The Kierkegaardian Mind

Adam Buben, Eleanor Helms, Patrick Stokes, Adam Buben, Eleanor Helms, Patrick Stokes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429582028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) remains one of the most enigmatic, captivating, and elusive thinkers in the history of European thought.

The Kierkegaardian Mind provides a comprehensive survey of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising thirty-eight chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into eight parts covering the following themes:

• 
  
  

• Methodology
• Ethics
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy of Religion and Theology
• Philosophy of Mind
• Anthropology
• Epistemology
• Politics.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Kierkegaard's work is central to the study of political philosophy, literature, existentialist thought, and theology.

PART 1
Methodology

1
The Passion of Kierkegaard's Existential Method

Lee C. Barrett

Introduction

Kierkegaard’s ‘method’ of engaging philosophical and theological issues has often been regarded as an anomaly in the history of Western thought. ‘Method’ has usually suggested a rigorously standardized procedure for addressing puzzlements about general features of life in the world, typically with supporting arguments to demonstrate that the particular method in question is superior to its rivals. However, Kierkegaard’s authorship does not fit neatly into the methodological frameworks of such high-profile nineteenth-century traditions as Kantianism, Idealism, Empiricism, etc. Consequently, a discussion of his work often has been relegated to an appendix to histories of nineteenth-century theology and philosophy. This is understandable, for his peculiar writings do not resemble anything remotely like the standard philosophical or theological texts of his era. They are filled with multiple voices, pseudonymous authors, books-within-books, thick irony, and abrupt shifts in topic. Although some of his pages look like logical argumentation, even these arguments are often disrupted by unexpected digressions. In many passages Kierkegaard seems to deliberately eschew any disciplined development of a theme, something which would be anathema to any methodologically driven thinker.

Given such a peculiar authorship, it is inevitable that interpretive questions would abound concerning the nature and purpose of his work, and the method, if any, that informed them. Was the basic thrust of his writings an advocacy of subjective relativism? Were his texts designed to be antidotes to all totalizing ideologies and complacent closures? Or were his works an odd sort of apologia for a specific doctrinal position? Philosophically, was his method a proto-phenomenology of religious experience, the application of a Hegel-like dialectic to the development of the individual, a harbinger of Heidegger-style existentialism, a Wittgenstein-like clarification of the uses of specific bits of religious language, or an anticipation of post-structuralism? Theologically, was his oeuvre a presentiment of Barth’s Christocentrism (only with more subjective fervour), a foreshadowing of Tillich’s method of correlation, or an ancestor of Bultmann’s call to authenticity? Was he an orthodox Lutheran, an odd sort of Pietist, or a crypto-Catholic? The difficulty of classifying Kierkegaard’s literature in terms of some curricular niche in the academy is so severe that many do not regard him as a bona fide philosopher or theologian at all. Perhaps his work should be approached as open-ended imaginative literature. Maybe he was a literary provocateur, with no message to communicate, no specific meaning to promote, and no particular method to pursue (Poole 1993).

Nevertheless, the fact that Kierkegaard’s writings have inspired the development of a host of divergent theological and philosophical methods suggests that something of methodological significance may have been implicit in his texts. In spite of the elusive and idiosyncratic nature of his work, he may still count as a theologian and philosopher who thought in a disciplined way. Kierkegaard himself was not averse to this characterization of his work, for he once observed that his task ‘was to situate Christianity in reflection’ (KJN 6, 300/SKS 22, 298), with ‘reflection’ being one of his principle characterizations of the critical abstraction associated with philosophy and theology. Accordingly, Kierkegaard frequently borrowed such tools from philosophy as conceptual clarification, the ferreting out of hidden assumptions, and the exposure of fallacious arguments. However, he employed these standard conceptual strategies for a particular purpose. In his authorship Kierkegaard was trying to provoke a profound transformation in the reader, enabling the reader to become more self-reflective and responsible. In order to catalyze this self-reflection, he borrowed strategies from the histories of philosophy and theology in a rather promiscuous and ad hoc way. But there was a method to his seeming madness. An overarching vision of what theological and philosophical writing should be like governed his use of more specific traditional philosophical tropes and even his employment of fables, biblical stories, and jokes. This pervasive metastrategy could be considered his ‘method.’

Kierkegaard's methodological context

No matter how much their methods might differ in other regards, most of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries assumed that philosophy and theology involved the straightforward description of highly general and foundational features of the nature of the cosmos, human experience, divine revelation, or alleged transcendent realities. It was further assumed that these descriptions would take the form of propositions employing fairly univocal, stable concepts, aiming at clarity. Furthermore, these propositions were to be logically arranged, exhibiting an orderly progression from one topic to another, a progression often determined by almost geometric patterns of entailments. The desired result was a comprehensive explanatory system in which all the propositions would fit neatly together. Ideally, arguments should be advanced to defend the truth of the individual propositions and of the system as a whole. The arguments should be persuasive enough to compel cognitive assent, or at least present a plausible case.

This understanding of philosophy and theology was common to the plethora of schools that flourished in the early nineteenth century, in spite of their evident differences in method. Doctrinally inclined theologians regarded their propositions as referring to objective supernatural states of affairs, authorized by the Bible and the confessional tradition. The scriptural propositions only needed to be organized in a more logical order, so that their implications for the understanding of God, Christ, and humanity would be more transparent. Kierkegaard was well familiar with this heritage through the work of the ‘Old Orthodox’ party of Andreas Rudelbach in Denmark (KJN 5, 36–7/SKS 21, 39). The neo-Kantians saw their foundational propositions as referring to the necessary a priori structures of human cognitive, moral, and aesthetic experience. Although in Kierkegaard’s day the legacy of Kant was going out of fashion, it lived on in a muted form in the textbooks Kierkegaard used by Karl Bretschneider (1828). The Hegelians regarded their assertions as objective descriptions of the dialectical movement of Spirit, manifested both in logic and in the history of consciousness. Kierkegaard was well aware of this tradition through the influence of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen on Danish culture (Stewart 2007a; 2007b). Even thinkers influenced by Pietism, who might have been expected to write in a more emotive or expressive manner, treated their assertions as second-order descriptions of the contents of religious experience or of the dynamics of subjectivity. This was evident in the lectures of H. N. Clausen (KJN 3, 3–82/SKS 19, 7–85) and in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whom Kierkegaard studied under the direction of Martensen. Even philosophers affected by Romanticism, who assumed that the ephemeral and eternal aspects of experience could be synthesized in an intuition of harmony and wholeness, regarded philosophy as the systematic exposition of the underlying unity of the cosmos (Pattison 2002). All of these traditions assumed that theology and philosophy should offer a unified, cohesive, clear, and rationally defensible system.

Kierkegaard’s fluid, fractured, and shifting authorship was an implicit rejection of all this. His resistance to theology and philosophy as ‘science’ was rooted in his different understanding of the purpose of philosophical and theological thinking and writing. For Kierkegaard, theological and philosophical reflection should first and foremost enable an individual to assume responsibility for the shape of her own life and to feel the ultimate importance of doing this. Kierkegaard was consistent about this throughout his authorship, insisting that the genuine purpose of philosophical and theological writing is to encourage a deep and sincere engagement with the question of how one should live one’s life. The closure that most philosophies promised militated against the risk and passion that existential engagement requires. Kierkegaard objected that the closed, didactic systems that traditional philosophy and theology have generated are only abstract ideals, which lack the power to transform individuals. Thinking by itself can only heal life’s fissures in the imagination, not in reality.

The plurality of life-view options

A major part of this task of coaching self-reflection and self-responsibility required that an individual realize that there are multiple options for her life and appreciate what those options are. One of Kierkegaard’s most persistent fears was that individuals would simply conform to the dominant cultural ethos, without questioning it and without considering alternatives. For this reason, he appreciated Socrates, whose use of irony (although it was largely negative) tried to liberate Athenians from automatic adherence to the mores of their polis (CI, 204–9/SKS 1, 249–53). More particularly, Kierkegaard was worried that the distinctiveness of the Christian way of life would be obscured through its conflation with vague notions of bourgeois propriety and dutiful citizenship, or even with the pursuit of a pleasurable existence. Consequently, the clarification of the differences among various ways of life became a primary goal of Kierkegaard’s project.

In this regard Kierkegaard was helped by the concept of a ‘life-view’ elaborated by the poet and philosopher Poul Møller (1839–1843). Although Kierkegaard sometimes uses the phrase to designate any manner of living that encompasses a broad range of behaviour, he more typically restricts it to intentional and comprehensive ways of giving coherence and direction to an individual’s existence, integrating its affective, volitional, and ideational dimensions. Life-views are efforts to give unity to an individual’s life by actualizing an enduring ideal that can withstand fluctuations of mood, the vagaries of temperament, and the contingencies of fortune. A life-view enables an individual to see her existence as something more than a random congeries of reactions to external circumstances (TA, 14–6/SKS 8, 16–9). Each life-view is implicitly an informal network of concepts, attitudes, values, hopes, and fears that structures the way life is experienced.

Kierkegaard uses ‘life-view’ in a more expansive and protean way than his more familiar term ‘stages of life.’ The concept of ‘stages,’ particularly as articulated by the pseudonym Climacus, seems to refer to only four existential options (the aesthetic, the ethical, the generically religious, and the Christian) with some boundary territories (such as irony and humour). However, Kierkegaard’s other voices instantiate or describe ways of life that cannot be reduced to one of the classic four stages or their boundaries. For example, Stoicism’s resignation is described as a life-view, even though it is neither purely ethical nor fully religious (EPW, 76/SKS 1, 32). Similarly, in Two Ages Kierkegaard depicts a stance of hopeful and trusting resignation as a distinctive life-view (TA, 12–3/SKS 8, 15–6).

Because life-views are crucial for human flourishing but are also multiple, Kierkegaard’s main concern became the clarification of the differences among them, with an eye to highlighting the distinctiveness of Christianity. Kierkegaard feared that the modern age had obscured the differences among life-views; consequently, his practice of philosophy and theology concentrated on communicating the essential differences among them. Kierkegaard sought to make the uniqueness of these ways of living come alive for a culture that had blurred their boundaries. This project of clarification was fraught with philosophical and theological significance, for each life-view suggested a unique way of construing the issues dear to philosophers and theologians, including the nature of time, the self, intersubjectivity, the virtues, etc.

According to Kierkegaard, the contours of a life-view, even ones that the individual has not embraced or experimented with, can be communicated because the imagination can present an ideal way of life to the self (Gouwens 1989). The imagination can foster a partial grasp not only of the concepts and values, but also of the passions and modes of action that constitute that way of life. The imagination can mediate between the ideal and the real by helping individuals to project themselves into alternative ways of living. Of course, in order for this to happen the individual’s imaginative powers must be activated.

Communicating life-views

Kierkegaard’s novel way of engaging in theological and philosophical reflection is most evident in his scattered remarks about communicating life-views and in his general practice of communicating matters of existential significance. Because the imagination had to be stimulated, attention to the literary dimensions of his work became crucial to the way he engaged in the philosophical and theological tasks. Kierkegaard’s reliance upon images, parables, rhetorical disjunctions, and other literary devices sharply differentiated his method of communication from those of his contemporaries. He was convinced that matters related to the meaning and purpose of human life cannot be communicated without the use of the appropriate evocative rhetorical strategies. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus encapsulated this theme in his celebrated dictum that in subjective communication the ‘how’ is more important than the ‘what’ (CUP 1, 202/SKS 7, 185). In his journals Kierkegaard put this even more forcefully, writing that ‘the difference in life is not what is said, but how’ (KJN 7, 90/SKS 23, 91). Therefore, attempting to paraphrase an existential communication into something didactic would be a gross distortion; in fact, it would evacuate the statement of meaning. Accordingly, Kierkegaard remarked, ‘What I have to say must not be lectured. As a lecture it would become something completely different’ (KJN 4, 322/SKS 20, 321). If promoting a deeper engagement with life was the goal of Kierkegaard’s authorship, then an engaged literary style had to provide the indispensable form for his authorship. It was this conviction that made Kierkegaard’s theory and practice of communication so distinctive.

Kierkegaard’s conviction about the link between literary strategies and the communication of life-views was evident in his proposal that a literary work has enduring value only in so far as it communicates a coherent life-view. Otherwise, the emotional responses that a text elicits would be fleeting, disconnected, and fluctuating, producing no deeper engagement with life. In fact, ideally, the entire literary production of an author should exhibit a particular life-view. Kierkegaard praised the novelist Madame Gyllembourg for having been consistent throughout her career as an author (TA, 12–4/SKS 8, 15–6). Each new work exhibited continuity with her past productions, showing that she had been faithful to her life-view and to her project of communicating it to her readers. Most importantly, she consistently communicated the pathos that underlay her unique life-view. Kierkegaard found the works of Hans Christian Andersen to be sadly wanting in this regard, for they lacked a unifying life-view and simply expressed the vagaries of his personality (EPW, 74/SKS 1, 30). If the communication of the pathos of a life-view was essential for literary works, it was even more essential for philosophical and theological texts.

Kierkegaard’s authorship signalled a revolution in the understanding of the significance of literary devices for the doing of theology and philosophy, for in the composition of his own texts he was experimenting with the ways in which texts could communicate life-views. Most strikingly, by wrestling with the issue of communicating a Christian life-view, Kierkegaard problematized the boundary between theological literature and the types of devotional and upbuilding literature that could be put to Christian purposes. Kierkegaard’s unconventional way of writing about religious matters, so often noted by commentators, was inspired by his convictions concerning the unique nature of authentic religious communication. It is this sensitivity to the requisites of Christian communication that led him to forge a new method of reflection different from the legacies of Protestant scholasticism, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations for Kierkegaard's Works
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Kierkegaard's life, context, and legacy
• PART 1 Methodology
• PART 2 Ethics
• PART 3 Aesthetics
• PART 4 Philosophy of religion and theology
• PART 5 Philosophy of mind
• PART 6 Anthropology
• PART 7 Epistemology
• PART 8 Politics
• Index