Introduction: Why Read Kierkegaard?

and what of this present book?

Reading Kierkegaard opens out a world. An eclectic and versatile author, he has much of interest to say on a range of subjects: theology, the nature of philosophical writing, ethics, the concept of the individual, politics, and human relations. Employing a variety of genres, philosophical, pastoral, and lyrical, he can write didactically, movingly, and not least be hilariously funny. Kierkegaard plumbs the depths of what it is to be a human being; one who lives with anxiety and aspiration, and who trusts and rejoices in God, nding in that relationship the resources that make for wholeness. Often extolled as the ur-existentialist, possessed of an observant eye for human foibles and the pathos of existence Kierkegaard delves into the minutiae of human lives. He will elaborate an intricate understanding of what it is to be a self that, willing to be itself and grounded in God, comes into its own; an understanding to which one can well hold in the wider way in which he rst depicts this without necessarily going along with his specically Christian twist. His edifying writings extol us to be strict if also gentle with ourselves while compassionately observant and thus merciful in our dealings with others; his political judgements if conservative are strikingly apposite; his prayers sheer poetry. Returning once and again to these texts one never fails to be struck

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by new insights. Thinkers with whom it is this worthwhile to engage are few indeed. Butsurmounting these many merits of the authorshipthere is a profounder reason to grapple with Kierkegaard. To a greater degree than any other of whom I am aware, Kierkegaard grasped the challenge that modernity represents to Christian claims, recasting how Christianity must present itself in the light of it. For, as he well understood, Christian contentions are compatible neither with the epistemology (the understanding as to what is knowledge) nor the moral axioms of a post-Enlightenment age. However, having acknowledged the depth of his probing and the imaginative nature of his response, as one delves deeper one comes to recognize that his response is undergirded by a whole epistemology which is quite foreign to how (one must surmise) most of us think today. Kierkegaard is surprisingly all of a piece: he holds suppositions that allow him to think as he does (albeit that he knows Christian claims paradoxical to reason). It is when one has uncovered this that a debate can take place with him at the much deeper level of epistemological presuppositions. We are into fascinating territory; that one who lived so recently could think so differently. It was largely his Lutheran context that allowed Kierkegaard in developing Lutheran thought to make the response that he did to modernity; and that that is the case will be a major theme of this book. There are other ways too, as for example his ideas about the origin of humankind or his social and political presuppositions, in which Kierkegaards position is at odds with what we now know or hold. Exploring these sheds a shaft of light on the extraordinary transitions which humanity has negotiated in the past 170 or so years. What, we may well ask, is it to consider questions of truth and ethics in relation to the thought of a past yet relatively recent author? There is a sense in which one must necessarily deliberate in relation to the thinking of those who have preceded us: one cannot progress in a vacuum. Quoting the person whose insights were perhaps more seminal than those of any other for his own work, allowing him to take up the position that he did, Kierkegaard muses:
Write. For whom? Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you love. Will they read me? Yes, for they come back as posterity. (Johann Georg Hamann).

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Write. For whom? Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you love. Will they read me? No!1

Meanwhile the past thinker, whether read or not, is always engaged in a one-sided dialogue! No more could Hamann read Kierkegaard than can Kierkegaard respond to me. But do the dead come back as posterity? It is conceivable that in considering my critique of Kierkegaard there will be those inclined to side with him against me. That would be a debate that I would that I could enter into. My sense, however, is that change is fundamental and that such a person would not express what he or she had to say quite as did Kierkegaard. There are a range of matters such a discussion would need to take into account which were not fully on the scene at the time that Kierkegaard wrote (or it must be said, in as much as they were present, Kierkegaard was not always minded to face). What is so interesting is that although the past world may be intelligible one can never simply stand in its shoes. Recognition of such change has inclined some in Arts subjects (particularly it would seem in North America) to conclude that one cannot adjudicate on truth, that there are but fashions and opinions. Now the present author is far from unsympathetic to Continental philosophy, if indeed such thinking has been a correct interpretation of the thought of one like Jacques Derrida, which I doubt. What strikes me, however, is that on the contrary in a discipline like theology we cannot evade questions of truth. That discipline is historical and relative in as much as those statements that (until very recently) have been held absolute, the great Christological statements of the 4th and 5th centuries, were worked out within a particular philosophical climate (and, not least, judged politically apposite). But otherwise it must be said that it is both that we now think within a different philosophical milieu and that, in an objective sense, we have knowledge which undermines or casts in doubt what was earlier deemed truth. It was after all because with part of himself Kierkegaard was a modern man that he saw so clearly the challenges that Christianity was up against. Meanwhile in the eld of ethics not only is it that we have broken through to biological knowledge (such that notably it is no longer possible to hold the male of the species
Sren Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, eds and trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, IN and London, 196778) [henceforth JP], vol. 2, no. 1550 (Pap. X2 A 15), n.d., 1843.
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normative for humanity), but furthermore we have thought through the implications of a priori principles rst enunciated in the Enlightenment as to the humanity and equality of all persons. But none of this means that, in the eld of ethics, Kierkegaard has not much to teach us; he is astute in his thinking about how one shall treat others. Of Kierkegaard one might say something similar, though in his case he chooses to revivify the past in the light of present. In many respects as I have already indicated (and this could hardly not be the case of a thinker writing in the 1840s) Kierkegaard was a child of modernity. Living this side of Hegel, he has a sense of the human being as social, knows that the self is formed relationally, though he ostentatiously amends this in contending (together with his Lutheran tradition) that such a self is formed in the rst instance in relation to God. Furthermore, living post-Kant he has a strong sense of the autonomy and hence also the responsibility and integrity of human beings. The question becomes how he shall bring together a sense of self with the foundational nature of the relationship to God. Kierkegaard cannot simply go back to Luther; though surprisingly modern, Luther did not have a post-Enlightenment sense of the individual. He cannot even go back to the time of Lessing, in many ways his hero. A whole revolution in human self-understanding has intervened with the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Furthermore, after Kant in particular, there was no way in which human beings could reason to God, no natural theology possible. Deeply apprised of these developments, Kierkegaard thinks humanity to have taken a wrong turning. But Kierkegaard did not write as though these developments had never taken place: he was profoundly indebted to them. It was simply that, drawing on his native Lutheranism, he must take up a novel stance in relation to them. Where there is a real gap between Kierkegaards ways of thinking and how I surmise most modern Europeans and many North Americans think today is in the realm of what one might name the epistemology of history. Kierkegaard seems to have almost no sense of what I shall call the fact that there is a causal nexus; that is to say that events are repeatable, that they are one of a type, that there are no interventions. To employ 19th-century terms, Kierkegaard is a supernaturalist not a naturalist. As we shall see, he seems to have held to a notion somewhat akin to what in the patristic period is known as recapitulation, namely guralism, such that God is held to intervene once and again, but in a cyclical pattern, bringing his purposes to fullment. This Kierkegaard

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combines with a Lutheran structure of thought whereby God (or the future) is actively present in the moment (to employ Kierkegaards vocabulary). Could I but debate with Kierkegaard it would be this whole different sense of things that would perforce be the subjectmatter of our initial conversation! For (much as I believe in the effectiveness of prayer or quiet loving thought for another) I take for granted that there can in this sense be no interventions. That we become ourselves by holding together our future and our present in the moment is another matter and may well be the case; here it may be said that (coming out of his Lutheran context) Kierkegaard was the rst modern existentialist. The wholly other sense present in Kierkegaard of the futures relation to the individual, let alone of God, as compared with Hegels social and collective thinking whereby Geist (rather than God) becomes one with the unfolding of history, is momentous. But why choose Kierkegaard as the one in the presence of whom to think through such fundamental matters? Precisely perhaps because he was in so many ways conservative, if radically conservative. He wishes to re-situate Christianity in the midst of modernity and also in the face of modernity. His was a conservative (or traditional) form of Christianity: not for Kierkegaard the attempt that notably Schleiermacher had made to accommodate it to the post-Enlightenment world. It is signicant that Kierkegaard did not really want to know about critical historical analysis of the bible, willing simply to circumvent its results as not relevant to the issue of faith. The benchmark as to what is Christianity which underlies his early Philosophical Fragments and with which he persists throughout the authorship is that of the Formula of Chalcedon of 451; that the second persona of a triune God was in two natures, fully divine and fully human. That, for Kierkegaard, is Christianity. Yet it is a radical conservatism as, drawing on the intrinsic existentialism of his Lutheran heritage, he seeks to nd a way to relate to such a truth in the modern age. Thus for him faith will stand over against reason. His stance may indeed be how Christianity must necessarily commend itself today, but if that is the case it follows that there are profound questions, not only epistemological but also ethical, that must confront Christian belief and to which Kierkegaard may well have no answer. While I of course consider these issues, in the rst instance this book is intended to enable those who have not as yet read Kierkegaard to do so with intelligence. Hence my subtitle Exposition and

j kierkegaard: exposition and critique

Critique. On the one hand I expound Kierkegaard, setting him in his intellectual context and historical setting; on the other pursue a farung consideration of the issues that his authorship raises. Of course there will also be much to appreciate about these texts. Kierkegaard felt he lacked dialogue partners, writing:
I am neither proud nor self-important nor vaingloriousI am a thinker, an immensely passionate thinker. And what irritates me is just this, that some would like to abuse and insult me, others to plague me with distinctions and honoursbut, help me if possible to go further, be of assistance in understanding more than I have understood, none, none, not a single mothers soul will do that. . . . And it is an agony to have to live in such a way that, in effect, I have to let them think me mad just to be allowed to thinkotherwise a great fuss may be made about me, I will have to tap my wine-glass and make speeches at gatherings, loved and honoured by all those who do not think.2

Even in its golden age, to which Kierkegaard belonged, Copenhagen, that market town as he was want to call it (Copenhagen = merchants harbour), could not provide the intellectual interchange that he desired. What I am noting, however, is that today the dialogue takes place over a time gap. Should one not, however, take on the dead? I am reminded here of Karl Barths listing of Schleiermacher among those with whom upon reaching the kingdom of heaven (after paying his respects to Mozartin this Kierkegaard would not have dissented) he will wish to converse. That is to say he who Barths life work had been intent on overthrowing. That ne Schleiermacher scholar Richard R. Niebuhr once told me that having completed his decidedly non-Barthian book on Schleiermacher he went with some trepidation to visit Barth. Now the Barth family lived in one of those Swiss houses designed in former days to house cattle on the ground oor, such that a staircase rose to the living quarters on the rst. Beside each step of the staircase there hung a picture of one of the greats of theology, from Kant and Schleiermacher forwards (a veritable Protestant theology in the 19th century). Upon Niebuhrs enquiring whether the order be ascending or descending, Barth proclaimed it to be descending, that is to say Kant and Schleiermacher were the greatest and things had steadily

2 Sren Kierkegaard: Papers and Journals, A Selection, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth, 1996) [henceforth Hannay], 31617 (Pap. IX A 161).

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got worse. And who is it with whom Kierkegaard sought to dialogue; whom he elevated as worth his attention? Those whose thought stood in many ways diametrically opposed to his own; Socrates the pagan and Lessing the sceptic. But they had integrity. It is this thought that should surely give us licence not simply to report on Kierkegaard but to think that we may and should take issue with him. It is, after all, to take him seriously. Through the manner of his writing Kierkegaard precisely invites such dialogue. Perhaps it was his love of Socrates that taught him to engage his reader in this way. Maybe he was also in this respect ber Friedrich attentive to Schleiermacher, whose Vertraute Briefe u Schlegels Lucinde he much admired. But then Schleiermacher, the great translator of Plato into German, had himself presumably absorbed engaged thinking from the ancient world. As did Plato in his dialogues, Kierkegaard will develop different intellectual (and existential) positions through depicting different characters. He may himself take up no one position, though one may well know what he thinks. Kierkegaards writing is often in tantalizing fashion open ended. This enables the reader to enter into the writing, developing his or her own thinking in terms of his categories (though one may also want to mould a position otherwise than occurred to Kierkegaard). The use of pseudonyms, moreover, allowed Kierkegaard to take some useful distance from his text, giving the reader space.3
3 I do not believe that one needs to go overboard on the issue of the pseudonymity of Kierkegaards authorship. Undoubtedly, as I have suggested, it served a purpose. There is some tension within the opus as a whole as between different pseudonymous positions, but this tension would seem to reect a tension intrinsic to Lutheran thought. It was scarcely that Kierkegaard was trying to hide his authorship, frequently giving his name as editorand everyone knew who had penned the works. One should remark that it was a common device in his society to employ a pseudonym; the Danish primus J. P. Mynster did likewise, equally allowing his authorship to be instantly recognized. Some commentators make much of the fact that, at the conclusion of the Postscript, Kierkegaard comments that in the pseudonymous authorship there is not a single word from him. But I do not think that ones judgement on the pseudonymity should be distorted by a single, possibly ippant remark made at the time that Kierkegaard was thinking of taking up a pastorate and it could have been awkward directly to own the work. It has to be said that the published work in its development has an inner consistency and that it is deeply commensurate with the thoughts that Kierkegaard committed to the privacy of his Journal. Furthermore, it has come to light that on not a few occasions he only decided at the last moment to publish under a pseudonym.

j kierkegaard: exposition and critique

The Kierkegaardian texts that I grapple with in this book are those central to the theological and philosophical themes of the authorship. (Thus I must notably omit Either/Or and there are other texts to which I make the odd reference without having the space to consider them.) My thinking is that, having tackled these texts, the novice reader can surely make his or her own way. It is difcult to know in what detail to expound Kierkegaards writing. There may well be Kierkegaard scholars who on other counts (notably my drawing attention to the Lutheran context of Kierkegaards work) nd it protable to read my book for whom such exposition is unnecessary. (Though it is in the context of expounding the text that I often draw attention to other matters and not least the Lutheran presuppositions present.) For the novice reader, however, it is all-important to be able to comprehend the texts, invariably either unwieldly on the one hand or dense on the other. One may initially lack a compass as to what they actually concern, which is frequently none too obvious. (If any reader thinks I am mistaken in my interpretation I shall be glad to know.) What has interested me, moreover, is to nd that the material I give in the Introductions to chapters is often not easily available. Readers desiring to know more of Kierkegaard as a person may wish to turn to the nal chapter at an early stage. The introductory chapter, Kierkegaards Intellectual Context, is designed to enable those less informed about modern Continental philosophy or ignorant of Lutheran thought to get on board. Behind this authorship lay a human life lived, one may say, ecstatically. Kierkegaard sensed time was short; he had long nursed a premonition that he would die young and was frequently none too well. Spending ten years as a student, reading everything except the theology he was supposed to be studying, he had had a superb education, in literature, philosophy, and the thought of the ancient world. That he crammed what must be one of the major authorships of modern times into little more than a decade was an extraordinary achievement. Meanwhile he did not fail to live life to the full. As a young man he had enjoyed an exuberant existencewhich he was later to regret as he became more religious. He entertained friendships and clearly delighted in children. Nor did he spurn the poor. Kierkegaard was known for the way in which, on his walks around Copenhagen, he would converse with all and sundry. He comments on the fact that people would pass by horses that had their nose bags

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tangled such that they could not feed, so one must surmise that he helped. Highly observant, all he encountered was potentially raw material for the authorship. It is this that makes his writing so engaging. Born into advantaged circumstances, for much of his life he was well-off, feasting on ne food and having a penchant for fashionable clothes. But he also knew what it was to fear poverty, leaving at his death almost nothing. This was a very human life, running the gamut of human emotions. He worked to ward off depression. From such a life an authorship emerged that is literature. Kierkegaard said of himself that he was the greatest prose writer that the Danish language had known and his fellow countrymen have not dissented. It was his fate to write in a minor European language;or should we say his fortune given that he writes I am proud of my mother tongue whose secrets I know, the language I treat more lovingly than a autist his instrument.4 In this regard I have a striking memory of sitting in the theatre in Copenhagen at the time of that citys celebration of its status as that years European City of Culture, a single actor on the stage under a spotlight reading Kierkegaard. The audience was spellbound, alternately so silent you could have heard a pin drop and falling about in laughter. It was an indication of something often not realized about one who has been given the epithet the gloomy Dane. Indeed Kierkegaard takes sin seriously and is no optimist about humankind. He will never let human beings be self-satisedly comfortable, failing to confront ultimate issues. But a great love of life emerges from his writings. Of course much is inevitably lost in translation: the alliteration, the play on words. But it is still the case that more particularly in his edifying or spiritual discourses the cadences of his prose in some way comes through in translation. What is striking is Kierkegaards ability to nd the right tone, style, and structure to suit each of his books, so various in their subject-matter. The authorship is extraordinarily eclectic. Of his time, Kierkegaard was also in his writing style before his time; this, too, contributing to the time lag in his discovery. We possess few images of Kierkegaard who, decidedly shy about having his portrait drawn, would fail to turn up for sittings. Nor did

JP 6:6259 (Pap. IX A 298).

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he deign to have a photograph (or daguerreotype as this new technique was known) taken, an unfortunate oversight on the part of one who aspired to be discovered by posterity. In his day an Italian had already set up his stall in Copenhagen. Fascinated by steam engines (American, locomotives) and hot-air balloons Kierkegaard was not entirely averse to modernity, so he had better have availed himself of this opportunity. The well-known sketch on the front cover of this book owes to his second cousin, Christian Kierkegaard, by profession a drawing master. If it was executed in 1840, Kierkegaard was 27. We have furthermore an interesting sketch from his later years by one H. P. Hansen, reproduced on the back cover. It appears to have been drawn from a rst-oor window as, with amboyant hat and spectacles perched on his nose, Kierkegaard marched by. Walking the streets of Copenhagen today one can still piece together something of the sights and the world that was his. Would that that citys most famous son could hear of the waves he has caused (as he half expected he would) and know of the affection in which today he is held by so many.