Selves in Discord and Resolve

Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology From Either/Or to Sickness Unto Death

Edward Mooney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134717019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Selves in Discord and Resolve, Edward Mooney examines the Wittgensteinian and deconstructive accounts of subjectivity to illuminate the rich legacy left by Kierkegaard's representation of the self in modes of self-understanding and self-articulation. Mooney situates Kierkegaard in the context of a post-Nietzschean crisis of individualism, and evokes the Socratric influences on Kierkegaard's thinking and shows how Kierkegaard's philsophy relies upon the Socratic care for the soul. He examines Kierkegaard's work on Judge Wilhelm, from Either/Or, Socrates, in the Postscript and Abraham and Job in Repetition and Fear and Trembling.

1

PRELIMINARIES

Philosophy, Portraits, and Poetry

[I]n a sense, to write your own words, to write your own inner voice, is philosophy.

–Stanley Cavell¹

[I]f will can be captivated, or conversely, if vision can be transforming,…imagination [is] at work.

–M. Jamie Ferreira²

MIDWAY THROUGH HIS THUS FAR LANDBOUND CRITICAL PROJECT IMMANUEL KANT allows himself a prospect on the sea:

I have now explored the territory of…understanding, and…measured its extent, assigning to everything its rightful place. This domain is an island…surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.³

Kant tells us quite incautiously that he’s mapped the land of understanding, but in his seaward gaze, he captures something else, a sense of risk, allure, and limits—limits paradoxically opening on the wondrous.

In this lyrical passage from his First Critique, Kant counsels caution, for the turbulent and alluring sea is the natural home of illusion. Yet his ambivalence shows through, as if the “adventurous seafarer” might be prized for his hazardous attempts at navigation, which he will pursue despite the dangers.⁴ Philosophy at last for Kant beckons seaward—for freedom at least, and more generally for some sense of the ideals that lie beyond the landlocked realm of exclusively cognitive activity. This becomes explicit in remarks on poetry from his Third Critique. As he has it there, poetry “strengthens the mind by making it feel its faculty—free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determination—…as a sort of schema for the supersensible.”⁵ Ideals of free, creative activity inspire and make possible moral, esthetic, and religious practices, practices that, Janus-faced, look now upon the securities of the familiar, now upon the uncanny, uncertain realm beyond the breakers.⁶ An esthetic image or narration focused seaward, toward “illusion,” “adds to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our cognitive powers, and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit [or soul, (Geist)]”⁷ In this attunement to his work and world, Kant could well be a sort of poet—dialectical, to be sure—who ventured out in searching tasks he could neither “abandon nor carry to completion.”⁸ In any case, he sets the scene for Kierkegaardian lyrical explorations of the self, a course from the familiar and secure out to the wondrous and back.

PORTRAITS AND VOICE

Kierkegaard’s doctoral dissertation in theology was titled The Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates. This signals Kierkegaard’s interest in irony both as a literary device and as a way of life; and it also signals his abiding attachment to Socrates.⁹ Either/Or followed, appearing in 1843 initially in two separately bound volumes. Speaking from the first is the esthete, “A,” an anonymous voice known only through his productions and through the characterizations provided by a “Judge Wilhelm” in the second volume. Collected in the first volume are bits and pieces of the esthete’s musings and reflections, flights of fancy and psychological reflections. And in lengthy letters addressed to the esthete from the second volume, we have the sober intonations of Judge Wilhelm. Readers are left poised within this “either/or,” between the appeals of an esthetically varied but fragmented life and an ethically coherent but conventional life. The balance may be tipped toward the second view, the portrait of an ethical existence. But this justly famous double portrait is only one of many sketches hung in Kierkegaard’s museum of pseudonymous works.

These figures speak inwardly and outwardly to one another. In addition to the Judge and the esthete, there are, as we have mentioned, portraits of Socrates, whose voice emerges especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, of Abraham, whose trial with God is sketched in Fear and Trembling, and of Job, whose voice is heard both in Kierkegaard’s “Job Discourse” and in a short work titled Repetition, published along with Fear and Trembling. Each portrait and voice embody a stance toward life, towards its moral, esthetic, and religious dimensions. In the chapters that follow I map the placement and listen for the dialogue among these figures. Themes overlap and interlock as Judge Wilhelm, Socrates, Job, and Abraham appear and reappear in sketches of ordeals of emerging moral and religious selfhood.

Perhaps halls of portraiture suggest too quiet a setting. An alternative metaphor, recurrent in Kierkegaard’s works, is the theater. Taking this cue, Kierkegaard’s views are dispersed among pseudonyms, allocated to characters in a drama vaster than the banquet depicted in his Stage’s on Life’s Way. In the pages of Repetition, a young man anticipating his night at the Königstädter Theater reflects that “no young man of any imagination…has not at some time felt himself caught up by the magic of the theatre and desired himself to be transported into that fictitious reality, so that like a Doppelgänger he can hear and see himself, [desired] to split himself up into all manner of possible differentiations of himself from himself, so that each differentiation is in turn a single self.”¹⁰ In this light, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works emerge as a polyphonic religious-comic-tragic theater of action and idea, as a dialectic of self-development spread out among figures on a stage, or among a sequence of stages. Our task is then to draw the multiplicity of selves and stages into meaningful pattern.

The metaphor of theater is powerful, but not the only alternative to halls of portraiture. There is another metaphor for dynamic unity-in-multiplicity among voices that we will have occasion to invoke. The interplay among voices can be rendered musically. The shifts in tone and orientation of Kierkegaardian pseudonymous selves in discord and resolve are akin to voices sounding variations on a gathering of themes. Their links resonate in concert as the movements of an orchestral suite, or as the arias, choruses, and recitatives of an extended oratorio. Sickness Unto Death presents just such a relational view of self. Its formula for a self, a “relation relating to itself,” can be spelled out as a performing musical ensemble, an ensemble of voices that model self, a community of selves, and the stage or world that each inhabits.

POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

While demonstrative argument holds an undisputed place in philosophy’s varied traditions, the role for poetic inspiration and verse is less certain. Plato introduces Diotima, a muse appearing dream-like in the Symposium who lyrically recounts to Socrates the tale of love’s transport of the soul toward the beautiful. But perhaps a true philosopher would excise the poetry from this tale.

In the Republic, Plato refers to an “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and poetry, and seems to cast the poets beyond the pale, exiling them from a city ruled by wisdom.¹¹ But Plato, like Kierkegaard, was a dramatist by inclination, and whatever his protest against poetry, at crucial points he cannot resist the appeal of lyric myth and imagery. In the Republic, the image of the cave or the closing myth of Er are prominent examples. His deep ambivalence is starkly framed in the death scene where Socrates converses with friends about life and immortality and then takes hemlock. In that most existential and lyrical of his creations, Plato has him confess: “[A] vision has often come to me…[It] always says the same thing: ‘Socrates, make music and compose.’”¹²

If Plato leaves the quarrel between poetry and philosophy less than settled, later writers—say Heidegger, Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard—have philosophy embracing poetry, the “ancient quarrel” now a companionable affair.

In contrast, 17th- and 18th-century philosophers, with some exceptions, model their work on the newly emerging physics; the insights and style of drama or poetry become correspondingly submerged.¹³ Poets are granted as little standing before the bar of intellect as rustic village priests. But 19th-century German Romanticism and Idealism bring poetry back to center stage.¹⁴ And between an Enlightenment veneration of science and the philosophical upheavals that followed, we have Kant, who aimed to give Newtonian physics a sure and honorable footing, and as important, also aimed to secure a vision of human freedom and creative imagination. The scope of “pure reason” is sharply curtailed in Kant’s First Critique. But this tethering of reason seems to have invited poet-philosophers to imaginative exploration of what lay beyond the scope of what could now be called “mere reason.” Kant’s First and Second Critiques established laws that physical objects and human actions must obey. His Third Critique allows nature to infuse poetic or artistic Genius with power to freely give law to art.¹⁵ Imagination links commanding freedom to poetic creativity. Poetry, as we have seen, “strengthens the mind” reinforcing it as “free, spontaneous, and independent of natural determination.”¹⁶ Imagination “quickens the cognitive powers, and thus [also gives material to] the cognitions.”¹⁷ In his notes on religion, Kant discusses archetypes of wisdom or faith, exemplary figures whose “essence” is conveyed through imaginative narrative and symbol rather than rational doctrine or principle.¹⁸ Thus the champion of enlightened, rational critique simultaneously inspires writers in the tradition of Romanticism and Idealism whose bent is lyrical and literary.¹⁹

Kierkegaard exploits this mixed Kantian heritage, combining skeptical critique with poetic “languages of the heart.”²⁰ Verse can portray the tangled webs of freedom and contingency, the fluid stances that become the characters or selves through which we meet the world. No longer focused solely through the lens of physics, nature may be a place of respite or consolation and storms may emanate a terror. Poetic sensibility conveys the relevant “existential” reality missed by a more scientific stance. Personal quests for meaning or fulfillment can compete with or overshadow the wider search for impartial, objective knowledge.

Possibilities for poetic-imaginative depictions of self and world blossom fully in Kierkegaard’s comic array of pseudonyms. The first volume of Either/Or collects discourses and fragments with such literary nonphilosophical titles as “Shadowgraphs,” “Diapsalmata,” and “The Unhappiest Man.” The nameless esthete who composes these also writes “The Seducer’s Diary.” The second volume contains rambling letters from a Judge Wilhelm. Repetition is composed by Constantine Constantius; it too contains a sheaf of letters from a nameless esthete. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, a mammoth work, is subtitled “A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic composition: An Existential Contribution,” authored by Johannes Climacus, full of satire, humor, and irony.

Kierkegaard anticipates the polyphony of Nietzsche’s wanderer poet-prophet Zarathustra and his cast of circus characters and wilderness companions, figures who argue, preach, scold, and sing. This is the polyphony Bakhtin finds in The Brothers Karamazov, each character voicing an independent stance, none belonging uniquely or unambiguously to Dostoyevsky.²¹ As the novelist himself writes, with regard to Father Zossima’s “reply” to Ivan Karamazov’s nihilism and despair,

[T]he answer here…is not a point-by-point response to any previously expressed positions…but only an oblique response…so to speak in an artistic picture.²²

Later in this lyrical-dialectical tradition, we have Heidegger assigning to the poet—say, Hölderin or Rilke—the role of “shepherd of Being,” and “guardian of language.” These philosophers, poets, and littérateurs take on topics well beyond the scope of Enlightenment philosophy. They unveil human risks and insecurities in God-abandoned worlds, measure the nearness of death, track penumbras of dread and hope, and trace disconcerting plasticities of self and chasms dropping sharply between self and others.

VARIETIES OF “THE POETIC”

We can distinguish several lines of complexity in Kierkegaard’s philosophical or dialectical use of “poetry” or “the poetic”: 1) Lyrical, aphoristic or “edifying” styles are often at play in competition with more familiar Aristotelian expositions, Kantian deductions, or Cartesian meditations. 2) Poetry, music or dance are models and metaphors for creative production, displacing an exclusive reliance on models from geometry or physics. 3) Poetic or literary work becomes an explicit topic of analysis and discussion, as in Either/Or’s lengthy critique of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and its comparison of ancient and modern tragedy. 4) The figure of “the Poet” often appears, a voice as integral to the philosophical exposition as (say) the voice of a scientific, academic, or lawyerly intellectual. 5) An entire way of life, an existential “life-sphere” or stage in human development, is charted as poetic or esthetic, contrasting with familiar philosophical sketches of the religious, scholarly, or civic life. And to complicate matters, (6) there may be a way of “living poetically” that is part and parcel of the religious life—not in opposition to it.²³

These multiple layers of poetic infusion are illustrated vividly in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The pseudonym in charge, Johannes de Silentio, opens with a section called “Attunement,” a notion Heidegger later adopts in Being and Time.²⁴ Variations on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac are imagined by the poet, each sketch meant to “tune” the reader’s mood. The narrator then sets out in verse to snare his hero, Abraham. Bathed in self-importance, he wonders if the true hero is Abraham—or perhaps rather himself, “The Poet” who preserves Abraham in Art. In any case, we know the writer is not a bookworm, absent-minded scientist, or pious priest.

A subsequent section of Fear and Trembling, the “Preamble from the Heart,” spins out sufferings of unrequited love.²⁵ To offer solace for the lovesick of this world, knights of faith and knights of resignation, transformed Don Quixot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Preliminaries
• 2. Self-Choice or Self-Reception
• 3. Getting Back the World
• 4. Faith and Simple Shopmen
• 5. Absolutes and Artistry
• 6. Kierkegaard Our Contemporary
• 7. A View From Here and Now
• 8. Music of the Spheres
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index