistic’ orientation. From Philo, through Origen, Augustine, pseudo-Dionysus and on to Aquinas, many of the defining figures of the theological tradition can be called as witnesses. If, in the early modern period, whether in the rationalising tendency within later scholasticism or in Protestantism’s surrender to secular models of reason, this tradition became clouded over (with such notable exceptions as Oetinger and Hamann), Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Derrida, separately or in combination (and perhaps unintentionally), have provoked theologians to recover their own linguistic self-reflexivity. Even (perhaps especially) the linguistically turned version of theology, however, cannot avoid the question of justification. For what legitimates or controls the application of just these sources of scripture and tradition to the human discourse about God, and what legitimates the very specific readings of scripture and tradition that are characteristic of the particular confessional theologies? It may well seem self-evident from within a particular religious community that we should invoke just these criteria for justifying or repudiating just these specific doctrinal or counter-doctrinal assertions. Indeed, it may be constitutionally necessary to do so, in a legal as well as in a moral and intellectual sense, if the outcome is to live up to its claim to be ‘Catholic’ or ‘Evangelical’. Nevertheless, the results must always seem questionable, when not frankly absurd, to those who stand outside the charmed circle. ‘Theology’, in Milbank’s sense, is not merely the private language of a club, but is happy to be so. Perhaps, however, the scandal can be moderated by arguing that if standing within a concrete linguistic and cultural tradition is an ineluctable dimension of understanding, then the situation of the theologian is no more than a special instance of the general hermeneutical situation. But this does not entirely obviate the question of why this tradition is to be embraced, why these words (and no others) are the words we need to articulate the business we do with God. Such questions press upon anyone standing this side of the Enlightenment, for whom religious affiliation cannot be other than a matter of choice. Even if I am one of the minority who still adheres to what was once called the faith of the fathers, this can no longer be a spontaneous expression of tribal membership. Even if I have not made a specific decision to enter into this faith community, the fact that I stay in it is possible only on the basis of a decision to do so.2 Nor is this simply the experience of rootless intellectuals: in the contemporary situation of what Heidegger called ‘planetary homelessness’ it is the situation of believers

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of every level of education. In any case, even the mainstream traditions of the major world religions – Protestant Christianity is an extreme case, but not an exception to the general rule – have for some considerable time (at least half a millennium in the case of Western Christianity) been engaged in an internal debate about what precisely the sources of doctrine are and how best to apply them. It may seem as if, by setting out to read the discourses with an eye to their rhetorical character and doing so within the parameters of a hermeneutical rather than an analytical approach, I am locating the present study within theology’s linguistic turn, and treating Kierkegaard’s religious message as being self-legitimating by virtue of its rhetorical form, its ability to out-narrate its secular rivals, or, simply, to speak to us. Such a tactic could be seductive, and there are undoubtedly aspects of Kierkegaard’s writing that lend themselves to this kind of reading. However, in the last resort, this is probably a less adequate and, I think, less interesting reading than that which would make of Kierkegaard a kind of existential phenomenologist. It is a reading that, perhaps, is asking the right questions but foreclosing on the really interesting responses that will emerge if we persist in keeping the question open for as long as possible, rather than rushing to an appealing but sophistical answer. The fundamental problem with such an approach is in its failure to address the issue of authority adequately. The view that religious language (in this case Kierkegaard’s religious language) can be self-legitimating on the basis of its own internal resources simply fails to take the crisis of religious identity sufficiently seriously. Kierkegaard, however, was a thinker for whom this crisis was reflected in virtually every aspect of his work. Although his writings contain some of the strongest affirmations of authority in modern theology, especially the authority of what, in his final writings, he calls ‘New Testament Christianity’, and although he consistently attacks the claims of human reason to stand in judgement on divine truth, he no less strongly and no less consistently undermines the possibility of an institutional or traditional embodiment of that authority. The truth claims of religion are no longer held to be objectively or indifferently true, but are depicted as dependent on subjective appropriation; they are only communicable indirectly; and even the Christ had to take on the incognito of a human being not recognisably different from anyone else, divesting himself of the power to summon legions of angels in support of his cause. Nor does Kierkegaard himself claim to be the authoritative representative of that cause, as if an individual could arbitrarily make of himself a source of authority capable of filling the void left by the Church’s demise. In any case, and however we read the later religious writings (in which the appeal to authority is most marked), the discourses with which we are primarily concerned here are precisely specified by Kierkegaard as being ‘without authority’, as ‘talks’ not ‘sermons’. Whatever the nature of their appeal, whatever the manner of their use of scripture or Church teaching, the reader is not asked simply to assent to their teaching as to an authoritative demand, but to appropriate the

The language of upbuilding 121 message in the light of his or her own reflective deliberation, on the ground of the open, hypothetical, ‘subjunctive’ and ‘sublime’ communicative space created by the discourses’ distinctive stylistics, and to do so as a participant in a dialogical process.3 Of course, taking a starting-point within a body of writings that are without authority and that therefore cannot fall back on the internal buttressing of a given or traditional theological language-game, means that we are still left with the problem of relating whatever we find there to Kierkegaard’s (and Christianity’s) more exclusive doctrinal claims. For the present, however, it is sufficient to note that, in their own terms at least, the discourses do not offer themselves as heteronomous: even when they speak of the self becoming as nothing, they point towards an understanding of the God-relationship that has positive and humanly appealing applications in the personal life. Though not heteronomous, however, this understanding of the God-relationship is not attainable simply on the basis of an analysis of the immediate data of the human condition, as for Schleiermacher. But it is perhaps premature to accept that the only outcome of the linguistic turn in relation to religious language is the return to a closed system of internal legitimation. This may be the course that theology itself is taking (and, in a sense, must take if it is to be true to itself), but theology has no monopoly on religious discourse. There are other options, and my argument here is not only that we are able to read Kierkegaard through the lens of the upbuilding discourses without presupposing the assumptions of an insiders-only theological language-game, but also that Kierkegaard’s own understanding of what he is doing in these discourses does not itself make any such presuppositions. But doesn’t the very fact that the discourses repeatedly invoke God and the God-relationship necessarily mean that some sort of presumption in favour of a religious world-view is being made here? The question, of course, is what Kierkegaard understands by ‘God’ and what he thinks he is saying in appealing to a transcendent ground that, in shining through us when we become as nothing, gives itself as the focus, goal and meaning of our lives. Is this, as Karl Barth put it, simply talking about Man with a loud voice? And, if not, what justifies understanding the human in terms of the more-than-human or otherthan-human? These, however, are not just questions about whether or not there is a God ‘out there’, waiting to be known, but about language, and, furthermore, not simply about how we use or intend a particular given word, ‘God’, but about the fundamental possibilities of language and communication. Although Kierkegaard wrote a great deal about the theory of indirect communication, some, but by no means all, of which also involves theoretical reflections on language, he wrote very little directly in the way of theory of language. If we are to talk about Kierkegaard’s theory of language we have to piece together hints, remarks and short asides, rarely longer than a page or two, scattered throughout the authorship, but we may also draw on the manner in which Kierkegaard’s own way of writing exemplifies a certain understanding of what is going on in the language he is using.4 For present purposes, however, it will not be necessary to attempt a full-scale reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s

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theory of language (if he had one), but simply to focus on what he says about religious language, language about God, the language in which we speak of transcendence – and how he uses such language – in the specific context of the upbuilding writings. This will lead us to see how, for Kierkegaard, religious language is not just a slightly queer case of language use but provides a vantagepoint from which to see elements that are essential to language as such. How, then, does language work religiously, what can language show of transcendence? II ‘Showing’ takes us to the heart of the matter, since, for Kierkegaard, religious language is characteristically figurative or pictorial (Billedlig). This, as he sees it, is both a problem and an opportunity. Given that figurative language is incapable of giving a true representation of God, who is by definition invisible and cannot therefore give us a picture in words that would count as an adequate representation corresponding to this unique object, it would seem to follow that religious language is never going to be more than enigmatic, ‘a dark saying’ (a phrase that recurs many times in Kierkegaard’s comments on religious language). Yet, at the same time, the very pictoriality of figurative speech gives us something to think about. An image cannot be merely accidental in relation to its subject matter, as if it were only a cipher or conventional sign. This ambiguity is nicely summarised in The Concept of Anxiety, when, commenting on the term ‘moment’ (Øjeblikket, ‘the glance of an eye’), Kierkegaard says that this ‘is a figurative expression and to that extent not such a good thing to have to do with. But nevertheless it is a beautiful word to attend to’ – and he goes on to offer an interpretation of the meaning of the moment, as a key to the understanding of time, in which the pictorial idea of ‘the glance of the eye’ plays a prominent part.5 More forcefully still, there are occasions when Kierkegaard says of a figurative expression that it is the ‘truest’ and ‘most proper’ way of speaking of God. The question of image and language, of figurative representation and truth, was a question that Kierkegaard inherited from his philosophical and cultural environment. It was, for example, central to the dynamic of Hegel’s system, where the historical development of different spheres or forms of life is shown to move from the external, which the image (Bild) or pictorial representation (Vorstellung) can adequately express, to an ever greater inwardness, which can be grasped only in the imageless form of the concept. This movement is also, broadly speaking, a transition from spatiality to temporality. This dynamic is particularly prominent in three areas of Hegel’s philosophy that were of most concern to Kierkegaard: aesthetics, psychology and religion. In aesthetics, the line of aesthetic development follows a trajectory from such external, spatially determined forms as architecture and sculpture, via painting and music, to the inner, temporal art of poetry. In psychology, the structure of consciousness is shown as developing from the indeterminate feeling of being acted upon, through intuition (where Hegel’s term Anschauung has a strongly visual meaning,

The language of upbuilding 123 literally ‘looking at’) and representation (Vorstellung), the lowest form of which is the simple image (Bild) that, retained in memory (Gedächtnis – cf. Gedanke, ‘thought’), becomes the material of thinking. Thinking in the fullest sense, however, depends on the memory developing the capacity to transform the data of images into signs, i.e. into language. Language is thus the synthesis of the universalising and abstract action of mind upon the particular, representational material of immediate sensuous life. Similarly, Hegel envisages religion as developing from the representation of God in plant, animal or geometrical form, through the idealised anthropomorphism of Greek statuary to the spiritual inwardness of Christianity, briefly lost in what Hegel saw as the gross materialism of the medieval Church, but regained in the pure inwardness of Luther’s principle of faith and, in this form, providing philosophy itself with its essential spiritual content. Kierkegaard adopts much of this general framework. However, there is a crucial difference in Kierkegaard’s adaptation of it. Whereas for Hegel the development took place along a differentiated but unbroken continuum, Kierkegaard sees the crucial transition from the outer to the inner, from the aesthetic to the religious, from what is commensurable with pictorial representation to what is essentially unrepresentable, as involving a rupture that thought cannot easily presume to cross. Consequently the philosophical ambition of providing a unitary conceptual recapitulation of the total development of culture and mind was impossible. So, whereas Hegel can see the transition from pictorial representation to pure linguistic articulation, from image to logos, as a process of fulfilment in which the essential truth of what is given in pictorial representation is carried over, preserved and reinstated in what is in fact a still more adequate way in language and pure thought, Kierkegaard finds in this a clash of incommensurable forces that continually frustrate each other’s expressive endeavours. The figurative dimension of language subverts the ambition of thought to achieve perspicuous clarity of expression, while thought for its part robs language of the bond to concrete existence provided by its figurative element. However, it is not pure thought that is the issue for Kierkegaard, except as a topic of ironic and humorous polemic. More important is the question of religious inwardness, which also stands in a problematic relation to the outward, such that the movement from the outward to the inward, from the aesthetic to the religious, is repeatedly enacted as an iconoclastic gesture of transcendence. Yet, paradoxically, Kierkegaard’s literary re-enactment of the biblical and Protestant tradition of iconoclasm is itself carried out in and by means of an intensely self-conscious use of the figurative possibilities of language. The tension thus created not only reflects the conceptual struggle of Kierkegaardian thought, it permeates his very manner of writing. The stylistic consequences of the struggle between thought and image have been well brought out in a recent study by Isaac Winkel Holm, The Thought in the Image. On the basis of a detailed and highly sensitive close reading of key texts, Holm’s claims that we cannot rightly think of Kierkegaard as trying to think his way through and beyond

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imaginative representation, as if the image were a mere husk that could be cast aside once the true meaning had been reached. Instead, the very distinctiveness of Kierkegaardian thought, as articulated in his writing itself, is that it is at every moment determined by the conflicting twofold presence of image and idea, caught in the unstable, indeterminate, perhaps confusing but also creative space between the two. A kind of leitmotif in Holm’s study is an image (!) alluded to in the discussion of Don Juan in Either/Or Part I. This image, taken from a book illustration, depicts mythical sea-maidens, beings formed out of waves that well up into peaks and form female faces, only to subside back into the endless and formless sea surge. It is just this unstable oscillation between form and chaos, or between different levels or kinds of form, that Holm sees as the clue to the interrelationship between image and thought in Kierkegaard’s own manner of writing.6 This, I think, not only suggests something that should not be lost sight of in attempting to understand Kierkegaard – it also suggests why his writing itself is often so extraordinarily difficult to follow: the difficulty is not, as with Hegel or Husserl, to do with the sheer concentratedness of abstraction, but with the intense ambivalence, self-contradiction and inward frustration that shapes sentence after sentence. Holm’s own study is focused primarily on The Concept of Irony and Kierkegaard’s aesthetic writings, and his chief interest is in the literary dynamics of these texts. My suggestion here is that it is just this agonistic aspect of language that also provides the key to Kierkegaard’s distinctive approach to religious language. This should forewarn us that in attempting to give an account of Kierkegaard’s ‘theory’ of religious language we are not going to come up with anything that makes such language seem easier than it is. Holm’s analysis of the semantic knot in the very grain of Kierkegaard’s writing anticipates and reflects a conceptualisation of the God-relationship itself as intrinsically paradoxical, such that any attempt to speak ‘properly’ of God will have to internalise that paradox and that knot in its manner of speaking. With a glance back to earlier comments about the apophaticism of some religious traditions, we need add only that Kierkegaard would not have been the first to have attempted to write about God in such a way as to advert to the intrinsically problematic nature of so doing. There are two key passages that take us right to the heart of the matter, both of which concern the propriety of calling God ‘Father’. Since Kierkegaard assumes that both doctrine and piety agree in affirming that this is the ‘highest’ or ‘truest’ name by which we can call God,7 this provides a supremely testing case for looking at what it means to speak of God at all. If we cannot say of God, that he is ‘Our Father’, or if we cannot give any clear meaning to what it is we are saying by calling him Father, then it is hard to see how anything else in the Christian language game can withstand close scrutiny. Today, of course, in the wake not only of Freud but of widespread changes in patterns of family life, it would be very hard for anybody to write as unabashedly as Kierkegaard did of the relation to the father as being the highest and the best in human life. Is such an appellation reducible – in Feuerbachian or Freudian terms, perhaps

The language of upbuilding 125 – to the values of nineteenth-century family life or to Kierkegaard’s own peculiarly intense, peculiarly troubled relation to a singularly dominant and difficult father? The committed reductionist will want to read no further, but, although we should keep the reductionist’s question open, we should not presume in advance that Kierkegaard’s discussion is going to be nothing but a defence of patriarchal values. Let us rather see what he actually says in the further development of his argument. The first of the passages concerned comes at the end of the discourse ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’ when, after Kierkegaard has been talking in third-person terms of how fortune and misfortune can both be turned to good use by one who knows what it is to be strengthened in the inner being through the arousal of self-concern, and of how this strengthening itself is only possible as a divine gift from God our Father, he suddenly shifts to the second person, and appeals directly to the reader to confirm in the light of their own experience the truth of what has been said. In making this appeal, Kierkegaard begins by asserting that the name ‘Father’ signifies ‘the most beautiful, the most uplifting, but also the truest and most significant’ earthly relationship. However, as he immediately acknowledges, ‘this expression is, though, figurative’. It is ‘transferred’ or ‘metaphorical’ (overført, lit. ‘carried over’) (SKS 5, p. 104 [99]). Kierkegaard acknowledges that there are grounds to fear that in, as it were, ‘ascending’ towards heaven, the expression can never speak other than darkly or enigmatically, eloquent more of the human longing that there should be someone ‘up there’ who is father-like than of divine truth itself. To one whose perspective is determined by outward appearances, this is how it must seem, and the expression itself will therefore be deemed ‘improper’ and ‘not actual’. To such a one, the proof of God’s fatherhood is in the gifts we receive, i.e. if life is good to us, then that speaks in favour of there being a Father–God in heaven. But the more inward person sees that it is not the outward things that are at issue, not the gifts themselves – fortune or misfortune – but the one who gives them: what makes God’s gifts precisely God’s gifts is that, in giving them, God gives also Himself. But not ‘also’ in the sense of a mere add-on. Rather, God Himself is the primary matter of the gift, such that the real gift is that whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, we are able to enter into or to appeal to the God-relationship, to know God as our Father. The gifts themselves become merely the occasion for acknowledging that we receive all things from God (as, in the very next of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses we see exemplified in Job, who is able to bless the Name of God both in fortune – ‘The Lord gave’ – and in misfortune – ‘The Lord takes away’). This, Kierkegaard says, is why calling God Father is ‘the most proper; and the ‘truest’ expression, and not, as had been suspected, ‘figuratively imperfect’. This claim may seem to us abrupt. Kierkegaard’s argument involves a view of the God-relationship that is not centred on the simple fulfilment of subjective wants and therefore makes more difficult the dismissal of all God-talk as the projection of infantile wishes. Nevertheless, he scarcely seems to take sufficient

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account of the problems engendered by the attempt to transfer meaning from the human to the divine spheres. In other words, Kierkegaard does not seem to give us grounds for asserting that the God who gives Him‘self’ to us, with and under everything we experience as this gift, is really best named as ‘Father’. Why should we not equally name ‘Him’ simply as Creator or, for that matter, Mother. Islamic theology could, for example, agree with Kierkegaard that everything is in every way utterly dependent on God, but would regard it as blasphemy to call God ‘Father’. Clearly, we must read Kierkegaard very closely at this point. In his initial concession that ‘Father’ might seem all too human a name for God, he had listed the objections that it was ‘figurative’, ‘transferred’ (i.e. metaphorical), ‘improper’ and ‘not actual’. Now, although he claims that it is not merely ‘figurative’ but ‘proper’ and ‘true’, he does not specifically deny that it is, nevertheless, a transferred or metaphorical expression. These discourses are not, of course, academic works, and we may be forcing the text if we seek to base too much on this omission.8 Maybe we should just take these lists of adjectives as practically coterminous and treat ‘figurative’ and ‘transferred/ metaphorical’ as synonymous terms. Nevertheless, the omission is interesting, and suggests that the name ‘Father’, though ‘proper’, is not necessarily to be taken as directly signifying God in the manner of a conventional linguistic sign. To speak of the foundational terms of religious language as metaphorical in this way is not therefore to dismiss them as ‘improper’, but it sets down a caution against imagining them as involving a direct and unproblematic relationship between ‘sign’ and ‘thing signified’. That Kierkegaard is not simply offering an apologia for the privilege given to the term ‘Father’ by Christian piety becomes apparent when he immediately goes on to elaborate on the differences between divine and human fatherhood, thereby warning us that ‘propriety’ does not necessarily mean synonymity. First, he observes, when we say that God is Father we mean that he is Father of all, everybody’s Father: he is not ‘my’ father, in the sense of mine-and-nobodyelse’s, like my human father. Nor, he adds, does this universality derogate from the value of divine fatherhood, as if to speak of God as Father is merely to abstract a general idea of fatherhood from the multitude of concrete human fathers. On the contrary, that God as Father is not in an exclusive relationship with any particular human being but is Father of all can be seen as pointing to the pre-eminence of divine fatherhood. Although the peculiar kind of jealousy and concern that belongs to exclusive and particular relationships can generate a feeling of specialness, it can also limit and distort those same relationships. If you come to share some success with your earthly father, he will indeed share your joy, but he will also have a residual anxiety in case things nevertheless go wrong for you. However, there will be no such reserve on the part of God, since the very fact that you have brought your joy to him shows that it is for your good. Similarly, if you pour out your troubles to your earthly father, he will weep with you – but perhaps more because you are weeping than because of what it is that has made you weep, something which, perhaps, he does not

The language of upbuilding 127 entirely understand or with which he cannot entirely empathise. God, however, will not only hear your cry but understand it. Or perhaps when you come to your earthly father with some need, you find him too weak, or too irresolute, to be able to comfort you, whereas God will always be strong in inverse proportion to your weakness and need. The conclusion, then, is that even the most loving human father who ever lived would be no more than ‘a stepfather, a shadow, a reflection, a likeness, an image, an enigmatic hint’ in relation to the fatherhood of God. We do not call God ‘Father’ because of our experience of human fathers, since that experience, no matter how good, is in the last resort ambiguous. We call God ‘Father’ because (in an allusion to the text of the Letter to the Ephesians on which this particular discourse is based) He is the one after whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named (SKS 5, pp. 105–6 [99–100]). Someone who does not share Kierkegaard’s religious preference for the term ‘Father’ may feel dissatisfied with the way in which he cuts the argument short by invoking scripture in this way. He might have seemed to be making a perfectly good case for some general idea of dependence that might, according to experience and occasion and with an appropriate acknowledgement of the metaphorical character of what is being said, bring out something of what it means for God to be the one on whom we are absolutely and utterly dependent and do so in any one of a number of terms: Father, Mother, Creator, Lord, Ground of Being, etc. Are we to see in Kierkegaard’s insistence on the exclusivity and primacy of the term ‘Father’ the sign of a heteronomous theological discourse in which objections and questions that do not accept the authority of scripture are simply brushed aside? Or is this Kierkegaard himself struggling, without authority, to find a way to truth? As if to acknowledge that he has unfinished business, Kierkegaard returns to the problem of what it means to call God ‘Father’ in the next series of discourses, in one of the several discourses he wrote on James 1: 17–22, ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift comes from Above’. This time, however, the problem of the relationship between divine and human fatherhood is further problematised by making explicit the question of sin, something that was perhaps implied in the comments on the shortcomings of human fathers in the previous discourse, but not clearly stated as such. Here, although his main text is from James, Kierkegaard also calls upon Matthew 7: 11, ‘If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!’ He begins his discussion of this text by considering the case of someone who finds it comforting because of its associations with human fatherhood, i.e. who interprets it as saying ‘you know what it is to receive good gifts because of your experience of receiving good gifts from your human father, but the gifts your heavenly Father has for you are even better.’ Such a one, however, does not notice that this word, like every holy word, can at diverse times be milk for the infant and strong food for the adult, although the word remains the same:

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In order for this to happen, Kierkegaard explains, we should note that the biblical text presupposes that those to whom it is addressed are evil. At first this is disturbing, but we can scarcely deny that human giving is flawed. Moreover, experience shows that even when we mean to do well by each other it often turns out badly. I give my son a new bike, and the next day he is killed while riding it. If God’s way of giving is no more than a projection based on our experiences of human giving, then the word would be only what a father’s love often is, ‘a beautiful, a holy, a sad memory, an uplifting feeling that brought to mind a lively sense of what is best in human life, but also human weakness, that quickened the soul’s most blessed longing, but recalled it, and laid it under the rubric of anxious concern’ (SKS 5, pp. 133–4 [130]). Such a way of understanding the idea of God as the giver of good and perfect gifts, then, will never escape the ambiguity of the experiences from which it abstracts. A person who understands it this way ‘has immersed himself in the saying [in such a way that] he would not let the word raise him up to its level, [in order to] forget the figurative in the light of the Real [or Actuality] …’ (SKS 5, p. 134 [130–1]). He would be misled into thinking that since even the best human relationships are marred by imperfection, life in its entirety is similarly disfigured. But this is in fact the opposite of what the saying means, since the point of the text is that even though we are evil, we nevertheless do know how to give good gifts, and that this is a token that our Father in Heaven, who is not evil, will be able to give even more perfectly. We might, of course, reflect that our giving is constrained by ignorance. We do not always know what is best for us. Perhaps it is sometimes best for us to be denied our wishes. Our abstract knowledge concerning the good is often too abstract for us to be confident that we are correctly applying it in any particular instance. Such a line of thought, however, Kierkegaard says, is an expression of moral doubt. Someone who thinks along these lines will be led towards a policy of inhuman detachment, since his anxiety about the outcome of his actions will lead him to close his eyes and harden his heart to what is genuinely good in the world. If such a person understands his life religiously, his religion will be one of world denial. But the point of the saying, Kierkegaard insists, is not to interpret God by the standards of the world but to distinguish divine giving from human giving and to emphasise the unique goodness of what comes ‘from above’. For in the case of God there is and can be no division between act and knowledge of the kind that makes this kind of moral doubt possible. God gives what He knows to be good, and what He knows to be

The language of upbuilding 129 good, He gives. There is a point of analogy, for ‘a father’s love has a likeness to, is a reflection of God’s love’, but it is no less true that ‘a father’s love is never such as God’s, never so strong or so inward, and cannot therefore achieve what God’s love achieves, which, in the power of love, is all-powerful’ (SKS 5, p. 136 [133]). But, Kierkegaard says, it is in grasping the difference that ‘the image vanishes’ and we hear the word saying just what James also says: that every good and perfect gift comes from above: What earthly life does not possess, what no human being possesses, is what God alone possesses. It is not a perfection in God that He alone owns it, but it is a perfection in the good, that, insofar as a human being comes to participate in it, he does so through God. What is the good? It is that which comes from above. What is the perfect? It is that which comes from above. From whence does it come? From above. What is the good? It is God. Who is it that gives it? It is God. How is the good a gift and why is this no figure but the only real and true expression? Because it is from God … for God is the only one who gives thus, who gives in such a way that He gives the condition [for receiving the gift], the only one who, in giving, has already given. God gives both the [capacity] to will and to accomplish [the good], he begins and fulfils the good work in a human being. (SKS 5, p. 137 [134])9 A superficial reading might see in this only a blind appeal to an inscrutable transcendence, rhetorically hammered home by the hypnotic repetition of the phrase ‘from above’, the barest and most abstract signifier of transcendence. Now Kierkegaard is indeed insisting on transcendence, on the difference between divine and human giving. The good comes only from above, from God or through God. But we should not overlook the comment that it ‘is not a perfection in God that He alone owns [the good], but it is a perfection in the good that, insofar as a human being comes to participate in it, he does so through God.’ The point, then, is not simply to assert the fact of divine transcendence or divine power: it is also to draw attention to a point of contact between heaven and earth. For the good is what it is, in itself: it is not simply whatever God arbitrarily chooses it to be. The good is what works for the unifying and reconciling of the diverse polarities of the self, and of the divisions between selves, the whole project of becoming who we are in mutual responsibility that lies at the centre of the anthropology of the discourses. That which God meets, and affirms and enables in us, then, is our seeking to be at one with ourselves and with our neighbours – and that striving is itself the work of God. Kierkegaard is not, of course, offering a theoretical argument, though, in keeping with the whole mood of the discourses, what he says is offered as something for us to think about. It is a meditation on scripture by one without authority, and its persuasiveness depends on a repeated appeal to our experience of the world and our ability to re-envision that experience. The argument is

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protracted, tortuous, constantly interrupted and turning back on itself, taking into account objections and alternatives that few readers, left to themselves, would have thought up. Nevertheless, a pattern emerges: that figurative language may properly be used of God and of the Good, but only on the basis of a decisive difference. This difference does not (as in the case of the Thomist theory of analogy) primarily reside in the distinction between creature and creator, though that is assumed, but is to do with sin, with the distinction between evil and the good that also divides the divine and the human. To grasp this difference, and so to understand the meaning of the figure, we must see it in the light of what Kierkegaard calls the Real or ‘Actuality’ (Det Virkelige). It is perhaps curious that Kierkegaard should insert such a technical philosophical term into the midst of an upbuilding reflection on the fatherhood of God, but it is typical, perhaps, that, when writing in one mode (the religious), he never entirely forgets the other (the philosophical). For Kierkegaard the Real or Actuality is always defined in opposition to possibility, to imagination, to the hypothetical, to the subjunctive, to what ‘may’ but need not be, to the theoretical, to ideality, to the aesthetic. Here the turn to the Real may hint at the platonic sense of the Idea as the ‘real’ meaning of the image or figure, but, more urgently, it points to the need to engage with what is actual as the matter of existential concern. The ‘meaning’ of the figurative expression is therefore not to be found by looking past the figure to the idea that it represents while nevertheless remaining within the medium of possibility, and therefore not to be understood theoretically. Instead we are to make that meaning our own by the way in which we enact it concretely and ethically, by concerning ourselves with what is actually at issue in the figure: the enactment of the good. It is only insofar as we are concerned about such an enactment that we can ‘properly’ understand ourselves as dependent on God and, therewith, what it means to call God ‘Father’. In this context, the insistence that the good is ‘from above’ is not so much to do with asserting the primacy of a determinate theological concept of God, but with the existential realisation that the very possibility of seeking to enact the good is not generated out of the resources of our autonomy, but comes to us as opportunity, gift, blessing. The analogy with Schleiermacher’s account of absolute dependence is close, but, as was also noted in distinguishing Kierkegaard’s understanding of metaphor from the Thomist doctrine of analogy, the relationship between the divine and the human is not based solely on the paradigm of creaturely dependence but presupposes the specific difference that comes from sin. God, then, is not primarily being thought of as the Whence of our Being, but, rather, the Whence of an understanding of ourselves as separated from the good by sin (whether by our own choice or by our failure to choose) but, nevertheless and despite that, being given again the possibility of coming into relation to the good. Such a formulation presupposes the shipwreck of autonomy, but, against theological heteronomy, reinstates autonomy as the basis for the renewal of striving towards the good. That every good and perfect gift comes from above means that, despite it all, despite the tricks played by contingency and the steady erosion of relationships and vital powers at the

The language of upbuilding 131 hands of time and circumstance, despite death waiting in the background of every breath we take, life is worth it, worth going on with, and that, even in the face of mass killing and all the evil of the human heart, life is beautiful, though we can never adequately explain why. The meaning of the figurative expression in relation to God, then, is that, in Schleiermacherian terms, God is the ‘whence’ of a belief in life’s goodness sufficient to empower our personal and moral striving: a power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. This may not seem to amount to much and to underestimate the difference brought about by sin, but such an objection would be failing to take into account all that is experienced in the crisis of moral failure and the sense of culpability, internalised to the point of despair, to the point where I don’t believe I can go on living or where I have become as nothing. In the face of all the negativity we have experienced individually and collectively, the possibility of a renewed commitment to the good can only be experienced as coming from nowhere, as a miracle, as – ‘from above’. And, recalling the discussion of the preceding chapter, it is becoming ever clearer why the affirmation that life is, despite it all, worth living is inexplicable. In the light of such basic affirmations (or, it may be, refusals) we cannot, finally say why. This inability to offer a total explanation, however, is not, of itself, a sign of moral failure but, rather, a sign that we are in the domain where moral decisions first become possible. All talk of what comes from above, then, and the Whence of its coming, will be marked by this difference, this impossibility, this nothing. Perhaps one of the most striking images Kierkegaard uses to describe this comes in a footnote to the Introduction of The Concept of Anxiety where, in the persona of Vigilius Haufniensis, he is discussing two other pseudonymous works, Fear and Trembling and Repetition. In attempting to pinpoint the exact continuity and discontinuity between the aesthetic and the religious suggested by the concept of repetition, he writes: Either the whole of existence culminates in the ethical requirement, or the condition is put in place, and the whole of life and of existence begin again, not as immanently continuous with what has gone before … but with an act of transcendence that separates repetition from the first existence by a breach such that it is only a figurative expression [my emphasis – GP] when it is said that what goes before and what follows after are related to each other in the way that the whole realm of marine life is related to the forms of life found on land and in the air – although, the opinion of some naturalists is that these, in their imperfection, prototypically prefigure everything that is revealed in the latter. (SKS 4, p. 325 [17]) Recalling the discussion of image and likeness in the discourses on the lilies and the birds from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits,10 we may say that insofar as the figurative plane of language is likened to the sea, it may bear the image of the divine but can never itself be its likeness. Whether language is to

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reveal the nearness of the God is not a matter that can be decided from within language itself, any more than the sea’s reflecting surface can decide whether what is mirrored in it is to be the image of a person, a ship, a seabird or a passing cloud. Although the possibility of analogy is present in language, language itself does not determine whether that possibility remains merely presumptive or is fulfilled by becoming actual in the personal choice of the good. III But we have not yet exhausted all the dimensions of identity and difference in play in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the figurative nature of religious language. To follow this further, we shall have to leave the upbuilding discourses for a closely related text, Works of Love, a text that embraces both the categories of the upbuilding and of the radically Christian and to which we shall therefore return when we come to consider more closely the relationship between these two forms of religious life. Works of Love takes the form of a sequence of discourses, using many of the same conceits and tropes with which we are by now familiar. The first discourse of the second half opens with a striking claim that ‘All human discourse, even the divinely spiritual discourse of Holy Scripture is essentially transferred or metaphorical (overført) discourse’ (SV 3 12, p. 203 [209]), a claim that, interestingly, seems to imply that the question of religious language cannot be addressed without a broader understanding of language in general. Kierkegaard goes on to draw out in more detail the literal meaning of the term ‘over-ført’, namely ‘carried over’ or ‘trans-ferred’ (cf. ‘meta-phor’). This metaphorical nature of language, he argues, is grounded in the constitution of the human subject. From the moment of birth every human being is to be regarded as a spiritual being, as Spirit (Aand, cf. German Geist). However, it is only sometime later that the individual actually becomes conscious of themselves as Spirit (a baby, for example, does not have such a self-reflective consciousness). This consciousness is therefore preceded by a period in which life is experienced in a primarily sensuous–soulish way, scarcely distinguishable from animal life. But Spirit is not opposed to the sensuous–soulish. Rather, it supervenes upon it. What happens in such supervenience is that the sensuous–soulish period or aspect of life is ‘taken over’ by Spirit and ‘so used, so grounded that it becomes the trans-ferred (i.e. the metaphorical)’ (SV 3 12, p. 203 [209]). Kierkegaard’s argument can be summarised thus. The phenomenon of human language relies upon its material embeddedness in the sensuous. The time, space, audibility and visibility of language belong to this sensuous dimension, without which it just does not exist. But this means that it is possible to use language in a purely sensuous way, without understanding its spiritual meaning. The sensuous person and the spiritual person can both say the same thing – but mean quite different things by it. Nor does this have to be a moral distinction. We might think simply of the infant who learns a poem parrot-

The language of upbuilding 133 fashion and the adult who understands what it means. Precisely because Spirit is not sensuous, and because language must always occupy a determinate place within the dimension of the sensuous, Spirit has no special language of its own: Because Spirit is invisible, so then its language is a secret one, and the secret consists precisely in this: that it uses the same words as the child or simple person, but uses them in a transferred sense, metaphorically … (SV 3 12, p. 203 [209–10]) This is how Scripture proceeds, and it is exemplified by the word ‘upbuilding’ itself, namely to build up, a word which has a powerful ‘physical’ meaning, belonging to the world of bricks and mortar and manual labour, but which is spiritual, invested with a paradoxical and inverted meaning in scripture, such that being built up means, as we have seen, allowing oneself to become as nothing, to be annihilated and only so to find our truth. The difference between figurative expression and real meaning, then, is not only decisive for religious language in particular: it is a feature of all spiritually significant language. Later, Kierkegaard returns to the question of the figurative meaning of language from yet another angle, addressing a limitation in the picture of language he has developed up to this point. This picture, it has to be said, is somewhat static, resting as it does on the division between inner and outer, Spirit and sensuousness in such a way that it might seem as if the question were how to correctly position the figurative mirror of language in relation to a given spiritual object. This may seem like yet another case of what Nietzsche called Christianity’s reworking of Platonism for the people. Kierkegaard, however, now proceeds to open up a further, no less essential dimension of language that corresponds to one of the important themes in the upbuilding discourses: time. In the discourse ‘Love Hopes All – and Yet is Never Put to Shame’ Kierkegaard is concerned about what he calls the figurative (billedlig) nature of Christian discourse, and he suggest that it is precisely by means of its figurative language that Scripture gives a sense of ‘festivity and solemnity’ to earthly existence. Nor is Scripture ashamed to use such language of the Eternal itself, as when it speaks of earthly life as the time of sowing and eternity as the time of harvest (SV 3 12, p. 238 [247]). What is being said here? I suggest that we may paraphrase Kierkegaard by saying that the answer to the question of how to speak rightly of love can only be given eschatologically, in the time of harvest. But in the light of what we have learned about the relationship between Spirit and sensuousness, this means that the spiritual aspect of language is not available as something present here and now, ‘behind’ the surface of sensuous manifestation, as it were. The fullness of meaning belongs to a time that is not our time, to the absolute future, the eschaton, the end that cannot be anticipated by human judgement. And this means that, this side of the eschaton, all meaning is in a state of indeterminacy. This comment is confirmed by Kierkegaard’s use of the image of dictation. In relation to God, he suggests, we should be like a

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person taking dictation, trans-ferring into our language only what God speaks to us (SV 3 12, p. 242 [252]). At first this seems to imply the heteronomous character of the religious relationship, and to be a way of guaranteeing the ‘correctness’ of what the person taking the dictation produces. But that is not how Kierkegaard uses it here. His point is rather precisely to do with the openendedness of language, since the person taking the dictation, he says, cannot and must not put in the final full-stop until the full meaning of what is being said has been uttered (SV 3 12, p. 242 [252]). But this side of the eschaton, in our time, the time being, it never is. Importantly, Kierkegaard connects the impossibility of closure with the relational, social character of language. For it is not just a matter of our own separate attempts to speak rightly about love, according to what we hear in the divine dictation. Crucially, Kierkegaard points to the situation that what we hope on behalf of others, whether we give a generous and hopeful interpretation to the words of others, is integral to our being able to ‘mean’ our own words of love, and, therefore, ‘mean’ anything at all (SV 3 12, pp. 246–7 [256]). Bearing in mind that the God-relationship is not being conceived of here as a kind of ontological foundation on which to erect some theological Cathedral but as an idea whose primary function is regulative, religious language is not simply a representational instrument for mapping the spiritual nature of the human subject but also, especially, for speaking about the time of our lives, our story. When we affirm in the face of everything that would persuade us otherwise that ‘Life is worth living’ by acknowledging God as the giver of every good and perfect gift, this is not just a statement about how we happen to feel today or what we experience in the immediate present (such as ‘This tree is in blossom’) but is an affirmation directed towards the totality of our temporal existence (though that does not, of itself, mean that we will be able to live up to what the affirmation requires of us tomorrow or the next day). It is a measure that we use not only to reckon our Whence, but also our Whither. Yet the difference, or, as it were, the distance that has been established between the figurative form of a word and its meaning points to the situation where there can be no privileged discourse in relation to the religious task. In Works of Love Kierkegaard makes this point forcefully, with regard both to love and to upbuilding. The first discourse of Works of Love, ‘Love’s Hidden Life and its Being Known by its Fruits’ focuses on the difficulties involved here by examining the issue of deception, i.e. the possibility that we may be deceived about love and, for example, mistake selfishness or infatuation for love. The discourse takes its overall theme from Luke 6: 44, ‘Every tree is known by is own fruits, for one does not gather figs from thorns, or pluck grapes from thorn bushes’. But the problem is how to recognise what love’s own fruits ‘are’, i.e. what are grapes and what are thorn bushes. For there is a certain sense in which love is by its nature concealed, i det skjulte; it is not visible to the sensuous eye, but, in an allusion to Proverbs 4: 23, its life is said to flow from the heart, the heart that is hidden like the secret source of the lake, or like God, hidden by the radiance

The language of upbuilding 135 of His own luminosity. Indeed, human love is itself hidden in the innermost depths, beyond all grounds, groundlessly connected with the whole of existence because it is rooted and grounded in God, and in God’s groundless love. However – therefore – precisely this means that the source of love is unknowable. It is only ‘by their fruits [that] you shall know’ what really are works of love. Referring to 1 John 3: 18 (‘Let us not love in word or speech but in deed and truth’) Kierkegaard emphasises that the fruits of love are deeds. Words alone are mere ‘leaves’ and, if we feed ourselves on the leaves, not only will we not be nourished but we will prevent the fruits from appearing. Words about love, then, are not merely potentially misleading, but can be actively harmful. Words are ambiguous. The same word that is ‘blessed and nourishing grain’ in one person’s mouth becomes an alluring but fruitless externality in the mouth of another (SV 3 12, p. 17 [12]). The difference not only depends on whether the word is matched by a corresponding deed, but also on whether it proceeds from a resolute heart: There is no word in human language, not a single one, not the holiest, of which we can say: if a man uses this word, then it is thereby unconditionally proved that he has love within him. On the contrary, it is even thus: that a word spoken by one man can assure us that there is love in him, and the opposite word spoken by another can assure us that equally there is love in him: it is so that one and the same word can assure us that love dwells in the one who spoke it, and not in another who nevertheless spoke the same word. (SV 3 12, pp. 18–19 [13]) All depends on how the word is said ‘and above all how it is intended’ (SV 3 12, p. 19 [13]). Everything, then, comes down to the singular context in which the word is spoken, and on the singular heart, the singular intention with which it is spoken. But, Kierkegaard adds, the point of this discussion is not in order that we might learn a technique for testing the truth or falsity of talk about love, so that we might the better judge one another, but to hear the biblical word under the rubric ‘Thou art the man’, i.e. to become concerned about the state of our own heart, our own intentions, and about whether our own words are truly words of love, i.e. to hear it in the mode of existential actuality, in the light of our own concern for the good. The theme is underlined by the first discourse of Part II, ‘Love Builds Up’. Here we find a passage echoing the passage in the first discourse of Part I beginning ‘there is no word …’, only now it is not ‘love’ that is the subject of reflection but upbuilding itself. Like love, upbuilding is said to have the characteristic that ‘it can give itself in all and be co-present in all’ (SV 3 12, p. 206 [212]). Therefore, ‘there is no word in language that is in and for itself upbuilding, and there is no word in language that cannot be said to be edifying and have an upbuilding effect if love is present’ (SV 3 12, p. 206 [213]). Religious language, talking about God, is not a privileged discourse accompanied by

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some sort of context-free guarantee. Religious language works, when it works, not because of a special grammar or a special vocabulary, but because of the manner, context and intention of its articulation – what Kierkegaard means by the ‘actuality’ of language. All of this makes deceit and irony integral possibilities of language. For the fact that a word does not qua word determine its own meaning, that there is a gap between word and meaning built in to the very structure of language, means that a word can not only be spoken parrot-fashion, without understanding, but it can be spoken with a meaning that is intentionally different from its sensuous meaning – and there is no technique, no method for telling whether the speaker is ‘really’ in his words, if, that is, his heart is in it. Here, then, is the possibility of a constant confusion between irony and love, a possibility that is exploited so well (‘well’ in his own terms, at least) by the Seducer. He too, of course, speaks ‘words of love’, but whether he ‘really’ means them cannot be decided by the words themselves. In contrast to Don Juan, who deceives through the sheer immediacy of his sensuous presence, words themselves provide him with the means of deceiving. But perhaps also of being deceived, since, as the opening paragraph of Works of Love emphasises, to be deceived about love is the most dangerous thing of all, and we are always deceived when we fail to speak rightly about love.11 I have suggested that one consequence of the situation that the difference between word and meaning (or between figure and sense) is built in to the very structures of language is that theology is barred from any sort of claim to a privileged position within the overall economy of language, since even the holiest of words can ‘actually’ be used for the most profane and blasphemous purposes. Nor is the problem (if that is not too weak a term) limited to the danger that we might end up mouthing vacuities dressed up in religious garb. More worryingly, religious language may be used to legitimise and, as it were, to grace all manner of possible criminality. Nor is this just a theoretical possibility: it is depressingly ‘actual’, and history offers any amount of evidence that the most exalted expressions of religious benevolence and the most carefully argued theological positions have coexisted with the most horrific outbursts of destructiveness, against Cathars and Albigenses, against Jews and Muslims, against Catholic and Protestant, against witches and heretics, against the enemies of nation and Church. Those who wish to enlist Kierkegaard into the ranks of the counter-Enlightenment should note that his critique of language must logically issue in the same position of practical tolerance embraced by the Enlighteners. A further consequence is that, once more, a virtually impassable barrier is erected in the way of any attempt to read Kierkegaard phenomenologically. If, previously, phenomenology was considered more or less exclusively in its aspect of a form of philosophical psychology, we should note that it was also possible for phenomenology itself to embrace the linguistic turn. This, effectively, is what Heidegger himself set out to do not only in his later philosophy, with its conspicuous appeal to the language of poetic words, but already in Being and

The language of upbuilding 137 Time, where it is precisely the Gerede, the everyday idle chatter in which people talk inauthentically about themselves, that is the negative phenomenon from which the existential hermeneut can project backwards an idea of what authentic existence would be. Although Heidegger’s concept of idle chatter is often linked to Kierkegaard’s critique of the corrupt language of modern society (particularly as found in his polemical account of ‘the present age’), Kierkegaard’s view as to the inherent ambiguity of language runs much deeper than Heidegger’s. The problem for Kierkegaard is not simply that language has fallen away from a kind of primordial purity into the degenerate second-hand discourse of mass society, but that language is as ambiguous and unstable as those who use it. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard is even prepared to entertain the thought that it is ‘language itself ’ that by speaking the word of prohibition and penalty to Adam prompted humanity’s initial fall (SKS 4, p. 351[45]).12 For Heidegger, however (probably more influenced in Being and Time by Plato than by Kierkegaard), even fallen language still contains a reflection of its original power to reveal Being: ‘Elemental words’, especially elemental Greek words, can be prised open to disclose the radiant presence of truth concealed within them – ’ θεια, truth, itself.13 like the word αληæ But none of this means that Kierkegaard wants simply to discard language – which would be a peculiar wish for one who not only wrote but also talked so much. The same difference between meaning and expression that insinuates the possibility of irony into language also means that even the most ordinary, everyday language can suddenly catch fire with ultimate meaning. In a discourse from The Gospel of Sufferings, Kierkegaard reflects on the term overveie (meaning, literally, to weigh over, and used in the sense of consider or reflect) and comments: To weigh over is a metaphorical expression, but very significant, and therefore has the advantage that a metaphorical word always has, that, as if through a secret doorway, or as if by a sudden enchantment, one can find oneself taken from the most everyday situation into the midst of the most exalted ideas, such that in talking about quite simple things, about daily concerns, one suddenly discovers that one is also talking about the highest things of all. (SV 3 11, p. 282 [307]) Although it is always possible that the one who speaks words of love is speaking out of a spirit of ‘vanity, pride, in short, of evil’ (SV 3 12, p. 356 [374]), it is also always possible that the most ordinary and vernacular expressions may, in the actuality of utterance, become words of love. ‘Religious’ language in this sense is not a special sort of language (such that an academic discipline like theology could appropriate it as its proper field of competence) but the fulfilment of the basic intention in all non-technical language use: the mutual affirmation and building up of the human community in solidarity and love, the expression and the enactment of a basic trust and basic good will

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towards one another. In this sense, from a Kierkegaardian point of view, to say ‘I love you’, and to say it meaningfully, is both to say the same as the religious expression ‘I hope for you that you will be found in Christ on the Last Day’ and to articulate a fundamental assumption implied in every linguistic exchange where there is a genuine will to communicate. But why talk up the ‘sudden enchantment’ that can befall language to the level of religiousness? Why will the religious person not just accept it as a wonder of nature but insist on speaking of it as a gift – an expression which, as David Kangas has pointed out, is said in the discourses not to be figurative (in precise analogy to the way in which God’s Fatherhood is said not to be figurative).14 Why ‘gift’? Why make that particular move and, by doing so, admit the possibility of a personal giver? Why not just say, givenness, sheer facticity, thrownness?15 If the question is asked at the level of knowledge, or within the perspective of philosophical ontology, we might agree: why not? So what makes the difference? Why should the possibility of saying ‘Life is beautiful despite it all’ be spoken of as ‘gift’? Perhaps the most succinct answer to this comes not from Kierkegaard, although I believe it is an answer from which Kierkegaard would not have dissented. It is found in some words of Hölderlin, in the last verse of ‘Heimkunft’ (‘Homecoming’), where the poet asks how we should name the God who gives such gifts. The problem, as Hölderlin articulates it, is not conceptual nor is it a problem of knowledge. Wenn wir segen das Mahl, wen darf ich nennen, und wenn wir Ruhn vom Leben des Tags, saget, wie bring ich den Dank? Nenn ich den Hohen dabei? Unschickliches liebt ein Gott nicht, Ihn zu fassen, ist fast unsere Freude zu klein. Schweigen müssen wir oft; es fehlen heilige Namen, Herzen schlagen und doch bleibet die Rede zurück?16 The question is not whether the person who interprets their life religiously is justified in the light of any general ontology or system of knowledge, but whether the joy they find in being able to renew both their faith in the good and their practical commitment to realising it in the face of sin can be satisfied with anything less than thanksgiving. But let us remember also – a point that is vital for the whole interpretation of the discourses being advanced here – that the possibility of a new beginning subsequent to taking account of the difference of sin is not just something that the individual arrives at through the process of a private exchange between himself and his world or between himself and his God. Just as the project of striving to unify the self is initiated out of the dialogical situation of mutual answerability, concretised in the word of appeal that the discourse itself is, so the possibility of renewal, this gift, reaches us as a second appeal, encompassing

The language of upbuilding 139 the former, but, beyond that assuring us of acceptance, renewal and hope. The ‘Christian’ word, like the upbuilding word upon which it supervenes, also comes to us concretely as an uttered word, a word of address and appeal spoken in a determinate situation of interpersonal relationship. Bearing this in mind, and reiterating the claim that it is context and usage and not ‘elemental words’ that determine the actuality of language, its reality in communicative action, we turn now to the rhetorics of the discourses, that is to the way in which Kierkegaard gives shape to language in the actual words of the discourses themselves. Notes 1 See J. Milbank (1998) The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, Oxford, Blackwell, esp. Chapter 4, ‘The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn’. 2 It may, of course, be argued that this situation is, in some respects, a result of Christianity itself, since, in the teachings of both Jesus and Paul, what is decisive for salvation is not fulfilling the law of my given religion: what counts is what I take upon myself on the basis of my own personal responsibility. Indeed, a movement in this direction is already given in the Hebrew prophets. 3 See Chapter 6, below. 4 For a full account of Kierkegaard’s view of language see S. Shakespeare (2001) Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God, Aldershot, Ashgate. 5 See N. N. Eriksen (2000) Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 5, Berlin, de Gruyter, pp. 69–76. 6 See I. W. Holm (1998) Tanken I Billedet: Søren Kierkegaards Poetik, Copenhagen, Gyldendal. On the sea-maidens see pp. 26ff. 7 Kierkegaard takes a characteristically ‘Protestant’ view here, against the Thomist view that ‘He Who Is’ would be the most proper name for God. 8 It should be noted that the Hongs’ translation is misleading at this point, since it is not consistent in the translation of key terms. 9 Again the Hongs’ translation obscures an important nuance. In the lead-in to this passage Kierkegaard says that ‘the image (Billedet) vanishes’ in the face of a proper understanding of the text. The Hongs render this as ‘the metaphor’ vanishing – but, I have suggested, it is crucial that ‘the figurative’ and ‘the metaphorical’ are not synonymous. 10 See Chapter 3, above. 11 The seriousness of the choice that confronts us here is what, in my view, finally counts against Strawser’s apparent acceptance of a complete equivocation between irony and upbuilding. See Introduction, above, and Note 5. 12 See G. Pattison (2001) ‘The Most Dangerous of Gifts, or What did Language say to Adam?’ in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Year Book 2001, Berlin, de Gruyter. 13 See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 262. This method, already practised to great effect in Being and Time, becomes ever more prominent in Heidegger’s philosophical development. 14 See D. Kangas (1843) ‘The Logic of Gift in Kierkegaard’s Four Upbuilding Discourses in N.J. Cappelørn, H. Deuser and J. Stewart (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2000, Berlin, de Gruyter, 200, pp. 100–120. 15 This question has been at the centre of important recent discussions in the philosophy of religion. See, for example, J.-L. Marion (1998) Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

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16 When we bless the meal, whom may I name, and when we Rest from the livelong day, tell me, how should I give thanks? Do I name the Exalted One then? A God does not love what’s unfitting, To grasp Him, our joy is almost too small. We must often keep silent; holy names fail, Hearts are beating but speech yet holds back?

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I Kierkegaard did not understand language solely in terms of its own internal structures and functions. For language to mean anything it is necessary for it to become actual, for the indeterminacy of the relationship between the representational medium and spiritual intentionality to be actualised in concrete and determinate communicative action, with the qualification that any such finite moment of understanding remains in tension towards a final, eschatological disclosure that is not an occurrence within the time of human life. But what decides whether such actualisation occurs? Is it a kind of inexplicable grace, a spirit blowing where and as it will (whether that grace is ascribed to ‘language’ itself or, perhaps, to God)? Or can we somehow assist its advent? In turning to the question of Kierkegaard’s rhetorics we are moving out of the realm of language as a system of formal structures and abstract possibilities into the sphere of language’s actual presence in the human life-world, language in use – and in a quite specific way. For Kierkegaard, rhetoric meant, above all, ‘the art of persuasion’, and to see language under the aspect of rhetoric is to see it activated in the situation of concrete personal communication, as one person seeks to persuade another into or out of a determinate point of view, to influence the other, insofar as that is possible, for good or ill. I am, then, taking ‘rhetoric’ here to mean the way in which language gets shaped in the actuality of ethical communication. An important element in this shaping must be the speaker’s (or writer’s) concern for the impact of what is said (or written) on the listener (or reader) and, therefore, the speaker’s understanding of the listener’s needs and his anticipation of the listener’s response. In looking at the upbuilding discourses from the point of view of their rhetoric, then, I am not significantly interested in tracking down the various exemplifications of the formal tropes of classical rhetoric or the conventions of the early-nineteenth-century Danish sermon as they appear in Kierkegaard’s texts. We can presume that Kierkegaard had some knowledge of the theory of rhetoric (he read Aristotle, and, probably, Mynster’s essay on the art of preaching) and would have been sensitive to the occurrence of certain formal turns and figures in other rhetorically determined

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texts, such as sermons (and, clearly, he did incorporate some of the characteristic features of Mynster’s own sermons into his own discourses). This is not, however, my concern here, where the task is not primarily historical or expository but hermeneutical. The question, then, is, how are Kierkegaard’s discourses shaped by his understanding of the rhetorical situation of persuasion? Or, to rephrase the question, how does the way in which Kierkegaard shapes the discourses rhetorically illuminate his understanding of the nature of ethical and religious communication and of the possibility of actualising the structures of language in ethical and religious persuasion and decision? The aim, then, is not to read the representations of the religious life in the discourses phenomenologically (and I have already given reasons why I do not think such an approach finally works), but to look at the rhetorical form of the discourses themselves. If there is anything ‘phenomenological’ here, the phenomenon in question is simply the communicative situation itself as reflected in the texts of the discourses.1 I shall begin with some quite general observations that might be seen as stating the obvious. Nevertheless, precisely because of the lack of precedent for approaching texts such as these philosophically and, moreover, for doing so with an eye to their rhetorical character, it is worth making sure that the ground is well prepared. First, then, it is striking that Kierkegaard chose to complement the indirect communication of his pseudonymous works with a ‘direct’ communication of the kind exemplified in the discourses. He could, for example, have opted instead to give us a series of doctrinal expositions. Perhaps it is obvious why he did not – obvious, that is, to any reader who has read Johannes Climacus’ critique of theoretical knowledge. To present the direct communication doctrinally would be to expose it to the possibility of a speculative or metaphysical reading, a reading that did not require the ethical involvement of the reader. In this connection we might note Kierkegaard’s remark that whereas dogmatics had in the past understood itself as being metaphysically based, it should, in the future, re-envision itself as rhetorically determined (Pap. VI A 17). In relation to the upbuilding discourses it is striking that in this journal entry and the supplements to it, Kierkegaard lays special emphasis on the concept of probability. He refers especially to the discussion of Carneades’ account of the topic in Heinrich Ritter’s History of Philosophy. Ritter’s presentation highlights the resort to probability as a consequence of Carneades’ refusal to allow any of the proposed grounds for knowledge to count as absolutely certain. Carneades himself seems to have understood this sceptical position as consistent with Plato’s questioning of the senses as a possible basis for knowledge, and offered it as a polemical response to the Stoic ‘explanation’ of humanity as a part of the cosmos. However, according to Ritter, Carneades’ interest in probability was not primarily with regard to its epistemological function but with a view to its application in the practical life. In this context Carneades acknowledged that while we have to have some reason for choosing one course of action rather than another this can only be a matter of probability. The issue of what could provide a basis for ethics in the absence of any finally objective account of what

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 143 it is to be a human being was, naturally, one that Kierkegaard would find especially compelling and it is notable that he also used Carneades’ criticism of attempts to establish qualitative change by means of cumulative quantitative change in Philosophical Fragments as part of his argument against using theoretical knowledge as a basis for ethical and religious truth (SKS 4, p. 248 [43]). In these same journal entries Kierkegaard makes the further remark that Aristotle specifically connected rhetoric with probability (but adding that a Christian rhetorics would need to emphasise instead the dimension of improbability).2 These reflections highlight Kierkegaard’s own task in the discourses, namely how to construct an ethical and religious appeal to the reader that does not fall back onto theoretical claims about the nature of human being. At the same time, the carefully constructed appeal of the discourses cannot aim simply to push the reader into the free fall of unmotivated action but looks for a determinate response, both presuming and requiring a kind of motivation or interest on the part of the reader that will be congruent with the moral and religious purposes of the discourses. Seeing the religious life as a matter of weighing probabilities raises the question of whether Kierkegaard believes that ‘truth’ is, in the last resort, less important than effectiveness, i.e. subjective appropriation. Does it matter whether the doctrine is true or not, if only we are once started on the way of being religiously built up? And this, as we have already seen, raises the further question of whether the whole communicative process of upbuilding in fact presupposes the acceptance of heteronomously determined belief. Let us, however, postpone consideration of these questions for now, since it may be that only the actual analysis of Kierkegaard’s rhetorical practice will equip us adequately to address them. The main point to hold on to is simply that the discourses are not doctrinal treatises but rhetorically determined ethical communication. The second general observation, scarcely less obvious than the first, is that, since the discourses speak to me of the state of my soul, my God-relationship, they presuppose the fittingness of making such an issue the matter of interpersonal communication. The very first discourse, ‘The Expectation of Faith’, already signals the limits of what one person can do for another as regards faith, since faith has to be willed by the one who wants it: it is between the believer and God and, if faith is lacking, all that a third party can do is to help demonstrate that the issue is indeed a matter for the person concerned and no one else, or else to assume that the auditor has it and, by praising faith, move him to want to will it, to see it as a good that might be desired – but, either way, the communicator himself can never perform that act of will on behalf of the potential believer. Consequently, the discourses as a whole are, in a certain sense, indirect. Nevertheless, they are ‘about’ a certain determinate topic, the individual’s God-relationship, founded in the free act of the believer and, precisely because the speaker/writer makes it very clear from the beginning that he writes as one without authority, it follows that this is not a matter which only duly authorised persons are entitled to talk about. The one who is

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without authority writes as one on the same level as his readers and what he can do for them, they can do for him. In this way he demonstrates by his communicative practice that the matter of the discourses, the God-relationship of the individual, is something that any human being can legitimately raise with another. A number of implications follow from this. The first is that my Godrelationship is regarded as something towards which I am able to take a position, i.e. that it is not something fixed or predetermined, but that it matters to the actual configuration of that relationship that I relate to it and how I do so: it is worth talking about because it is something for which, in freedom, I am answerable. The second is that my God-relationship is not purely private: although the limitations regarding what one person can do for another can never be removed, there is also the possibility that, under certain conditions, my God-relationship may be affected by the words of another, whether that takes the form of being challenged, provoked, stirred or encouraged. But, third, it is not just a matter of my being moved by another, since the possibility of such a ‘successful’ outcome to religious communication, coupled with the opportunity that any human being has to raise the issue of the God-relationship with any other, means that I have in fact an obligation to address the other with regard to their God-relationship. It would therefore seem to follow that in addressing the other, in entering into any kind of discourse with another, I ought to keep in view the issue of the God-relationship as a possible horizon of that discourse. As Kierkegaard argues in ‘The Expectation of Faith’, the issue of faith arises out of a general consideration of what it is I can and should most wish for others. But this further means that talking about it, or keeping it in view in the context of discourse generally, is itself integral to the form of my own God-relationship or, indeed, to the form that the God-relationship takes for all who participate in that discourse. In other words, the manner in which I take up or neglect the requirement to address the other with regard to the issue of their God-relationship, and the manner in which I take up or neglect the other’s address to me concerning my God-relationship, both express and determine the nature of my God-relationship. We can condense these points into the following, more concise formulation: that spiritual existence, existing as Spirit, in the actuality of the God-relationship, embraces the spiritual responsibility I have both towards myself (to let myself be built up) and for the building up of the spiritual community. What this means for Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings is that the upbuilding address is offered as a means of actualising both the individual’s self-responsibility as regards the Godrelationship, and the building up of spiritual community. The third preliminary observation is that the fact that it matters that I speak or am spoken to as regards the God-relationship is not just a consequence of the supreme importance to any human being of this relationship (and it is no less important for those who choose not to believe in God at all than for those who do): it is also motivated by the possibility of moral and religious error. Were we to assume that every individual was perfectly fulfilled in their

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 145 God-relationship (whatever that might mean), then it might well seem impertinent to raise the issue with them at all, and, if we did, both the tone and content of what we would say would be very, very different from that of any ethical or religious communication with which we are familiar: it would need to be liturgical, perhaps, or even celestial. Certainly the manner of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses is coloured throughout by this possibility of error. The work of edification presupposes at every point a dimension of non-fulfilment, which may be doctrinally figured as a ‘fall’. Nor is this just a matter of the interiority of each individual. It no less importantly concerns the language in which the address is to be made, where it appears as the assumption that our language is no longer Edenic, and we cannot presume that we know things by their right names. Language and spirit are separated by a structural difference of kind that is integral to the functioning of language in the world. Religious communication is therefore what it is in, with, and under a world of differences, and it is only under these conditions that it can seek to build up the unity of the individual with himself and to deepen the community of all who are in the way of being built up. Crucially, of course, this applies equally to the speaker and to the listener. I cannot assume for myself, any more than I can assume for my listeners, that my God-relationship is as it should be, or that the words I am using are just the right words that this particular spiritual situation or need requires. That these words are not the right words, or that these words will not be heard aright, are twin possibilities that continuously – and necessarily – haunt the task of speaking upbuilding words. The difference between representation and Spirit that Kierkegaard holds to be inherent in all language means that language cannot of itself make present the actual possibility of the God-relationship in any causal sense, i.e. I cannot so master language as an instrument of religious communication that I can secure the outcome I intend every time I use it. Language remains, nevertheless, a medium in which making-present can be ventured, opening a space, a place – as we shall see, a stage – in which and on which what is decisive, what is actual, may occur. For Kierkegaard it is also fundamentally important that his language is written language – a factor which means that even if we understand his task in the discourses as being essentially Socratic, the execution of that task must necessarily take a different form and be differently structured from that of a prototype who wrote nothing.3 But (and this is our fourth general observation) Kierkegaard’s use of language in the discourses has a quite distinctive feature: (with the exception of the titles, dedications and prefaces) it is a written text presented as the transcription of a spoken address. This involves a fictionalisation that is a conscious strategy on Kierkegaard’s part, a strategy that is made clear both in the general form of the discourses and in the use of ‘sermonic’ tropes such as the appeal to readers as ‘My listeners’, the allusion to a Church setting (‘these holy places’) and the use of ‘we’. However, this has the further implication that – to a much greater degree than would be the case with doctrinal exposition – the text necessarily bears the imprint of the specificities of time, place and person that belong to

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spoken language, even when that spoken language is itself a fiction. These words could only have been ‘spoken’ in Denmark, in the nineteenth century, by someone steeped in a very historically specific form of Protestant Christianity and with strongly localised literary and social horizons. This contextual determination justifies and, perhaps, necessitates historical research, in order to reconstruct these horizons, as far as that is now possible, and such reconstruction can go a long way towards expanding our understanding of the text. At the same time, however, this raises, or intensifies, the question of whether these texts, shaped as they are by the author’s perception of the needs and assumptions of Danish readers of the 1840s, can make their matter present as an actual possibility for us. As noted in the Introduction, collections of nineteenth-century sermons are among the most unread books in any library, and not just because we have become less religious. The situation is quite different from that of the nineteenth-century novel, where the specificities of time, place and person also belong to the very nature of the texts. But we read novels, for the most part, very differently from how we read sermons, and what perhaps adds to the enchantment of a novel only serves to alienate us further in the case of the sermon. I do not know, as Tolstoy’s first readers would have known, many of the nuances of social etiquette among the Russian aristocracy of the nineteenth century (or, as Gogol’s first readers would have known, the nuances of rank in the Russian bureaucracy) and, in comparison with those first readers, I have lost something. But precisely the difference registered in this loss may also invest the text with a kind of allure, a magic of otherness, that enhances its appeal. But if the matter of the religious address is what should concern me most immediately and profoundly in my actual life, here and now, then those same historical specificities disrupt my relation to the text. If acquiring historical knowledge then becomes a prerequisite for reading the text, it would seem as if the possibility of reading it religiously is doubly displaced, a point Kierkegaard himself consistently made with regard to the Bible. The problem is further exaggerated by Kierkegaard’s own insistence that what is at issue is not a matter of doctrine, a ‘what’, but concrete, personal address. Seen like this, the standard appeal to a two-horizon hermeneutic must be severely qualified, since it cannot be simply a matter of historically reconstructing what it meant for Kierkegaard to say what he said in his particular time and place and then translate it into our time and place. The ‘message’ is too closely bound up with its manner of utterance, its ‘how’, its form, for it to be abstracted from that and then, as it were, re-applied. But is there any other way? Perhaps, for us, finally, not. Perhaps, for us, finally, the fact that everything is fated to sink into the past and to become historical is simply an ineluctable part of our situation. So perhaps, finally, all that belongs to the past must be approached, first and foremost, as the object of historical enquiry. But, perhaps, ‘finally’ is not where we are yet at as regards Kierkegaard. Perhaps his horizons are not so far off in time or place that he has become, simply, unreadable. His works have not yet become archaeological artefacts inscribed with a forgotten system of signs.

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 147 Be that is as may. Nevertheless, even if some historical reconstruction is necessary, there may be approaches to the text that do not wait upon the deliberations of historical specialists. One such way, I suggest, is precisely that of attending to the rhetorical shape of the texts, and taking that rhetorical shape, rather than the specific representations of the religious life within the texts, as our primary ‘phenomenon’. This seemingly formalist approach, then, far from abstracting from the religious matter of the texts, illuminates that matter in a way that, to some extent, frees it from the time/space/person coordinates of their historical origin. Nor is this simply of benefit to a religiously interested reading. It is also, I suggest, fruitful for a philosophical approach and, I believe, holds the key to seeing how we can vindicate the texts in the face of the charge of heteronomy and, while preserving their religious character, open them up to a philosophical reading. With these comments, we turn to look more closely at the way in which Kierkegaard gives rhetorical shape to the discourses and at how this serves their religious aim. II Once more, it will probably prove best to start with the obvious and to take our lead from the most elementary of questions. The texts before us were published as Upbuilding Talks, so: who is talking to whom? The first part of this double question seems not so hard: clearly, if anyone is talking here, it is Kierkegaard. That there may be problems with the second part, however, also seems clear. If, in the first instance, Kierkegaard was talking to his Danish contemporaries, the sort of people who went and bought the discourses from Philipsen’s bookshop, can we really say that he is also talking to us, especially to those of us who do not inhabit the religious tradition to which these works belong? Unfortunately, of course, even the first part of the question is not so simple. Kierkegaard’s name undoubtedly appeared on the title page of these discourses. But is it really Kierkegaard who is speaking here? Actually, no one is ‘speaking’ here in the strict sense. These are not ‘talks’ in any literal sense nor even stenographic records of talks, but written texts, written as written texts. Although some of the discourses that Kierkegaard composed specifically for the Friday communion services were in fact spoken by him in the context of the liturgy, that is not the case with any of the discourses we are considering here. In this respect they differ fundamentally from printed collections of sermons, such as those of Bishop Mynster, with which they are most frequently (and, in many respects, quite correctly) compared. As Mynster himself noted in his reflections on the art of preaching, a spoken sermon is a different thing even from the written text in the preacher’s hand. Mynster vigorously defended the preacher’s freedom to vary the written text according to the dynamics of delivery.4 Once such freedom is allowed, however, even a sermon that has been revised to reflect what was actually spoken is very rarely going to be a precise record. The status of the written text in relation to an

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actual sermon is thus, on the one hand, preparatory, and, on the other, mnemonic. It is to assist the preacher in saying what he wants to say, and to assist the listener to recall it. It is from the beginning a substitute for a spoken word delivered once, and only once. There would have been little doubt in the minds of those who read Mynster’s sermons that this was so, and that the domestic reading of sermons was a secondary activity, that it could serve as a useful supplement to the spoken word, but, religiously, was no substitute for having been there, in the communal gathering that (as Mynster’s own theology continually emphasises) is the privileged time and place of Christian communication. But just as Mynster’s readers would know the ‘secondary’ status of the texts in front of them, so Kierkegaard’s readers would know from the beginning that these were not the transcripts of live sermons but were simply written addresses, printed words, books (or, more precisely, booklets). There is no empirical actuality to which the discourses correspond. Their reality is exclusively literary. That this is how it is, is apparent in the texts themselves. Kierkegaard’s Forewords draw attention to the literary status of the discourses in a variety of ways. Moreover, although his style is at many points close to Mynster’s, there is one significant point of difference that takes us to the heart of Kierkegaard’s rhetorical stylistics: the absence of ‘I’, the first person singular personal pronoun. Already in the Forewords ‘I’ is displaced by ‘the speaker’ (Den talende). Rarely in the discourses themselves does Kierkegaard speak simply and directly in his own voice. In introducing his text or theme he will typically use a formulation involving the first person plural, as in ‘So shall we then talk of the thorn in the flesh’, or ‘So let us more closely ponder strengthening in the inner being’, etc. This is not in itself a departure from the precedent of printed sermons, and generally Kierkegaard’s use of ‘we’ closely models that of Mynster (and many other preachers) in expressing the assumption that the speaker and those being addressed share the intellectual, moral, social and, especially, religious horizons necessary for understanding what is being said. But despite the extensive use of ‘we’, Mynster has no embarrassment in speaking in the first person about his actual views or about his past experiences. This Kierkegaard virtually never does, and when he does, the impact is considerable, as in a passage in ‘The Expectation of an Eternal Happiness’ where he is critically considering those who believe in the kind of outward marks of divine election or reprobation that enable us, in this life, to predict the certain damnation of others. This, Kierkegaard says, is itself a manifestation of worldly hatred, and, he adds, ‘Who cannot be alarmed at such perverseness – I, for my part, have always sought in vain to understand it.’ (SKS 5, p. 261 [267]). What is the significance of this reticence? In one respect it would seem to follow from Kierkegaard’s disclaiming of authority. Mynster’s sermonical ‘I’ is precisely the ‘I’ of authority, of one who is authorised to speak for the Church in his own person and who, as a Pastor to his flock, has a responsibility to clarify his own position and views. No less importantly (and, at the same time, in close connection with the disclaiming of authority), this reticence reflects

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 149 the self-consciously literary nature of Kierkegaard’s discourses. The discourses are not mnemonic in the same sense as printed sermons, not a reminder of a concrete occasion when ‘I’ spoke to ‘you’, but are themselves, as literary works, the sole site on which the communicative event they are ‘about’ can occur. But because this site is precisely that of a literary text, a piece of writing that is paradoxically figured as a ‘talk’, that communicative event is not, primarily, between the real life flesh-and-blood Søren Kierkegaard and ourselves, but between ourselves and the particular manifold of possibilities represented in the text. Although, as already argued, the discourses fundamentally presuppose spiritual community as a necessary counterpoint to the search for self-knowledge and self-affirmation, the dialectics of faith are such that the author neither can nor may make himself responsible for the outcome of the process of communication. This concealing of the authorial ‘I’ is complemented by two important and, perhaps, more obvious elements. The first is the explicit emphasis on the role of the reader, the second is the invention of a succession of subordinate voices, that represent the various points of view that engage the attention of the reader in her journey through the texts. These subordinate voices not merely conceal, they displace the voice (as it were) of the author and give definition to the communicative space opened up by the discourses. In a sequence of sometimes quite extraordinary analogies and metaphors the role of the reader is invoked in each of the Forewords to the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. In the first of these Kierkegaard speaks of the discourse as having gone out into the world until it finds that individual, whom, with joy and gratitude I call my reader, that individual whom it seeks, towards whom it, as it were, stretches out its arms, that individual who is sufficiently well-disposed to let himself be found, sufficiently well-disposed to receive it … (SKS 5, p. 13 [5]) Then, switching analogies he imagines that the discourse has ‘gone’ nowhere, that it abides in quiet solitude, ‘like an insignificant little flower, hidden in the great wood’. Then, he says, I see, ‘or believed that I saw, how the bird I call my reader, suddenly noticed it, winged its way down, plucked it up and took it away. And when I had seen this, I saw nothing more’ (SKS 5, p. 13 [5]). That this moment of reception by the reader has a decisive character is brought out in the no less fantastic – but, perhaps, less fanciful – imagery of subsequent Forewords. In the second, the discourse is a messenger, who goes its ‘mysterious’ way until it finds that individual whom, with joy and gratitude, I call my reader – till it finds what it is looking for, that well-disposed person who reads aloud to himself what I have written in silence, who, by his voice, releases the enchantment of the written characters, by his utterance calls forth

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Such a one, Kierkegaard insists, ‘by making what is mine into his does more for me than I for him’ (SKS 5, p. 63 [53]). In the Foreword to the third set of discourses, Kierkegaard summons a biblical image to his aid. The one who receives the discourse kindly, ‘by receiving it does what the Temple gift-box did for the widow’s mite: it sanctifies the gift, bestows it with meaning and transforms it into much’ (SKS 5, p. 113 [107]). In the three Forewords of 1844, the reader is, successively, one who takes with the right hand what the author offers with the right hand,5 who transforms the talk (Talen) into a conversation (Samtale) and raises it from corruption to incorruptibility (SKS 5, p. 231 [231]). Finally, reiterating that the discourse is nothing for or of itself but only what the reader makes of it, Kierkegaard comments that, as author, he knows necessarily nothing of this, and meets his readers (i.e. by speaking in his own person in the Forewords) ‘only … in order to take his leave …’ (SKS 5, p. 289 [295]). The second characteristic means by which Kierkegaard conceals or displaces himself as author is, as stated, the interposition of a series of other speakers. Apart from the relatively rare substitution of the third-person term ‘the speaker’, perhaps the most important among these is ‘the discourse’ itself, personified as a virtually independent agent.6 Again the Forewords set the tone, as Kierkegaard speaks of ‘this little book’ as going on its ‘lonely way’, meeting and embracing ‘that individual’. Of the various references to ‘the discourse’ scattered through the upbuilding literature, there are many where we may perhaps talk of hypostatisation but not yet of personification, and Kierkegaard might simply be read as making a comment about ‘the discourse’ as a particular piece of conceptually distinctive, independently free-standing and internally unified writing. Nevertheless, even these weak references are coloured by those where the discourse is personified in quite a strong sense, being endowed with personal attributes such as feelings and intentions. Like (and sometimes conflated with) the ‘little book’ of the Forewords, the discourse is not obtrusive and does not force itself on the reader (SKS 5, pp. 127, 289 [123, 295]; SV 3 11, p. 119 [129]); it is not ‘worldlyminded, contentious or confused’ (SKS 5, p. 239 [240]; cf. pp. 418, 422, 447 [40, 46, 76]) and does not aim to surprise, shock or frighten the reader (SKS 5, p. 295 [301]; cf. pp. 403, 407, 420, 440 [22, 27, 44, 67]). It shuns busyness (SV 3 11 p. 65 [66]) and therefore has a calming effect (SV 3 13, p. 201 [200]). Nevertheless, and although its fundamental desire is to be of service (SKS 5, pp. 238–9 [239]; SKS 5, pp. 435–6 [62]), it can be alarming or cause concern (SKS 5, pp. 239, 321, 332 [240, 331, 344]). But it would not be upbuilding if it were without sympathy (SKS 5, p. 248 [250]) and it does not sit in judgement

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 151 on its readers or make distinctions among them, as if it knew in advance just who its ‘good’ readers were (SKS 5, p. 76 [67]). On the contrary, it seeks to address all equally and to do so by speaking of those things with which everyone can be assumed to be familiar, rather than things that depend on the accidents of individual circumstances (SKS 5, pp. 239, 248 [239, 250]). Its tone is serious and may well contain a warning (SKS 5, pp. 238–9 [239]) but, according to the Christian Discourses, it does not forget, where appropriate, to wear a smile (SV 3 13, p. 18 [12]). As we might expect, the upbuilding discourse is said in Works of Love to have an essential relation to love (SV3 12, pp. 206ff., 355 [212ff., 373]), seeking to make clear that God is love (SV3 11, p. 261 [282]) and calling for mercy on the part of the reader (SV3 12, pp. 308, 312 [322, 325]). At the same time it rejects vulgar notions of human sympathy (SV3 11, pp. 132ff., 261 [145ff., 282]) and exposes double-mindedness (SV3 11, pp. 60, 63 [60, 64]). It is not worldly minded ([SKS 5, p. 239 [240]) and presupposes that the reader too is concerned for the eternal (SV 3 13, p. 132 [136 ]) and, on the basis of this presupposition, it fights for the triumph of the eternal in a person (SV3 13, p. 18 [12]). It cannot promise prosperity or recognition as worldly oratory might (SV 3 11, pp. 124, 261 [136, 282]; SV 3 12, pp. 185f. [191f.]); instead, it never grows tired of talking about suffering (SV 3 11, p. 100 [107]). It can, as already noted, be disturbing, and, in relation to worldly talk, its presence is like that of a stranger who, simply by asking ‘What are you talking about?’ exposes a trivial conversation for what it is (SV 3 13, pp. 121 [123]). Although at odds with everyday idle chatter, it is not without hope or courage in its struggle (SV 3 11, p. 13 [5]) and waits for its true reader as one who waits in quiet but joyous expectation for the coming of the bridegroom (SKS 5, p. 389 [5]). Its very existence is ‘a piece of daring’ (SKS 5, p. 365 [381]). It is not didactic (SKS 5, p. 432 [58]) and does not set out to communicate knowledge (SKS 5, p. 414 [36]) and it cannot help one whose desire is for knowledge (SKS 5, p. 364 [381]), but, equally, it is not in a state of confusion as regards thought and concepts (SV3 11, p. 261 [282]). It is not prolix or diffuse (SV 3 12, p. 98 [97]), being content to go on repeating the same point over and over again (SV 3 13, p. 141 [147]). It addresses the reader as an individual, each one in his or her singularity, yet, recalling that it seeks that in which all are equal and alike, it is not excessively concrete, since that would draw attention away from the universal point towards what is merely idiosyncratic (SKS 5, pp. 239, 248 [239, 250]; SV 3 11, pp. 132–3 [145–6]). That this personified figure of ‘The Discourse’ has a certain consistency throughout the upbuilding literature is scarcely surprising, since it condenses many of the essential features of what is involved in the whole process of edification. That it does so precisely as a personification, a dramatisation of what upbuilding means, underlines the point that upbuilding is not a matter of concepts or knowledge. But ‘the speaker’ and ‘the discourse’ are by no means the only figures who ‘speak’ in the discourses, whether their words are rendered as direct or reported. There are the various named speakers of the original biblical word that is the

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focus of meditation: the apostles James, Peter and Paul, Job, Solomon, John the Baptist and, on occasion ‘God’ (SKS 5, p. 47 [38]). ‘Scripture’ itself also speaks, as does ‘the word’ under consideration (‘the Word’ plays a particularly prominent role in the second of the discourses on the text ‘Every Good and Perfect Gift comes from Above’). Then there are a company of historical and literary figures, many of whose identities are masked, so that they appear as ‘a King, known of the people’ (the Danish King Valdemar Atterdag), ‘a thinker’ (Lucilio Vanini), ‘a pagan wise man’ (Diogenes of Sinope) or the ‘simple wise man of old’ (Socrates). This concealment of the name reflects not only Kierkegaard’s wish to prevent the discourses from appearing as pieces of scholarly writing, but further mediates the hidden name of the author himself. Following on from these are a whole sequence of representative types of various kinds. There are those who represent the qualities or virtues being promoted in the discourses – patience, love, faith – or their contrary vices – impatience or doubt (‘a two-tongued friend’). There are various imaginary characters, representing particular stages or standpoints encountered in life: age and youth appear frequently, as does ‘experience’ or ‘the experienced man’, and we also hear from the concerned one, the one whose wish was denied, the despairer, the humbled one, the believer, the one who prays, etc. Occasionally Kierkegaard invites the reader to take on a representative role, to put themselves into character, as it were, as a concerned or troubled person and to imagine what they would say from the standpoint of that person’s experience and point of view: ‘How, then, do you yourself read [the word]?’ he asks, what would you say if you were concerned, if your wish was denied, if you were in despair or if you were humbled? (SKS 5, p. 136 [133]) He applies an analogous operation to himself, as in the discourse ‘To Strive in Prayer’ where he introduces himself as a first-person presence, but in the context of an imaginary situation, asking the readers to imagine what it would be like if they were involved in an ongoing discussion with an older and wiser person, who, though well-disposed towards them, does not agree with their view as to the best course of action for them to take. If you have not had this experience, he says, ‘then think how it could happen to you or me, as I shall now show’ (SKS 5, p. 372 [390]) and then proceeds to use himself as the experimental subject of the situation. The cumulative effect of these mediating voices is an extremely important element in the discourses. In ‘The Expectation of Faith’ we hear, in order, from: one who has faith, another who has faith, one who wants faith, a well-disposed respondent, another respondent, the one who wants faith (again to himself), one who is proudly independent, one who is the proud pupil of a great master, a man who has God as his teacher, ‘You’ (the listener/reader), the man who wants faith to one he loves (the same: to himself), the man who faces the future in the light of experience, the experienced man (it is not clear whether these are the same), the believer, scripture, the voice of doubt, ‘you’ to doubt, doubt again, the believer, you the reader (three times!), ‘one or another’ listener/ reader, ‘I’ (though qualified by a conditional ‘But if I say …’), ‘I’ to my soul, the believer, ‘a little word’, ‘the older among us’, ‘the younger among us’. Each

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 153 of these figures, then, incarnates a specific point of view on the matter at issue, almost precisely in the sense of Bakhtin’s account of Dostoevsky’s characters as incarnating concrete points of view. It is striking that both the ‘I’ of the speaker and the ‘you’ of the addressee are also involved in this process (a point to which we shall return), but are also significantly qualified by it, in that they are, as it were, abstracted from the actuality of their existence and put ‘in role’. That this reflects a definite strategy on Kierkegaard’s part is suggested not only by the consistency and frequency with which this kind of mediated speech occurs, but is indicated when, for example, at the end of the discourse ‘To Preserve your Soul’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘We have allowed patience to stand outside, as it were, and we have allowed it to seem as if patience itself spoke … .’ He then continues by arguing that if instead he had allowed a more concrete human personality to speak (in this case an older person and a younger person) then the point might have been lost by the perspectival distortion that would unavoidably attach itself to the specificity of those personalities: ‘You see!’, he exclaims, ‘It is for this reason that we chose to allow patience itself to speak. It does not seek support from anybody’s experience, but shall, it says, marvellously empower every experience …’ (SKS 5, p. 204 [202]). Why, then, does he not limit himself to the abstract level of such personified virtues? Because the distortions that enter into play via the more concrete voices – youth, age, experience, etc. – indicate that they are to be taken as representative but not as exemplary, and, as such, mediating between the concrete singularity of the reader and the universality of the exemplary principles and virtues that the discourses are to aid the reader in acquiring and incorporating into her actual moral sensibility and practice. The discourses thus invite us to imagine ourselves in these representative roles, thereby experiencing how they correspond to lifepossibilities we know from the inside. Moreover, these representative figures do not occur in isolation. Taken one at a time, each of them offers only a distorted or limited possibility of existence, but these distortions and limitations are counterposed to other equally but differently distorted views, such that the shortcomings of youth are brought into view by means of the perspective of age and the shortcomings of age are made apparent in the comparison with youth. As we have seen, such a counterpoint does not deliver an automatic dialectical solution, but gives us material on which to ponder, something to weigh over and to judge for ourselves. All this is, in a word, to say that the discourses have a profoundly dialogical character, they are, in Bakhtin’s sense, double-voiced discourse, shaped by the way in which they respond to or anticipate the response of the one with whom they are in dialogue. This applies both to each discourse as a whole, i.e. to the relationship that is established between writer (under the mask of ‘the Discourse’) and reader, and to the interrelationship of voices within the discourse. If, with regard to the relationship between writer and reader, this comment might seem to be contradicted by the author’s self-concealment behind ‘the discourse’ and the fiction of the sermon (as if he imagined he could escape the condition of dialogue by placing himself outside the conversation), we have

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seen that Kierkegaard’s understanding of the relationship between the participants in ethical or ethical–religious discourse is such that the speaker is, in fact, obliged to put himself at a distance from his message precisely on account of the situation of the one being addressed, i.e. to respect, preserve and so to facilitate the addressee’s freedom of response. If the author were ‘in’ the discourse in the manner of a constant first-person presence, that very presence would itself obtrude into the space of reflection and decision that is the domain of its reception. Despite the disclaimer regarding religious authority, the very authority of the author would itself pre-empt and impose itself upon the free response of the reader. Then it could not possibly be a case of the reader doing more for the author than the author for the reader. The apparent absence of the authorial voice, then, is itself understandable as doublevoicedness, as an expression of the author’s anticipatory response to the reader’s response to the text. The double-voicedness of the internal dialogues articulated in the discourses is, in its detail, even more complex and variegated than this initial movement of self-concealment on the part of the author. In one aspect it is a reflection or a refraction of that original movement, carrying forward and making effective the masking of the author, filling the foreground of the text in such a way as to make the reader forget the authorial presence behind it. But it is also a means of enabling readers to recognise their own questions and concerns in the dialogical movement of the text. For the very partiality of these fragmented and polyphonically distributed voices, and the distortions inherent in them, reflect their proximity to the actual situatedness of the concrete subject and the distortions, foreshortenings and exaggerations that follow from that situatedness. As such they not only serve the author’s (hidden) movement towards the reader, they also facilitate the reader in imaginatively transposing him/herself into the world of the text. When we start to read the discourses, we probably do not have much of a clue as to Kierkegaard’s theory of communication or his conception of the Socratic, but we do know what it is like to be young or old, to be patient or impatient, concerned, troubled or hopeful. Again, Kierkegaard himself gives a clear hint as to the legitimacy of reading the texts dialogically. Although well within the repertoire of contemporary sermonical idiom, it is none the less telling how, in introducing the topic of the first discourse, ‘The Expectation of Faith’, Kierkegaard writes ‘Shall we not … talk with each other about …’ (SKS 5, p. 25 [16]). Recall also the Foreword to the three discourses of 1844, where it is said of the well-disposed recipient of the discourses that he will ‘take the seeker to himself, make an occasion to accept what is said, brings heat back into the cold thoughts and transforms the talk into a conversation’ (SKS 5, p. 231 [231]). Nor are the diverse voices within the text simply counterposed one to another in a conceptual sense: on a significant number of occasions they are presented as if in conversation – as in ‘The Expectation of Faith’, when the person who wants faith goes to a succession of respondents for clarification about what he should do, or as in the passage previously cited when Kierkegaard puts the speaker’s ‘I’ into conversation with

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 155 an older, wiser friend. Already in The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard had reflected on the interconnection of question, subject-matter and personal address in the construction of dialogue, with specific reference to Plato’s Socrates. Conversation, he says there, is precisely the means whereby the speakers are compelled to hold fast to the issue, being guided by the process of questioning through a sequence of concentric movements to the heart of the matter. Such dialogue involves both the individuals’ relation to each other and their concern for the subject. In this regard dialogue is not simply an ‘I–Thou’ encounter, nor is it simply a dialectical clarification. This simultaneously personal and substantive kind of dialogue is, I suggest, a powerful element in the discourses. This dialogical character is interestingly if unusually illustrated by Helle Møller Jensen, who has rewritten a number of them as dialogues from the perspective of pastoral psychology.7 In the last chapter we discussed the passage from The Gospel of Sufferings, where Kierkegaard reflects on the Danish word overveie and its figurative meaning. Translatable as ‘to reflect’, ‘to consider’ or ‘to think about’ it might literally be translated as ‘to weigh over’, in close proximity to the English ‘weigh up’. Although Kierkegaard is on occasion critical of approaching the Godrelationship as something one can weigh up in a slow, unhurried way (emphasising the urgency of genuine ethical decision-making), he is here taken with the positive aspects of the term, with its connotations of seriousness, gravity and decision. Reflection of this kind (without, of course, any of the connotations of the Latin-related terms for reflection) is, he thinks, a suitable antidote for the rash, intoxicated impatience with which the worldly mind is likely, left to itself, to approach the matter of religion. What the discourses do, then, is to create a medium in which reflection of this kind can occur.8 As such, it is a medium in which the elements at play in it are, as it were, in suspension, in the process of being weighed up, but not delivered to the reader in a final, authoritative form. Whether a particular insight or value is to become actual for the reader is something that the text itself cannot engineer. The text is neither the author nor the reader: like poetry and no less like philosophy it inhabits a realm of possibility. However, unlike poetry (and, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms often say, unlike philosophy), this kind of possibility is not a form of escapism or abstraction, since it always, intentionally and from the outset, keeps in view the consummation of the act of communication in the actuality of the reader’s existence. At the same time, to reiterate a now familiar point, this very transposition into possibility also bars the attempt to understand the text as authoritative. III The dialogical voices of the discourses, then, inhabit the medium of possibility. In this respect we might say of them that they are to be heard as speaking in the subjunctive mood. Kierkegaard himself provides a warrant for taking grammatical moods seriously, and, I suggest, briefly considering the discourses

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in this light helps us to see just where the kind of possibility in which the discourses are at home differs from that of the aesthetic or of philosophy.9 This will, I believe, also help us to see how the discourses might serve a contemporary philosophical ethics. In a group of early journal entries Kierkegaard explicitly addresses the question of the subjunctive. A statement in the subjunctive, as Kierkegaard understands it, does not make the kind of claim to objective representational validity that is implied by the use of the indicative. Neither does it make the kind of direct appeal made by the imperative. It does not directly refer and it does not directly command. A subjunctive statement transposes its content into pure ideality or possibility. In Kierkegaard’s view it therefore follows that there is a close correlation between the subjunctive on the one hand and the ideality of the aesthetic and of philosophy on the other. Thus, ‘The indicative thinks a thing as actual (the identity of thought and actuality). The subjunctive thinks a thing as thinkable’ (II A 156/DD 49), and [t]he grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive contains the basis for the most aesthetic concepts and arouses the penultimate aesthetic pleasure (in that it borders on the musical, which is the ultimate), and subjunctively the trite proposition cogito ergo sum is valid: it is the life principle of the subjunctive (so that one could essentially expound the whole of modern philosophy within a theory of the indicative and subjunctive; for it is purely subjunctive). (II A 159/DD 51) These remarks would seem to make the use of the subjunctive inappropriate in the context of ethical or religious communication. However, a further entry suggests another function for the subjunctive, that it appears as a glimpse of the individuality of the person being discussed, [and] can quite properly be said to be a dramatic comment in which the narrator steps aside as it were and gives the remark as something that is true out of that individuality (i.e., what is poetically true), not as factually so, not as if it could indeed also be that; but it is presented precisely in the light of subjectivity. (II A 161/DD 53) What is interesting about this entry is that the subjunctive, although previously linked to the ideality of philosophy and of aesthetics, is now brought into relation to the highly existential concepts of individuality and subjectivity. How can these emphases be reconciled? In direct religious communication, at least as we encounter it in the JudaeoChristian tradition, there are two primary modes of language in play: the indicative and the imperative, a relationship epigrammatically summed up in the first commandment – ‘I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 157 land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods than me.’ Now, although transposing an indicative statement into the subjunctive brings the content of that statement into the realm of ideality (and thus the realm of both philosophy and aesthetics), distancing it from the pressing immediacy of the commandment, the outcome is not as in either dogmatic theology or speculative philosophy. Theology, as Kierkegaard knew it, typically made faith dependent on matters of historical fact. Speculative philosophy deals in the ideality of the universal but it understands the universal in indicative terms as what is or is not universally the case. The ideality of the subjunctive, however, concerns what may be and, specifically, what may be a possibility for subjective appropriation. It shows its content ideally – but as an ideal lit up by ‘the illumination of subjectivity’. The subjunctive does not present its subject matter as simple fact, but makes the narrated facts available as ideal existential possibilities elicited from history. The situation can be stated in this way: if the dialectic of religious communication is constructed out of indicative and imperative statements alone, then we are perilously close to the situation of legalism: ‘This is the case, therefore do this.’ In Kierkegaard’s view, this brings it under the strictures he believes apply to any contemporary attempt at direct religious communication. If, however, the indicative statement is transposed into the subjunctive, it is then open to a subjective process of appropriation and response that is not predetermined by the closure of the indicative. At one and the same time it is freed from the constraints of empirical, historical or metaphysical objectivity while retaining a determinate content. As far as religious communication is concerned, a new axis becomes available, namely the axis between the subjunctive and the imperative. And it is precisely by making this axis central that the communicative act writes into its own constitution the possibility of a free appropriation. For the imperatives of faith are imperatives that appeal to the subject in its essential freedom: the recipient’s task is not merely to reduplicate the content of a given factual statement, to make their own the faith once delivered to the saints, but to come to self-affirmation in the freedom of their own response. This kind of relationship between the subjunctive and the imperative is spotlighted in the discourse ‘Patience in Expectation’, with its focus on Anna, the ancient prophetess, who, after a lifetime of expectation, sees for herself the Messiah brought to the Temple by his parents. Kierkegaard considers the cynical objection that Anna cannot be a model for us, since it was only fortuitous that she lived to see the fulfilment of her expectation. What if she had died the week before? Would the fulfilment then not have come too late? That, however, is the voice of impatience and despair speaking. Now impatience, and the contemporary culture of impatience, is very fond of the expression ‘maybe’, seeing how this or that plan or wish may or may not come to pass, and that, therefore, one cannot commit oneself too much to any one possibility. Playing on the similarity of the Danish ‘maybe’ (Maaske) and ‘it must be’ (det maa ske), Kierkegaard turns the phrase back on the impatient ones. It may be? For one who expects the eternal ‘It must be’ (SKS 5, p. 216 [217]). This ambiguity

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exemplifies how voicing the discourses as subjunctive can open a way towards the appropriating of the message as imperative, as a matter of decision and action. A further aspect of the representation of actual or existential possibility in the discourses is to do with the at times quite extraordinary plasticity with which Kierkegaard represents a sequence of ‘types’ that, like the dialogical voices, incarnate a succession of spiritual points of view. This tactic of visualisation, reflecting the figurative depth of language itself, once more reflects the conventions of the genre as recommended and practised by Mynster, who, in his reflections on the art of preaching, declared that the chief task of a sermon is precisely to make the subject as visible as possible, so that the preacher’s comparisons and figurative words, his personifications, the way he addresses now the whole assembly, now this individual in particular, his frequent questions – all this testifies to his attempt to make the object as visible as he can and to challenge his listeners to contemplate it.10 Yet, by virtue of the manner in which such visualisation is executed in the discourses it is distinctively and characteristically ‘Kierkegaardian’. That Kierkegaard should use such a technique is, in one respect at least, surprising, since this is one of the very points on which Kierkegaard is most strongly critical of the manner of preaching of the established Church. In an important passage in Practice in Christianity, in the sixth of a series of meditations on the text ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto myself’ (John 12: 32), Anti-Climacus describes how the authentic style of Christian preaching has become lost in a Church that, by virtue of its complacency, has become aestheticised and naturalised (SV 3 16, pp. 217ff. [233ff.]). Authentic preaching, he claims, is direct speech, spoken in the first person singular and addressed to a particular individual or individuals: ‘I say to you …’ is the principle of such communication. In established Christianity, however, the priest typically turns the pulpit into a stage, on which, like an actor, he holds up to his audience (or ‘spectators’ as the Danish term may be more directly translated) a sequence of images, introduced by such phrases as ‘Let us reflect on …’, ‘Consider …’ or ‘Behold …’, phrases constituted by or evocative of metaphors of vision. Such a preacher no longer communicates as an impassioned subject, addressing his hearer with the urgency of apostolic conviction, but is as one who has withdrawn into himself, avoiding eye contact with his congregation, almost statue-like – an aesthetic object to be looked at, not a living person to be responded to. This communicative style shows how, in Christendom, Christ has been aestheticised and turned into an object of admiration – whereas he himself had always called for followers, not admirers. The way in which the established clergy use language both reveals and helps to bring about this ‘fall’ from apostolic purity. Such priestly speech is performative utterance – but in a negative sense, since the priest subverts the message of the text by the way in which he articulates it. The medium frustrates

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 159 the message. Language has been subordinated to the requirements of aesthetic communication – since what is decisive for aesthetic communication is not word, but image. Yet, as we have seen, Kierkegaard’s discourses are even more reticent with regard to the author’s own ‘I’ than Mynster’s sermons, and the recognition and exploitation of the figurative, imagistic possibilities of language are crucial to everything Kierkegaard is trying to do in the discourses. Does it follow that the later, more radically Christian Kierkegaard is repudiating the whole rhetorical procedure of the earlier, merely upbuilding religiousness? Or can this apparent contradiction be reconciled? Let us address this question on the basis of the texts themselves, taking ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’ as an example. As we have seen, this discourse is punctuated by repeated injunctions to ‘Behold …’ a succession of characters – dramatis personae – who represent the spiritual possibilities with which the discourse is concerned. So, we are called upon to ‘behold’ the ‘fortunate man’ (SKS 5, p. 94 [89]) ‘the one familiar with adversity’ (SKS 5, p. 98 [92]), ‘the concerned one’ (SKS 5, p. 100 [94]), ‘the person who was wronged’ (SKS 5, p. 101 [95]) and ‘the person who was tried, who was tested in the distress of spiritual trial’ (SKS 5, p. 103 [97]). Earlier on in the discourse, even before we are explicitly invited to engage in these acts of visualisation, the descriptive quality of Kierkegaard’s style has already put us in the mood to be responsive to such invitations. In the opening meditation on the apostle Paul the image of the apostle is thrown into relief by contrast with that of Imperial Rome. Nor is it accidental that, in the lines immediately preceding the introduction of Paul, Rome itself is figured as a stage: ‘… far-famed Rome, where everyone who in any way believed himself able to capture public attention hastened as to his rightful stage …’ (SKS 5, p. 88 [80]). Although Paul himself does not seek such display, living in a ‘quiet and unobtrusive’ semi-confinement, Kierkegaard’s evocation of the decadent splendour of Rome is used to conjure up a verbal stage on which the figure of the apostle is to make his appearance. Paul too is thus made into a figural type for the reader’s contemplation – and thereby aestheticised. Has he – and have we as readers – therefore been subjected to the same demoralising treatment as that diagnosed by Anti-Climacus? I suggest not, and that part of the reason why not has to do with Kierkegaard’s understanding (and, perhaps more importantly, use) of the kind of interplay between subjunctivity and subjectivity that we have just explored. His ‘types’ are indeed aestheticised by being made into objects of contemplation, but they are suspended in the medium of aesthetic possibility in such a way that they are made available to be appropriated in a spirit of seriousness. But, if everything is adrift in a sea of aesthetic possibilities, what is there to move us to such appropriation? Part of the answer to this can be found by turning to another late work, this time to the signed collection of discourses entitled For Self-Examination and, again, applying the outcome to ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’. In For Self-Examination Kierkegaard recalls the prophet Nathan’s use of a

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parable to bring home to King David his guilt in having had Uriah murdered so that he, David, might have Uriah’s wife Bathsheba (SV 3 17, pp. 79ff. [37ff.]) Nathan’s parable concerns two men, a rich man and a poor man. The rich man has great herds of livestock, the poor man only one little ewe. When a visitor has to be entertained, however, the rich man refuses to slaughter any of his own animals and takes the poor man’s ewe. In the scriptural version of the story Nathan then asks David’s advice about what should be done. David declares angrily that the rich man should be put to death, whereupon Nathan retorts ‘Thou art the man’. David immediately sees the point and repents. In his retelling of it Kierkegaard embellishes the simple biblical narrative, introducing David as ‘the crowned poet and connoisseur of poetical works’ (SV 3 17, p. 80 [38]). Nathan offers the story to this ‘expert on matters of taste’ as a poetical work, requiring an aesthetic judgement. It is only when they have discussed the parable as a piece of literature that the prophet rounds on his critic and tells him ‘Thou art the man’. In this way, Kierkegaard suggests, the aesthetic surface of the parable has been used to engage the attention of the King and so to bring him to a position from which he can see his own misdemeanours in a true light. The parable, a merely imaginative, ‘subjunctive’ aesthetic possibility, thereby achieves what the mere objective reiteration of the commandment – ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt do no murder’ – was unable to achieve. Kierkegaard then extrapolates from these reflections a fundamental principle for the interpretation of scripture, ‘It is I to whom it [scripture] is speaking, it is I about whom it is speaking’ – a point he further illustrates with reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, with its concluding application, ‘Go and do likewise’. All of this is directly relevant to ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’. In this discourse Kierkegaard seems to be taking us through a picture gallery of spiritual types that we are invited to observe and comment on in much the same way as Nathan invites David to comment on his story of the rich and poor sheep farmers. The situation is rhetorically arranged so that ‘we’, the writer and his readers, understand ourselves as the subjects who observe these types as objects of our contemplative gaze and reflective judgement. Then, quite suddenly, in the final paragraph of the text, everything changes. The question is now no longer how Paul and the others are to be understood. It is rather a question about the reader’s own God-relationship. The reader is invited to consider his own understanding of human and divine fatherhood: ‘How is it with you?’ the discourse asks. Indeed, the crowd of second-person singular pronouns – in Danish Du, Din and Dig (and, in nineteenth-century usage, capitalised) – that suddenly covers the page is visible even when the text is held at arm’s length. The distancing of the subject from the object, that is integral to aesthetic contemplation, can no longer be sustained as the text almost physically grabs the reader in his own immediate subjectivity, allowing him no escape from the directness of its address. The language of figuration, refracted through the subjunctive mood of possibility, has been made actual. The story is not about what happened far away and long ago. The story is about what is happening

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 161 here and now. It is the reader’s own destiny that is in question. The apostle Paul and the other spiritual types are not represented historically as objectively given entities whose meaning is fixed and invariable but as possibilities that engage the existential concern of the reader. It is worth recalling that the task around which the discourse revolves is the awakening of the concern (Bekymring) in which the subject transcends ‘mere knowledge about the world and about himself as a part of [the world]’ (SKS 5, p. 93 [86]) in order to understand himself in relation to the world. Behind each of the vignettes describing one or other spiritual type lies the question of appropriation: ‘Is this – should this – be me?’ This, I suggest, not only gives us an important insight into Kierkegaard’s general way of communicating indirectly, but, quite specifically, into his use of the Bible. The biblical text is not an immovable datum, but comes to be meaningful for us precisely – and therefore exclusively – as it is incorporated into our personal and individual moral reflection and quest for self-knowledge before God. The appearance of the biblical text in the discourses, as in the authorship generally, is not a way of forcing a conclusion but of throwing open existing certainties to renewed examination and questioning, a manner of proceeding that is both reflected in and suggested by Kierkegaard’s own freedom in reading, retelling and applying scripture. The appeal to scripture that we have encountered at several key moments in the discourses, then, is not the reversion to the heteronomy of the Counter-Enlightenment, but a recontextualisation of the biblical word that introduces it into the midst of the open-ended debate about what it is to enact the good. IV This account of Kierkegaard’s rhetorical techniques has followed his own concern to make these texts religiously relevant to the reader’s actuality. At the same time, I believe, we have seen how they can be understood as exemplifying what Kierkegaard regarded as the ‘Greek’, dialogical way of philosophising as opposed to the German, systematic and doctrinal view of philosophy. For the process of weighing over the issues in play in the discourses may finally bring us to the point of an ineluctably subjective decision, but the process itself is integral to that moment of decision-making (otherwise we are back with impatience). In this way the discourses are themselves a kind of training in moral reflection. Now it is true that Kierkegaard does not give us any kind of historicising guide to moral decision-making along the lines of ‘This is the doctrine of Stoicism, this of scepticism, this of Mill, this of Nietzsche, etc.’ Nor does he present us with an analytic account of a series of possible ethical theories along with their advantages and disadvantages. He is, after all, not an academic scholar or teacher, and his method is not designed for the classroom. This, however, does not mean that it is not, in its own way, philosophical – after all, by no means all of the classic texts of the ethical canon are themselves academic in the narrow sense. What Kierkegaard does do is, as we have seen, to personify,

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to render plastic, to figure, to give voice to or to incarnate a range of moral and religious principles and maxims (and their various contraries – doubt, despair and the rest of the impatient pack) in such a way as to invite the reader to assess their comparative worth and significance, and, in the light of that assessment, to appropriate those that prove themselves the most valuable. Many years ago, Martin Thust coined the phrase ‘Søren Kierkegaard’s marionette theatre’ in connection with the pseudonymous authorship, and the phrase may, without too much distortion, be applied also to the world of the upbuilding writings.11 What Thust meant by this was that Kierkegaard’s characters are not three-dimensional figures of the kind we might expect to encounter in a realist novel (Dostoevsky, say, or Henry James), but nor do they have the kind of one-dimensionality of characters in a mediocre novel. Rather, they represent particular spiritual attitudes or movements. If, as Thust claims, this is true of the ‘personalities’ presented in the pseudonyms – the Seducer, the Assessor, Constantin Constantius and the rest – it is no less true of the various figures that appear in the pages of the upbuilding works. The concerned one, the melancholy one, youth and age, etc., are not three-dimensional characters and are fairly clearly not intended to be taken as individuals but as types, figures or, even, emblems. Even if we conjecture that some actual existential situation in the life of the author stands behind some of these types (something that will be explored further in the next chapter when we look at the relationship between the discourses and the engagement crisis), they themselves do not stand for the whole personality of the one living through that situation but for the specific, limited and discrete action, reflection, response or orientation that such a personality might express, be moved by or consider in the situation. They are not personalities but personifications, and in this regard they are more akin to the allegorical figures of a work such as Pilgrim’s Progress than to anything found in a novel, as well as to the ‘personalities’ of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Should we conclude from this that they are lacking in any kind of depth or are merely didactic? Surely not. For, if we read the discourses collectively and as a whole it becomes clear that each particular concrete attitude or movement represented by each figure must be interpreted against the background of a more general understanding of life that is sometimes implied, and sometimes made explicit. Moreover, there are differences among the types themselves, such that some represent quite localised attitudes or responses, whereas others have a more universal character (patience, love or expectation, for example). We could say that what these types represent are essentially principles and maxims of exactly the kind that we use for orientation in moral living, even if, for the most part, we do so unconsciously, semi-consciously or intuitively. No actual individual is or could be completely identified with ‘despair’, ‘impatience’, ‘youth’, ‘experience’ or even, for that matter, patience or love. These are idealised possibilities, which, in their most universal form, are, in Jeremy Walker’s expression, moral depositions. Kierkegaard’s way of setting them in an imaginary dialogue enables us to see how they shape up in relation to each other and how a life might look that incorporated these particular maxims into

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 163 itself, and, given that it is our lives that are in question here (something the rhetorical form of the discourses never allows us to forget), moves us to question how we might feel about looking at ourselves in the mirror every day if our lives were to fall under or be placed in the service of one or other of these principles or maxims. Through them we can try out what it would be to be ‘before God’. That this dialogue is ‘before God’ is to say that it is a matter of conscience or, simply, that it is the operation of conscience. As Kierkegaard put it in Works of Love, ‘In conscience it is God who beholds a person, in order that the person may behold God in all things.’ (SV 3 12, p. 359 [377]). ‘What we do in this life, echoes in eternity.’ The values we make our own, that guide our actions and inform our responses – our wishes, our expectations, in short, the measure that we bring to life – define who we are for ourselves and in our dealings with others irrevocably and forever (remembering, though, that it belongs to the grammar of ‘before God’ that we never get a final view of ourselves thus defined). But if, in this way, Kierkegaard’s discourses may be taken as representative of a certain way of tackling moral decision-making, i.e. exemplifying the kinds of processes we find ourselves involved in when engaged in the moral process, that still does not make them moral philosophy. Is Kierkegaard not still, finally, closer to the novelists than to the philosophers? The answer to this question will depend in large measure on our understanding of philosophy. If, for example, Heidegger’s pursuit of a fundamental ontology by means of a phenomenological analysis of human Dasein is taken as definitive for the task of philosophy, then maybe Heidegger is right in claiming that Kierkegaard’s psychological analyses, penetrating as they are, remain on the level of the ontic or the ‘existentiell’ and do not rise above this to genuine ontological enquiry. In such a perspective we would have to say that although the discourses may provide material for philosophy, they are not the thing itself. But it is far from clear whether the project of fundamental ontology is or should be the defining goal of all philosophical enquiry. Certainly it is far from obvious how such a project could be determinative for the agenda of moral philosophy (a reason, perhaps, why Heidegger himself – pace Joanna Hodge12 – contributed little of any significance to ethics). However, just because a text treats issues that interest moral philosophers does not mean that it itself is a work of moral philosophy. Moral philosophy must mean more than acquainting ourselves with as large a range as possible of morally interesting situations, and more than being able to read those situations with the kind of psychological acuity shown by Kierkegaard. The novelists too can portray a manifold of moral scenarios and explore them in the kind of depth and detail that makes literature a major resource for moral philosophy. But the moral philosopher must do more. He must organise, present and argue his understanding of those situations in such a way as to combine maximum coherence with maximum exemplification, and he must evaluate the outcome with regard to its knowledge-status. He must show us the kind of action and the kind of sensibility that are at issue when we speak of the moral life and he

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must guide us towards a way of evaluating the various aspects of such a life as well as the nature of that life as a whole (whether, for example, it is subordinate to the theoretical life or is itself what life is all about, whether it has limits and what those limits are with regard to other dimensions of living such as art, politics and religion, etc.). The objection to calling Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses an exercise in moral philosophy here could, then, be crudely put like this: while the discourses may be strong on examples, they are weak in terms of a unifying and intellectually credible strategy for dealing with them. Perhaps it is even as if, having confronted us with a wealth of morally taxing situations, Kierkegaard merely says ‘Over to you, dear reader. You work it out.’ Now it is, in a sense, crucial to the whole programme of the upbuilding literature that, in the end, the ball lands in the reader’s court, but it does not stop there. Kierkegaard does not simply insist on our hitting it back in our own way. His strategy requires his readers to consider their whole game-plan for life as part of their response to the challenge of the religious address. In other words, the discourses are not just a sequence of fascinating problems and dilemmas presented in an array of personified subjunctive possibilities. They are that, but they are that in order to stimulate our reflection on the fundamental values that guide our decision-making in each particular case. They require us to look at the spirit or the sensibility we bring to our moral, personal and religious living, remembering that what is decisive in the discourses is not only the values – patience, love, etc. – that they recommend, but the process of selfreflection itself, the inner dialogue of the self with itself by means of the figured possibilities presented in the text. This inner dialogue is itself conscience at work and the Socratically educative goal of the text is precisely to arouse the reader to undertake or to renew this work. At this point, however, a further objection can be made, namely that although it is true that Kierkegaard has a game-plan in view throughout the discourses, the name of this game-plan is Christianity, its intellectual basis is dogmatic and, with regard to human morality, it is profoundly heteronomous, a matter of improbability that cannot even be given the kind of grounding that an appeal to moral probability would provide. The values that are held up for commendation are Christian values, and this is advertised in the texts themselves by the appeal to scripture in general and apostolic authority in particular, and by the special privilege among the various types represented in the text to biblical figures such as Paul, Job, Anna, John the Baptist and the rest, including (in several discourses) Christ himself. This, as we have seen, is the view propounded from a theological perspective by Anders Kingo (1995). However, I would argue that the force of the appeal to scripture and the effectiveness of these various figures of faith is contextualised by the entire inner dialogue of conscientious self-questioning that the discourses set in motion in such a way as to undercut any purely heteronomous reading. If they persuade, it is because they are persuasive, and whatever authority the scriptural word may have, it is circumscribed by the non-authoritative nature of the discourses themselves. But this, I concede, must be a matter of judgement and of each reader’s own experience with the texts.

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 165 Yet it seems as if Kierkegaard cannot finally escape a highly damaging dilemma. Despite aiming at what I have called a ‘whole game-plan’ for the moral life, he seemingly fails to deliver anything that could finally ground or justify such a life rationally. Worse still, not only does he conspicuously deny himself the possibility of appealing to idealist or to utilitarian principles or of grounding his moral thought in any kind of descriptive anthropology or worldview, he also declines the assistance of divine revelation or ecclesiastical authority, so that he ends up by falling between philosophy and religion, being too suspicious of reason for the one, and sitting too lightly to authority for the other. What, then, is the meaning of non-authoritative religious discourse – as opposed both to autonomous philosophical discourse and to authoritative religious discourse – if not simply making up our values for ourselves? And does this not mean that, as Brandes already suspected, Kierkegaard is a kind of Nietzschean without really knowing it? In part the answer to this lies in Kierkegaard’s understanding of his contemporary intellectual and cultural situation. An analogous point of view was, I believe, succinctly expressed by Albert Schweitzer when he argued that, for modernity, a person’s life-view (in the sense of the unique configuration of values and aspirations that the individual lives by) must function without the support of a common world-view, whether that be idealistic, positivistic or whatever.13 Schweitzer is saying here essentially what his cousin (Sartre) was to articulate in the sharper and darker rhetoric of radical existentialism: that values are not inscribed in some intelligible heaven; we are the source of values by virtue of what we do: you are the sum of your actions. In this situation, then, there is a vast difference between seeking a maximum level of moral and personal coherence (developing the ‘whole game-plan’) and claiming that, in doing so, we are conforming ourselves to the way things are, whether this latter is conceived religiously or reductionistically. That this is the issue confronting Kierkegaard can, I think, be seen by reflecting on the implications for moral thinking and moral life of his critique of knowledge. For it is precisely the thrust of the attack on Hegelianism that the programme of absolute science, even if it could be fulfilled, could not prescribe the path of the individual’s concern for his own essential freedom. Religion and morality, in other words, have to go their way without the support of knowledge, and ethics has to manage without the back up of anthropology, even the kind of anthropology arrived at by means of phenomenological investigation. The moral task takes place outside the domain of any possible ontology. This is the frightening thing: but it is also the consequence of understanding morality as inseparable from the issue of human freedom. And yet there is also a crucial distinction from Sartrean existentialism, as was previously pointed out in considering Kierkegaard’s category of ‘before God’. The kind of pursuit of moral coherence and of taking responsibility for the values that shape our lives that Kierkegaard proposes is not aimed simply at the maximalisation of individual autonomy. It is, rather, a freely chosen holding on to our responsibility in full cognizance of a set of limits to autonomy that are built in to our very humanity itself. These limits

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are not interpreted, as by Sartre, in terms of necessary failure and the uselessness of all our passions, but as the possibility of life being experienced as an infinite gift and, as such, the occasion of infinite joy and gratitude. That this is not a view of ethics I am simply importing into the discourses from what we know of Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety or the Concluding Unscientific Postscript is, I think, illustrated by several of the passages adduced in this study: the distinction between knowledge of the world and knowledge of ‘what I mean to the world and the world means to me’ (‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’), the distinction between indifferent and concerned truth (‘Remember Now Your Creator’) or the failure of the attempt to master one’s self in ‘To Need God’ and the insistence that ‘The Discourse’ cannot help one who is interested only in acquiring knowledge. Where the discourses do achieve something subtly different from the pseudonymous works is in bringing out how Kierkegaard’s understanding of the moral situation differs from that of later existentialism by giving us a larger and deeper picture of what it might actually mean to live as if ‘before God’, counting ourselves ‘as nothing’. But there is a further difference that is rooted in the importance given to the act of moral appeal itself, an importance enshrined in Kierkegaard’s overarching concern with questions of communication and with the fact that he gives his ‘direct’ communication the form of open-ended discourses or talks. That these talks are ‘without authority’ and rely on the reader’s appropriation indicates Kierkegaard’s implicit experience and understanding of the situation of nihilism: that, for us, moral communication has not only to operate outside the range of sure and certain knowledge but also without the back-up of institutional, traditional or tribal authority. But that the appeal is nevertheless made indicates that Kierkegaard believes it is both possible and even necessary to go on being moral, to go on trying to live a good life and to practice the Christian virtues. For it is the appeal itself that moves us to such commitment: that we are called to responsibility, singly and mutually, towards ourselves and towards each other, and to speak to and with one another about our ultimate concerns. If being moral ultimately depends on the individual conscience (‘before God’), the occasion for becoming moral is that we know ourselves to be addressed, claimed, appealed to as if we were capable of taking up the moral task or of choosing faith. It is the centrality of the appeal as such that both justifies and is brought to the fore by the focus on the rhetoric of the discourses. Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ has often been invoked in contemporary British debates in the philosophy of religion, with its powerful image of the tide of faith having withdrawn, to leave us alone on an empty shore. I am suggesting here that Kierkegaard too both experienced and understood that situation, but, with Arnold, saw it as more than a simple choice between belief and unbelief. For Arnold’s poem is not just the description of a certain cultural situation, it also moves to a recommendation of how we should respond to that situation:

The rhetorics of the upbuilding discourses 167 Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. The appeal to the truth of love comes as if it were almost a deduction from the situation of nihilism, the reflex of a ‘therefore’ (‘for the world …’). That we call upon each other to be true, abiding in love, patient and expectant of a good outcome, and that we are moved to assure one another that it is worth it despite it all, is inseparable from the process whereby we come to believe that such things matter. But in Arnold’s poem and in what we have thus far read in Kierkegaard ‘love’ is, for now, still a somewhat abstract and empty term. The task of the following chapters will therefore be to draw out the understanding of love found in the discourses, and seeing that not primarily as a certain doctrine or concept of love presented to us for theoretical consideration but as the charge of the appeal that the discourses make to us as readers, the force of the claim they lay upon us. Notes 1 An interesting extension of his earlier existential phenomenology into the realm of communicative action is to be found in C. O. Schrag (1986) Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Bloomington, Indiana. 2 In ‘Purity of Heart’ Kierkegaard consistently attacks ‘probability’ as a legitimate factor in moral reflection. However, it is clear that something rather different is meant in these two places. In the one, the point is that moral reflection cannot be deduced from objective principles, an essentially Kantian point. In the other, the point is not to confuse the religious person’s concern for becoming transparent to themselves before God with prudential considerations as to short-term advantages or disadvantages connected with particular courses of action. For a fuller discussion see J. Olsen (1999) Theological Anthropology and Ethics in the Writings of John Henry Newman and Søren Kierkegaard, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University. 3 Part of the importance of Lessing for Kierkegaard is, I suggest, just this: that he provided Kierkegaard with a model of how one could write Socratically. See the description of Lessing in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (SV 3 9, pp. 59–62 [69–71]). 4 Mynster (1852) pp. 112–3. 5 The image of the discourses as the work of his right hand was, as we have seen, central to Kierkegaard’s retrospective account of himself as a decisively religious author. 6 Mynster (1852) p. 100 also mentions personification as a characteristic technique of preaching. 7 See H. M. Jensen, ‘Freeze! Hold it right there’ in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2000, pp. 223–39.

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8 In a much-discussed footnote Kierkegaard distinguishes Overveielser from upbuilding thoughts, bringing them closer to a more specifically Christian type of communication. (The subtitle of Works of Love refers to the discourses that make up the work as Overveilser.) See Pap. VIII I A 293. 9 For a full discussion of the philosophical significance of Kierkegaard’s sense of the subjunctive see P. Sheil (2002) Kierkegaard, Levinas and the Subjunctive Mood, Aldershot, Ashgate. 10 Mynster (1852) p. 100. 11 See M. Thust (1925) ‘Das Marionettentheater Sören Kierkegaards’, Zeitwende I: 13–38. Thust’s basic idea seems to correspond with Deleuze’s suggestion that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ‘put metaphysics in motion, in action’ by inventing ‘an incredible equivalent of theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy’. G. Deleuze (1994) Difference and Repetition, London, Athlone, p. 8. But perhaps this is something that moral philosophers – or, at least, moralists – have always done? 12 See J. Hodge (1995) Heidegger and Ethics, London, Routledge. 13 A. Schweitzer (1961) Civilization and Ethics, London, Unwin, pp. 184–5.

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I Throughout this study I have claimed that, despite what many philosophical readers experience as the disincentive constituted by their religious character, the upbuilding discourses can contribute to a philosophically oriented reading of Kierkegaard. Nor, I have suggested, need this be at the cost of the discourses’ religious message, as when they are read for their anthropological content while leaving out their theological conclusions. In terms of both content and form they are religious works: ‘edifying talks’. But if my general approach is thus far inclusive, it would seem that there are certain kinds of interpretative approaches that are going to be simply irrelevant and that may even need to be resisted if the possibility of a genuinely philosophical reading is what is being sought. Foremost among these – precisely because it is an approach that has had such a powerful influence on the history of Kierkegaard reception – is that of biography or, as is so often the case with Kierkegaard, psycho-biography. There are many reasons why the psycho-biographical approach should have become so powerful in relation to Kierkegaard. There are places in the texts themselves – especially, but not exclusively, in the journals and papers – where he seems to invite this kind of attention by the extent of his preoccupation with himself. How could it be otherwise when the issue is one of reduplication, of interested or concerned knowledge, when what matters is not merely theoretical adequacy but the active appropriation and expression of the message in life? If Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel hinges on the disjunction between theory and practice in Hegel’s own thought and, consequently, the need for a kind of thinking – Kierkegaard calls it subjective thinking – that is interested, concerned, passionate and existentially engaged, why should we not call on Kierkegaard himself to back up his claims with the evidence of his own life? A similar point arises in the context of his attack on the Church. For if the fault of the Church is precisely to have turned people into admirers of Christ rather than followers, believers but not doers, is it not natural to see what the practise of Christianity looked like for Kierkegaard himself, in the flesh? But, of course, the biographical interest does not stop there. What has intrigued many commentators is the powerfully personal note in so many key passages, with

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their haunting allusions to the troubled relationships with his father and fiancée, and the way in which the presentation of such central concepts as anxiety, guilt and despair is permeated by a sense of personal experience. Not entirely coincidentally, these understandable motives for pursuing a biographical reading were given greater prominence by the fact that the discovery of Kierkegaard coincided with the dominance of a theory of literary interpretation that placed the personality of the author at the centre of enquiry. The key to Kierkegaard’s thought, it was held, was precisely that it was Kierkegaard’s thought. Whereas, for Heidegger, ‘Kierkegaard’ would be the name of the matter to be thought, Kierkegaard’s biographically oriented commentators were led by the conviction that the meaning of the matter to be thought was no more nor less than Kierkegaard himself – whether this led to reductive, psychoanalytic interpretations or to the excesses of hagiography. This approach was initiated by George Brandes, who wrote the first full monograph on Kierkegaard’s life and work, setting a pattern that others were to follow: P. A. Heiberg, Frithiof Brandt and others in Denmark; Walter Lowrie and Josiah Thompson in the English-speaking world, Pierre Mesnard in France, etc. In many cases this quest for the man behind the masks led to gross exegetical absurdities and, in any case, had fallen into general disrepute by the 1960s. We do not read texts like that any more, it seems. Even if we did, a philosophical study of the discourses might not seem an appropriate context in which to try to apply such methods. Yet although Kierkegaard’s latest Danish biographer, Joakim Garff, pays minimal attention to the discourses (compared, for example, with his discussions of masturbation and epilepsy!) there are powerful reasons for acknowledging an important biographical context for the discourses, a context to which Kierkegaard himself drew attention on several occasions, as we shall see. But, again, this might not seem like the place in which to pursue the matter further, interesting as it might be in its own terms. For how could the exploration of the biographical circumstances of the discourses add to their philosophical meaning? If this question is to get anything like a positive answer, we shall need to be very clear about just what is being ventured in appealing to biographical data at this point. The main focus of this chapter will be on what, following convention, I call ‘the engagement crisis’, i.e. Kierkegaard’s engagement to Regine Olsen, his breaking off of that engagement, his attempt to explain (primarily to himself) the reasons for his action, the suffering he endured in its aftermath, and what he believed he learned through that suffering. However, unlike the psycho-biographers, I am not arguing that getting back to the facts of the case will somehow explain the meaning of the texts. Rather, I am assuming that whatever else they may be or may contain, what we have in the texts before us is not Kierkegaard’s life itself, nor even a simple reflection of it, but (to use a term Kierkegaard himself used in discussing the relationship between literature and life) its literary transubstantiation. It is a life as represented in literature and, if there was one thing Kierkegaard was consistently clear about, the literary medium is not life itself. Literary representation cannot relate to

Building up love’s ruins 171 life other than as possibility to actuality. Even the most scrupulous confessional journal will not be a simple relation of facts, especially when what is to be confessed is not a crime such as murder, but moral and religious failings in which motivation and intention are as important as ‘what happened’. Even if Kierkegaard had no deliberate intention to conceal himself in what he revealed about himself, we cannot simply take the biographical elements in his work as straightforward evidence for ‘how it really was’. However, if the act of transforming the immediacy of life into the medium of possibility effects an abstraction from the life of the author (and, as such, also a fictionalising of that life), it can, simultaneously, come to constitute a possibility for selfunderstanding on the part of the reader, according to whether or how the reader can read his or her own situation, question or passion into what the text itself represents. Seen in this light the presence of autobiographical material in the authorship comes to function analogously to the functioning of the other types and situations represented there. Understood in this way, drawing out the fuller story alluded to in such autobiographical references is not an attempt to get behind the text, but to allow what is in it to manifest itself more completely. In other words, it is not the engagement crisis as a matter of historical fact that is at issue here, but the engagement crisis as a theme in Kierkegaard’s writing and, as such, the focus for some of his most passionate and concerned reflections. In this sense, the further exploration of the engagement crisis as that is represented in the discourses will help us to see more of what is at stake in them, that is to say, it will help us to see more of the kind of moral concerns and questions they address. It is not a little likely that moral philosophers – and the philosophies they produce – tend to be guided, consciously or unconsciously, by a pre-selection of what they believe to be the most typical or the most privileged moral situations. This pre-selection will itself have an incalculable (or rarely calculated) impact on the reception of the theory in question. In this regard, it is very possible that part of the difficulty many readers have with Kierkegaard is that they do not readily recognise their own life-issues in his peculiar moral anxieties. Ultimately, the resistance generated by such non-recognition may be insurmountable. However, I hope that this examination of the role of the engagement crisis in the upbuilding discourses will bring to the fore issues that although originally embodied in the specificity of Kierkegaard’s own life are illuminating for those with very different experiences – those perhaps who do get married, or those who are the ones rejected by their fiancé(e)s or lovers, or those whose primary preferential love is for their parents, their children or their country. Moreover, following the pattern of the previous chapters, my ultimate focus will not so much be on what one might call the phenomenology of unhappy love, but on what the context of the engagement crisis means for the discourses as rhetorically determined pieces of writing, writing determined and shaped by its function as a concrete address. The outcome of this examination will, I hope, be twofold. First, we shall get a better idea of what it means to call these discourses ‘dialogical’ and, second, we shall be led to confront

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what is arguably the most decisive issue in all of the upbuilding writings: love. Works of Love is famous for its promotion of commanded, disinterested love at the expense of spontaneous, emotionally driven preferential love, a dualism later given wider circulation by Anders Nygren’s (1953) distinction between eros and agape (the latter being the distinctive kind of love commanded in the New Testament). That such a distinction is made in Kierkegaard’s text is undeniable. At the same time our understanding of it must embrace the whole context in which Kierkegaard is writing. The evidence of the ‘biographical’ dimension of this context is to underline the point that such a distinction can only make sense and will only be relevant where we feel our lives to be bound up with ‘natural’, spontaneous loving relationships, i.e. preferential loves. To put it another way: if Søren had not loved Regine, then the issue of breaking the engagement could scarcely have grown to the proportions that it did. And if we did not want to love those we do love, if love were only commanded, if love does not express our true intention, then, to speak in New Testament terms, we are still caught in a legalistic understanding of love, in simple dutifulness, not love. The goodness of the good will assumes a benevolence, a care for the other and for the way in which we relate to the other, that must precede any commandment. This, however, is to run ahead of ourselves. First, let us go back several steps and look in general at the grounds for bringing the engagement crisis into connection with the upbuilding writings. II That Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen is one of the two things that everybody who has not read Kierkegaard knows about him. The other is that he had a highly problematic relationship with his father. In fact, as we shall see, the engagement crisis encompasses both relationships, to the fiancée and to the father, since Kierkegaard’s grounds for breaking off the engagement, although now irrecoverable at the level of fact, were very probably connected with his relationship with his father. In the journals he refers to both Regine and his father as his ‘teachers’ (Pap. X 5 A 149.25/NB 15: 6). As far as facts go, the story of the engagement is straightforward enough. Søren and Regine first met in May 1837. He proposed to her in September 1840. Shortly afterwards he realised it was a mistake – but she did not. After a period of wrangling that lasted from August to October 1841 (in the midst of which Kierkegaard defended his thesis On the Concept of Irony) the engagement was finally broken off on 11 October. What has interested commentators, however, has not been the facts, but what lies behind them; above all, why Kierkegaard did what he did. The theories have been many and varied: that he was impotent, that he was a repressed homosexual, that he feared having inherited syphilis from his father or from a one-off visit to a brothel, that he feared he might have a child as a result of the same hypothetical visit to a brothel, that marriage would require him to confide the guilty secret of his

Building up love’s ruins 173 father (alternative explanations of this secret are: cursing God as a child, raping Søren’s mother prior to the marriage, sexually abusing his children) or simply that he felt called by God to the higher task of indirectly communicating Christianity to Christendom. The pseudonymous works bear the imprint of this crisis at many points. Stages on Life’s Way, for example, includes the transcript of a letter Kierkegaard actually sent to Regine – but, again, the question is how far the connection reaches and what is its significance for the overall import of the texts. How are we to read the stories of broken engagements in Either/Or, Repetition or Stages on Life’s Way? And what are we to make of the fascination for Kierkegaard of the story of Abraham and Isaac: is it a matter of himself having been the son sacrificed by the melancholy old man, or is he the one sacrificing Regine? Or both? All such questions are inevitably sharpened by the knowledge that the works to which they relate were said by Kierkegaard himself to have involved a deliberate deception. In The Point of View Kierkegaard describes how during the writing of Either/Or he made highly conspicuous visits to the theatre, which, although they actually lasted only five or ten minutes, reinforced the impression of himself as an idler, a loafer, a flaneur, a light-minded gad-about, with a good (perhaps even a brilliant) head on my shoulders, witty, etc. – but utterly lacking in ‘seriousness’. I represented worldly irony, a life of pleasure, a life of the most refined pleasure – but not a trace of ‘seriousness and positivity’, but, on the contrary, monstrously interesting and ‘piquant’. (SV 3 18, p. 111 [61]) All this, of course, was for public consumption. The reality, Kierkegaard subsequently claimed, was that he was essentially ‘in the cloister’ when he wrote Either/Or, having renounced marriage and committed himself to a religious path. He wrote in The Point of View: [S]trictly speaking Either/Or was written in a monastery, and I can vouch for the fact … that the author of Either/Or regularly and with monastic precision spent a fixed time every day, on his own account, reading upbuilding writings, and that he pondered his responsibility in fear and much trembling. (SV 3 18, p. 90 [35–6]) All of this duplicity, however, was aimed not only at the world at large, but also at Regine in particular. In 1849, after the completion of his aesthetic authorship and after the religious position developed in the upbuilding works was well-established, Kierkegaard wrote extensive journal notes about his relation to Regine. In them he writes how, after a meeting in which she seemed to be heartbroken, he

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went straight to the theatre, and how, the next day, in a final interview, when she asked him if he would ever marry, he replied that yes, he would, after ten years, when he would have had his fill of pleasures and would need a ‘lusty young girl’ to rejuvenate him. The deception involved in this exchange was translated into literary form and considerably expanded in The Seducer’s Diary, as these notes also assert: ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ was … intended to repulse – and I really know what I went through in the way of agonies in connection with its publication, because my thought was, like my aim, to incite everybody’s indignation against me, something that actually misfired, especially as far as the public was concerned, since it received me with delight, which contributed to my increasing contempt for the public – but insofar as anyone came, or comes, to think about ‘her’, it was also the most studied gallantry that can be conceived. To be spotted by a seducer is for a woman what it is for a fruit to be pecked by a bird – for the bird is a connoisseur. A ‘lover’, indeed, is blind, his judgement is therefore not objective … But a seducer is a connoisseur. And now ‘The Seducer’, the absolute connoisseur – and one single girl withal: truly, it was the greatest gallantry that can be conceived, but too deep to become popular … (Pap. X 5 A 149.19/NB 15: 4 [n]) However, this was only one line of deception, and it seems equally likely that some of the other possible explanations given in the pseudonymous works for his behaviour were also written for ‘her’. The same is true of the upbuilding writings. The first (and all of the subsequent upbuilding discourses) had on its title page the dedication, ‘To the late Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, formerly a clothing merchant of this city, these Talks are dedicated’. Nevertheless, the Foreword addresses itself, at least in part, to her, when it comes to speak of that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that single individual it is seeking, to whom it, as it were, stretches out its arms, that single individual who is sufficiently well disposed to allow himself to be found, sufficiently well disposed to receive it, whether it finds him cheerful and confident or ‘moody and preoccupied’ in the moment of meeting. (SKS 5, p. 13 [5]) This is, again, stated explicitly in the 1849 account of the engagement crisis, where it is said that not only The Seducer’s Diary but also [t]he foreword to the two upbuilding discourses was planned for her, like much else: the date of the book, the dedication to father. And in the book itself there is a slight hint about giving up, about only losing the beloved

Building up love’s ruins 175 if one gets him to act against his conviction. She has read it – I know that from Sibbern. (Pap. X 5 A 149.18/NB 15: 4) If in this way the engagement crisis contributed to shaping the text of the upbuilding discourses, Kierkegaard acknowledges that this is not to be taken as defining their meaning. On the contrary, what was written out of and for the sake of a personal communication became, perhaps by the very fact of being written, something rather different. Again from the 1849 reckoning: The sign that I do have a certain genius is, looking at the overall picture, just this: that a special providence makes what preoccupies me personally into something more broadly applicable. I am thinking here of what a pseudonymous writer wrote about Socrates: ‘… his whole life was personal self-preoccupation, and then providence comes and adds world-historical meaning to it.’ Or, to take another example. I am polemical by nature, and I understood this matter of the single individual early on. But, nevertheless, when I wrote it for the first time (in Two Upbuilding Discourses), what I was thinking of was especially my reader, for this book included a little hint to her, and for some time thereafter it was especially and deeply personally true that I only sought one individual reader. Gradually this thought was taken over. But here again the part of providence is so infinite. (Pap. XI A 266) What this broadening and radicalising might mean is spelt out by Kierkegaard in an entry from the year before: This matter of the single individual comes up in every book by the pseudonyms, with an ever-increasing price placed upon being a single individual, a single individual in the eminent sense. This matter of the single individual appears in every one of my upbuilding books, but there the single individual is what every human being is. This is precisely the dialectic of ‘the single individual’. The single individual can mean the most singular one of all and it can mean everyone. Now if one wants to stimulate attention, one will use this category in a series of rapid blows, but always in such a way that each is thus a double-blow. The pride in the one thought incites some, the humility in the other thought frightens others off … The pride in the one thought eggs on some who could very well desire to be the single individual in the sense of the pseudonyms. But then again the thought of ‘the single individual’ in the sense of the upbuilding works pushes them back. (Pap. VIII 2 B 192) ‘That individual’ addressed in the Forewords, then, both is and is not Regine. But however the original address to ‘her’ may have been broadened to mean

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something like ‘anyone who is prepared to accept themselves in their unique individuality’, it would be a mistake to think that ‘she’ and all that was involved in the relation to ‘her’ were simply left behind. The continuing importance of this element in the discourses’ manner of address is testified by a cluster of journal notes from 1849–50. Intriguingly, these relate back to the initial dedication of the discourses to Kierkegaard’s father. We have seen that Kierkegaard noted that this dedication was intended for her – a somewhat odd remark, given that she had good grounds for believing that Søren’s rejection of her was in some way attributable to his relation to the father. Now, however, this dedication seems to be about to be surpassed or, at least, complicated, since Kierkegaard seems to be laying plans to dedicate his next set of discourses to Regine: The dedication to Regine Schlegel, if there can be such a thing during my lifetime, could very well find its place in the front of a small collection of Friday-discourses but nevertheless essentially belongs to the writings on my work as an author. In the moment that I appear so decisively in the character of the religious, as that which I have wanted from the beginning, she alone is important, since my relation to her is a God-relationship. The dedication could read: R. S. – to whom, with this little book, is dedicated an authorship, that to a certain degree belongs to her, by one who belongs to her completely … (Pap. X 5 B 263) And, in a further note, Kierkegaard develops this further: To a contemporary, whose name must still be unspoken, but whom history will name – be it for a shorter or a longer time – as long as it names me is dedicated with this little book the whole of the authorship, as it was from the beginning. (Pap. X 5 B 264) Finally, the dedication is printed in a simplified form in a set of two discourses for the Friday communion published in 1851: ‘To one unnamed whose name some day shall be named is dedicated along with this little book the whole of the authorship from the very beginning.’ (SV 3 17, p. 25 [163]). What is especially interesting for interpreting the relationship between the engagement crisis and Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings is the seemingly definitive statement of the aim of the authorship in the Foreword to the same volume:

Building up love’s ruins 177 A gradually progressing work as a writer which had its beginning in Either/ Or seeks here its definite point of rest at the foot of the altar, where the author, who personally knows best his imperfections and guilt, does not by any means call himself a witness for the truth, but only a peculiar sort of poet and thinker who, ‘without authority’, has nothing new to bring but would read the fundamental document of the individual human existence-relationship, the old, well-known, handed down from the fathers – he would read it through yet once again, if possible in a more heartfelt way. (SV 3 17, p. 27 [165]) This story of dedications and little hints may seem to be, almost literally, marginal – but such matters were enormously important to Kierkegaard himself and for that reason alone deserve to be taken seriously. If we take the cumulative force of the references cited here (and they are by no means exhaustive), we can scarcely avoid recognising the fundamental connection between what is going on in the upbuilding writings and the eros, albeit the wounded, even the broken eros, of the relation to Regine. Here, then, is where we can begin to see how the radical separation of agape and eros in Works of Love is best comprehensible in the light of the whole surrounding discourse about eros (including all the misunderstandings, errors and sufferings to which eros can give rise) as developed through the engagement writings, including the discourses. This is not quite to say that the ‘love’ of Works of Love is a simple sublimation of erotic love (whatever that might mean) but, less grandly, that the refusal of eros makes sense only in a context in which eros has first been experienced, so that refusal is not at all the same as mere denial. The final dedication of the work to Regine, the appeal to a shared naming (and ‘at the foot of the altar’ – the altar of marriage?), suggests something like a sublimation but also the continuing acknowledgement of the obligations incurred by the initial movement of eros and the continuing ‘owning’ (in the sense this term has acquired in contemporary therapy) of the feelings associated with that initial movement. If the flood of passion has subsided, or, in this case perhaps, been dammed, what is left is not nothing, not sheer absence, but a debt, an outstanding claim against him. This is not merely emotional but also moral and religious. Or, to put it another way, emotion, eros, the movement of preferential love, can itself generate moral and religious obligations. III We shall return to the further development and implications of these remarks at the end of this and in the subsequent chapter. First, though, let us look more closely at how the story of the broken engagement figures in the texts themselves. In order to allow the full extent of the interdependence of life and literature to come into view, I shall offer an intensive reading of the presence of the engagement crisis in the first two discourses of 1843, but I shall subsequently,

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and briefly, indicate a number of other passages in later discourses where the issues raised by the engagement crisis continue to resonate. We have already heard Kierkegaard acknowledge that the Foreword to the first set of two discourses was addressed in a quite specific sense to ‘her’ as part of a double strategy. On the one hand, he was representing himself, in what he regarded as a gesture of ‘studied gallantry’, as a seducer figure. The discourses, however, offer a quite different ‘explanation’ for his conduct, an ‘explanation’ that draws the crisis into the realm of the religious, where the only true explanation for what happened is to be found. I shall, then, proceed to read these two discourses against the background of the engagement crisis, reading in them the struggles of one still seeking to offer the love and pain of this broken relationship to God and to find, from God, for himself and for ‘her’, an explanation for the paradoxical conjunction of both love and pain. The first, ‘The Expectation of Faith: New Year’s Day’ is on the text of Galatians 3: 23 to end; a text, that, not inappropriately, speaks of ‘the faith which should afterwards be revealed’ and of the present state of one ‘kept under the Law’ and thus ‘shut up unto’ faith, and there may be a thematic link with the engagement literature here in terms of the revelation of a truth that has been concealed under a contrary exterior, although such a link, if it exists at all, is not at all developed in the discourse itself. As is usual in Kierkegaard’s discourses, the subject matter itself is approached via an extended prelude (in this case a third of the total length!), which opens by figuring the discourse as being spoken to a congregation gathered ‘in the Lord’s house’ on New Year’s Day. Although this may seem to work against the force of the address to ‘that individual’ it is striking that the fiction of a congregation is not sustained and that the discourse slips from time to time into addressing ‘my listener’ [singular] rather than ‘my listeners’ [plural]. On such an occasion, the speaker notes, we are accustomed to wish each other well. Usually these seasonal greetings are merely generalised expressions of good will – but there may be one person for whom we feel something rather more special: ‘Our heart inclines more closely to him [than to others], and we are more concerned for his well-being [than for theirs].’ (SKS 5, p. 18 [8]). We should not be misled by the gender of the pronouns used here, for it belongs to the fiction that what we have before us is an address spoken in a Church service. Nor, in any case, would it help Kierkegaard’s maieutic task by identifying ‘that individual’ openly. Looking beyond the formality of the necessary conventionality of the discourse, however, it is not hard to see that the concern for ‘a particular person’ marks the beginning of what is, in effect, a story of unhappy love, the narrative structure of which is to sustain the remainder of the prelude and which, like other love stories scattered through the authorship (signed and pseudonymous) refigures the story of Søren and Regine and, in doing so, offers (and offers to her in particular) a re-evaluation and reinterpretation of that story. The moving force in this unhappy love story is provided by the lover’s concern over what to wish his beloved – and we may note that the plea that he would

Building up love’s ruins 179 have done and would do anything for her good is repeated many times in Kierkegaard’s writings ‘about “her” ’ (e.g. ‘If I had not been a penitent … I would willingly, more than willingly, have done everything [for her] … What happiness for me to be able to make her happy who, though, has suffered so much on my account’ [Pap. X 5 A 149/NB 15:4]); ‘… I who in my melancholy had only one wish: to enchant her …’ [Pap. X 5 A 150/NB 15:4]). Such remarks, and there are many more, identify ‘the wish’ and ‘wishing’ in the discourses as a kind of leitmotif for the spontaneous, immediate and unbroken longing that Kierkegaard identified most strongly with the upsurge of erotic love for this singular, individual woman. The presence of the engagement crisis becomes even more marked as we hear of the difficulties that will confront such a lover when he considers what to wish for the beloved. Dramatically, and in the space of a few lines, we are told that his thought ‘runs wild in its restless attempts to force or to entice from the riddle an explanation; looking about itself it dashes from one possibility to another, but in vain.’ This ‘soul full of wishes becomes dejected’, it is ‘like a prisoner’: ‘What others do easily and without effort seems to this person to be heavy and difficult; what he himself does easily for others seems to him hard in relation to the one he loves most, and the difficulty becomes greater the more he loves.’ (SKS 5, p. 19 [9]) But what is his problem? Most lovers find it easy to think of things they want for their beloved, and surely the somewhat banal insight that we do not always know what is for the best ought not to cause this level of distress? It is only, I suggest, when that insight is contextualised in a relationship in which the lover has a peculiar spiritual responsibility for the other that it can cause heart-searching such as this. And, of course, over and above the understanding that he shared with Assessor Vilhelm concerning the asymmetry between man and woman with regard to the religious responsibility assumed in marriage, Kierkegaard regarded himself as having a quite unusual responsibility vis-à-vis Regine: ‘I have borne the responsibility for her to the point of bearing responsibility for her life’ (Pap. X 1 A 661) he wrote in 1849. The impossibility of knowing what to wish for the beloved drives our lover to a state in which, although ‘he does not want to let the beloved slip out of his power, or give him (read: her) over to the power of the future, and yet he must’ (SKS 5, p. 19 [9]). Perhaps such a surrendering of the beloved to the future does not immediately or necessarily imply the ending of the relationship, humanly speaking, yet the language that is now being used marks a powerful escalation of the figurative investment being made by the story-teller. It is, after all, not self-evident that the recognition of the limits of what one person can spiritually do for another should be metaphorised as a ‘surrender’ – much as it might seem so to one who, in his own love-story had had to hear the words ‘… “You must let her go.” ’ (X 5 A 150/NB 15: 15). And how might not such a metaphor arouse the attention of ‘that individual’ reader who had herself been surrendered, even, shall we say, sacrificed? We return to the story as told in the discourse.

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Is there anything that such a perplexed lover might wish for his beloved? Faith perhaps? But no: the logic of faith and the logic of the wish turn out to be mutually exclusive. I cannot wish faith for another because ‘only by willing it himself could the other personally hold of it’ (SKS 5, p. 23 [13]). The lover has found, in faith, the one thing that is unequivocally good for the beloved but ‘what he could confidently wish for, and behold! it could not be wished’ (SKS 5, p. 23 [14]). ‘Is all of life, then, but a contradiction,’ the discourse asks, ‘can love not explain it but only make it more difficult?’ (SKS 5, p. 23 14]). Yet these thoughts also bring relief to the unhappy lover. They reveal ‘a new glory of faith that no human being can give it to another, but that what is highest, noblest, and most sacred in being human is what every human being has if he wants to have it …’ (SKS 5, p. 24 [14]). Yet if in this way the relationship can be re-evaluated from a religious point of view, the process of re-evaluation has itself brought about a change in the relationship: ‘Their lives had become more meaningful than before, and yet they had become like strangers to each other. His heart, which had been so rich in wishes before, had now become poor; his hand, which was so willing to help before, had now learned to be still, because he knew that it did not help. It was the truth he had seen, but this truth had not made him happy.’ (SKS 5, p. 24 [14–5]) The relationship is brought to an impasse. Life is a contradiction. Neither love nor truth can explain it, but make it more difficult. As far as the lovers are concerned, this truth ‘had separated them forever and ever in a way that death itself could not have separated them’ (SKS 5, p. 24 [15]). And now the lover achieves one last, liberating insight. Noting that if he had been able to give religious faith to the beloved then he would also have been able to give it away, thereby reducing her to a state of dependency that would disturb their relationship, he still sees for himself a maieutic function, namely to expose anything that is less than the highest good (faith) in its secondrateness and to demonstrate that faith can only be acquired by the self that wills to have it, in actually willing it. By presupposing its existence in the beloved, he will ‘bring her to will to have it on her own.’ This unhappy love story, then, seems to have found a happy ending of sorts: yet, note that the task that the lover has set himself is the very task that the discourse, understood as personally addressed to ‘that individual’, has set itself. This task is to persuade ‘her’ that the earthly separation of the lovers and the transformation of their love into and by means of faith are not incompatible. As the theme turns to ‘the expectation of faith’, the lover/writer offers the beloved the assurance that in faith, in the realm of the religious, in eternity, their love, despite appearances, does have a future and is not just a matter of the poetically charged recollection of the past, as Søren’s last letters to Regine might have seemed (probably deliberately) to have suggested.1 The discourse is in this way the answer to its own question: it is the maieutic means by which she can put aside all false interpretations and come to read their relationship religiously; to see it, to repeat it even, sub specie aeternitatis. The prelude draws to a close and the main theme of the discourse is

Building up love’s ruins 181 announced: the expectancy of faith. Delivering a warning to those who have already drawn up life’s accounts and who have no further expectations, great or small, it addresses itself to those still willing and able to look to the future. For all expectation is oriented towards the future as that which gives meaning and value to the present: ‘So it is first when one has conquered [the future], that his life in the present becomes strong and sound.’ (SKS 5, p. 27 [17]). But what is this struggle with the future unless it is a struggle with the self? Yet, since no one is stronger than their self, whence can a person derive the strength needed for victory over the self unless it is from the eternal? It is faith itself, and the expectation of faith, that all things work together for good for those who love God, that provides assurance of victory to come. Of course, not all wishes are fulfilled nor all desires gratified. Yet even when impotent in the face of a contrary reality, the addressee of the discourse still has the power ‘to smile as long at least as you believed anyone sought an explanation, a testimony in your expression’, to stifle ‘the anguished scream welling up from inside you that would disturb them’ (SKS 5, p. 31 [23]), ‘quietly to bear his solitary pain,’ rather than ‘shouting out’ (SKS 5, p. 32 [23]). Even when ‘the storms of life crush youth’s joyous expectations, when existence … demands everything back,’ the believer can remember that his expectation did not look to the world but to God (SKS 5, p. 32 [24]). Although we no longer have the narrative thread of the prelude to guide us, much of this is evocative of the engagement crisis and of the stance Søren understood himself as having assumed in that crisis. But now we come to a more direct hint. For the reader is asked to consider the case of someone of whom they can say, ‘I have faith in him’. But what if something ‘inexplicable’ happened, something ‘inconceivable’, an event that is not identified but that is of such a dramatic nature that all the others fall away ‘or, rather … showed that they had never had faith in him’ (SKS 5, p. 33 [24]). Perhaps the reader will continue to have faith in that person, even if he (read: she) pushes that faith to the point at which it is almost wrong to have faith in a human being. Perhaps this faith ‘was only something imagined … a fleeting emotion, a reflection of my earthly happiness’ (SKS 5, p. 34 [25]). And so, she is warned, ‘if in this faith you forgot that there was a higher faith, then, despite its beauty, this faith would nevertheless only have been to your ruin’ (SKS 5, p. 33 [25]). Yet, if faith in God remains, ‘the expectation of faith – which is victory’ may still be hers. Others might mock, but in place of the visible union of lives, another consummation is offered: ‘Now we are separated; we do not see each other daily, but meet secretly in the victorious moment of faithful expectation.’ (SKS 5 34 [26]). If the prelude told its story from the side of the lover, here, it would seem, we have a view from the side of the beloved, the beloved who had been surrendered to the power of the future but who can now find assurance of victory by means of that same power. Such a doubling of perspective is, as in the twofold retelling of the story of Jesus and the sinful woman who burst into the dinner at the house of Simon the Pharisee,2 a technique to which Kierkegaard

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has frequent recourse in these upbuilding works and that further reflects their characteristic dialogism. By this means we are shown that the hope of the lover and the hope of the beloved can still meet in the absolute future that is the power of the eternal – despite their failure to understand each other in, with and under the conditions of finite temporality. The closing prayer ends by reworking an image from the preface. There the author saw how the discourse, journeying on its way, at last found ‘that individual’ to whom it stretched out its arms. Now it is God who ‘after having led us by his hand through the world withdraws his hand and opens his arms to embrace in them the yearning soul’ (SKS 5, p. 37 [29]). Can it be, then, that for ‘that individual’ the embrace of the discourse can become the embrace of God, if she wins from it the hope that faith’s expectancy explains all? This is a different kind of consummation from what she had originally looked for, perhaps, but it is a consummation nonetheless. The second of the two discourses reads very differently from the first. Here the text – Kierkegaard’s ‘favourite’, James 1: 17–22 – is printed in full, and the opening verse, ‘Every good and perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation,’ is repeated throughout the discourse. Although this repetitive, almost incantatory invocation of the apostolic words interrupts the narrative structure that was apparent in the previous discourse, here too the traces of the life that has been transubstantiated into literature are scattered across the surface of the text . Already we are put on the alert when the opening prayer speaks of how the ‘mighty hand’ of God, which offers such rich blessings, seems sometimes ‘to be withdrawn’. May we come to see such times of withdrawal, the prayer asks, as preparatory to a renewed and a greater blessing. In the spirit of Galatians 3: 23 the obscurity of the present will find its explanation in a future revelation. Beginning with an invocation to take the text as seriously as its apostolic origin deserves, Kierkegaard contrasts two different types of person, with whom we are, by now, quite familiar. One is the immediate person, who reposes ‘in that law of nature that permits a man to develop himself in the world in the same way that it spreads a carpet of flowers over the earth … [for such a one] life has no riddles’ – and yet, he warns, ‘their life is a riddle’ (SKS 5, pp. 43–4 [33]). The other is ‘a troubled one’, one of those whom life ‘did not suckle with the milk of success, but turned away early; the grieving ones …’. Neither of these types can fully appreciate the apostle’s words. The former take life’s blessings too much for granted, whereas the latter are fixated on an otherworldly hope; for them, these words ‘awoke in them a confidence that was continually disappointed; they gave them wings that could indeed lift them up to God but did not help to them on their way through life’ (SKS 5, p. 44 [34]). But, the discourse asks, ‘Is God to be known as good only by heaven and by the spirit that flees the earth; does this earthly life know nothing of this?’ (SKS 5, p. 44 [35]). But what if these characters, the immediate one and the melancholy one,

Building up love’s ruins 183 are not merely picked out from the universal catalogue of human types but are imagined as having been brought into relationship to each other? The discourse does not ask this directly, but the characterisation of these two figures is strikingly reminiscent of the dramatis personae of the engagement crisis as Kierkegaard sketched them on a number of occasions. See, for example, Frater Taciturnus’ description of the protagonists in Quidam’s Diary, ‘he is shut up in himself – she cannot even be that … He is melancholy – she is full of the joy of life … He is essentially a thinker – she is anything but … He is ethical-dialectical – she, aesthetically immediate … He is sympathetic – she in the sense of immediacy is innocently self-loving’ (SV3 8, p. 224ff. [427ff.]). Or, in the journal, where Kierkegaard wrote of her as ‘a loveable child’ and of himself as being already ‘old, as an old man’ (Pap. X 5 A 150.7/NB 15: 15). We are by now not surprised to learn that the melancholy one’s problem centres on the question of an earthly happiness, a question that goes to the heart of the engagement crisis insofar as marriage to ‘her’ and human happiness were, for ‘him’, one and the same, ‘… to be married to her would have made me happy, more than I had ever dreamed of becoming …’ – if it had not been for his understanding of himself as ‘penitent that’, his ‘vita ante acta’, his melancholy (Pap. X 5 A 149.6/NB 15: 4). As we read further in the discourse, we learn that the soul of the melancholy one conceals a wish. He does not childishly demand the immediate fulfilment of this wish, but it drives him to the verge of tempting God: This wish is so important to me; my joy, my peace, my future, everything depends on it; it is so very important for me; it is so easy for God, since he is Almighty. But it was not fulfilled. (Pap. X 5 A 150.5/NB 15: 15) Recalling what was said above about the wish as a leitmotif for the presence of ‘engagement’ themes, compare the journal: I once prayed to God for her as for a gift, the loveliest; for a moment, when I also glimpsed the possibility of consummating a marriage, I thanked God for her as for a gift … (Pap. X 5 A 150.5/NB 15: 15) As we surely expect, the soul is refused his wish and suffers extreme torment as a result: [Y]ou left nothing untried; you scaled the dizzy peaks of presentiment to spy out whether any possibility might show itself [and] when you believed you saw one, you were instantly on the spot with your prayers, so that they might help you to turn what seemed to be there into actuality. But it was a mirage. You climbed down again and gave yourself up to sorrow’s anaesthetising dullness. Time would pass and things would turn out well.

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Building up love’s ruins And morning came, and evening came, but the day you wished for did not break. And yet you did indeed do everything, you prayed early and late, more and more inwardly, more and more temptingly. Ah! but still it did not come to pass. (SKS 5, p. 45 [36])

Such a one, renouncing even the certainty that eternity would bring him his wish, ‘the delight of your eye and your heart’s desire,’ finally develops ‘the meekness that receives the word that was planted in you and that could make your soul blessed: the word that every good and every perfect gift comes from above’ and is made humble enough to accept that God exchanged ‘your earthly wishes and foolish desires’ for ‘divine comfort and holy thoughts … denied you a wish but in compensation created this faith in your heart’ (SKS 5, p. 45 [36]). If all this says a great deal about the religious transmutation of the engagement crisis, the discourse goes on to illustrate the point by a human parable in the very passage that the journal specifies as being ‘a slight hint’ to ‘her’. ‘Suppose,’ Kierkegaard says, ‘there was a person in whom you really trusted because he wished you well, but you had one idea as to what was good for him, and he had another.’ Naturally, you (she!) try to persuade him to come round to your way of thinking, but if he persists, surely you must in the end say to yourself: If my prayers were to move him to do what he did not regard as right, then something even more terrible would have happened, that I had been weak enough to make him just as weak as me; then I would have lost him and my trust in him, although in the moment of intoxication I would have called his weakness love. (SKS 5, p. 46 [37]) After this ‘hint’ the discourse moves back to its main theme: the Godrelationship of the one denied his wish. The interplay between this, the main thread of the discourse, and the ‘human’ interlude, the ‘hint’ to ‘her’, might raise the question of whether we have been wrong in reading the discourse as describing the situation from his perspective. However, the complementarity of the ‘his’ and ‘her’ perspectives is not accidental. Possibly referring to this discourse, he speaks of his ‘hint’ to her to submit to the situation. This ‘hint’ was justified, he wrote, ‘Because I was not the Lord but was myself struggling with a higher power, and in this my inward struggle reflected her struggle with me.’ (Pap. X I A 665). The structure of the ‘his’ and ‘her’ perspectives are parallel, although focused on different objects. Changing tack, the discourse moves on to examine the question of how we know what gifts are in fact good, interpreting the adjectives ‘good’ and ‘perfect’ as referring to the objective goodness of the gift and its suitability for the recipient respectively. But such questions are said to lead to doubt and to

Building up love’s ruins 185 encourage us to pick and choose between what we give thanks for and what we do not, thus robbing the words of their apostolic authority over us. Crossreferring to Paul, the discourse reminds us that ‘Everything is good if it is received with thankfulness’. Yes, everything – if we dare to understand it in this way. But dare we? The discourse poses an ever more intense series of questions that ends, ‘And when your wish was denied you, did you thank God? And when you yourself had to deny yourself your wish, did you thank God? And when people did you wrong and insulted you, did you thank God?’ (SKS 5, p. 51 [43]). In these last three questions we again see the impress of the engagement crisis: the wish that was denied, the fact that he himself had to be the agent of its denial and that he was slanderously misunderstood and made the butt of malicious gossip – including a ticking-off in absentia from F. C. Sibbern (not only one of Kierkegaard’s professors but also a sometime chaperone to the two lovers), an event which his letters to Emil Boesen reveal caused him particular annoyance. Yet in all such trials the one who has faith must thank God: that is precisely the measure of their love of God. But who is strong enough to love God in this way? In the light of this question, the next section of the discourse argues that the requirement of thanksgiving is only practicable if it is rooted in the still more fundamental act of repentance: For even the one who is always willing to give thanks nevertheless loves according to what he judges to be perfect, whilst a person can love God in truth only when he loves him in the light of his own imperfection. Which love is this? It is repentant love … for in repentance it is God who loves you. In repentance you receive everything from God, even the thanksgiving that you bring to him. (SKS 5, p. 53 [45–6]) But we are still not finished, for even in repentance there lurks the danger of egotism – if, for example, we are motivated by the desire for self-punishment: ‘The wrath within you wanted, as it were, to come to the help of the divine wrath so that punishment might consume you.’ (SKS 5, p. 54 [47]). But even then, even if the punishment falls on such a self-torturer who can say ‘yes’ to all that special providence brings down upon him, what if there is something in the punishment that cannot be accepted or explained, an undefined ‘more’ as the discourse calls it. Could such a ‘more’ be that the punishment falls upon the innocent as well as upon himself, the guilty one? Perhaps we might read these shadowy words in the light of such comments on the engagement crisis as this: I thanked God for her as for a gift; later I had to see her as God’s punishment of me … And in truth God punishes fearfully! What a horrific punishment

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His own tendency to self-torture; the movement of self-punishment; the pain the separation caused ‘her’, a pain that became a part of his punishment – is this pain perhaps the ‘more’ from God that he could not bear? Even in this extremity, however, if the sufferer can still cleave to God with the conviction that God is love and does it all out of love, then, ‘even though the outer being was damaged, the inner being was nevertheless renewed’. The discourse closes with a prayer that the apostle’s words may be received in this spirit, the spirit of a ‘saving obedience.’ The two discourses of May 1843, then, offer more than an obscure ‘hint to her’ about how to read the engagement crisis. The traces of this crisis could be tracked elsewhere among the eighteen discourses, although it is perhaps rarely present in such a sustained and concentrated manner as in these two. We might, for example, think of the first two discourses on ‘Love covers a multitude of sins’, where we see the counterposing of two very different judgements on, in the one case, the sinful woman at the dinner party and, in the other, the woman taken in adultery. In each case Kierkegaard emphasises the contrast between the world’s censorious and condemnatory judgement and the love of Christ that covers such sins for the sake of and in the spirit of love – a ‘hint’ that his own behaviour was susceptible of very differing interpretations. In Repetition Kierkegaard had used the young hero’s enthusiasm for the biblical figure of Job to bring Job’s experience of loss and despair into connection with the engagement crisis, so here too, in the discourse on Job, there are further explorations of the theme of loss and its implications for the God-relationship. And what of Anna, the widow who was nevertheless faithful through a long, long lifetime to her expectation of a final fulfilment? Or we might fast-forward to the last discourse, on ‘The one who strives in prayer’. Like the first it speaks of struggle and of victory in struggle; like the second it speaks of the prayer that asks for what is good for the one who prays; and, like both, it sees both struggle and prayer as being concentrated in the demand for an explanation. Brought to a standstill, annihilated by the power of the contradictions in which he is enmeshed, such a one gains his final victory when God is victorious over him in such a way that he was transfigured in God by coming to reflect the image of God. The full force of this, in connection with the engagement crisis, will, necessarily, depend on recognising the complementarity between the relationships of the lovers to one another and to God. Remembering this we will then read in the expression of hope in final victory or ultimate transfiguration the vindication of his certainty that if he truly did what he did out of love, and may therefore come to be transfigured in God, so she too, if she is faithful to

Building up love’s ruins 187 her love for him, may be transfigured. On the one hand, she will be transfigured by what she, through him, will become: She was the beloved. My life is unconditionally to accentuate her life, my authorship can thus be regarded as a monument in her honour and praise. I take her with me into history. And I who in my melancholy had only one single wish: to enchant her – there it is not denied me. (Pap. X 5 A 150.5/NB 15: 14) But if this seems too redolent of male solipsism, making her, and her happiness, a mere adjunct to his religious crisis, transfiguration is also held out as the goal of the discourses’ maieutic work, whereby, as address to her, and as an attempt to offer an explanation to her, she is liberated from her human dependence on him to seek the fulfilment of her own God-relationship. It is hard at this point to resist asking about ‘her’, even if such a question digresses from the main line of our enquiry. Did she get the explanation that was being offered? Many of Kierkegaard’s own comments suggest that she was taken in by the ‘Seducer’ line and that if she had known the truth she would have been unable to comprehend it, a situation that was demonstrated by her relatively speedy marriage to Fritz Schlegel. The immediacy of such a young girl cannot grasp the reflection, the double-, the multiple-reflection, that a religious melancholy and a religious crisis such as that suffered by Søren involves! I was to be captured. And I had to be captured thus: that, in the deepest sense, I came into conflict with myself. Therefore the other party had to be someone who in a sense was nobody … For that, a woman was to be used … (Pap. X 2 A 3) The whole crisis it seems was, in an eminent sense, his alone: I have always commanded when I should be wounded … In a sense, I put the bow in her hand, I myself set the arrow, showed her how to take aim – my idea was – and it was love – either I become yours or you will be permitted to wound me so deeply, wound me in my melancholy and in my God-relationship, so deeply, that I, though separated from you, yet remain yours. (Pap. X V A 150.1/NB 15: 13) Was the whole thing then no more than a shadow-play in Søren’s magical puppet-theatre? What we know of her response, apart from Søren’s conjectures, is very indirectly communicated in the documents that she released for publication after her death.3 The Editor’s Preface to these documents appears to reflect her

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own, very guarded, comments on the crisis, and there are further clues to be gleaned from two letters to Henrik Lund, Søren’s nephew, who oversaw the handing-over of such papers and items as she accepted from Søren’s bequest to her of all his worldly goods. Her comments do not entirely bear out the image of blithe immediacy that Søren and such associates as Frater Taciturnus paint. Indeed, she expressly and with some vehemence rejected the charge that she had no religious presuppositions. At home she had received a full religious education; from an early age her mother had taken her with her to the ‘Congregation of Saints’, and from early on the Bible and Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ had been her favourite reading, to which she continued to hold fast throughout her life. However, she had neither the ability nor the desire to talk about her God-relationship, fearing that in a certain sense the best thing about it would thereby be volatilised.4 (A view she could indeed have learned from the pages of Imitatio Christi itself!) Schlegel, we are told, accepted that ‘it wasn’t easy to have been Søren Kierkegaard’s fiancée, nor yet to have been his former fiancée’ and the issue was from time to time discussed between them: ‘Even as a newly engaged couple we see them in the evening in Schlegel’s room, sitting and reading aloud to each other from Kierkegaard’s writings,’ in which she recognized her story and his, transformed into ‘poetry and truth’ by his poetic spirit. Despite everything, despite her love for her husband, she still, in her last days, remembered ‘with inner conviction’ Kierkegaard’s words to her: ‘Look, Regine, in eternity there is no such thing as marriage; there both Schlegel and I will delight to be together with you.’ Ignoring what a travelling ironist might make of such a heavenly menage à trois, we also learn from the letter to Henrik Lund that she had recognised herself in the preface to the three ‘godly’ discourses on The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air published in 1849, a preface that was also dated 5 May and that referred back to the preface of 5 May 1843, and she speaks directly of herself as having been sacrificed to God, ‘whether it was from an innate tendency to self-punishment (a doubt which he himself raised) or, which I believe, that the time and the requirements of his work were the cause, as a result of an inner calling from God.’ Whether Regine reached this conclusion in the course of the engagement crisis itself (whatever Søren’s perception of her response), whether she inferred it from the discourses and other literary works, or whether it was from later events or from her perusal after his death of his letters and papers, we do not know. My argument here, however, is limited to the following point: that she could have read it in these discourses and that, perhaps more extensively than Søren’s mention of ‘a little hint’ suggests, they offered an explanation of the crisis in the direction of the religious. Thus, in the measure that she so received them they became for her not merely an explanation but a transfiguration of the love and the pain of their relationship. This carries with it the important implication that the religious meaning and value of the discourses are therefore inseparable from how she might have received them.

Building up love’s ruins 189 If ‘that individual’ is herself a part of the process that gives the discourses the religious power they have, their biographical meaning comes to confirm the evidence of their formal dialogicality and to argue against the view that the religion they express points to the ontological solitude of the human condition. By the way in which the discourses represent the transubstantiation of the love and the pain of the engagement crisis they tell the story of how he got out of it and found himself before God. As an address to her, the discourses themselves are a part of the story and so is she. They are dialogue not monologue. However darkly, they do not speak of one but of two. In Bakhtin’s sense they are ‘doublevoiced discourses’, defined by him as ‘incorporating a relation to someone else’s utterance as an indispensable element’.5 Bakhtin’s further comment on the self-utterances of Dostoevsky’s ‘later heroes’ is also relevant here: they arise, he wrote, ‘out of two merged rejoinders, but the interruption of voices in them goes [so] deep, into such subtle elements of thought and discourse, that to turn them into a visible and crude dialogue … is of course utterly impossible.’6 That seems an apt description of the literary remains of the attempts by Søren and Regine to understand each other and to articulate the belief that each maintained in the reality of their love. These comments in some respects confirm the view of Martin Buber that, compared to Heidegger, Kierkegaard was a thinker who knew the ‘Thou’: that the Kierkegaardian conscience is not an ‘it’ that calls us to ourselves but exists only in the voice of an other who calls us.7 However, whereas Buber understands Kierkegaard as speaking only to the ‘Thou’ that is the ‘Thou’ of God – for which he, Søren, was prepared to sacrifice all human relationships – my interpretation of the discourses points to the inseparability of the human and religious drama that was Kierkegaard’s life and authorship. If in these discourse we become capable of hearing the cry of the lover from whose arms the beloved has been torn away, we shall discern in the emptiness of his arms the space that awaits a second voice; a space left open for the joyful possibility of a consummating embrace in which both voices are reunited and separation conquered.8 And if it is this embrace that gives these words the religious meaning that they seek, then it follows that we too, in reading them today, will only find them religiously transforming words in the measure that we ourselves, each in our unique individuality, understand ourselves as beingin-relationship, responsible before and to the other, and willing (and here’s the tragedy, perhaps, of Søren himself) to be held in the embrace of the other, in a mutuality of exchange – never, of course, to be won without passion and never to be possessed without the risk of pain. Using biography to expand our understanding of the dialogicality of the discourses in this way is not done in order to reduce that dialogicality to the historical fact of the encounter between Søren and Regine. The distinctive character of these texts is not the way in which they reveal their historical past but the way in which they are dialogically constructed as an appeal to the future, an appeal that he might yet meet her in the light of that future transfiguration that would explain all. Moreover, I claim, this appeal, that is both dialogical and existential, is so embedded in the structure of the discourses,

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that it reaches out beyond ‘ her’, the discourses’ first reader, so as to resonate also for us who come after. But, it might be objected, even if the discourses do contain a special lesson or even a word of encouragement for readers of later times who might see in it a distant mirroring of their own experiences of unhappy love, surely the story of Søren and Regine is so peculiar, so one-off, that this is only ever going to apply to a very small, even a diminutive number of people? Of course, if we only allow texts to speak to us as and when we are able to get a very precise fit between the text and our own experiences, then Kierkegaard’s are not the only works about love that are going to fall below our horizon of interest. Not only Dante and Beatrice or Abelard and Heloise but many more modern heroes and heroines of frustrated and sublimated love are going to drop out of sight. Literary loves can always be dismissed with a derogatory sneer: What have the lovers of Henry James or Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster, of Baudelaire, or Genet or de Beauvoir to do with us? But my argument has not been intended to promote this particular story as exemplary. What is interesting about it is not simply the story itself, but Kierkegaard’s insistence on attempting to retrieve meaning from his love’s failure and, thus, his bringing to the fore the question of what it is that gives human love its significance and value. Very few stories of unhappy love will have anything like the shape of the story of Søren and Regine, but the transmutation that the story undergoes in the discourses highlights one very particular and, humanly, particularly difficult question. The universal limitations of the human condition (sickness, death, ignorance, folly, etc.) would seem to count against human love finding total fulfilment on the plane of earthly life: no matter how strong the lovers’ desire for union, some residue of misunderstanding, of non-fulfilment or non-coincidence will always remain; but does the impossibility of such total fulfilment mean that we must regard love as meaningless or, less drastically, as not suitable for being an ‘ultimate concern’? Let me try to spell out this point by reference to a non-Kierkegaardian text and a brief commentary upon it. The text is Karen Blixen’s short story, Babette’s Feast.9 One of the strands in the story concerns Laurens Loewenhielm, a dissolute young Swedish army officer, who falls in love with Martine, one of two daughters of a pietistic country priest. Realising that there is no place for him in her life, Loewenhielm returns home and sets out on a course of self-advancement, rising to the rank of general. Over thirty years later he returns to the village where Martine still lives, and participates in the splendid feast that Babette, the sisters’ French cook, prepares to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of their father’s birth. As he is leaving, Loewenhielm speaks to Martine in the hall and tells her that there has not been a single day of his life when he has not been with her in his heart, and there will not be a single one of the days left to him when he will not be with her though they will never see each other again. He assures her that, through his visit and the almost religious communion engendered by the miracle of the feast, he has come to realise that, ‘in this beautiful life of ours, nothing is impossible’. She assures him that she knows it too, and they part, this time forever.

Building up love’s ruins 191 Again the story is by no means typical, and the human motivations are, perhaps, more mixed than in the story of Søren and Regine (in his telling of it, that is). Here, however, an understanding is spoken and acknowledged by both sides, and it is an understanding that the only way of realising their love has been by accepting its impossibility, by allowing the other to live a separate life, and to make no claim either way, although, crucially, the fact that a word is spoken and understood means that this is not just a matter of having drifted apart into mutual indifference. It might still be objected that this is a charming literary tale that has no obvious application to the world of actual relationships in the fast-moving and complex world of the twenty-first century, where we meet very few generals and very few maiden daughters of pietistic parish priests. I am suggesting, however, that Loewenhielm’s words, which I take to be a precise epitome of the meditation on the engagement crisis carried out in and through the upbuilding discourses, do pinpoint the very important testimony offered by Kierkegaard. Not every love is unhappy in this way, and some love, it seems, is, after all, happy. But even where lovers are able to live happily ever after, part of that happiness is to do with their readiness to see into the impossibility of their own final fulfilment in that love. To put it paradoxically, part of the condition for living happily ever after is to live with the knowledge that living happily ever after is an impossibility, i.e. it is not something that we can determine on the basis of our own good sense, wilfulness or determination. Having the other, and letting the other go are profoundly interconnected in an inversion of the more familiar observation that jealousy is, all too often, the quickest means to effect what the jealous person most fears. This is not to say that ‘success’ is just a matter of chance, since, if we cannot determine the outcome of our efforts, we do have the freedom to direct and regulate our behaviour in the light of the best possible understanding of our situation. While the idea of total fulfilment, of perfect love, may be unrealisable in this world, such an idea can nevertheless serve to regulate the way in which we make a path for ourselves through the complexities of human relationships – although it is crucial that we keep in mind the very unrealisability of the idea and the concomitant knowledge that we are none of us perfect in love. Kierkegaard’s proposal is that love lives only under the condition of its final unfulfilability. Putting it like this shows how Kierkegaard’s private and unrepeatable experience of the erotic could, after all, yield an outcome that is relevant to lovers with quite different experiences. Every one of us must learn to let the beloved out of our grasp and hand him or her over to the power of the future. The person who says ‘I cannot live without him’ shows by those very words that she has little understanding of what love really requires of us. Again it must be emphasised, however, that this point, and the way in which it demonstrates how the discourses can function as a resource for moral enquiry, is not primarily to do with the correctness or otherwise of Kierkegaard’s anthropological theory or psychological observations, but the way in which, by being what they are as a personal address, the discourses bring to the fore

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the element and the urgency of mutual answerability, of what it is to be one another’s keepers, the obligation to do all that we can, limited as that may be, to keep each other in hope. They show that there is something we can still do when we commit ourselves to go on loving even when we can no longer give a reason or a justification for it. In doing so they also throw open a passage from the language of human needs, longings and aspirations to the language of religion. Notes 1 See S. Kierkegaard (1978) Letters and Documents, Princeton: Princeton University Press, Letters 39, 40 and 42. 2 See Chapter 8 below. 3 I have used the German edition. Sören Kierkegaard und sein Verhältnis zu ‘ihr’, Stuttgart, Axel Juncker, 1905, tr. and ed. R. Meyer. Meyer interviewed Regine in the late 1890s. 4 Ibid., pp. v–vi. 5 M. Bakhtin (1984) Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, pp. 185–6. 6 Ibid., p. 210. 7 See Buber’s essays The Question to the Single One and What is Man? in English translation in the collection Between Man and Man, London, Fontana, 1961. 8 This is not intended to provide a justification of Søren’s conduct towards Regine. Although the discourses appeal to her and offer her an understanding of what has passed between them, the hope contained in this appeal is admittedly his hope and the religious figuring of the transfiguration of eros also involves a sublation or a double-guessing on his part of the voice of the other. The voice of the other (Regine) is affirmed only on the condition that her eros is, to use Simone Weil’s expression, decreated. But who has decided that eros is to be given unrestricted scope in determining what counts as human fulfilment? Recalling that both ‘Søren’ and ‘Regine’ function in these texts as fictionalised types for our reflection, the point is not so much what he seeks to impose on her but what we are asked to consider as a convincing model of religious fulfilment. What we are considering is not a report on historical facts, but an attempt to raise the question of the human stake that needs to be placed if we are pursue a religious existence. 9 In Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) (1986) Anecdotes of Destiny, Harmondsworth, Penguin. See also the film of the same title, directed by Gabriel Axel in 1988. Blixen was, of course, not ignorant of Kierkegaard, and the possibility of influence at some level cannot be ruled out, although that is not my interest here.

8

Love’s witness

I I have argued both that the upbuilding discourses provide a perspective within which to develop a unitary reading of Kierkegaard’s writings as a whole and that a decisive motivation at work in the discourses is the need to develop an ethical and religious transubstantiation of erotic love – in Kierkegaard’s own case his unhappy love for Regine. In this final chapter I shall argue that it is precisely the question of love, its transformation and transfiguration, that provides the interpretative bridge from the world of the discourses to the other dimensions of Kierkegaard’s authorship: to the pseudonymous writings, to the supposedly more Christocentric writings of, for example, the pseudonym AntiClimacus, and to the call for a radical renewal of Christian discipleship as the active imitation of Christ and the readiness for martyrdom. With regard to the pseudonymous works, I claim that taking the upbuilding discourses as a guide to their interpretation does not lead to a coarsening or blunting of their literary quality but, on the contrary, demands a yet finer tuning of the reader’s literary sensitivity. In the case of the ‘higher’ religious (i.e. Christian) works, I claim that approaching them via the upbuilding discourses demonstrates that they do not require us to presuppose the prior acceptance of dogmatic principles or ecclesiastical authority if we are to understand their message. I shall attempt to make good these claims by concentrating on what I regard as key texts, in which the most difficult and the most decisive issues are brought to a head. With regard to the reciprocity of the upbuilding and pseudonymous works, I shall take the two discourses on the text ‘Love shall cover a multitude of sins’ from the Three Upbuilding Discourses of 1843 and use them to re-read the account of Abraham given in Fear and Trembling. I shall then juxtapose these same discourses with the closing section of The Sickness unto Death in order to demonstrate their deep congruence with what many see as the most distinctively Christian of all Kierkegaard’s works. With regard to the relationship between upbuilding and radical discipleship, I shall focus on the closing section of Works of Love. First, then, to the upbuilding thought of love as a way in to reading Fear and Trembling.

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Taking Fear and Trembling as representing the pseudonymous authorship at this point is justified in a preliminary way simply by noting the singular importance this work has acquired in the reception of Kierkegaard’s thought – something that Kierkegaard himself foresaw. It is at one and the same time one of the most literarily complex but also theoretically challenging of all the pseudonymous works. A further warrant for this particular comparison – over and above the general case for applying Kierkegaard’s own image of using the works of the right hand to read those of the left – comes from the fact that the Three Upbuilding Discourses of 1843 were published on the same day, 16 October, as both Fear and Trembling and Repetition. In allowing these texts to question each other, however, I am not claiming so much that the discourses can simply ‘explain’ what is otherwise obscure in Fear and Trembling as that they help us to expand the field of possibilities for interpreting the pseudonymous text. It should also be added that I am not here attempting a total reading of Fear and Trembling, but am focusing only on its best-known opening pages. What follows, then, is no more than the beginning of a conversation, although it is, I believe, a conversation that cannot but deepen and expand our sense for what is going on in the pseudonymous text.1 When we turn to the texts themselves we find several immediately suggestive pointers: the second of the discourses concerned twice quotes the words ‘fear and trembling’ (from Philippians 2: 12–13), and it also includes a discussion of the figure of Abraham – in a very different key from that of Fear and Trembling (but that is the point). Going further – perhaps almost rashly – we might notice how (unusually for the discourse form) the text of the first discourse is broken up into discontinuous paragraphs that could be seen as echoing the discontinuous structure of the ‘Attunement’ in Fear and Trembling. In both cases this disruption of the linear flow of the text causes a (literally) visible space to open up around the written word. Is this Kierkegaard’s way of making present in his text the silence that is an important theme in Fear and Trembling and in the discourse (the writer of Fear and Trembling even calls himself Johannes – de silentio)? In support of this seemingly adventurous claim, we might add that in the same first discourse there is particular emphasis on vision, and on how we look, whether our gaze is such as to reveal sin or to cover it. Just this emphasis, however, edges the discussion towards the realm of the extra-linguistic, towards silence, a point underlined by Kierkegaard’s comment regarding the way in which, confronted by the crowd who had brought before him the woman taken in adultery, Jesus wrote in the ground, ‘in order,’ as he puts it, ‘to wipe out and forget’ what was written (SKS 5, p. 77 [67]). Writing itself is thereby relativised in the context of the overall task of understanding and communicating love. In the second discourse a similar point is made by Kierkegaard’s emphasis on how the woman who throws herself at Jesus’ feet in repentance is silent: she cries out, he says, but does not speak (SKS 5, p. 84 [75]). Later discourses on the same scene will, as we shall see, lay still greater stress on her silence and the fact that, in the biblical narrative, she is, as Kierkegaard will put it, transformed into a picture. This pictorialisation further accentuates the question concerning the manner of our own looking.

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The mutual echoing of the two texts with regard to formal characteristics might also be discerned in the use of a refrain-like series of blessings in the first discourse that is unique in the body of the discourse writing and that seems to echo the refrains that follow each of the four retellings of the Akedah in Fear and Trembling.2 These each concern the process of weaning the child from the mother’s breast, and the theme of the separation of mother and child is also taken up in the second of the two discourses under consideration.3 There are also important comments in the same discourse on the limitations of the righteous man, and, as anyone trained in Lutheran theology would know, righteousness was a quality pre-eminently associated with Abraham: it was, as Luther’s translation of Romans 4: 3 emphasised, the principal fruit of Abraham’s faith. Perhaps underlying this is a broad hint that whereas the theological focus of Fear and Trembling is faith (and the kind of righteousness that might accrue to us on the basis of faith), that of the discourses is on love. It is not that Fear and Trembling is silent on the topic of love – simply that the relation of faith to love is presented in tortured and paradoxical terms, as in the discussion of the dominical word of Luke 14: 26, where the would-be disciple is warned that following Jesus requires coming to hate father, mother, wife, children, brothers and sisters (SKS 4, pp. 163–6, [72–4]). Abraham must love Isaac, Kierkegaard insists, if his readiness to sacrifice him is really to express faith towards God – but there is nothing here of love’s eirenic triumphing over sin as presented in the discourses. Finally, although this is seemingly a more remote connection, both the ‘Eulogy over Abraham’ and the first of the discourses offer an explicit response to a nihilistic vision that represents the world as being the product of sheer chaos. But although this might appear to be the most tenuous of the links, I shall in fact begin here, because this, I believe, most easily establishes the underlying metaphysical questions addressed by both texts. Strikingly, neither attempts to answer them directly in metaphysical terms – although they finally diverge in the way they redefine (or, it might be said, avoid) them. The ‘Eulogy over Abraham’ begins by evoking a picture of the world as produced by a wild, blind power that would mock any claims regarding an ‘eternal consciousness’ on the part of humanity: Were there no eternal consciousness in a man, if the ground of all things was nothing but a wild, fermenting power that, writhing in dark agonies brought forth all things, great and small alike, if there were a bottomless emptiness, never to be sated, hidden beneath all things, what would life then be but despair? If things were thus, if there were no holy bond binding mankind together, if one generation replaced another like leaves in the forest, if one generation followed another like birdsong in the forest, if the generations of men passed through the world as a ship passes through the ocean, the wind through the desert, an event without thought, fruitless, if an eternal, ever-hungry oblivion lay in wait for its prey and there was no power strong enough to rescue it – how empty and comfortless life would

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The ‘hero’ in this case is Abraham, a hero who is unique in that his struggle was not against the world but with God, and the poet is the pseudonym Johannes de silentio himself. This nihilistic vision of chaos as the ground of all things had appeared before in the aesthetic authorship. We have already seen how, in the essay ‘Shadowgraphs’ from part one of Either/Or, the speaker wildly invokes ‘the vortex that is the world’s innermost principle’ and invites it to break loose with that final terrible shriek that, more surely than the last trump, declares the downfall of everything, let it stir itself and sweep away the exposed cliff on which we stand, like a speck of dust blown away on its breath … (SKS 2, p. 166 [168]) In terms of Kierkegaard’s strategy in Either/Or, the evocation of this kind of nihilistic cosmology points to the basic ideological presuppositions of the aestheticism he is seeking to investigate. The inference at which he is hinting is that the aesthetic absorption in a world of alluring appearances, of brilliantly and beautifully worked images, is in effect no more than casting a painted veil across the meaningless and shapeless abyss. Aestheticism of this kind is thus shown to be essentially evasive, a strategy of avoidance regarding the way things really are. Behind the beautiful images of the veil is a sublime and awful nothing: pointless, destructive, exceeding all representation and conceptualisation. This vision is both a return to Presocratic cosmogony and a specific allusion to the world-view of romanticism. Behind the claims made by the romantics on behalf of imagination, Kierkegaard is saying, is the more terrible vision of a primordial chaos, a chaos that haunts romantic art itself in the wild landscapes of the Alps, in poetic, musical or painterly evocations of the tumult of sky and ocean, a tumult recapitulated in the threat of universal anarchy unleashed by revolution and war. Such a vision is summoned forth in Schelling’s cosmogonic writings, where, however, the chaos is finally subordinated to the rule of love. Yet, Kierkegaard asks, does the romantic really believe that this vortex can be tamed, doesn’t he have a deep down vertiginous dread that the world will one day, perhaps even quite suddenly, collapse back into the maelstrom from which it originated? Does he, can he, really believe – in terms now familiar to us – in the possibility of good and perfect gifts coming to us from a Giver in whom is no variableness or shadow of turning? Johannes de silentio puts his trust in the hero and poet. His hero is a man who can raise himself to the point of struggling with God, of being blessed by God, and of holding on to that blessing through the trials to which his faith is subjected. His poet (himself) is one who recreates the meaning of that trial of

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faith, from a distance, in the fractured prism of his own weakness. But is this, like the programme of Either/Or’s Symparanekromenoi, a counsel of despair? A strategy of whistling in the dark by one who is unable, finally, to deliver what he hopes for? That this may be so is perhaps already indicated by Johannes’ own repeated assertion that he cannot understand Abraham. Why can’t he? Is it because Abraham really is incomprehensible? Or is there some other reason? Is part of the problem, at least, to do with Johannes himself? We note that Johannes distinguishes two moments (or, as he calls them, movements) in the God-relationship. The first is that of infinite resignation, in which the individual is prepared to sacrifice the world for the sake of God. This, Johannes says, he can understand (even though the person who can actually do such a thing will inspire deep awe). But what Abraham performs is a sublime double-movement: he both renounces the world (concentrated in the figure of his only son Isaac through whom Abraham himself, according to God’s promise, is to be blessed through all future generations) and yet believes that he will get Isaac back, in this world. This is the double-movement of faith, that Johannes insists is so incomprehensible. But is Johannes, perhaps, approaching the problem in a maladroit way? What can the discourses on love tell us? The first comments, briefly, on the expression ‘a multitude of sins’. It is a ‘fearful’ word, Kierkegaard remarks, and may well bring to mind another phrase in which, thanks to linguistic usage [in Danish but not in English – GP], it frequently occurs, the manifold of creation, which makes us think of the numberless host of generations, the innumerable swarm of living beings, whose number none can give, because no number is large enough, and because there is no moment in which one can begin to count, for in every moment innumerably more beings are brought forth. (SKS 5, p. 72 [62]) This, I take it, is, in succinct form, a recapitulation of the cosmology of the vortex of Either/Or and of ‘the bottomless emptiness’ across which one generation follows another ‘like wind through the desert’ according to Fear and Trembling. But the vision is further intensified in the discourse, for the sheer self-spawning numerical sublimity of cosmic life is repeated in sin, ‘for sin is very fertile, and one sin gives birth to many and they become ever more and more multitudinous’ (SKS 5, p. 72 [63]). In the situation in which sin is already operative, the fact of sin itself generates new occasions for sin, whatever the occasion of our first fall into sin.4 The individual’s hope in the possibility of escaping this situation through the exercise of their own freedom is crushed by the sheer magnitude of accumulated sinfulness in the world, so that in the very moment in which freedom is aroused it almost inevitably succumbs to the sheer vertigo induced by this magnitude and, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘grasps at finitude’, ontogenetically repeating the phylogenetic fall. The dreadful crisis of sublime

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freedom echoes, intensifies and repeats the awful, meaningless sublimity of the nihilistic cosmogony. That we are free and responsible for who we are does not deliver us from the despair of nihilism, but raises that despair to a new level. Once more, we may add, we find Kierkegaard broaching questions essentially analogous to those of Nietzsche and Sartre. If things are as hopeless as that, then it is no wonder that Johannes de silentio cannot understand a hero whose deed seems to bespeak a hope that is not merely other-worldly (something that would be all too humanly comprehensible if the nihilistic vision holds good), but is precisely a hope for this world despite it all. But, to reiterate my doubt about Johannes: is he really looking at the question in the right way? We should not expect that Kierkegaard’s way, as we find it in the discourses, and especially the discourses on love open before us now, will be to demonstrate that the Symparanekromenoi or Johannes have theoretically misconceived the world. That is to say, we should not expect to find anything in the way of a proof or demonstration that the cosmos is not the product of blind chaos. Rather, the question is how we see it. Referring to ‘the old saying’ that ‘to the pure all things are pure’, Kierkegaard argues that in the world of Spirit what matters is not merely what one sees, but what one sees depends on how one sees; for observation is never merely receptive, a discovering, but is also productive, and insofar as it is this, then what is decisive is how the observer himself is. (SKS 5, p. 69 [59]) Love transforms sin by the way it sees it. Accordingly, ‘if the eye of love were not shut, if it did not itself hide the multitude of sins by its way of observing, how should it then dare to try to make a halt to sin’s power!’ ‘Or,’ he goes on to ask, ‘should we prefer to praise a cunning character who knows how to portray the manifold of sins even more fearfully? Or should we not rather ask this cunning character where he has got his information from?’ (SKS 5, p. 74 [64]). So what of Johannes? What is his way of looking? Is it the way of love? Or is his prowess more in the way of uncovering the fearfulness and the myriad possibilities of sin? Revisiting his four different retellings of the Akedah in the light of this question we might begin to notice that Johannes does not give us four stories of faith, still less of love, but four stories of the loss or obscuring of faith. In the first, when Abraham feigns cruelty on the grounds that it is better for Isaac to believe his father to be a monster than to think that God has asked for such a thing, it is not said explicitly that Abraham has lost his faith, but, clearly, Abraham has altered the terms of what God asked him to do, he has not seen the commandment through as it was commanded, and in his concluding prayer he asks God for mercy for this very failure. In each of the other retellings it is made clear that Abraham has in fact lost his faith, and, in the last, Isaac too has possibly lost his. It is then against the background of these stories that Johannes eulogises Abraham. None of them are, of course, actually the story of

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Abraham. They are reflections on how it could have worked out if Abraham had not been the hero of faith that, in fact, he was. But what is Johannes doing here if not magnifying Abraham’s achievement by setting it against what, in the words of the discourse, are ‘a multitude of sins’? In doing so he opens up the prospect of infinitely more interpretations of the story, sublimely spawning an endless sequence of sinful possibilities that cannot do other than render the original narrative deeply incomprehensible. Johannes sees what the biblical narrative covers over in silence. But can seeing of this kind be commended? In the first discourse on love Kierkegaard suggests that if one who had love in his heart were to find himself surrounded by a multitude of sins, he would be like a traveller in a strange land who did not understand its customs and was unable to explain them to others. Johannes, however, even when he is faced with faith, is like a stranger who does not understand its customs, and seeks to orient himself by taking his bearings from what he knows of human beings’ darker side. We have already remarked how one of the striking features of the four retellings of the Akedah in Fear and Trembling is the way in which each concludes with an analogy drawn from the process of weaning. Each of these culminates in an impersonal imperative – the first, for example (following the imagined version of the story in which Abraham feigns madness), speaks of how the mother might blacken her breast to make it unattractive to the child and concludes ‘Fortunate the one who did not need more fearful means with which to wean the child!’ (SKS 4, p. 108 [11]). As a commentary on the Akedah, they set up a contrast between the religious trial undergone by Abraham and the kind of pain associated with the immediate life of mother and baby. Such immediacy is not without its own moment of separation, misunderstanding, suffering and deception, the refrains imply, but all of this is embedded in an encompassing relationship that prevents it from getting out of control. Thus, in the third refrain Johannes speaks of how the mother too experiences sorrow when the child is to be weaned, as the life that was once within her, then drew its nourishment from her now separates out. Thus mother and child sorrow ‘briefly’ together. But this is just what Abraham and Isaac cannot do. By setting up a counterpoint between the Abraham story and the four parables about weaning, Johannes thus sketches the two boundaries of a spectrum of separation experiences, running from the most immediate through to the religious and encompassing every possible intermediate variation. We can thus see a multitude of stories of separation, difference, and incomprehension: between Abraham and Isaac, between mother and baby, obviously – but also between Abraham and Sarah; between Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael; between Abraham the hero and Johannes his merely human poet; between Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Søren his son; between Søren and Regine; between natural human consciousness and faith; maybe between all subjectivities insofar as each is defined by their incommunicably singular individuation. For who knows if their neighbour is even now undergoing a trial such as that of Abraham, who knows if his neighbour (who looks just like

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a tax-collector) is not a knight of faith or, conversely, sinking down into the blackest depths of despair? Perhaps underlying all of these is the separation between Abraham and God, especially if, with Mooney, we apply the parables of weaning to Abraham himself. But we have once more to ask whether this contrast between the ‘comprehensible’ separation experienced within the natural life of immediacy and the ‘incomprehensible’ separation depicted in the story of Abraham may not perhaps be coming at the matter in a distorted and distorting way? What if Abraham’s trial is not really so different from the trials to which all flesh is heir? Or what if there were a consolation to hand that did not require invoking the suspension of moral law and human reason? It has already been noted that these refrain-like commendations resonate formally with the sequence of blessings found in the first discourse on love, but the motif of mother and child is also picked up on in the second discourse on the same subject. Again, however, it is used to point to possibilities that do not come to expression in Johannes’ work. The discourses are no less familiar than Johannes with the fall into a world of differences, with the endless selfmultiplication of sin, doubt, duality and separation. Nevertheless, the moment of separation is not pictured here as an outcome of this fall but as the possibility of an awakening to love. To show how this may be so Kierkegaard summons the image of mother and child. Love, he argues, is no dream or numbing of consciousness that befalls us effortlessly. If wisdom, understanding, peace of mind, and the blessedness of heaven must be bought and life itself paid for by the pains of birth, ‘should love know nothing of the pangs of birth?’ ‘… God’s love awakens in every breast like a [screaming] infant, not like a smiling child that knows its mother.’ (SKS 5, pp. 82–3 [74–5]). In the face of the anxiety aroused by sin, ‘love does not shut its eyes’ but takes all such anxieties into itself, and no matter how wounded by them, it ignores them – ‘covering’ them, in the words of the text – for the sake of fulfilling its goal, i.e. being itself, being love. Here, then, the basic human experience of separation from the mother is not figured as if this separation were contained within an immediate, unbroken, unity. The appeal to common experience is not, as it was for Johannes, to provide a contrast to the incomprehensible trial of Abraham’s faith, but is more direct, invoking the experience of traumatic separation, incomprehension and struggle that all readers are assumed to understand qua human beings as a key to understanding what it might be to love. Turning back to Johannes’ text, then, may we not infer that – from the point of view of the discourse on love – Johannes’ insistence on the incomprehensibility of Abraham is the obverse of a misreading of the general nature of our being-in-the-world? The abyssal fall into difference is not something that concerns the exception alone, it is the starting-point of every human consciousness, registered in the scream that accompanies our coming into the world. Johannes believes that he can understand resignation, the loss even of the whole world for the sake of God, but not the double-movement of faith and the return to the singular object of faith (for Abraham his being blessed through all generations by means of Isaac): but love, despite its knowledge of separation and the pain that comes from

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that, starts with the singular and sees that singular in its unity with all – not naively, in the manner of immediacy, but in the way that Jesus looked on the sinful woman who burst into the Pharisee’s dinner party, knowing all but seeing past what he knew or, more precisely, covering over it all by the manner of his seeing. The thrust of the critical dialogue that is being developed here between the two discourses on love and Fear and Trembling is confirmed by the explicit discussion of Abraham in the first discourse on love. The Abraham referred to here is not the Abraham of Mount Moriah, but the Abraham who, in the face of God’s impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, persuaded God that if there were only ten good men in the city He should spare it.5 Rejecting the snide remark that Abraham’s prayer and his own righteousness served precisely to draw God’s attention to the sinfulness of the two cities, Kierkegaard says that this is indeed an example of love covering a multitude of sins, and we might even say that Abraham’s mediatory prayer caused God Himself to forget the multitude of sins with which Sodom and Gomorrah were teeming. But these reflections on Abraham come after another example of love covering a multitude of sins: the example of Paul on his journey from Crete to Rome, when his ship was in danger of being wrecked. Paul, however, assured all on board that, because of his presence, not a life would be lost. Yet, as the outcome of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah shows, perhaps there were not even ten just men left there, since, after all, God did destroy them. Abraham’s prayer did not finally cover all the sins of those cities, whereas Paul’s presence did save the lives of all his companions. So, Kierkegaard concludes, Abraham was great, ‘And yet what is Abraham in comparison with an apostle, what was his freespiritedness in comparison with an apostle’s?’ (SKS 5, p. 76 [67]). And he follows the comparison with a refrain contrasting righteousness – the quality distinctively associated with Abraham – with love: ‘Great is a man, whose life, if it has been righteous, will culminate in his being set in judgement over angels: more blessed is the love that covers a multitude of sins.’ (SKS 5, p. 76 [67]). A similar contrast is also suggested in the second discourse on love, when Kierkegaard writes of the righteous man’s self-confidence being brought into question by love so as to inspire in him ‘a fear and trembling he had never before known’ (SKS 5, p. 82 [73]). But that he experiences love’s presence as the occasion of ‘fear and trembling’ is an expression of his focus on righteousness. Could he let go of that and look at the matter from the standpoint of love, then the ‘fear and trembling’ would, perhaps, evaporate of themselves. And, let us note, this is not just a contrast between righteousness and love, it is also a contrast between greatness and blessedness: what fascinates Johannes in Abraham is precisely his greatness; after enumerating a variety of forms of greatness, he concludes that: There was one who was great by virtue of his power, and one who was great by virtue of his wisdom, and one who was great by virtue of his hope, and one who was great by virtue of his love [!], but Abraham was greater

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Abraham loves – but his love is what it is by means of hatred, and – as Johannes presents it here – is by no means the epitome and all-inclusive quality of Abraham’s life but one among other expressions of what makes Abraham truly Abraham: his incomprehensible, sublime greatness. But, as Kierkegaard put it when writing in his own name, what was even Abraham’s free-spiritedness in comparison with an apostle’s? Let us try a thought-experiment. We have seen that Johannes de silentio is probably a little bit too eager to uncover a multitude of sins, and could well learn from the discourses to cast a less critical eye on whatever catches his attention, but how would it be if the Abraham of Fear and Trembling were to have internalised the teaching about love of the discourses: what difference would it make? How would an Abraham who loved like the repentant woman or with a free-spiritedness like that of an apostle have responded to God’s call to sacrifice his son? Perhaps his love of God would have been so great that he could not have believed that God would ask such a thing, since to imagine such a thing would have been to make God less worthy of worship. Or perhaps, receiving every word from God as a sign of God’s infinite love and responding appropriately, a loving Abraham would simply have given himself to the movement of resignation, finding his happiness in unknowing submission to divine will. Clearly these possibilities point in very different directions, and neither these nor what has been said here more generally about using the three discourses of 1843 to explore Fear and Trembling exhaust the possibilities generated by such mutual interrogation, still less do they predetermine what might be uncovered by a more extensive use of the discourses in interpreting the pseudonymous works generally. That would be a task going well beyond the limits of this (or of any one) book. The point here is simply to get the conversation started. II If, in this way, it is possible to set up a dialogue between the upbuilding discourses and the pseudonymous works, a dialogue that is not simply a matter of using the discourses to ‘explain’ the pseudonyms and that therefore does not suppress but rather calls upon our ability to attend to the textual intricacies of each, does the comparison between Abraham and Paul nevertheless point to what is, in the end, the heteronomous nature of Kierkegaard’s religious project? Even if the discourses are not doctrinal treatises, even if they are what they are as and by virtue of their rhetorical construction, their way of opening up a space of morally imaginative dialogue, is their direction not determined in advance by Kierkegaard’s Christian presuppositions? As Kierkegaard was to insist in

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his later reflections on the genius and the apostle, the apostle is to be listened to precisely because he is an apostle, not because of his beautiful style or literary genius but on the sole grounds of his authority. Are we not, then, no matter how long we may be able to put it off, being led inexorably to the conclusion that the index entry for Kierkegaard’s authorship is, finally, heteronomy, revelation rather than reason? What is decisive, even more than the freespiritedness of the apostle, is the gaze of the Christ, seeing, and in seeing forgiving, the sinful woman who so boldly burst into this gathering of righteous men. Against drawing this conclusion we might weigh many of the considerations already mentioned: that the reader does not in fact need to hold any explicit religious belief in order to enter into the moral dialogue set up by the discourses, that the types and situations which constitute this dialogue are such that the reader may be assumed to know them from general human experience, from the scream of the newborn baby to the contrast between a pharisaical obsession with sin and the ability of love to cover a multitude of sins. If in the end this last possibility needs a Christological anchor, however, it is presented by Kierkegaard as a possibility that is already found within human behaviour, in however limited a degree. This is not only evidenced by Abraham’s compassionate prayer for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is also at the heart of the appeal to ‘her’ made by the discourses, namely that the true lover should be able to look past and over the other’s sin and to believe in the truth of love despite and against appearances and despite and against the separation between the lovers that characterises their life in this world – an appeal, I have suggested, that may also apply, though in transposed form, to many whose life story does not obviously resemble either ‘his’ or ‘hers’, i.e. to any who have known disappointment, misunderstanding and betrayal in love, who have fallen into a world of differences where they find themselves separate and cut off from those they would wish to love, whether these be parents, children, friends, partners or companions of whatever kind. Just as Johannes de silentio retells the story of Abraham four times, so too, in the second discourse on love, Kierkegaard tells the story of the woman at the house of the Pharisee twice over (and we shall see that that by no means exhausts his treatment of the subject). The first time is from her point of view, exemplifying, through her, how love confronts and overcomes the anxiety about sin, giving her the courage to burst into where she would encounter enmity and judgement. The second time is from the point of view of Jesus himself: Then love discovered what the world concealed – the love in her; and as this love had not yet fully triumphed in her, the Saviour’s love came to her aid, so that ‘the one to whom five hundred pennies were remitted might love the most’, and he gave her love a yet greater power of covering the multitude of sins, the love that was already there, for ‘her many sins were forgiven, because she loved much.’ (SKS 5, p. 86 [77]) Kierkegaard could, perhaps, not state more clearly that the love with which

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Christ beholds her is of essentially the same kind as the love that is at work in her. If human love ultimately needs to be underwritten by divine love, both that need and the divine love that corresponds to it are understandable on the basis of our human experience. Nothing that is said here, of course, suggests that we can somehow compel that divine love and, certainly there remains for Kierkegaard (as for Christian doctrine generally) an indissoluble mystery of grace. The love that saves comes to us no less than – indeed infinitely more than – the blessings of creation, as gift. But the meaning of that love is not strange to us. How does what is being claimed here, however, measure up to the argument that the religion of the discourses is one thing, but Kierkegaard’s own final position (religiousness B and beyond to Anti-Climacus) is of another kind: a ‘higher’ kind that understands the ontological difference between human sinfulness and divine holiness so radically that it can only be crossed from God’s side, and is so crossed exclusively and solely in the incarnation and saving work of Christ, believed in according to the dogmatic formulations of the Church councils as very God and very man and, as such, an offence to reason? In order to address this question, let us test the position we have arrived at against the highest expression of Kierkegaard’s Christology, an expression formulated in what is generally spoken of as his most radically Christian work The Sickness unto Death, ascribed to his ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus. In the discussion of the category of ‘before God’ we saw how this functioned regulatively, and that the degree in which it was adopted by the subject brought about a corresponding intensification (or potentiation) of self-consciousness. However, The Sickness unto Death goes on to speak of a further potentiation beyond that of understanding oneself as existing ‘before God’, namely existing ‘before Christ’. It is this that stimulates the highest development of consciousness and, whereas the category of ‘before God’ corresponds to thinking of oneself as nothing (i.e. understanding oneself in sinful separation from God) the category of ‘before Christ’ corresponds to forgiveness, and to self-acceptance. In the characteristically condensed language of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard sums up what it means to understand oneself as existing ‘before Christ’ as follows: A self situated over before Christ is a self potentiated by the colossal condescension of God, potentiated by the colossal impression that is made upon it by God’s having allowed Himself to be born, to become man, to suffer and to die for this self’s sake. As was said in the foregoing: the more idea of God, the more self, so here: the more idea of Christ, the more self. A self is qualitatively what its measure is. That Christ is the measure is the almost ridiculously powerful expression for the colossal reality a self has, from God’s point of view. For it is first true in Christ that God is a person’s goal (Maal) and measure (Maalestok), or measure and goal. (SV 3 15, p. 164 [113–4])

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But what is the specific content of the idea of ‘before Christ’? According to Anti-Climacus it is, emphatically, the idea of the forgiveness of sins. To understand one’s existence as existence before Christ, is to understand oneself as being forgiven. That this is also the highest potentiation of self-consciousness follows from Christ’s love being expressive not merely of the general love that God has for each of His creatures individually but also His actively willing to be born, to suffer and to die for them. For them? For you, for me, Kierkegaard would say. Here we seem to be face to face with what I have alluded to as the ultimate heteronomy of Kierkegaard’s thought. If the highest potentiation of a self is that it understands itself as the recipient of God’s favour in the incarnate Christ, then it would seem that the highest degree of selfhood is, as it were, reserved only for those who can make the Christian confession of faith. Now I am not aiming to deny that, for Kierkegaard, the experience of forgiveness, that is, the maximum experience of the meaning of what it is to be a self, involves belief in Christ as God. But my argument is not that Kierkegaardian faith is simply the immediate outcome of the kind of moral and personal reflection that the upbuilding discourses seek to arouse. What I do claim is that the way to faith, the way to understanding the meaning of faith, makes sense in the context of such reflection. Faith in Christ does not simply explode in our faces like a randomly placed terrorist bomb. Rather, it comes as the final expression of a process of understanding that is firmly and broadly contextualised in human experience. This becomes clear if we turn from the specific content of the idea of existing ‘before Christ’, where we know ourselves to be ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’, to the way in which we come to see ourselves this way. Particularly interesting in this regard and in the light of the whole of this study is that The Sickness unto Death is closely associated with a sequence of further discourses that have powerful thematic or contextual links both with the 1843 discourses on love and with the engagement crisis. These can therefore serve to focus many of the issues that have been in circulation in this and the preceding chapter. The discourses concerned are the Three Discourses for the Friday Communion,6 An Upbuilding Discourse (The Woman who was a Sinner) and Two Discourses for the Friday Communion. The first of these (Three Discourses) was said by Kierkegaard in his journals to be ‘related to the last pseudonym AntiClimacus’ (Pap. X 2 A 126) or to be ‘parallel to Anti-Climacus’ (Pap. X 2 A 148), the pseudonymous author of The Sickness unto Death. The journals also link these discourses to the engagement crisis, when Kierkegaard comments that if it had been possible, the reconciliation with ‘her’ would have occurred simultaneously with the three discourses … which contain in the preface – for the sake of a repetition of the entire authorship – a repetition of the preface to the two upbuilding discourses of 1843, a book I knew she read at the time. (Pap. X 2 A 127)

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One of the three discourses is on the text of Luke 7: 47 (the words of Jesus’ response to the incident of the woman who burst into the dinner party at the house of the Pharisee). The single upbuilding discourse, written in the period immediately following the publication of The Sickness unto Death but not published until December 1850, is devoted entirely to this episode and is entitled ‘The Woman who was a Sinner’ (Synderinden). The Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1851 contain the final, all-inclusive dedication of the entire authorship to Regine, as well as the declaration in the Foreword that with this the entire authorship has come to rest at the foot of the altar. The two texts chosen for the discourses are Luke 7: 47 (again) and ‘Love shall cover a multitude of sins’ (again). Let us, then, briefly look at the points in these discourses that relate to the question as to the scope and role of human understanding and experience in relation to the ultimate object of faith. If the forgiveness of sins in Christ were to be proclaimed in a completely heteronomous manner, the consciousness of the one forgiven would, perhaps, scarcely enter the picture. This is indeed the case with extreme formulations of the doctrines of predestination and election, where the belief or unbelief of the human individual concerned is acknowledged as being completely irrelevant. God, it is said, can do what he likes, as and when he likes, like a potter working a lump of inanimate clay. If this is offensive (in that he elects to damn the good and save the wicked), too bad – what right does the clay have to question the potter? Or, as Luther put it (quoting a pseudo-Augustinian source), man is a donkey that is ridden either by God or by the devil, but who can do nothing about it himself. Now although this is a position that is found within Protestant theology, it is far removed from Kierkegaard’s own thought-world. Thus, in the discourse from 1849 on the woman who was a sinner, he declares the woman to be a ‘pattern’ or ‘prototype’ (Forbillede) a term he often reserves for Christ himself. Why? Because although it is true that the forgiveness of sins is offered to all, or, more precisely, that the sins of all are forgiven in Christ: [T]his truth, which therefore must be spoken to everyone individually, is in another sense not yet true but must be made into truth by everyone individually. It is in this sense that the woman is made into an eternal image, by her much love she made herself, if I dare put it like this, indispensable to the Saviour. For that there is a forgiveness of sins, accomplished by him, was made true by her, she who loved much. (SV 3 14, pp. 198–9 [143]) Kierkegaard’s note of caution ‘if I dare put it like this’ indicates that he feels himself to be close to the margins of what may be said about the role of humanity in the work of salvation from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity and underlines the quite extraordinary extent to which he makes the human process of appropriation central to the saving event. This is not, of course, in order to eliminate Christ as hyper-scrupulous dogmatists might fear. For, Kierkegaard

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insists, we must remember that the one she loved was precisely Christ, and that ‘Christ is grace and the giver of grace’. The separately published discourse on ‘The Woman who was a Sinner’ again makes of her a model for imitation, and, Kierkegaard remarks, we should not be surprised that it is precisely a woman who is presented in this role by scripture. In this connection he also recalls Mary, who, even though she did not understand the word spoken to her by the prophetess, kept it in her heart (the right place for the word that is the good seed of the gospel, he comments), as well as Mary the sister of Lazarus, who sat at Jesus’ feet in order to give herself to the ‘one thing needful’. Unity he asserts, is precisely a quality for which women have a better sense than men, who are typically caught up in the fruitless complexities of reflection and understanding. This sense for unity is, of course, a manifestation of women’s kinship with the whole sphere of immediacy, instinct, passion and feeling. Again Kierkegaard emphasises his point by taking undisguised liberties with the text in order to emphasise the role of the human being in the event of forgiveness: Thus she heard him say ‘Her many sins are forgiven her …’ This she heard, but he said more. He added ‘because she loved much’. I suppose that she did not hear this at all, it would perhaps have troubled her to think that there was a ‘because’ and that this was ascribed to her would perhaps also have troubled [her] love, that it became the object of praise in this way. So I suppose that she didn’t hear it, or perhaps that she did hear it but misheard it, so she believed that he said ‘Because he loved much’ so that the saying was about his infinite love, and that because it was so infinite therefore her many sins were forgiven … (SV 3 17, p. 20 [157]) Putting to one side the issue of Kierkegaard’s assumptions about gender, this passage could scarcely make clearer that the ascription of sole agency to Christ in the event of forgiveness will be made spontaneously by the heart that truly loves – but that, in fact, her love, the human love, is no less necessary. The attack upon reason in relation to faith is not and cannot therefore be an attack on the human as such, but more on a particular way of being human, the reflective mode dominated by the understanding, that will only accept what can be ground in an explanatory ‘because’ and ‘therefore’. But the relation of love to grace is not of this kind. Paradoxically, love that really is love operates in such a way that it necessarily conceals its own all-important role from itself. Whereas reason must continuously advert to its rational credentials in order to make good its claims, love, though no less human than reason, forgets itself in finding its resolution in the event of forgiveness. The use of Luke 7: 47 in the Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1851 takes a very different tack. Here the question concerns the implication that one who is forgiven little loves little. If a person hears the words ‘Your sins are forgiven’ but does not dare to believe them, then these words, although uttered in and

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by love, become words of judgement. Much, therefore depends on our response. But, as a good Lutheran, Kierkegaard swiftly moves to rebut the theologian’s objection that this means that forgiveness is something we can earn, something merited, a matter of works-righteousness. Nevertheless, there is something theologically ambiguous about his response: But basically it is not all the case that the forgiveness of sins is merited, certainly not by works, but by love. When it is said that the one who is forgiven little, loves little, does it then not means that it is love that decides whether and to what extent one’s sins are forgiven – and that in this way the forgiveness of sins becomes a matter of merit? Indeed not. (SV 3 17, p. 37 [175–6]) But the denial itself acknowledges the proximity of the question. As Kierkegaard goes on to describe it, what is happening here is a virtuous circle, in which ‘first you love much’, then ‘much is forgiven you’ and then you love even more. What he is denying – ‘Indeed not’ – is not the role of love but that this can be understood as merit, for to think of it as merit would be to draw it back into the domain of instrumental rationality, of ‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’. Recalling that in these discourses Kierkegaard is claiming to be recapitulating the whole of the authorship, it is striking how the second of them returns, once again, to the text ‘Love covers a multitude of sins’. But whereas Kierkegaard has elsewhere talked about this from the standpoint of human love, he is, he says, now going to talk about it in terms of the love of Christ. Crucial here is a point he emphasised in the discourse on ‘The Woman who was a Sinner’. This is a point that seems to weigh against the non-dogmatic reading I am attempting here, since in the earlier discourse he suggested that we have a comfort that the woman herself did not have. For although she had access to Christ in his physical presence, she did not have – as we do – a knowledge of his atoning death. Here too he insists that when Christ covers a multitude of sins it is precisely with his body, his body that dies on the cross and his body that is given to the faithful at the altar. Now it has certainly not been my intention in developing a ‘philosophical’ interpretation of the discourses to mask the fact that in one sense they do presuppose a set of distinctively Christian theological assumptions. It would almost be absurd to claim otherwise. The question is what does this mean for our reading of them? Does it mean that they are incomprehensible except to those who share these assumptions, who share Kierkegaard’s faith (in this case his faith in the Christian doctrine of the atonement)? Or, despite their Christian vocabulary and concepts, can we say of them that, within the necessary limitations of all communication involving our ultimate concerns (of which more, presently), they essentially seek to make the meaning of that faith accessible, attractive and understandable to the good-willed reader? Perhaps only the Christian will be moved by Kierkegaard’s words to advance to the

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altar and receive the sacrament in faith, but the whole body of Kierkegaard’s meditations on love will, I suggest, enable the non-believing friend who remains seated to see that the meaning expressed in this act is not simply an absurd or gratuitous act unconnected with the rest of life. In theological terms this might sound as if I am calling Kierkegaard an ‘apologetic’ writer. To a certain extent this is true. However, the whole tone of his writings about the woman who was a sinner, perhaps the pre-eminent representative within the authorship of what love means (apart from Christ himself), suggests that his is part of a very different kind of apologetic from that which, from the early Church to modern liberal theology, has sought to use the materials of reason and rational reflection on experience in order to build a bridge between humanity and faith. For what is most characteristic of the woman is not her reason or her reflection but her immediacy, that is, her passion, her feeling, her emotion. But it does not follow that Kierkegaard is saying that we can dispense with reflection. While the text itself suggests that Kierkegaard would have nothing to say against someone who sought to approach God with the sheer force of unreflected, unbroken passion, it is clear that, because of the kind of texts they are, his discourses are both products of reflection and addressed to those who are themselves reflecting on the meaning of their lives and on the values they seek to live by. A woman who was a sinner and who would not even stay to hear the Saviour’s own ‘because’ would probably not be reading works such as these, works that, in keeping with the whole strategy of the discourses (according to the interpretation developed here), appeal to reflection. In this connection it is worthwhile recalling the turn that Kierkegaard gives to the story when he describes the way in which Christ talks about her to the other guests. Prostrate at Jesus’ feet, Kierkegaard says: She says nothing and she is therefore certainly not what she says; but she is what she does not say, or what she does not say is what she is, she is a symbol, like a picture … And it is almost as if for a moment the Saviour himself regarded her and her situation thus, as if she was not a real person but a picture. Certainly, and in order to make the lesson all the more forceful for those who were present, he does not speak to her … He speaks about her … almost as if he turned her into a picture, a parable … It is almost like a story, a sacred story, a parable – and yet it was really happening there in that place in that very moment. (SV 3 14, p. 197 [141]) Even in the moment of presenting the woman as the archetype of immediate devotion, then, the immediacy of the situation is disrupted and the lesson refracted through Christ’s own act of reflection on that immediacy. Reality becomes a symbol, something to be understood, and it is as symbol, as parable, as matter for reflection and understanding that she is presented to us. The point of the discourse is not to encourage us to undertake a course of therapy designed to put us back in touch with our feelings. In keeping with the notion

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of the guiding ideas of Kierkegaard’s discourses being reflectively approved principles and maxims to be freely chosen by the subject for the deliberate regulation of moral life, what love might mean for us would arise out of our reflective judgement on this acted parable. We might, for example, come to see the meaning of her love and of Jesus’ response as working out, for us, somewhat along the following lines: do not allow your scruples about your own motivation or judgement to hinder you in making the most of the opportunities for good action that arise, including opportunities of testifying to the presence of what is truly commendable, and always take the generous view of others’ motivations and actions. As with the other principles and maxims we might draw from the discourses, these might seem anodyne, banal even, but much will depend on the context and the experiences to which they are addressed and in which they are to be realised. Publicly witnessing what we believe to be really and truly good when we know that we ourselves do not embody the ideal and when the act of witnessing will itself cause attention to be paid to our weaknesses is a recipe for being held up to ridicule or worse. Taking the generous view of another’s action in the situation of a broken engagement, or of a marital break-up or of territorial disputes between states (or in the office) is not a strategy to which many are spontaneously moved to subscribe, and, even if they do, they do not usually find it easy: heart-rending, humiliating, endlessly frustrating, probably, but rarely easy. For the action of the woman is also exemplary in this: that it is not just a private transaction between herself and Christ. It is a public action, a kind of confession before the world not only of her sinfulness and need for forgiveness, but also of the reality of the love in him. In accordance with this, we may say that Kierkegaard’s way not only leads to the altar – it also leads from there, as the believer is exhorted in the closing words of the second of the two discourses for Friday communion to seek to maintain the communion with Christ ‘in your daily life, by more and more living yourself out of your self and living yourself in to him, into his love, the love that covers a multitude of sins’ (SV 3 17, p. 47 [188]). The communicant has not simply withdrawn from the world into the sacred sphere of the Church, but must work what has been experienced in the Church into their manner of living in the world. What this actually means is a vast new topic, both in Kierkegaard’s authorship and in the life of anyone who cares to try it. It is, for example, the matter of Works of Love, and a full account of what it would mean to live a life of love according to Kierkegaard would require an extensive interpretation of that text. I shall not attempt that here, but shall focus on one point that connects to the concern for rhetoric and communication that has been one of the threads of this study, namely the obligation on one who loves not only to love but also to bear witness to love. This, it will be shown, not only points out the path from upbuilding via love to radical discipleship, it also throws further light on the sense in which it is possible to read Kierkegaard’s upbuilding literature philosophically.

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III Works of Love has at several points helped us to clarify Kierkegaard’s understanding of language and communication. It is itself described in its subtitle as ‘Some Christian Reflections (Overveielser) in the form of Talks (Taler)’. If we follow the discussion of the term Overveielser at Pap. VIII 2 A 293 these have to be something very different from ‘upbuilding discourses’, since, as Kierkegaard puts it there, Overveielser do not presume that the reader understands or accepts the concepts at issue, but first seek to arouse their concern for them. Overveielser are sharper, more provocative than ‘talks’ that seek only to build up. However, this contrast is scarcely borne out by the content of the text. At first glance it may seem as if the perspective of Works of Love is ‘transcendent’ in a way that separates it from the upbuilding works, since Kierkegaard consistently emphasises the difference between a ‘merely’ human, natural love, a love that is preferential and that, as such, reflects our immediate egoism, and a love that is commanded, Christian love in the strong sense. Such a disjunction was, famously, to be institutionalised in twentieth-century theology by Anders Nygren in his study Eros and Agape, where he stressed the thoroughgoing distinctiveness of Christian love. Although Nygren’s argument was based on the New Testament itself, his argument reflected what was understood to be an essentially Kierkegaardian distinction. Certainly there is a case for reading Works of Love in this way. On the other hand, Works of Love itself testifies to a far-reaching congruence between love and edification in such a way as to make for a more complex picture. The first discourse of the second part carries the title ‘Love Builds Up’, and contains important reflections on language and on the concept of the upbuilding itself. Kierkegaard stresses that, like all figurative language used in a religious context (i.e. as an expression of Spirit, of human self-consciousness as free and self-responsible), the term ‘upbuilding’ is not to be understood directly but in a metaphorical sense. Really to be built up is to be built down, to take everything back to its foundations and to secure those foundations as the basis for whatever else is to be developed or achieved in life (SV 3 12, pp. 204–5 [210–1]). But this inversion of meaning is not at all alien to the idea of upbuilding in the early upbuilding discourses, since there too to be built up was really to be reduced to nothing, to reach the transparency that allows our one sure and certain foundation to come to view. If we have succeeded in showing the extent to which love is a defining theme of the upbuilding discourses and a key to their pivotal role in mediating between the pseudonyms and the later, radically religious writings, this discourse makes quite explicit the full extent of the interconnectedness between love and upbuilding. In a passage that echoes the first discourse of the first part of Works of Love, where the topic is love, Kierkegaard insists that there is no word that is upbuilding in and of itself and no word that in and of itself cannot become upbuilding. The conspicuous and deliberate self-referentiality of this passage draws our attention to the essential identity of love and the upbuilding. This

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identity is, moreover, expressly asserted when Kierkegaard writes ‘Wherever we look, where the upbuilding is present, so is love, and wherever we look, where love is, so is the upbuilding.’ (SV 3 12, p. 208 [214]). Kierkegaard illustrates the point by taking as an example of how love is upbuilding a large family having to share a cramped apartment but who, nevertheless, live together in a loving way. In describing the kind of love such a family exemplifies, he uses the term hyggelig, a term that might be translated as ‘homely’ or ‘cosy’ or, even perhaps, ‘comfy’, i.e. a term that emphasises the very ordinary, everyday humanness of the situation, a characteristic altogether without intellectuality, and thus akin to what C. S. Lewis describes as the ‘storge’ aspect of love, i.e. the kind of love we see in a sow nestled down in the straw with her piglets.7 Nothing could emphasise more strongly that the possibility of living out the meaning and value of love, and therefore of living as one being built up, belongs to human beings generally and does not require any particular dogmatic presuppositions. The last discourse of Works of Love takes as its topic ‘The Work of Love in Praising love’, a topic that has an obvious interest for a study focusing on the significance of Kierkegaard’s rhetorics for our understanding of Kierkegaardian religiousness. Here too the universality of love is emphasised, and, therefore, the universality of the possibility of praising love. Whereas an art requires not only practice and determination but also a special gift which only a few in any generation can expect to have: Love, by way of contrast, is not, as is art, jealous of itself, and therefore only given to the few. Everybody who wants to have love will be given it, and if he wants to take upon himself the task of praising it, then he will also be successful in that. (SV 3 12, p. 343 [360]) However, despite locating itself squarely on the ground of the universally human, the discourse develops the idea of what it is to praise love in such a way that the one who praises love as it should be praised increasingly takes on the outline of the radically Christian ‘witness to the truth’ who will come to dominate Kierkegaard’s later religious writings. First of all we read that truly to praise love one must do so in self-denial. What this means in the first instance is that one who is to praise love must be ready to devote himself to a single thought. Although it is far from obvious from the immediate context why this should be so, this reflects Kierkegaard’s view developed not only in Works of Love but throughout the upbuilding authorship that love, being built up, essentially involves the unification of the self, ‘willing one thing’. Of course, as he straightaway goes on to add, he does not mean thinking one thought in the sense of thinking about something external, what he elsewhere describes as having an idée fixe. The point here is that the one thought is inseparable from also thinking ‘how things are with oneself as one thus thinks’ (SV 3 12, p. 344 [361]), that is, transparency. Praising

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love, then, must be based on the foundation that edification too has all along sought to secure. For, as Kierkegaard goes on to explain, the inward direction of thought consequent upon such self-concern will, if it is truly to arrive at a God-relationship, recognise that there is that in it, that in the self, which must be broken, changed done away with. The person who undertakes such a journey of self-discovery must be prepared to discover their own powerlessness and ‘to make himself nothing before God’ (SV 3 12, p. 348 [365]). The work of praising love is a labour that any human being may undertake, and yet this very first requirement already seems to have raised the matter to a level at which most people would regard it as too difficult, too extreme. In recognition of this Kierkegaard interrupt himself to ask rhetorically: Oh! but I do not know to whom I am talking about this or how far there is anyone at all concerned about such things. But I do know that there have lived those who would be so concerned, and I know that precisely those who have praised love most fruitfully, have been well and widely travelled in these now largely almost unknown waters. And for them I can indeed write, entrusting myself to that beautiful word: ‘ ‘Write!’ ‘For whom?’ ‘For the dead, for those you have loved in times past.’ – and in loving them I will also meet together with those most loved amongst the living. (SV 3 12, p. 345 [362]) This ‘beautiful word’ is, in fact, a quotation from Herder that Kierkegaard had noted some years previously in his journals. Interestingly, he does not quote it here in full. Originally it continued from the reply ‘For the dead …’ with a further question and answer: ‘ “Will they read me?” “Yes, for they will return as posterity!” ’ If, at this point, we allow ourselves to hear something of the pathos of its original form resonating within the new, reworked version, we can see that the act of writing – in this context the act of writing words that bear witness to love – is charged with a sense of loss and separation, a loss and a separation that can only be made good and reconciled in a projected future in which the word finds its reader. This remark, then, finds added depth from what we have seen both of the presence of the engagement crisis in the upbuilding authorship and of the eschatological reference of all spiritual language. Praising love is at one and the same time a willing of the eschatological restitution of broken relationships, an affirmation that for God all things are possible, and in and through testifying in writing to such hopeful willing, building up the contemporary community of love. The second rule for praising love is that it must be done in sacrificial disinterestedness. The relation to the contemporaries is once more emphasised, but, as Kierkegaard develops the point here, sacrificial disinterestedness will not only mean being prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of the truth that is in love, but, because truth conflicts with how things are in the world, the one who is to praise love in this manner must separate his own person from

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the message in such a way that there can be no question of his serving the interests and self-interests of the age, ‘the moment’ as Kierkegaard repeatedly refers to it at this point. Therefore, Kierkegaard claims, he must make himself repulsive to his contemporaries and appear to others not as ‘one of us’ but as a selfish person, whose speech is unlovable and far from attractive in any normal sense. Only so, can he be sure that he is not seeking some personal benefit from being the poet of love. Only so, we may add (in the light of what we have previously learned of Kierkegaard’s understanding of ethical communication), can he preserve the freedom of response of his readers or auditors. This is a hard task, but the witness will be sustained by the hope that if the message is incomprehensible and paradoxical to those to whom it is immediately addressed, the speaker is nevertheless continually ‘before God’ and will be seen and understood in his deepest intentions by God. Also, we may add, that (as the quotation from Herder implied), this hope in God is also a hope for the eschatological fulfilment of the act of communication as a human event. If the contemporaries misunderstand the witness now, he may still look to a time, an absolute future, in which the misunderstanding will fall away and the message be received and understood. The horizon of eternity compensates and more than compensates for the vacuity of the moment. Such a witness, Kierkegaard goes on to say, is an apostle, one who, like Paul, can say of himself that he speaks ‘not as pleasing men, but God … neither used we flattering words, nor a cloak of covetousness … Nor of men sought we glory; neither of you nor yet of others, when we might have been burdensome as Apostles of Christ.’ (SV 3 12, p. 349 [366]). Kierkegaard declines to depict such a witness to the truth, since, he says, his task here is simply to speak of praising love. Nevertheless, we can glimpse the outlines of what he might wish to show us, guided by the clue offered in the figure of Paul himself and by Kierkegaard’s assertion that even if, in passionless times such as ours, a witness to the truth may not actually be put to death (SV 3 12, p. 352 [370]), it remains the case ‘that love of God is hatred of the world’. To praise love, then, is finally to bear witness to Christ and to follow him in being despised and rejected of men. This Christological conclusion has been hinted at earlier in Works of Love. The prayer with which the first part opened asked ‘How could we rightly talk of love, if You were forgotten, You, who revealed what love is, You, our Saviour and Reconciler, who gave yourself up to save all!’ (SV3 12, p. 10 [3]). In the discourse ‘Love does not seek its own [advantage]’ Kierkegaard had reminded us that Christ was the pattern (Forbillede) of love, drawing us to Him that we might be conformed to His likeness (SV3 12, p. 254 [264]). This theme of Christ the pattern, which becomes so dominate in Kierkegaard’s subsequent religious writings is, of course, strongly attested in Christian devotional writings, but it is also of particular interest in relation to what we have learned of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the human religious situation. For we have seen how in becoming as nothing the human being becomes receptive to the image (Billede) of God in which we were originally made, and how, in the

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stillness and silence of the deeply transparent heart, that image can, once more, take shape. Talk of Christ as a pattern, however, moves things on a step further, for ‘For-billede’ is precisely an image held out before us that we must strive actively to appropriate. Thus, the second part of Kierkegaard’s religious authorship moves away from the religion of hidden inwardness to the active following of Christ and witnessing to Christ in the world. Works of Love registers most accurately the moment of transition between these two modes of religiousness. In doing so, however, it also shows how the logic that seems to demand this Christological fulfilment is a logic inscribed in the very structures of human beings’ quest for self-knowledge and their attempts to speak rightly about love. The figure of the self-sacrificial, ‘transcendent’ witness to Christ arises as the outcome of a consideration of love that can even embrace the seemingly all-too-human example of a poor but ‘cosily’ contented family. Furthermore, the question of how to speak rightly of love is itself contained in the more fundamental question of how to speak rightly at all (in the sense of enabling language to function as a medium of Spirit and Spirit’s fundamental desire for spiritual community). Finally, even the best answer to the question of how to speak rightly of love cannot itself avoid the ambiguity inherent in all language and in all acts of love, and ‘The Work of Love in Praising Love’ ends by reminding us of just this ambiguity, since we can never escape the possibility that when a human being speaks words of love what is said is really said in the spirit of ‘vanity, pride, in short, of evil’, but, equally, ‘it is also possible that it is love’ (SV3 12, p. 356 [374]).The task remains what is in fact the essential task of any communication that aspires to truthfulness amongst spiritual (free) beings. That the transition to a more overtly Christological understanding of religiousness, with its concomitant requirement of witnessing to the truth publicly and sufferingly, is, nevertheless, conceived within a framework erected on the ground of common human experience and understanding, is further hinted at in the reappearance of Socrates in ‘The Work of Love in Praising Love’. We can scarcely begin at this point to offer a complete resumé of Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Socrates, and still less to address the many complex issues generated by that treatment. Broadly speaking, Kierkegaard sees Socrates as representing the best way of philosophising, if philosophising is to be acceptable at all. He is the epitome of the critical, questioning spirit that is impressed neither by weight of learning nor by institutional status, and that never loses its essential irony. Socrates, in the language of the Postscript, is what ‘a subjective thinker’ is really like. But, as we have also seen, he is also somewhat like the writer of upbuilding discourses. Both are primarily concerned about the ethical, in Kierkegaard’s distinctive sense of the term, and both recognise the essential limits of what one human being can do for another. Both accept that it is impossible to bring the other to be ethical or to have faith, although both see the possibility of a maieutic role that, among its procedures can serve to show the failure or internal contradictions of false

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solutions and that can also heighten the learner’s sense for the value of the goal of becoming a true ethical subject or having faith. Both are also clear as to the need for self-concealment on the part of the ethical communicator, so as to secure the freedom of response on the part of the learner. It is, then, hardly surprising that Kierkegaard at this point, when he is considering the work of love in praising love, should remember Socrates once more. He is first mentioned explicitly in the context of Kierkegaard’s complaint as to the emptiness and vacuity of the age: ‘The time for thinkers seems to be past!’ he exclaims (SV 3 12, p. 350 [368]). It is, perhaps, curious that it is precisely thought and the thinker he should set in contrast to the world in the first instance, just as it the first attribute of the one who is to praise love rightly is said, under the rubric of self-denial, to be ‘holding out over a long period in thinking just one thought’ (SV 3 12, p. 343 [360]) and not, as in Purity of Heart, willing one thing, which might have seemed a more appropriate move at this point. What is needed, then, is, in the first instance, a thinker, although such a one cannot be recognised by his contemporaries: It is just as it was in the time of Socrates, as, according to his prosecutor, ‘Everybody understood what was necessary for educating the young and there was only one who didn’t – that was Socrates’. And so, in our age, ‘everybody’ is to be counted amongst the wise ones and only here and there is there a single one who is stupid. (SV 3 12, p. 351 [368–9]) As at so many points in the authorship, then, Socrates is invoked as a reminder that the majority view is by no means necessarily the truth, and that what is most needed is someone willing to question what in others is universally regarded as beyond dispute. Socrates is also introduced into the discussion of how the one who praises love should make themselves unlovable. This time he is not named but is referred to, as Kierkegaard often refers to him, as ‘the simple wise man of antiquity’. Here it is expressly said that Socrates not only had the negative function of challenging the self-images of the age, but also ‘knew best to speak beautifully of the love that loves beauty …’ (SV 3 12, p. 353 [371]). Nevertheless, and this is precisely why he is such a good example for Kierkegaard at this point, he was also famed among all of these beautiful people who loved beauty for being the ugliest man in Greece. Far from being discouraged by this, however, his ugliness was intimately connected with his understanding of what it means truthfully to speak of beauty. For just because of his own grotesque physiognomy, it was impossible for anyone to confuse him with that which he sought to recommend. Had he had a more elegant nose, Kierkegaard conjectures, perhaps he would not have dared to speak of beauty at all. But, if Socrates supplies a useful analogy to a contemporary would-be witness to love, there is, it seems, something missing. For, Kierkegaard adds, ‘the love that is the love of beauty is not the true love that is the love of self-denial’ (SV 3 12, p. 354 [372]).

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Here, as in many of Kierkegaard’s references to Socrates, the most lavish praise is accompanied by a note of reserve. This reserve hangs together with the whole question as to the limitations of the human, and especially of human reason, in relation to faith and, above all, to Christ, the God–man, as the ultimate paradoxical object of faith. The possibility of such a faith, and of a consequent policy of self-transformation in the light of and according to the pattern provided by Christ, would, it seems, necessarily lie beyond the reach of any purely Socratic approach. This, after all, seems to be the clear message of Philosophical Fragments, where Socrates is taken as representing a doctrine of immanence that is rejected as inadequate for understanding the claims of Christianity. Here too, although the question of recollection is not at issue, the Socratic can only go so far. The sticking-point, as Kierkegaard sees it here, is the question of will, a question focused by love being made the matter of a commandment: you shall love your neighbour. This is also just the point to which the matter is brought when Socrates is once more revisited in The Sickness unto Death. Here too, in terms similar to those of Works of Love, a Socrates is said to be what the age most needs, although or, rather, because it is what it least thinks of: a Socrates, with his ‘ironic– ethical correction’ of a world confused by its excess of knowledge. The discussion centres on the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance, and the corresponding point that it is impossible to know what is right and not to do it. The insight of Christianity that goes beyond this, Kierkegaard says, focuses on just the transition from knowing to doing that Socrates overlooked. This transition is precisely the point at which the will is in play, and, against the background of his extensive analyses of anxiety, despair and sin, Kierkegaard draws attention to the seemingly intractable problem of the bad will, the will that simply will not will the good, that wills not to will the good (but whether it does this out of active malevolence or because it is actually not capable of so willing is a whole further issue). And yet, he concedes, even from the Christian standpoint there is a sense in which Socrates is, after all right. For just because the will is lured away from doing what it should do instantly by being, as it were, dragged to a halt by our not understanding the consequences attendant upon what it is for God to be the origin and ground of our existence, even in Christianity ‘we have still not come further than the Socratic’ (SV 3 15, p. 147 [94]) for, as Socrates himself would doubtless say, our failure to will the good comes precisely from our not having an adequate conception of what our good really is. To put it in now familiar terms (that are also alluded to in the discourse on ‘The Work of Love in Praising Love’), our failure is in not having an adequate measure for guiding and regulating our lives and conduct. If we really understood what it would mean to have an expectation of an eternal blessedness and to regulate our lives by that expectation rather than taking ‘Man’ to be the measure of all things (SV 3 12, p. 350 [368]), how could we not will whatever was required as an appropriate response to such a hope? And, as I have argued, such a hope is itself already implicit in the pre-Christian understanding of communication itself as willing mutual spiritual transparency: to communicate, to want to

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communicate is, understood properly, to will to participate in a community of free spiritual beings, i.e. to will love. Love, communication, and will (= Spirit = freedom) continuously reinforce each other in a cycle of affirmation – or fly apart in a cycle of destruction. And so, finally, it seems that the ultimate inexplicability of will, i.e. why the will should, in freedom, will to will the good, is not only a problem for Socrates, but a problem for theory and understanding as such, ‘and further than this,’ says Kierkegaard, ‘no human being can come’ – a statement that must, presumably, include all Christian theologians as well as all philosophers (SV 3 15, p. 147 [95]). With this limit, thus set down in Kierkegaard’s most radically Christian work, we find ourselves back with the problem confronting the well-wisher in the first of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses who, simply by considering what it would be best to wish for his friend, discovered that the ultimate desideratum was just what could not be wished, since it was something the other could only choose or will to have for and by themselves, ‘faith’ as it was called there. And so, in relation to this limit, the question of communication once more returns. Do we at this point just walk away in silence and abandon each other to our separate, private struggles with and for God and the good? Or is there, despite and in recognition of this limit, something we can still do, something we can still say to and for each other? Kierkegaard’s answer is just the answer that permeates every page of, in the first instance, his upbuilding writings, but no less his pseudonymous works and the radical Christian works of the later 1840s and 1850s: it is that what we can do is to speak to each other with a view to building one another up, assuming in the other the presence of a good intention and, by the act of making this assumption, giving this good intention a chance to become articulate and so to strengthen itself; we can praise love, assuming in the other the presence of love, and, by this assumption, and by the communication that incorporates it, giving that love an occasion to speak and, in speaking, to act; and all of this is inseparable from Socratically hollowing out and discarding whatever is fake, or lazy or incoherent; it is to bring unity to our thinking, and transparency to our speech. Even the Christian witness, who, as witness to the love of Christ, will be despised and rejected by men and, in every sense of the word, become a martyr in his cause (even if, in an age such as ours, it is only a martyrdom of laughter), will in the end still see shadowing him the figure of the Socratic witness to love, who, having once seen for himself the sun of truth and then returning to the cave in order to liberate those still in chains and bring them to see for themselves the beauty that is to be found outside, discovers that what the inhabitants want least of all is their illusions challenged. If we have once made the transient moment, with its momentary demands, intoxications and troubles, the measure of our lives, then any alternative (and ‘There is no alternative!’ can be a potent rallying-cry in this fallen world) will seem to be no more than unnecessary trouble and strife and the annihilation of what, we assume, makes life worth living. Under the spell of such an assumption

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it may seem easier to rid ourselves of those who suggest such alternatives than to risk trying them. The first thesis of Kierkegaard’s dissertation On the Concept of Irony read, ‘The similarity between Christ and Socrates is posited as located in their dissimilarity.’ The conclusion of this study, however, is that the dissimilarity between Christ and Socrates is to be found in their similarity. In the context of Kierkegaard’s authorship this means that the point of similarity between irony and radical discipleship is to be located precisely in the category of the upbuilding. Notes 1 A similar exercise has recently been attempted in Sinnett (2000) with regard to Either/Or and the first two discourses. However, my procedure differs from his in this: that although we both wish to set up a conversation between pseudonymous and upbuilding works, he attempts to establish a kind of point-by-point interaction whereas I see the relationship more in terms of opening up the field of interpretative possibilities of each set of texts. 2 Compare ‘Blessed is the man whose sin is forgiven, more blessed the love that hides the multitude of sins’ (SKS 5, p. 74 [64]) with ‘When the child is to be weaned, the mother will have stronger food to hand lest the child perish. Happy the one who has stronger food to hand!’ (SKS 4, p. 111[14]). 3 On the role and importance of the theme of weaning in Kierkegaard see K. Nordentoft (1978) Kierkegaard’s Psychology, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, Chapter 2, ‘When the child is to be weaned …’ (pp. 16–50). Ed Mooney is one of the few commentators on Fear and Trembling to have paid close attention to these. He uses them to argue for what could be called a humanising of Kierkegaard’s account of faith in Fear and Trembling itself. The interpretation given here, however, reads these refrains as emphasising the almost superhuman quality of Abraham’s faith as it is presented in Fear and Trembling itself, while allowing the discourse the task of presenting a counter-position that is at one and the same time more human and yet, ultimately, ‘higher’. See E. F. Mooney (1991) Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Albany NY, State University of New York Press, pp. 30–3. 4 See The Concept of Anxiety, Chapter 2, ‘Anxiety as Explaining Original Sin Progressively’. 5 This story is noted in Fear and Trembling, but not much is made of it. 6 This is the title of the Hongs’ translation. Kierkegaard’s title ‘The High Priest’ – ‘The Tax Collector’ – ‘The Woman who was a Sinner’ does not involve the term ‘discourses’ as such. My argument, however, does not hinge on the title but on the form and content, and they are clearly discourses. 7 See C. S. Lewis (1963) The Four Loves, London, Fontana, Chapter 3, ‘Affection’, pp. 33–54.

Bibliography

Works by Kierkegaard Cappelørn, N.-J., Garff, J. and others (eds) (1997– continuing) Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Copenhagen, Gad. Heiberg, P. A., Kuhr, V. and Torsting, E. (eds) (1909–48) Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, Copenhagen, Gyldendal. Hong, H. V. and Hong, E. H. (tr. and eds) assisted by Malantschuk, G. (1967–78) Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vols. 1–6, with index and composite collation in Vol. 7, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Hong, H. V. and Hong, E. H. (eds) (1978–2000) Kierkegaard’s Writings, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1962) Samlede Værker, 3rd edn, eds A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, Copenhagen, Gyldendal. Meyer, R. (tr. and ed.) (1905) Sören Kierkegaard und sein Verhältnis zu ‘ihr’, Stuttgart, Axel Juncker.

Bibliographical Bibliographical sources relating to the upbuilding discourses and summaries of relevant secondary literature in Danish, German, French, Japanese and English can be found in Cappelørn, N.-J., Deuser, H. and Stewart, J. (eds) (2000) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2000, Berlin, de Gruyter.

Other works Bauckham, R. (1999) James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage, London, Routledge. Buber, M. (1961) Between Man and Man, tr. and ed. R. G. Smith, London, Fontana. Come, A. B. (1988) ‘Kierkegaard’s Method: Does He Have One?’ Kierkegaardiana XIV: 14–28. —— (1995) Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self, Montreal and Kingston, McGill–Queen’s University Press. —— (1997) Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self, Montreal and Kingston, McGill–Queen’s University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, tr. P. Patton, London, Athlone.

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Derrida, J. (1995) ‘Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions’ in Peter R. Sedgwick (ed.) Nietzsche: A Critical Reader, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Diem, H. (1929) Philosophie und Christentum bei Sören Kierkegaard, Munich: Chr. Kaiser. —— (1959) Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence, tr. H. Knight, Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd. Dinesen, I. (Karen Blixen) (1986) Anecdotes of Destiny, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Disse, J. (1991) Kierkegaards Phänomenologie der Freiheitserfahrung, Freiburg/Munich, Alber. Dunning, S. N. (1985) Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Elrod, J. W. (1980) Kierkegaard and Christendom, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Eriksen, N. N. (2000) Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 5, Berlin, de Gruyter. Fenger, H. (1980) Kierkegaard, the Myths and their Origins, Newhaven, CT, Yale University Press. Ferguson, H. (1995) Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology, London, Routledge. Fryszman, A. (1993) ‘ “Teoria kommiunikatsii” Seriona K’erkegora I dialogichkoe mishlenie Bakhtina’, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 31: 33–55. Garff, J. (1995) ‘Den Søvnløse’: Kierkegaard laest Aestetisk/Biografisk, Copenhagen, Reitzel. —— (2000) SAK. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard: En Biografi, Copenhagen, Gad. Geismar, E. (1926) Søren Kierkegaard: Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed, Copenhagen, Gad. Gouwens, D. (1996) Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Grøn, A. (1997) Subjectivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard, Copenhagen, Gyldendal. Hagemann, T. (2001) Reden und Existieren: Kierkegaards Antipersuasive Rhetorik, Berlin, Philo. Hannay, A. and Marino, G. (1998) The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell. —— (1985) History of the Concept of Time, tr. T. Kisiel, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. —— (1991) Nietzsche, Vol. I, The Will to Power as Art, tr. D. F. Krell, San Francisco, Harper and Row. Heiler F. (1937) Prayer, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hirsch, E. (1933) Kierkegaard Studien I–II, Gütersloh, Bertelsmann. Hodge, J. (1995) Heidegger and Ethics, London, Routledge. Holm, I. W. (1998) Tanken I Billedet: Søren Kierkegaards Poetik, Copenhagen, Gyldendal. James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience, London, Longmans, Green and Co. Kant, I. (1952) Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Kingo, A. (1987) Den Opbyggelige Tale: En Systematisk-teologisk Studie over Soren Kierkegaards Opbyggelige Forfatterskab, Copenhagen, Gad. —— (1995) Analogiens Teologi: En Dogmatisk Studie over Dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards Opbyggelige og Pseudonyme Forfatterskab, Copenhagen, Gad. Law, D. (1993) Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

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Lewis, C. S. (1963) The Four Loves, London, Fontana. Lippitt, J. (2000) Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Basingstoke, Macmillan. Lowrie, W. (1938) Kierkegaard, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Malantschuk, G. (1971) Kierkegaard’s Thought, tr. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Marion, J.-L. (1998) Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press. Mooney, E. F. (1991) Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press. Mynster, J. P. (1852) Blandede Skrivter, 3 Vols, Copenhagen, Gyldendal. Nishida, K. (1986) ‘The Logic of Topos and the Religious Worldview’, The Eastern Buddhist, 19, 2 and 3: 1–29, 81–119. Nordentoft, K. (1978) Kierkegaard’s Psychology, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Nygren, A. (1953) Agape and Eros, tr. P. S. Watson, 2 Vols, London, SPCK. Olsen, J. (1999) ‘Theological Anthropology and Ethics in the Writings of John Henry Newman and Søren Kierkegaard’, unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University. Pattison, G. (1992) Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, Basingstoke, Macmillan; (1998) 2nd edn, London, SCM Press. —— (1993) ‘ “Who is the Discourse?” A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature’, Kierkegaardiana 16: 28–45. ——(1996) ‘A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses’, Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte [Journal for the History of Modern Theology] 3: 185– 202. —— (1998) ‘The Theory and Practice of Language and Communication in Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses’, Kierkegaardiana 19: 81–94. —— (2000) ‘Sublimity and the Experience of Freedom in Kierkegaard’, in J. Giles (ed.) Kierkegaard and Freedom, Basingstoke, Palgrave. —— (2001) ‘The Most Dangerous of Gifts, or What did Language say to Adam?’, in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Year Book 2001, Berlin, de Gruyter. —— (2002) Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. —— (2002) ‘Representing Love: From Poetry to Martyrdom’, Kierkegaardiana 22. Pattison, G. and Shakespeare, S. (eds) (1998) Kiekegaard: The Self in Society, Basingstoke, Macmillan. Paulsen, A. (1973) Menschsein Heute: Analysen aus Reden Søren Kierkegaards, Hamburg, Friedrich Wittig Verlag. —— (1966) ‘Das Verhältnis des Erbaulichen zum Christlichen’, Kierkegaardiana VI: 97–106. Polk, T. (1997) The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith, Macon, GA, Mercer University Press. Poole, R. (1993) Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1958) Being and Nothingness, London, Methuen. —— (1967) Words, tr. I. Clephane, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Schrag, C. O. (1969) Experience and Being: Prolegomena to a Future Ontology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

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—— (1986) Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Schweitzer, A. (1961) Civilization and Ethics, London, Unwin. Shakespeare, S. (2001) Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God, Aldershot, Ashgate. Sheil, P. (2002) Kierkegaard, Levinas and the Subjunctive Mood, Aldershot, Ashgate. Sinnett, M. W. (2000) Restoring the Conversation: Socratic Dialectic in the Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard, St Andrew’s, Theology in Scotland. Sponheim, P. (1968) Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence, London, SCM. Stack, G. J. (1977) Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press. Stewart, J. (1997) ‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Despair in The Sickness unto Death’ in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1997, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter. Strawser, M. (1997) Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification, New York, Fordham University Press. Tanner, J. S. A (1992) Anxiety in Eden: Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise Lost, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Taylor, M. C. (1980) Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley, University of California Press. Theunissen, M. (1958) Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard, Freiburg/Munich, Symposion. —— (1981) ‘Kierkegaard’s negativistic Method’ in Joseph H. Smith (ed.) Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, Newhaven, CT, Yale University Press, pp. 397–8. —— (1993) Der Begriff Verzweifelung, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. —— (1996)‘Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay’ in N.-J. Cappelørn and H. Deuser (eds) Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1996, Berlin, de Gruyter. Thulstrup, M. M. (1967) Kierkegaard og Pietismen, Copenhagen, Munksgaard. —— (1959) ‘Lidelsernes Problematik hos Kierkegaard og Mystikerne’, Kierkegaardiana 3: 48–72. —— (1981) ‘Pietism’, in N. Thustrup and M. M. Thulstrup (eds) Kierkegaard and Great Traditions: Biblioteca Kierkegaardiana 6, Copenhagen, Reitzel. Thust, M. (1925) ‘Das Marionettentheater Sören Kierkegaards’, Zeitwende I: 13–38. Tillich, P. (1968) Systematic Theology, Welwyn, Nisbet. Wahl, J. (1967) Études Kierkegaardiennes, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Walker, J. (1985) Kierkegaard: The Descent into God. Kingston, McGill–Queen’s University Press. —— (1972) To Will One Thing, Montreal, McGill–Queen’s Unviersity Press. Watts, A. (1951) The Wisdom of Insecurity, New York, Pantheon. Westphal, M. (1996) Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press.

Index

actuality 19, 20, 26, 37, 91n., 135–6, 160–1, 171 adulthood 43–6, 98 aesthetics: the aesthetic 15, 18, 67, 87–90, 122, 160, 196 annihilation of self 51–6, 83, 86, 88, 90, 115 anthropology 35–64, 65–7, 74 anxiety 78, 92n. Aristotle 141, 143 Arndt, J. 58 Arnold, M. 166–7 atonement 23, 24, 208 Augustine, Saint 36, 52 author: role of 13–15, 19–20, 93–4, 147–54, 169–71 authority 23, 31, 32, 34n., 119–21, 164–5 autonomy 73, 101, 116, 130 Axel, G. 192n.

Calvin, J. 114 Camus, A. 112 Cappelørn, N. J. 11n., 92n., 139n. Carneades 142–3 Christ see Jesus Christ Christianity 1, 2, 12, 14, 17, 18, 22–6, 30–3, 35–7, 66–7, 123, 164, 169, 193, 202–19 Come, A. B. 73–4, 92n. communion 10–11n., 208 concern 51, 87, 89, 135, 161 Corsair, The 16 Crites, S. 72

Baader, F. von 58 Bakhtin, M. M. 8, 11n., 153, 189, 192n. Barth, K. 5, 91n., 121 Bataille, G. 68 Bauckham, R. 64n. Baudelaire, C. 89, 190 beauty 87 Beauvoir, S. de 190 Bernard of Clairvaux 59 Bible: personalities from 36, 52, 62, 63, 97, 152, 157, 159–60, 164, 181, 185, 194– 210; other references to 31, 45, 48, 52, 98, 127–8, 133, 134, 135, 146, 156–7, 158, 178, 182, 194–210; see also James, Letter of; Paul, Saint; Jesus Christ biography 5, 56–8, 162, 169–92 Blixen, K. 190–1, 192n. Boehme, J. 59

death 26, 47, 73, 95–6, 114–15, 130–1 Deleuze, G. 168n. Derrida, J. 8, 11n., 119 Descartes, R. 101 despair 42–3, 45, 78, 80, 83–4, 198, 200 Deuser, H. 11n., 92n., 139n. dialectics: the dialectical 9, 27, 30, 65–9, 72, 91n. dialogue (dialogical element in texts) 3–4, 8, 99, 121, 138–9, 152–5, 161–7, 181–2, 189–92, 202 Diem, H. 91n. Dinesen, I. see Blixen, K. Diogenes of Sinope 44–5, 152 Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-) 119 Disse, J. 72–3, 74, 84, 92n. Dooley, M. 64n.

Bournonville, A. 79 Brandes, G. 165, 170 Brandt, F. 170 Buber, M. 189, 192n. Bunyan, J. 162

Index Dostoevsky, F. M. 153, 162 Dunning, S. N. 91n. Eckhart, Meister 58–9, 116n. Elrod, J. 11n. epistemology 10, 77, 100 Eriksen, N. N. 139n. eternal happiness 30, 98–100 ethics: the ethical 9, 10, 16–22, 25, 30, 79, 142–3, 163; see also moral reflection existentialism 35 expectation 50 experience 98 faith 3, 32, 36, 47, 50, 68, 82, 104, 123, 143, 149, 180, 185, 197, 198–200, 205, 217 fall, the 137, 144–5 Fenger, H. 5, 11n. Ferguson, H. 34n. Ferreira, J. 64n. Fichte, J. G. 37, 101–4 figurative element in language 54, 79, 122– 39, 155, 159–61 forgiveness 36, 113, 205–10 Forster, E. M. 190 freedom 38, 72–3, 74, 86–91, 105–12, 197–8, 217–18 Freud, S. 124–5 Friday communion see communion Fryszman, A. 11n. Garff, J. 4–5, 11n., 56, 58, 64n., 170 Geismar, E. 57, 64n. Genet, J. 190 Gerhard, J. 58 German idealism 101–2, 105 God: God as Being 70, 83–4, 139n.; God as Father 124–32, 138; the Godrelationship 17, 24, 26–31, 36–8, 43–5, 50, 51–6, 57, 59–62, 68, 71, 74, 82–6, 90, 93–116 passim, 121, 122, 134–5, 138, 143–5, 182, 183, 184, 195–202, 213; see also Jesus Christ Gogol, N. 146 Good, the 54, 129–32, 135 Gouwens, D. 11n. grace 32, 36, 57 Grøn, A. 74–6, 78, 80, 82, 83, 92n. guilt 29, 30, 74, 113 Guyon, Mme. 58 Gyllembourg, T. 49

225

Hagemann, T. 11n. Hamann, J. G. 36, 119 Hegel, G. W. F. 3, 7, 37–8, 66, 68, 71–2, 73, 74, 77, 81, 82, 84–5, 86, 91n. 101–2, 111, 116n., 122–3, 124, 165, 169 Heiberg, P. A. 170 Heidegger, M. 1, 2, 3, 7, 11n., 35, 61, 70, 71, 77–8, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84–5, 91n., 92n., 119, 136–7, 139n., 163, 170, 189 Heiler, F. 64n. Herder, J. G. 213 heroism 196–9 heteronomy 32, 37, 121, 130, 134, 143, 164, 202–10 Hirsch, E. 32, 34n., 57–8, 64n. history 53, 145–6 Hodge, J. 163, 168n. Hölderlin, F. 138, 140n. Holm, I. W. 123–4, 139n. Hong, H. V. and E. H. 19, 139n., 219n. human condition, the 32, 35–64, 74 humour 22–3, 24, 28–30, 123 Husserl, E. 73, 74, 77, 80, 124 image of God 54–6, 59–60, 214–15 imagination 18, 20–1 immanence 22, 29, 30, 32 immediacy 37–8, 39–41, 43, 69, 72 incarnation, the 25, 26, 29, 30, 36, 204 indirect communication 2–3, 5, 14–22, 23, 24, 121, 142, 143 intuition 77–8, 101 inwardness 27, 28, 30, 56, 123 irony 2, 11n., 22–3, 29, 78, 103–4, 123, 136 Jacobi, F. H. 37 James, Letter of 52, 64, 127–9 James, H. 82, 162, 190 James, W. 61 Jensen, H. M. 155, 167n. Jesus Christ 18, 31, 32, 36, 139n., 158, 181, 185, 203–10, 214–19; see also incarnation, the Jung, C. G. 15 Kafka, F. 110, 112 Kangas, D. 138, 139n. Kant, I. 9, 86–91, 97, 116 Kierkegaard, M. P. 171–4, 176, 199 Kierkegaard, S.: works referred to: Christian Discourses 30, 151; Concept of Anxiety, The 71, 74–6, 78, 122, 131, 137, 166,

226

Index

219n.; Concluding Unscientific Postscript 2, 5, 13, 16, 22–33, 80, 99, 166; Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses passim; Either/Or 2, 15–16, 25, 32, 34n., 82, 87–8, 124, 136, 173–4, 196, 197, 198; Fear and Trembling 2, 10, 16, 131, 166, 193–202, 219n.; For Self-Examination 159–60; From the Papers of One Still Living 49; The Gospel of Sufferings see Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits; Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est 5; Journals 6, 16–22, 56–8, 156, 172–6, 179, 183, 184, 187, 205; Lectures on Communication 13, 16–22, 24, 25, 30, 34; Letters and Documents 192n.; Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air 188; On my Work as an Author 13; On the Concept of Irony 71, 78, 124, 155, 172; Philosophical Fragments 22, 24–5, 26, 29, 32, 43, 116n., 143, 217; Practice in Christianity 158–9; Prefaces 25; The Point of View for my Work as an Author 2, 4–5, 13–16, 21, 22, 24, 99, 173; Purity of Heart see Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits; Repetition 16, 52, 57, 92n., 131, 173, 186, 194; The Sickness unto Death 5, 10, 71, 77, 78, 80, 83–4, 97, 100–1, 104–5, 112, 193, 204–6, 217; Stages on Life’s Way 34n., 102, 173, 183; Three Discourses for the Friday Communion 205–10, 219n.; Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions 10n., 12, 21, 34n., 114–15; Two Ages: A Literary Review 49; Two Discourses for the Friday Communion 205–10; The Unchangeableness of God 32; Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 10n., 19–20, 48, 53–6, 59–60, 62, 131–2, 137, 155, 167n., 216; The Woman who was a Sinner 205–10; Works of Love 10n., 12, 19, 63, 132–7, 151, 163, 168n., 172, 177, 193, 210–19 Kingo, A. 32, 34n., 164 Kirmmse, B. 64n. knowledge: limits of 16–19, 51, 69, 80–1, 84, 91, 105–6, 112–3, 128, 130, 138, 142–3, 165, 217 Koefoed-Hansen, H. P. 25 language 9, 19, 118–68 Law, D. 64n. leap 38 Lessing, G. E. 2, 99, 167n. Lévinas, E. 117n. Lewis, C. S. 212, 219n. love 10, 19, 63, 113, 134–8, 151, 167, 169–219

Lowrie, W. 57–8, 170 Lund, H. 188 Luther, M.: Lutheranism 31, 35-6, 52, 57–8, 59, 123, 195 maieutics 17, 18, 24, 215–16 Malantschuk, G. 65–9, 91n. Marcel, G. 82 Marion, J.-L. 139n. Martensen, H. L. 21, 23, 25, 36, 58–9 Matustik, M. 64n. measure 97–100, 104–6, 113, 204, 217–18 Mesnard, P. 170 metaphor: metaphorical element in language 125–39 Meyer, R. 187–8, 192n. Milbank, J. 118–19, 139n. Milton, J. 92n. modernity 13, 16–17, 32, 34n., 48–9, 73 Molinos, M. de 58 Møller, P. M. 59 moment, the 79, 122 Mooney, E. 64n., 200, 219n. moral reflection 9, 10, 26, 60, 96–7, 99, 120–1, 153, 161–7, 171, 205, 209–10, 215–16 Muhammed: The Prophet 85 Murdoch, I. 82 Mynster, J. P. 7, 10n., 13, 19, 21, 25–6, 33n., 34n., 141, 142, 147–8, 158, 159, 167n., 168n. mysticism 56–61, 65 Nietzsche, F. 8, 17, 165, 168n., 198 Nishida, K. 61, 64n. Nordentoft, K. 219n. nothingness 30, 52–6, 62, 93, 94, 103–4, 114, 131; see also annihilation of self; transparency Nussbaum, M. 82, 92n. Nygren, A. 172, 211 Oetinger 119 Olsen, R. 58, 167n., 169–92 ontology 9, 10, 70–85, 93, 134, 163 Origen 119 other: relation to 62–3, 108–14 overveie, overveielser 19, 137, 155, 168n., 211 paradox 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 34n. Pascal, B. 36, 57 pathos 20, 26–7 patience 49–50 Pattison, G. 64n., 92n., 139n.

Index

227

Paul, Saint 36, 52, 57, 58, 62, 85, 98, 139n., 152, 159, 160, 185, 201, 202, 214 Perkins, R. 64n. personification 149–53, 158–62 phenomenology 9, 61, 69–85, 93, 115–16, 136–7, 142, 163 Philo of Alexandria 119 philosophy 3, 4, 7–9, 14, 23, 32–3, 34n., 65–92, 93, 99, 123, 147, 157, 161–7, 215 pietism 35, 99 Plato: Platonism 4, 59, 69, 137, 142, 155 Polk, T. 11n. Poole, R. 4, 5, 11n., 77 possibility 19, 156–8, 160, 171 Protestantism 58, 60, 95, 119, 120, 123, 139n. psychology 35, 70, 75–6, 78–9, 122–3

Sinnett, M. W. 11n., 219n. situation 4, 19, 21, 26, 142 Socrates: the Socratic 3–4, 10, 24, 25, 26, 32, 69, 78, 96–7, 145, 152, 155, 175, 215–19 Søltoft, P. 64n. Spinoza, B. 44 Spirit 55–6, 80, 86, 100–1, 132–3, 145 spirituality 10 Sponheim, P. 91n. Stack, G. J. 91n. Stewart, J. 11n., 92n., 139n. Stoicism 142–3 Strawser, M. 11n., 23, 34n., 139n. Sturm und Drang 36 subjectivity 27–30, 36, 156–7, 159 subjunctive, the 155–160 sublime, the 9, 86–91, 196–8 suffering 27–8, 87, 98–9, 112

Rahner, K. 82–3 reader: role of 21, 75, 93–5, 149–50, 157, 160, 175–6 recollection 22, 24, 29, 30, 217 reflection 37–8, 43–5, 69, 72, 100–4 religious experience see mysticism repentance 36, 82, 185, 194 resentment 43 rhetoric 9–10, 141–68 Ricoeur, P. 74 Ritter, H. 142 romanticism 36–7, 101–4, 196 Rosenkrantz, K. 80

Tanner, J. S. 92n. Tauler, J. 59 Taylor, Mark C. 72, 82, 92n. Tersteegen, G. 58 thanksgiving 36, 138, 185–6 theology 23, 77, 85, 118–20, 134, 136, 157 Theresa of Avila 58 Theunissen, M. 71, 83–4, 92n. Thomas à Kempis 58, 188 Thomas Aquinas 119 Thompson, J. 170 Thulstrup, M. M. 58, 64n. Thulstrup, N. 64n. Thust, M. 162, 168n. Tillich, P. 70, 71, 82–3, 91n., 113 time 46–51, 60, 70, 74, 133–4 Tolstoy, L. 146 transfiguration 53, 64n., 68, 186–7, 188, 193 transparency 54, 86, 90, 93, 96–7, 99, 100– 4, 113–14, 212, 217; see also annihilation of self; nothingness truth 10, 22, 24–5, 51, 53, 80–1, 122, 123

Sartre, J.-P. 17, 82, 106–12, 114, 116–17n., 165, 198 Schelling, F. J. W. 37, 58, 196 Schlegel, F. 188 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 15, 21, 25, 36–7, 59, 121, 130 Schrag, C. 62, 64n., 70, 91n., 167n. Schweitzer, A. 165, 168n. Sedgwick, P. R. 11n. self: self-knowledge 5, 31, 37–8, 40, 49–56, 67–9, 73–6, 80–4, 85–6, 100–5, 114, 116, 149; see also freedom sermons 12–13, 21, 22, 23, 32, 142, 145–6, 147–9 Shakespeare, S. 64n., 139n. Sheil, P. 117n., 168n. Sibbern, F. C. 66, 68, 185 silence 194 sin 22, 24, 29, 31, 35, 78–9, 82, 85, 130, 137, 138, 144–5, 197–202, 217, 218

upbuilding: concept of 15–16, 19, 21–2, 211–12 Valdemar Atterdag, King of Denmark 152 Vanini, L. 44, 152 Wahl, J. 64n. Walker, J. 11n., 96–7, 116n., 162

228

Index

Walsh, S. 64n. Watts, A. 63n. Waugh, E. 95 Weil, S. 192n. Westphal, M. 34n., 64n., 91–2n. wish: wishing 46–8, 178–9, 183–5 witness 10, 31, 210, 211–19

Wittgenstein, L. 119 Woolf, V. 190 works 31 worship 27, 30, 36, 55–6, 59 Young, E. 36 youth 43–7, 98